The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton and the decline of the Republic. Please add news, signs of life or hope, or other items in the comments.
Popular ScienceWe might finally know how the first black holes formed
Generally speaking, there are two widely known and very popular varieties of black holes: stellar mass black holes, which are smaller and form when a big star collapses into itself (yielding a supernova explosion in the process); and supermassive black holes, which form as a result of… a perplexing mystery. See, the early universe is thought to have been riddled with supermassive black holes, which were able to accrete gas and dust that molded up into stars and planets that eventually aggregated into galaxies as we know them. But how could the first star-making black holes appear if there were no stars around to collapse into themselves?
We might finally have a resolution to this cosmic chicken-or-the-egg problem. A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters lends big support for an emerging model for how these objects might have formed sans-stars, potential giving cosmological clarity to a mystery that previously lacked any real scientific explanation.
Shantanu Basu, a physics and astronomy professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, explains that the model is based around an alternate idea of what causes black holes to stop growing. In one corner of the ring, you have the “collapsar” model outlined above. In this case, “gravitational collapse is halted by the intense thermal and radiation pressure that is generated in the center of a collapsing gas fragment, AKA the star.”
The Atlantic cod’s migratory supergene comes at a cost
Human eating habits tend to have devastating consequences. No species embodies the ravages of our appetite like the Atlantic cod. In the early 1990s Atlantic cod populations that had sustained maritime cities on either side of the ocean for centuries crashed. Numbers fell to 3 percent of what they had been in the 1970s, and in 1992 a moratorium was issued as a last ditch effort to preserve what cod was left off the coast of Newfoundland.
Atlantic cod have only in the last decade begun to recuperate from the devastation that happened 30 years ago. And new evidence published in Science Advances on the cod population genetics provides suggests one reason why it might have been slow going: It turns out the crash of the early 90s didn't just wipe out their numbers, it also stripped away their resiliency and left a population that was genetically vulnerable.
A team from the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans took DNA from different cod stocks off the coast of Northeastern Canada, and what they found was that some of the fish carried a crucial “supergene” (really a group of genes always transmitted together in a particular arrangement).
NatureThe biologist using insect eggs to overturn evolutionary doctrine
By the spring of 1998, Cassandra Extavour had spent more than two years failing to get her PhD off the ground. She had moved from her native Toronto in Canada to a pioneering laboratory in Madrid, where she was trying to engineer the eggs of fruit flies to have two different genetic make-ups. But she hit hurdle after hurdle, and nobody in the lab could help. If she couldn’t make the flies within the next few months, she would have to quit the project.
As she sat with her adviser and went through the dozens of unsuccessful tests she had done, they came up with one last strategy to make the flies using a different gene variant. Her adviser reassured her that it wouldn’t have any unwanted effects, but couldn’t point to any hard data. Even with time running out, Extavour was unwilling to take his word for it. She embarked on a months-long series of experiments to prove to herself that the gene did what he said. In the process, she built her own tools to ask a question that nobody had addressed before. “That’s the kind of project that I really love,” she says.
Two decades later, Extavour is still pursuing original research questions and overturning convention as she investigates some of the most fundamental aspects of animal development.
Climate change made Europe’s mega-heatwave five times more likely
After a series of unusually hot summers, France and other parts of Europe last week experienced another intense heatwave that broke temperature records across the continent.
For one group of climate scientists, the event presented a rare opportunity to rapidly analyse whether the heatwave — which made headlines around the world — could be attributed to global warming. After a seven-day analysis, their results are in: climate change made the temperatures reached in France last week at least five times more likely than they would be in a world without global warming.
The scientists with the World Weather Attribution project decided to take action when they saw the heatwave coming, and ended up performing a near real-time analysis while at a climate conference in Toulouse, France. As they met at the International Conference on Statistical Climatology, the city and most of the country baked — the southeastern town of Gallargues-le-Montueux broke national temperature records, hitting 45.9 °C on 28 June.
GizmodoPlants Are Definitely Not Conscious, Researchers Argue
The remarkable ability of plants to respond to their environment has led some scientists to believe it’s a sign of conscious awareness. A new opinion paper argues against this position, saying plants “neither possess nor require consciousness.”
