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.
Science DailyMaking a case for returning airships to the skies
Reintroducing airships into the world's transportation-mix could contribute to lowering the transport sector's carbon emissions and can play a role in establishing a sustainable hydrogen based economy. According to the authors of an IIASA-led study, these lighter-than-air aircraft could ultimately increase the feasibility of a 100% sustainable world.
Airships were introduced in the first half of the 20th century before conventional aircraft were used for the long-range transport of cargo and passengers. Their use in cargo and passenger transport was however quickly discontinued for a number of reasons, including the risk of a hydrogen explosion -- for which the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 served as a stark case in point; their lower speed compared to that of airplanes; and the lack of reliable weather forecasts. Since then, considerable advances in material sciences, our ability to forecast the weather, and the urgent need to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions, have steadily been bringing airships back into political, business, and scientific conversations as a possible transportation alternative.
The transport sector is responsible for around 25% of global CO2 emissions caused by humans. Of these emissions, 3% come from cargo ships, but this figure is expected to increase by between 50% and 250% until 2050. These projections necessitate finding new approaches to transporting cargo with a lower demand for energy and lower CO2 emissions. In their study published in the Springer journal Energy Conversion and Management, researchers from IIASA, Brazil, Germany, and Malaysia looked into how an airship-based industry could be developed using the jet stream as the energy medium to transport cargo around the world.
Mysterious release of radioactive material uncovered
It was the most serious release of radioactive material since Fukushima 2011, but the public took little notice of it: In September 2017, a slightly radioactive cloud moved across Europe. Now, a study has been published, analyzing more than 1300 measurements from all over Europe and other regions of the world to find out the cause of this incident. The result: it was not a reactor accident, but an accident in a nuclear reprocessing plant. The exact origin of the radioactivity is difficult to determine, but the data suggests a release site in the southern Urals. This is where the Russian nuclear facility Majak is located. The incident never caused any kind of health risks for the European population.
Among the 70 experts from all over Europe who contributed data and expertise to the current study are Dieter Hainz and Dr. Paul Saey from the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien (Vienna). The data was evaluated by Prof. Georg Steinhauser from the University of Hanover (who is closely associated with the Atomic Institute) together with Dr. Olivier Masson from the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) in France. The team has now published the results of the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
NatureMilky Way’s twisted spiral revealed in 3D
The twisted form of the Milky Way has been revealed in three dimensions, thanks to a map of bright, young pulsating stars.
The map is the most detailed yet to be made of the galaxy using only direct distances to individual stars. The best maps of the Milky Way so far have used indirect measures — based on observations of gas or stars in a given direction and structures seen in other galaxies. The latest chart was published in Science on 2 August.
A team at the University of Warsaw measured the positions and distances of supergiant stars known as Cepheids, using the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile — a project that has doubled the number of known Cepheids in the Milky Way. Mapping the distances traces the Milky Way’s spiral arms, and how the disk warps at its farthest reaches, to form an S-shape when seen side-on.
‘Tropical Trump’ sparks unprecedented crisis for Brazilian science
When neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro presented a preview of a report on the dire state of research in Brazil at a meeting of a major scientific society on 23 July, several government soldiers entered the room and began filming. Some in the audience took the soldiers’ actions as a show of intimidation.
“Maybe these guys were just soldiers who want to learn about science,” says Ribeiro, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal. He coordinated the analysis on behalf of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), which hosted the meeting and commissioned the report. But it didn’t look like they were there out of curiosity, Ribeiro says.
The GuardianThis US heartland has been flooded for five months. Does anyone care?
Dating back to late February, about 550,000 acres of land have been underwater in the rural Yazoo backwater area of the lower Mississippi delta. About half of the acreage is farmland, creating devastating effects in a region where agriculture is the lifeblood of the economy. While flooding in the region is common, this year’s floodwater has hung around longer than ever.
Carmen Hancock, James Hancock and Rodney Porter have spent the past five months helping their elderly neighbors survive in their homes surrounded by floodwater. “We’re living by the good Lord to do what’s right,” said James Hancock. “There’s a number of older people living in this neighborhood, and it’s just the right thing to do. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. That’s what I live by. You do what has to be done.”
Compounding the problem was a high Mississippi River, which remained near or above flood stage for the longest span since 1927. The perfect storm of historic rainfall and a high river resulted in a backwater flood that has lingered beyond anything the region has ever seen.
