The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
BBC NewsNasa removes US astronaut from ISS mission
The US astronaut Jeanette ] has been removed from her upcoming mission to the International Space Station (ISS) just months before launch.
Dr Epps was to have been the first African-American astronaut assigned to the space station crew. She would have flown aboard a Russian Soyuz flight in June but is being replaced by another astronaut. Nasa has not given a reason for withdrawing her but says she will be considered for future missions.
Jeanette Epps, born in Syracuse, completed a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 2000. After graduating, she worked in a laboratory for two years before being recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
She worked as a technical intelligence officer for seven years before being selected as a member of Nasa's 2009 astronaut class. Her time with the CIA included deployments to Iraq.
2017 'warmest year without El Niño'
Manmade climate change is now dwarfing the influence of natural trends on the climate, scientists say.
Last year was the second or third hottest year on record - after 2016 and on a par with 2015, the data shows.
But those two years were affected by El Niño - the natural phenomenon centred on the tropical Pacific Ocean which works to boost temperatures worldwide.
Take out this natural variability and 2017 would probably have been the warmest year yet, the researchers say.
Science Science groups react to U.S. government shutdown as researchers scrambleScience groups are reacting with dismay to a partial shutdown of the U.S. government that began today after the U.S. Senate failed last night to advance funding legislation. Many scientists, meanwhile, are scrambling to determine whether or not they will be able to keep working.
The shutdown is “just deeply disappointing because Congress has had months to fund the government,” said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a statement. “Without a resolution the federal scientific enterprise will come to a screeching halt, potentially adding millions of dollars in costs and months of delay to taxpayer funded projects.”
The funding lapse “deals another serious blow to an already beleaguered American scientific enterprise,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. (publisher of Science Insider), in a statement. He suggested the shutdown will add to long-term funding strains that have reduced federal spending on research from about from 1.25% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 0.82%, “which is a near 40-year low.”
xOMB director Mick Mulvaney: "I found out for the first time last night that the person who technically shuts the government down is me, which is kind of cool."https://t.co/Xea8MyyBHG
— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) January 20, 2018 NatureSimple blood test detects eight different kinds of cancer
A single blood test could one day be used to detect a variety of cancers, results from a preliminary trial suggest.
The past few years have seen a bevy of experimental tests called liquid biopsies that hold the promise of detecting and tracking tumours from a simple blood draw. Many of these tests are designed to detect a single kind of cancer by spotting tumour-associated mutations in DNA sequences found floating freely in the blood.
The latest study, published on 18 January in Science, is unusual in that it tests not only for these DNA mutations, but also for aberrant levels of certain proteins, in an effort to detect eight different cancers. The test was able to detect disease in about 70% of more than 1,000 people who had already been diagnosed with cancer.
The researchers hope that their work could eventually lead to a test that is simpler and cheaper than the intensive sequencing involved in some other liquid biopsies.
The GuardianComplex engineering and metal-work discovered beneath ancient Greek 'pyramid'
More than 4,000 years ago builders carved out the entire surface of a naturally pyramid-shaped promontory on the Greek island of Keros. They shaped it into terraces covered with 1,000 tonnes of specially imported gleaming white stone to give it the appearance of a giant stepped pyramid rising from the Aegean: the most imposing manmade structure in all the Cyclades archipelago.
But beneath the surface of the terraces lay undiscovered feats of engineering and craftsmanship to rival the structure’s impressive exterior. Archaeologists from three different countries involved in an ongoing excavation have found evidence of a complex of drainage tunnels – constructed 1,000 years before the famous indoor plumbing of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete – and traces of sophisticated metalworking.
Strangest things: fossils reveal how fungus shaped life on Earth
Much of the weirdness depicted in the TV show Stranger Things is distinctly fungal. The massive organic underground network, the floating spores, and even the rotting pumpkin fields all capture the “otherness” of fungi: neither plants nor animals, often bizarre-looking, and associated with decay. As weird as they may seem to us, fungi are integral to the story of the evolution of our landscapes and climate.
Molecular studies show us that animals and fungi share a more recent common ancestor than either group does with plants, and that these groups had all diverged over a billion years ago. A sparse fossil record for fungi is not entirely surprising, given the low preservation potential of soft, microscopic threads, but we still have tantalising glimpses of their history. Recent work on the Rhynie Chert, a deposit formed in hydrothermal wetlands 407m years ago, preserving an early land ecosystem in exquisite detail, has helped to reveal the hidden history of fungi. All modern groups of fungi are abundant in Rhynie chert samples apart from the basidiomycota, the group which includes those most familiar of fungi: mushrooms. New findings have been published in a special volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching has started early, biologist says
Warm water has already begun bleaching coral on the Great Barrier Reef, weeks ahead of the period with highest forecast risk. Satellite data suggest widespread bleaching is possible by March.
Selina Ward, a coral reef biologist from the University of Queensland, has photographed the bleaching, which she said appeared to be very localised so far, but was concerning because of how early in the season it was.
“It was quite a large stretch and there were some very recently dead corals,” Ward said. “Hopefully it isn’t a sign of more to come.”