Many of us take it for granted that plants, which lack a brain or central nervous system, wouldn’t have the capacity for conscious awareness. That’s not to suggest, however, that plants don’t exhibit intelligence. Plants seem to demonstrate a startling array of abilities, such as computation, communication, recognizing overcrowding, and mobilizing defenses, among other clever vegetative tricks.
To explain these apparent behaviors, a subset of scientists known as plant neurobiologists has argued that plants possess a form of consciousness. Most notably, evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has performed experiments that allegedly hint at capacities such as habituation (learning from experience) and classical conditioning (like Pavlov’s salivating dogs). In these experiments, plants apparently “learned” to stop curling their leaves after being dropped repeatedly or to spread their leaves in anticipation of a light source. Armed with this experimental evidence, Gagliano and others have claimed, quite controversially, that because plants can learn and exhibit other forms of intelligence, they must be conscious.
Calculation Shows We Could Add a U.S.-Sized Forest to the Planet to Fight Climate Change
Trees are good for all sorts of things, like providing shade for picnics and habitat for animals. But they’re also a huge part of the efforts to combat climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.
New findings were published on Thursday in Science show just how important a role they could play in climate mitigation efforts by calculating “Earth’s tree carrying capacity.” Right now there are estimated to be nearly 17 million square miles of forest cover on Earth, and there’s enough room to add another 3.5 million square miles of trees—a U.S.-sized chunk of land—to sequester even more carbon. There’s just one slight wrinkle: Climate change could make life in certain parts of the globe inhospitable for some of those new trees, particularly in the tropics.
Despite trees being nearly everywhere, figuring out just how much tree coverage the planet has is a pretty challenging task. The Food and Agriculture Organization defines forest as any area with more than 10 percent tree cover. And the best way to really see just how much tree cover’s out there is using satellite data, which is exactly what the study turned to.
Phys.orgHundreds of sharks and rays tangled in plastic
Hundreds of sharks and rays have become tangled in plastic waste in the world's oceans, new research shows.
University of Exeter scientists scoured existing published studies and Twitter for shark and ray entanglements, and found reports of more than 1,000 entangled individuals.
And they say the true number is likely to be far higher, as few studies have focussed on plastic entanglement among shark and rays.
The study says such entanglement—mostly involving lost or discarded fishing gear—is a "far lesser threat" to sharks and rays than commercial fishing, but the suffering it causes is a major animal welfare concern.
Genes, yes, but obesity pandemic mostly down to diet: study
A three-fold jump since 1975 in the percentage of adults worldwide who are obese has been driven mainly by a shift in diet and lack of exercise, but genes do play a role as well, according a large-scale study published Thursday.
For people genetically predisposed to a wider girth, these unhealthy lifestyles compounded the problem, resulting in an even higher rate of weight gain, researchers reported in The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal.
The standard measure for obesity, the Body-Mass Index (BMI), is calculated on the basis of weight and height.
A BMI of 25 up to 30 means that one is overweight. Thirty and above corresponds to obesity, a major risk factor for heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and some cancers.
USGSMagnitude 7.1 Earthquake in Southern California
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck southern California on July 5, 2019 at 8:20 pm local time (03:20 UTC). This event was centered near the July 4, 2019 M6.4 earthquake.
USGS scientists and crews continue to work around the clock conducting field work, mapping impacted areas and monitoring additional aftershocks to keep the public informed.
USGS has issued a red alert for economic losses meaning that extensive damage is probable, and the disaster is likely widespread. Estimated economic losses are at least $1 billion dollars, less than 1% of GDP of the United States. Past events with this alert level have required a national or international level response.
The GuardianCockroaches could soon be almost impossible to kill with pesticides
Cockroaches have become harder to kill and could soon be “almost impossible” to control using pesticides alone, according to a study funded by the United States housing department.
Researchers from Purdue University in Indiana spent six months trying to eradicate German cockroaches (Blattella germanica L.), one of the most common species of household cockroach in the US, Australia and Europe, from three low-rise apartment buildings in Illinois and Indiana.
The results were published in Scientific Reports last month.
Everyone’s going back to the moon. But why?
t 2.51am on Monday 15 July, engineers at India’s national spaceport at Sriharikota will blast their Chandrayaan-2 probe into orbit around the Earth. It will be the most ambitious space mission the nation has attempted. For several days, the four-tonne spacecraft will be manoeuvred above our planet before a final injection burn of its engines will send it hurtling towards its destination: the moon.