We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report
Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure, scientists will warn this week.
A leaked draft of a report on climate change and land use, which is now being debated in Geneva by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states that it will be impossible to keep global temperatures at safe levels unless there is also a transformation in the way the world produces food and manages land.
Humans now exploit 72% of the planet’s ice-free surface to feed, clothe and support Earth’s growing population, the report warns. At the same time, agriculture, forestry and other land use produces almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.
'No doubt left' about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts
The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99%, according to the lead author of the most authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts.
Three studies published in Nature and Nature Geoscience use extensive historical data to show there has never been a period in the last 2,000 years when temperature changes have been as fast and extensive as in recent decades.
It had previously been thought that similarly dramatic peaks and troughs might have occurred in the past, including in periods dubbed the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly. But the three studies use reconstructions based on 700 proxy records of temperature change, such as trees, ice and sediment, from all continents that indicate none of these shifts took place in more than half the globe at any one time.
ScienceSlow-motion video reveals how ants deliver their painful venom
Painful encounters with ants don’t stem from their bite; it’s their venom-delivering stingers. Now, in a video posted online this week, a researcher has recorded the first ever close-up look at how these stingers work.
Ant stingers are slimmer than the width of a human hair. After biting down on their target to secure themselves, the insects swing their abdomens forward to get their stingers in place. Not all species have stingers (some spray toxic acid), but the feature—passed down from an ancient wasp ancestor—is more common than not.
x xYouTube VideoYellowstone grizzly bears are again listed as threatened
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) this week restored grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to the U.S threatened species list, following a court decision that turned on how to accurately count and restore the population.
The agency’s action complies with a ruling by a federal judge last year that said FWS’s 2017 removal of the grizzlies from the list violated the Endangered Species Act. The delisting, first proposed during former President Barack Obama’s administration, would have allowed limited hunting of Yellowstone bears for the first time in more than 40 years. The agency had based the delisting on evidence that the Yellowstone population, one of six in the continental United States, had grown. Environmental groups and Native American tribes sued to block the action.
GizmodoScientists Went to China to Create Controversial Human-Monkey Embryos
An international collaboration is claiming to have created hybridized human-monkey embryos in China. Disturbingly, the research could result in monkeys capable of producing human organs for transplants, leading to a host of ethical concerns.
A researcher involved in the experiment, biologist Estrella Núñez from the Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), confirmed the achievement to Spanish news site El País. The project is being led by Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who runs a lab at the Salk Institute in the United States.
Few details are known, but the experiment, in which the researchers created chimeric, or hybridized, human-monkey embryos using human stem cells, is “an important step towards [Izpisúa Belmonte’s] final goal of converting animals of other species into factories of organs for transplants,” reports El País. All hybridized embryos were destroyed after 14 days, and no monkey was produced during the experiment.
Climate Change Has Made Our Stormwater Infrastructure Obsolete
We are not ready for the extreme rainfall coming with climate change. A quick dramatic thunderstorm in New York on Wednesday flooded Staten Island so badly that brown murky water joined bus riders for their evening ride home.
It’s just one in a growing number of examples of infrastructure not being up to the task. And now, a newly published study shows just how unprepared our infrastructure across the U.S. is to handle extreme rainfall events. Many cities’ water management systems—think stormwater drains or dams—aren’t equipped to handle climate change-influenced weather shifts, according to the study published in Geophysical Research Letters. Staten Island got a taste of that when stormwater infrastructure failed to handle about the inch of rain that fell in 20 minutes. That’s because the system wasn’t built to withstand that much rain in such short a time. But New Yorkers aren’t alone in this predicament.
“The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it’s supposed to because of the big changes that we’ve seen in extreme rainfall,” lead author Daniel Wright, a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.
Phys.orgJuly heatwave up to 3C hotter due to climate change
The record-shattering heatwave that baked much of northern Europe last month was likely between 1.5 to 3.0 degrees Celsius hotter due to manmade climate change, an international team of scientists said Friday.
The three-day peak saw temperature records tumble in Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain while the city of Paris experienced its hottest day ever with the mercury topping out at 42.6C (108.7 Fahrenheit) on July 25.
