90-Second Read: Hantavirus cruise ship outbreak, risk of microplastics-caused climate warming and Alaska landslide tsunami

First, you may have seen some headlines last week about an outbreak of Hantavirus on a cruise ship. Feltman: Why are we talking about Hantavirus and this cruise ship? As of May 7 the number of people on this cruise ship who had been infected with Hantavirus was eight people. Lewis: Just to catch people up, this outbreak was first noticed about a week ago on a ship called the MV Hondius, which was a cruise ship departing from South America, Argentina.

But the kind that we're seeing on this cruise ship is more the respiratory kind. In order for a pathogen to be a major pandemic concern, it needs to be very transmissible, and that is something that we have not yet seen with this Hantavirus. And of course, there was the famous cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, where some of the early COVID cases happened. Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some science news you may have missed.

But unfortunately, the specific virus we're talking about, with regard to this cruise ship, is one of the rare instances where it is technically possible to spread from human to human. Unfortunately, according to this new study, any cooling effects we might get from light microplastics are probably vastly outweighed by the warming effects of dark microplastics. Last summer, in August, a small cruise boat called the David B spent the night in an inlet about 50 miles from Juneau, Alaska. One scientist at the Alaska Earthquake Center has been testing a landslide detection algorithm, and so far it's detected 35 landslides in near real time.

But this new study suggests they can also have a warming effect on the atmosphere. In the spring and summer of last year the ice retreated inland several hundred feet, exposing so much bare rock that it ultimately caused a landslide. Lewis: Yeah, so we have to remember that this is a virus that is very different than a lot of the pathogens that have caused respiratory pandemics in the past.