Exactly 50 years after the astronauts of Apollo 11 made their historic voyage to the Sea of Tranquillity, Chandrayaan-2 will repeat that journey – though on a slightly different trajectory. After the robot craft enters lunar orbit, it will gently drop a lander, named Vikram, on to the moon’s surface near its south pole. A robot rover, Pragyan, will then be dispatched and, for the next two weeks, trundle across the local terrain, analysing the chemical composition of soil and rocks.
Wide Sargasso seaweed: 5,500-mile algae belt keeps on growing
It weighs 20m tonnes, stretches from west Africa to the Gulf of Mexico, and washes up on beaches creating a malodorous stench. Now scientists say a vast swathe of brown seaweed could be becoming an annual occurrence.
Researchers say the explosion in sargassum seaweed first materialised in 2011. But new research shows it has appeared almost every year since then, forming the largest bloom of macroalgae ever recorded. What’s more, the seaweed band – dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt – seems to be getting bigger.
The scientists say the seaweed can be a boon for marine wildlife, providing habitat for creatures including fish and birds. But it also brings problems. Thick mats can block sunlight, while if large mats die and sink it can prove deadly for marine life, including coral.
Science DailyStudy explains universal pattern in fossil record
Throughout life's history on earth, biological diversity has gone through ebbs and flows -- periods of rapid evolution and of dramatic extinctions. We know this, at least in part, through the fossil record of marine invertebrates left behind since the Cambrian period. Remarkably, extreme events of diversification and extinction happen more frequently than a typical, Gaussian, distribution would predict. Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability.
While scientists have long known about this unusual pattern in the fossil record, they have struggled to explain it. Many random processes that occur over a long time with large sample sizes, from processes that produce school grades to height among a population, converge on the common Gaussian distribution. "It's a very reasonable default expectation," says Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow Andy Rominger. So why doesn't the fossil record display this common pattern?
In a new paper published in Science Advances, Rominger and colleagues Miguel Fuentes (San Sebastián University, Chile) and Pablo Marquet (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) have taken a new approach to tackling this question. Instead of trying to only describe fluctuations in biodiversity across all types of organisms, they also look at fluctuations within clades, or groups of organisms that share a common ancestral lineage.
Some corals can survive in acidified ocean conditions, but have lower density skeletons
Coral reefs face many challenges to their survival, including the global acidification of seawater as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. A new study led by scientists at UC Santa Cruz shows that at least three Caribbean coral species can survive and grow under conditions of ocean acidification more severe than those expected to occur during this century, although the density of their skeletons was lower than normal.
The study took advantage of the unusual seawater chemistry found naturally at sites along the Caribbean coastline of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where water discharging from submarine springs has lower pH than the surrounding seawater, with reduced availability of the carbonate ions corals need to build their calcium carbonate skeletons.
In a two-year field experiment, the international team of researchers transplanted genetically identical fragments of three species of corals to a site affected by the springs and to a nearby control site not influenced by the springs, and then monitored the survival, growth rates, and other physiological traits of the transplants. They reported their findings in a paper published June 26 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
MongabayNew protected area in Bolivia is nearly as large as Yellowstone in the US
A new protected area in northwest Bolivia will promote wildlife conservation and sustainable development in local communities, its creators say.
The municipal government of Reyes, in northwest Bolivia, approved the Municipal Park and Natural Area of Integral Management Rhukanrhuka on June 25. The protected area encompasses some 859,451 hectares or more than 2.1 million acres, making it nearly as large as Yellowstone National Park in the United States, widely regarded to be the first national park ever created.
Rhukanrhuka is located in the same region as Bolivia’s Madidi National Park, which, together with several other nearby protected areas such as Peru’s Manu Biosphere Reserve, is considered one of the world´s most biodiverse and largest protected area complexes.
Ocean currents spin a web of interconnected fisheries around the world
Chances are the locally caught fish you bought down by the wharf was spawned thousands of miles away, migrating on ocean currents, a new study has found.