The ferocious heat came off the back of similar soaring temperatures in June, helping that month to be the hottest June since records began.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) team combined climate modelling with historical heatwave trends and compared it with monitoring data across the continent.
Cutting pollution won't cause global warming spike, study finds
Fears that efforts to reduce air pollution could dramatically speed up the process of global warming have been allayed with the publication of a landmark new study.
Scientists have long worried that air pollution, while having a devastating impact on human health, may paradoxically have been acting as a 'brake' on the heating of the atmosphere. Pollution particles help clouds to form with more water droplets, meaning they reflect more of the sun's energy back into space.
Until now, the extent to which pollution inadvertently helps to cool the planet has not been clear. If the cooling is strong, it would mean that efforts to clean up the air could actually accelerate global warming, making efforts to tackle climate change even more difficult.
However, new research carried out at the University of Reading has shown pollution affects different clouds in different ways. While some clouds get thicker, others become thinner, meaning pollution is unlikely to offset more than half of greenhouse gas warming.
Genes that first enabled plants to grow leaves identified by scientists
The genes that first enabled plants to grow shoots and conquer the land have been identified by University of Bristol researchers. The findings, published in Current Biology, explain how a 450-million years ago a switch enabled plants to delay reproduction and grow shoots, leaves and buds.
Over the course of half a billion years of evolution, plants have evolved from tiny and simple ground-hugging forms into diverse and complex varieties that abound the Earth today, from the garden rose to the 100-metre tall redwood tree. An international research team from the Universities of Bristol (UK), Lyon (France) and Palacký (Czech Republic) has now discovered the secrets of shoot evolution.
Popular ScienceA rare, deadly virus is circulating in Florida—and this is just the beginning
A mosquito-borne virus called the Eastern equine encephalitis virus is circulating in Orange County, Florida, health officials warned this week. The virus was identified in a group of chickens researchers use to monitor levels of mosquito-borne diseases in the area.
Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) is dangerous: When it spreads to humans, the virus can infect the brain, and turns fatal in about a third of people, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But the disease is also extremely rare in humans—it only affects an average of seven people in the United States each year. However, like all viruses transmitted by mosquitoes, there's a risk that it could have a bigger impact under a warmer climate. The number of annual cases may start to creep up. "I would not be surprised at all to see that happening," says Thomas Unnasch, an expert in EEEV and distinguished professor in the College of Public Health at the University of Southern Florida.
Save the world by saving your plants' seeds
In 2010, a friend and I started the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library. It's a lot like a regular library, but instead of books, we lend packets of seeds. You can check them out, plant them at home, and harvest new ones that you're welcome to return to us for the next person to use.
A century ago, just about every farmer in this country saved seeds from their crops to replant the following year. Now, most buy new ones each season from big agriculture companies, which engineer them to produce uniform, high-yield harvests. But breeding for consistency rather than biodiversity can make plants more susceptible to various diseases and pests.
MongabayNew DNA toolkit identifies multiple species from environmental DNA
Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and CALeDNA have developed a toolkit designed to quickly identify the species in a biological community by simultaneously analyzing the environmental DNA (eDNA) from multiple species from a single analysis of a sample of water or soil. Their aim is to eliminate the need for researchers to sort and process multiple eDNA sequences independently, thus saving time and money.
They published a description of the open-source software tool, called the Anacapa Toolkit, as well as results of a field test in the kelp forests off southern California.
Some turtle embryos can influence their own sex, study finds
The sex of some turtle species is influenced not by genes but by the temperatures they experience in the nest. Eggs incubated at cooler temperatures develop into males, while those that face warmer temperatures turn out to be females. When temperatures fluctuate between cool and warm, the eggs produce a mix of male and female babies.
The Chinese three-keeled pond turtle (also called the Chinese pond turtle) is one such species. But its embryos seem to have some control over their own sexual fate, according to a new study.
Science NewsStars may keep spinning fast, long into old age
Stars may keep some of their youthful vigor as they age. Astronomers have spotted a star in its twilight years that spins much faster than expected. The discovery supports a new idea that, rather than continually slowing with age, some stars may have a magnetic midlife crisis that keeps them on a roll.
“This process of slowing rotation … that we assumed happened indefinitely over the lifetime of a star may be interrupted in the middle of a star’s life,” says astronomer Travis Metcalfe of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. He presented new measurements of the star’s age July 30 at the first TESS Science Conference.
