90-Second Read: Hantavirus outbreak, climate risks from microplastics and Alaska’s surprise 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 you might not have heard of Hantavirus before, but it is a virus family that people have been sickened with before, and it's generally spread by rodents, like rats or mice.

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. But yeah, in terms of why experts are not, like, immediately concerned that this will spark a larger epidemic, I think the reason is just that this type of virus and the way it spreads is not conducive, as far as we know, to that type of outbreak. 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. Now, the idea of microplastics permeating the air and even seeding clouds into existence is.

Here to tell us more about what happened is Tanya Lewis, SciAm 's senior desk editor for health and medicine. 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. We're-this is a reminder of public-health paradigms I do not wanna be reminded of." So let's start with the good news: Why are experts not freaking out about this? On the other hand, you know, we have to sort of put it in perspective and remember this is a rare virus and it is something that people have been infected with in the past, so it's not a completely new virus, unlike SARS-CoV-2, which we had never seen before..

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. But the authors of the new study argue that global climate assessments should do more to factor in these tiny plastic bits. Last summer, in August, a small cruise boat called the David B spent the night in an inlet about 50 miles from Juneau, Alaska. That big slide hit the water and sent a tsunami racing through the fjord-like, so much water that the tsunami surged more than 1,500 feet up the sides of the fjord and sloshed back and forth, like in a bathtub. One scientist at the Alaska Earthquake Center has been testing a landslide detection algorithm, and so far it's.