An estimated 90 percent of marine catches are caught within 200 miles, or 320 kilometers, of countries’ shores, but they most likely originated in spawning grounds under the jurisdiction of a different country, according to the study published June 21 in the journal Science.
Analyzing data of catch and known spawning grounds of more than 700 fish species, coupled with ocean current data, the paper’s researchers developed a computer model to show where the various species tended to be born and caught.
Scientific AmericanWorm Wiring Diagram May Help Us Understand Our Own Nervous System
More than 30 years ago a team of scientists painstakingly traced the connections among each of the 302 nerve cells in the hermaphrodite Caenorhabditis elegans worm. But it took until now for someone to get around to doing the same for the male.
A new map, published in Nature, represents the first such complete wiring diagram for both sexes of an animal. The so-called connectome shows which neurons are linked to others, along with the muscles and other functions they control, and how strong those connections are. The wiring plan enables researchers to better understand how these creatures sense and react to their environment.
“It provides a level of completeness in terms of understanding the entire structure of an animal nervous system at an unprecedented level,” says Douglas Portman, an associate professor at the University of Rochester, who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary that ran alongside it.
ScienceBiblical Philistines—archenemies of ancient Israelites—hailed from Europe, DNA reveals
As a schoolgirl in Israel, Michal Feldman learned that the ancient Philistines, who lived between present-day Tel Aviv and Gaza during the Iron Age, were "the bad guys." In the Bible, they were the archenemies of the Israelites, who fought Samson's armies and sent Goliath into battle against David. "Philistine" is still a slur for an uncivilized barbarian.
Now a Ph.D. student in Germany, Feldman has found a new way to understand the Philistines. By analyzing DNA from 12th century B.C.E burials in the Philistines's renowned city of Ashkelon, her team has found that they were interlopers in the ancient Middle East. Their closest known kin were from southern Europe, the team reports this week in Science Advances.
The DNA data suggest a kernel of truth to Greek and Middle Eastern legends that describe survivors who moved south after the catastrophic collapse of great Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean in the late 13th and early 12th centuries B.C.E.
Sci NewsNeanderthals Used Pine Resin as Glue to Haft Stone Tools into Handles
The hafting of stone tools was an important advance in the technological evolution of Paleolithic humans. Joining a handle to a knife or scraper and attaching a sharp point to a wooden shaft made stone tools more efficient and easier to use. According to new research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, Neanderthals living in Europe from about 55,000 to 40,000 years ago traveled away from their caves to collect resin from pine trees, and then used that sticky substance to glue stone tools to wood or bone handles.
“We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans,” said senior author Dr. Paola Villa, from the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder, the Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana in Rome, Italy, and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“That insight came from a chance discovery from two Middle Paleolithic caves in Latium, Italy: Fossellone Cave and Sant’Agostino Cave.”
Physicists Teleport Quantum Information inside Diamond
A team of physicists at the Yokohama National University, Japan, has successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation — the remote exchange of quantum states — in a diamond.
“Quantum teleportation is a key principle for quantum information technology. It permits the transfer of quantum information into an otherwise inaccessible space,” Professor Hideo Kosaka, senior author of the study.
“It also permits the transfer of information into a quantum memory without revealing or destroying the stored quantum information.”
The inaccessible space, in this case, consisted of carbon atoms in diamond. Made of linked, yet individually contained, carbon atoms, a diamond holds the perfect ingredients for quantum teleportation.
The AtlanticIf humans ever discover life on Mars, this is how it might start: with a breaking-news alert heralding a startling development well beyond Earth.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, The New York Times sent a bulletin: “Mars is belching a large amount of methane gas. It’s a sign of possible life on the red planet.”
NASA quickly published a press release acknowledging the detection, which, the Times had reported, marked the largest amount of methane ever registered by the Curiosity rover, a NASA mission that touched down on the red planet in 2012. But after that, the agency went quiet. The news had come from an email between scientists on the Curiosity team that had been leaked to the Times. It wasn’t supposed to be known, at least not yet. And there’s no room for nuance in a breaking-news alert.
The Lost Nurdles Polluting Texas Beaches
Last September, Jace Tunnell discovered a layer of tiny, round plastic pellets covering a beach on Padre Island off the southern coast of Texas. There were “millions of them,” he recalled, “and it went on for miles.” Tunnell, a marine biologist, knew exactly what the pellets were, but says he had never actually seen them before.