The Arctic is burning and Greenland is melting, thanks to record heat
The Arctic is on fire. Record-breaking temperatures and strong winds are fueling an unprecedented number of wildfires across the region this summer. In Siberia alone, hundreds of wildfires captured by satellite images July 28 spanned about 3 million hectares of land. Across Alaska, as many as 400 wildfires were burning as of mid-July. And the heat is also melting Greenland’s ice at an alarming rate.
The scale and intensity of the June 2019 wildfires are unparalleled in the 16 years that the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, or CAMS, has been tracking global wildfire data. And July’s numbers “have been of similar proportions,” says CAMS senior scientist Mark Parrington. “I’ve been surprised at the duration of the fires in the Arctic Circle, in particular.”
Scientific AmericanLost Cities and Climate Change
Not far from my grandmother’s house is a ghost city. At Angel Mounds on the Ohio river about eight miles southeast of Evansville, there are a few visible earthworks and a reconstructed wattle-and-daub barrier. There is almost nothing left of the people who build these mounds; in a final insulting erasure, the site is now named after the white settler family who most recently farmed the land.
There are traces of other dead villages along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, mounds scattered from present-day Indiana to Arkansas and Alabama. In southern Illinois, a few miles from the Missouri border, hidden among empty corn and soy fields, is the center of that dead civilization’s gravity: the lost city of Cahokia.
Parrots Are Making the U.S. Home
You might expect to hear parrots like these in the wild in South America. But these birds are actually nesting in the middle of Chicago. Despite being known as monk parakeets, the green-and-gray birds are true parrots. And they’ve been living in the Windy City since the 1970s. But not just there.
“There are monk parakeets in many, many states. They’re breeding in around 21 states.”
Jenny Uehling, a Ph.D. student now at Cornell, who was at the University of Chicago when she studied these birds.
“Certain populations will pop up in certain states and then disappear, but they’re by far the most widespread of any of the species.”
Sci-News20,000-Year-Old Seawater Found Trapped in Limestone from Maldives
A team of researchers from Princeton University and Universities of Miami and Chicago has found drops of ancient seawater in the sediment cores from the Maldives, a set of small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The seawater could be as old as 20,000 years.
“Previously, all we had to go on to reconstruct seawater from the last Ice Age were indirect clues, like fossil corals and chemical signatures from sediments on the seafloor,” said University of Chicago’s Dr. Clara Blättler, lead author of the study.
“But from all indications, it looks pretty clear we now have an actual piece of this 20,000-year-old ocean.”
Researchers Discover Eleven New Species of Rain Frogs in Ecuador
Pristimantis is the most diverse genus of tetrapods — a group of vertebrates that includes amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals — with 532 described species.
This genus is distributed from Honduras in Central America to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from the sea level to elevations above 13,100 feet (4,000 m).
In Ecuador, it comprises 34.3% of the frog diversity with over 200 species. The newly-discovered species are Pristimantis atillo, P. chomskyi, P. gloria, P. jimenezi, P. lutzae, P. multicolor, P. nangaritza, P. teslai, P. torresi, P. totoroi, and P. verrucolatus.
The AtlanticThe Brain-Eating Amoeba Is a Nearly Perfect Killer
Last week, a North Carolina man became a notorious microbial killer’s first confirmed victim this year. Fifty-nine-year-old Eddie Gray had unknowingly come across a brain-eating amoeba while swimming in a man-made lake near Fayetteville in mid-July; 10 days later, he was dead.
Since the brain-eating amoeba was first recognized and named, in 1970, grisly reports of its disastrous attacks have made headlines nearly every year. About 97 percent of confirmed cases in the United States have been fatal. But the infection is also incredibly rare, and the small sample size leaves the epidemiologists who study it and the doctors who encounter it with their hands tied. It may be one of nature’s most perfect crimes.
Matthew Downen had never done anything like this before. In a hotel room in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, he watched as a dealer poured a bag of amber fossils onto a white towel spread over a desk.
The previous night, at the opening reception for the eighth International Conference on Fossil Insects, Arthropods, and Amber, Downen had gotten a tip from a friend: A guy here had spiders fossilized in amber, and he was looking for someone to take them.