ReutersU.S. tests nuclear power system to sustain astronauts on Mars
Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface of Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy officials, at a Las Vegas news conference, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA’s Kilopower project.
Chinese 'rainbow dinosaur' had iridescent feathers like hummingbirds
There’s not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s an iridescent dinosaur.
Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of a crow-sized, bird-like dinosaur with colorful feathers from northeastern China that lived 161 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.
They named it Caihong, the Mandarin word for rainbow. Microscopic structures in the exquisitely preserved, nearly complete fossil unearthed in Hebei Province indicated that it boasted iridescent feathers, particularly on its head, neck and chest, with colors that shimmered and shifted in the light, like those of hummingbirds.
Deutsche WelleExtreme weather a factor in 2015 mass death of saiga antelopes
Unusually high temperatures helped contribute to the dramatic sudden death of more than 200,000 "critically endangered" saiga antelopes in Central Asia's remote steppe grassland in 2015, according to a new study.
Over the course of three weeks in May 2015, a bacterial disease caused blood poisoning and wiped out more than 80 percent of the saiga population in Kazakhstan's Betpak-Dala region. In some herds, not a single animal survived.
World's largest underwater cave discovered in Mexico
Explorers have verified that two giant underwater caverns under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula are connected, making the 347-kilometer (216-mile) flooded cave system the largest known on the planet.
Researchers didn't discover a new cave, but proved that the 263-kilometer Sac Actun cave and 83-kilometer Dos Ojos system near Tulum ran continuously. German underwater diver Robert Schmittner led a team for nearly 10 months to prove that the two cave systems were, in fact, one.
"This is an effort of more than 20 years, to travel hundreds of kilometers of caves submerged in Quintana Roo mainly, of which I dedicated 14 years to explore this monstrous Sac Actun system. Now everyone's job is to preserve it," said Robert Schmittner, who worked with Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM), a project to study and conserve the subterranean waters of the Yucatan.
Scientific AmericanNew Climate Censorship Tracker Comes Online
Columbia University and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund today launched an online tracker of the Trump administration's crackdown on climate science.
The project, called the Silencing Science Tracker, has so far assembled 96 entries of federal restrictions or prohibitions on climate science since November 2016. The database is built from media reports, and it's searchable by agency, date and type of action.
More than half the entries are listed as censorship, either from government restriction or researchers who are self-censoring. Other instances include targeted personnel changes, budget cuts and other federal actions aimed at minimizing or hindering climate research. The project also links to resources for whistleblowers and legal help.
Scientists Move Closer to a Universal Flu Vaccine
[…] The University of California, Los Angeles–led group reported in this week’s Science that they may have created the “Goldilocks” of flu vaccines—one that manages to trigger a very strong immune response without making infected animals sick. And unlike current flu vaccines, the new version also fuels a strong reaction from disease-fighting white blood cells called T cells. That development is important because a T cell response will likely confer longer-term protection than current inoculations do and defend against a variety of flu strains (because T cells would be on the lookout for several different features of the flu virus whereas antibodies would be primarily focused on the shape of a specific strain). “This is really exciting,” says Kathleen Sullivan, chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was not involved in the work.
The Washington PostMonarch butterfly migration was off this year and researchers are worried
Thanksgiving was right around the corner, and a sizable number of one of America’s most famous migrants could be seen still sputtering south. Not across the Texas-Mexico border, where most monarch butterflies should be by that time of year. These fluttered tardily through the migratory funnel that is Cape May, N.J., their iconic orange-and-black patterns splashing against the muted green of pines frosted by the season’s first chill.
This delayed migration is not normal, and it alarmed monarch researchers across the country. The Cape May stragglers were only a sliver of the record number of monarchs reported in the Northeast in November and December — news that sounded good initially to conservationists. But seeing butterflies so far north so late in the year suggested that few of these latecomers would reach their Mexican wintering grounds. Scientists fear that climate change is behind what they’re calling the latest monarch migration ever recorded in the eastern United States, and they worry that rising temperatures pose a new threat to a species that saw its population hit record lows in recent years.
4,000-year-old Egyptian mummies were thought to be brothers. Genetics tells a different story.
Long ago, Egyptians carved a cemetery into a rock wall along the Nile River 250 miles south of Cairo. The cemetery outlasted its 12th Dynasty creators. It survived intermittent pillaging by tomb raiders. And then in 1907, an excavator named Erfai discovered an untouched tomb. This was an unusual burial site. Within the tomb lay two high-society men, called Khnum-Nakht and Nakht-Ankh, their coffins adjacent.
Hieroglyphs on their 4,000-year-old coffins told part of their story. Each man was described as the son of a woman named Khnum-aa. The burial ground earned the nickname “the tomb of the two brothers.”
The two brothers have been on display in Britain, in the Manchester Museum, since 1908. Yet, nearly from the start, experts cast doubt on the men's fraternal relationship. A team led by anthropologist Margaret Murray, the first female archaeologist to become a lecturer at a British university, argued that "it is almost impossible to convince oneself that they belong to the same race, far less to the same family."