They’re called nurdles, and they’re the preproduction building blocks for nearly all plastic goods, from soft-drink bottles to oil pipelines. But as essential as they are for consumer products, nurdles that become lost during transit or manufacturing are also an environmental hazard. In the ocean and along coastal waterways, they absorb toxic chemicals and are often mistaken for food by animals. They also wash up by the millions on beaches, leaving coastal communities to deal with the ramifications.
Researchers say nurdles—which weigh a fraction of an ounce (approximately 20 milligrams each)—are found virtually everywhere. It is estimated that more than 250,000 tons enter the ocean annually. In February, Fidra, an environmental group based in Scotland, reported nurdle pollution in 28 of the 32 countries they surveyed, from Ecuador to South Africa.
For Smart Animals, Octopuses Are Very Weird
A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. Once released, it moves to protect itself—it grabs discarded seashells and swiftly arranges them into a defensive dome.
Thanks to acts like these, cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have become renowned for their intelligence. Octopuses, for example, have been seen unscrewing jar lids to get at hidden food, carrying coconut shells to use as armor, barricading their den with stones, and squirting jets of water to deter predators or short out aquarium lights.
But why did they become intelligent in the first place? Why did this one group of mollusks, among an otherwise slow and dim-witted dynasty of snails, slugs, clams, oysters, and mussels, evolve into creatures that are famed for their big brains? These are hard questions to answer, especially because cephalopods aren’t just weirdly intelligent; they’re also very weird for intelligent animals.
BBC NewsAlaska heatwave: Anchorage hits record temperature
The US state of Alaska, part of which lies inside the Arctic Circle, is sweltering under a heatwave, with record temperatures recorded in several areas, including its largest city.
Temperatures reached 90F (32C) in Anchorage on Thursday, shattering the city's previous record of 85F. […]
This has wreaked havoc on local communities, wildlife and the state's economy.
Climate change played a role in the deaths of thousands of puffins in Alaska, scientists said in May.
They said they believed the birds had starved to death when the fish they eat migrated north with rising sea temperatures.
Ars TechnicaAlaskan permafrost warming experiment produces surprising results
Emissions from burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, and agricultural practices aren't the only things that control how high atmospheric CO2 will go in the future. There are also feedbacks in the Earth's climate system, where warming temperatures cause the release of carbon into the atmosphere. One of these is the release of carbon from permafrost as it thaws and decays.
Unlike emissions, which we can control through actions like retiring a coal-burning power plant, humans can only indirectly change the behavior of these feedbacks—the sooner we halt warming, the smaller their emissions will be. Figuring out exactly how much (and how fast) those feedbacks will emit is a major challenge for climate science.
A striking new study led by César Plaza works on the first step of this challenge: measuring how much carbon is being lost from permafrost right now.
No, a “checklist error” did not almost derail the first moon landing
Last week was the forty-sixth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing—the first of the six crewed landings on our nearest celestial neighbor. In the years between 1969 and 1972, 12 human beings walked on the surface of the moon: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Al Bean, Alan Shepard, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, John Young, Charlie Duke, Jack Schmitt, and Gene Cernan. Each Apollo landing by necessity leapfrogged the previous by some notable amount, because even as Apollo 11 was preparing to lift off it was obvious that the money wasn’t coming and Project Apollo might be the only chance to visit the moon—perhaps for a long, long time.
Even though Apollo 10’s "dress rehearsal" had taken NASA through all but the final phase of the lunar landing two months before, there were still a large number of unknowns in play when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin separated Eagle from Columbia, leaving Michael Collins to watch his crewmates descend to the lunar surface—perhaps to stay there forever.
And as it turned out, the first landing on the moon almost did encounter disaster. Shortly after Eagle entered one of the most complicated stages of the descent, the guidance computer began throwing off alarms—very serious alarms, of a type no one in mission control or on the spacecraft was immediately familiar with. Back at MOCR2 in Houston, the burden to determine whether or not the alarms were benign—and therefore the decision to determine whether to abort the landing, blow the Eagle in half, and make an emergency burn to try to make it back up to Columbia—fell on the shoulders of two people: guidance controller Steve Bales and backroom guidance specialist Jack Garman.