Downen, a doctoral student in entomology at the University of Kansas, was initially ecstatic. Spiders for free? He had come to the meeting to present his research on spider diversity in ancient lake beds; more fossilized spiders could expand his findings. When he expressed his enthusiasm, he was quickly introduced to a large, jovial dealer named Jorge, who showed him a smartphone photo of a spider with an unusually long abdomen. “He was like, ‘We’ve got all kinds of amber,’” Downen recalls. Jorge told Downen that if he was interested, he should meet him the next morning at 8—and bring cash. Downen realized that this was a commercial transaction, not a spider free-for-all.
Live ScienceWhy Is There So Much Oil in the Arctic?
In 2007, two Russian submarines plunged down 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) into the Arctic Ocean and planted a national flag onto a piece of continental shelf known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Rising from the center of the Arctic Basin, the flag sent a clear message to the surrounding nations: Russia had just laid claim to the vast oil and gas reserves contained in this underwater turf.
Russia's dramatic show of power had no legal weight — but it isn't the only nation that's trying to stake claims to the Arctic's vast depository of oil and gas. The United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland and China are all trying to cash in. It's no wonder: Projections show that the area of land and sea that falls within the Arctic Circle is home to an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil, an incredible 13% of Earth's reserves. It's also estimated to contain almost a quarter of untapped global gas resources.
Most of the oil that's been located in this region so far is on the land, just because it's easier to access. But now, countries are making moves to start extracting offshore, where the vast majority — 84% — of the energy is believed to occur. But long before this oil race began, how did the Arctic become so energy rich? [How Does Oil Form?]
Greenland Lost 217 Billion Tons of Ice Last Month
A staggering 217 billion tons (197 billion metric tons) of meltwater flowed off of Greenland's ice sheet into the Atlantic Ocean this July. The worst day of melting was July 31, when 11 billion tons (10 billion metric tons) of melted ice poured into the ocean.
This massive thaw represents some of the worst melting since 2012, according to The Washington Post. That year, 97% of the Greenland ice sheet experienced melting. This year, so far, 56% of the ice sheet has melted, but temperatures — 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average — have been higher than during the 2012 heat wave. All told, this July's melt alone was enough to raise global average sea levels by 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters), according to the Post.
xFor those keeping track, this means the #Greenland#icesheet ends July with a net mass loss of 197 Gigatonnes since the 1st of the month. https://t.co/Qgwj6WtUzF
— Ruth Mottram (@ruth_mottram) August 1, 2019 Ars TechnicaNew advanced malware, possibly nation sponsored, is targeting US utilities
A new piece of advanced espionage malware, possibly developed by a nation-supported attacker, targeted three US companies in the utilities industry last month, researchers from security firm Proofpoint reported on Thursday.
Employees of the three unnamed companies, Proofpoint reported, received emails purporting to come from the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying. This non-profit group develops, administers, and scores examinations used in granting licenses for US engineers. Using the official NCEES logo and the domain nceess[.]com, the emails said that the recipients failed to achieve a passing score on a recent exam. The attached Word document was titled Result Notice.doc.
Roll over, Beethoven: Decoding the maestro’s musical style with statistics
Famed Classical/Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven had a distinct statistical signature to his compositional style, according to an innovative analysis published in a recent paper in PLOS ONE. The study is part of the rise of so-called "digital humanities," although much of the work to date in this burgeoning subfield has focused on textual analysis.
"New state-of-the-art methods in statistics and data science make it possible for us to analyze music in ways that were out of reach for traditional musicology," said co-author Martin Rohrmeier, head of EPFL's Digital Humanities Institute, which is devoted to achieving a better understanding of how music works. "The young field of digital musicology is currently advancing a whole range of methods and perspectives."
x xYouTube VideoGot a horrifying foreign superbug? You may have more than one
The sad tale of a US resident who fell ill while traveling abroad has prompted an ominous warning from health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—that is, that the most horrifying, highly drug-resistant infections known to health experts tend to travel in packs.
The patient who prompted the warning was traveling in Kenya in the late summer of 2018 when a cerebral hemorrhage struck. The brain bleed landed the traveler in a hospital there for a month, during which time doctors performed a variety of procedures. Those included placing a feeding tube and inserting a breathing tube into the neck. The patient encountered several complications during the treatments, including sepsis, pneumonia, and a urinary tract infection, requiring courses of potent antibiotic and anti-fungal medications.