The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton. Saturday’s OND is focused on the past week’s science news.
GizmodoCosmic Rays May Have Blasted Gigantic Sand Dunes Into Existence on Saturn's Moon Titan
The equatorial dunes on Saturn’s moon Titan are among the most dramatic surface features in the Solar System, but scientists aren’t exactly sure how they formed. New experimental evidence suggests the dunes arose as a result of cosmic rays hitting Titan’s surface ice.
Titan is one of the neatest places in the Solar System. It’s a Saturnian moon that features a dense atmosphere, liquids at the surface in the form of hydrocarbon lakes and seas, enormous dust storms, and ice volcanoes that spew jets of water instead of molten lava. Titan also features an equatorial desert, called the Shangri-La Sand Sea, that’s home to a network of monumental dunes, the tallest of which reach as high as 100 meters (330 feet). Using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and the ESA’s Huygens lander, researchers have been able to observe these dunes, which extend across an area measuring over 10 million square kilometers (3.9 million square miles).
A New Study Paints Bright Future for Humpback Whales But With a Caveat
The western South Atlantic humpback whale suffered incredibly at the hands of humans, with the population dipping to just 450 by the 1950s. A new study, however, has found that the species may be bouncing back thanks to conservation efforts to protect whales.
Published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science, the study found that the current number of humpback whales in this specific population is around 25,000, a dramatic jump from the 1950s low point. The study authors predict that within the next 10 years, the western South Atlantic humpback whale may return to the 27,000-stronghold it was back in 1830 before people began their killing spree.
AP NewsFirst all-female spacewalking team makes history
The world’s first all-female spacewalking team made history high above Earth on Friday, replacing a broken part of the International Space Station’s power grid.
As NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir successfully completed the job with wrenches, screwdrivers and power-grip tools, it marked the first time in a half-century of spacewalking that men weren’t part of the action. They insisted they were just doing their job after years of training, following in the footsteps of women who paved the way.
America’s first female spacewalker from 35 years ago, Kathy Sullivan, was delighted. She said it’s good to finally have enough women in the astronaut corps and trained for spacewalking for this to happen.
x xYouTube Video CNNCalifornia earthquakes just caused a major fault line to move for the first time, a study shows
The Ridgecrest earthquake in July was the strongest to strike Southern California in 20 years. And the main quake, along with more than 100,000 aftershocks, caused a major fault to move for the first time, researchers say.
The movement attributed to the quake is less than an inch along the surface of the fault and would be virtually undetectable to an ordinary resident. But it has intrigued researchers for two reasons. They're not clear what it means, and they've never seen this particular fault move, said Zachary Ross, assistant professor of geophysics at Caltech and an author of a study of the fault published Friday in the journal Science.
Researchers from Caltech and NASA recognize the fault shift as creeping. The phenomenon, though, usually occurs without an earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey.
The findings come as scientists continue to warn that the "Big One" -- the monstrous earthquake that could potentially level populous Southern California -- is overdue.
'Waterfalls' of gas reveal baby planets, study saysAstronomers spied three spots around a star that could indicate baby planets are forming and growing there, according to a new study.
This is the first time astronomers using the ALMA radio telescope have seen 3D motions of gas in a disk around a star where planets form. The study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The current understanding for planet formation follows a specific order. Stars form from clouds of collapsing gas and dust. Then, a protoplanetary disk of leftover gas and dust surrounds the star. Planets form from this disk, using the leftover gas and dust that created the star to pull together solid material for planets.
The GuardianFastest ants in world found in northern Sahara, researchers say
The sand dunes of the northern Sahara are home to the fastest ants in the world, according to researchers who clocked the insects foraging for food in the blistering midday sun.
Video footage reveals the ants galloping across the scorching sand at speeds approaching one metre per second, the equivalent of a house cat tearing about at 120mph.
The faster the ants ran, the more they took to the air, in gallops that brought all six legs off the ground at once. At full pelt, the insects travelled 108 times their body length per second, the researchers found.
Doubting death: how our brains shield us from mortal truth
Warning: this story is about death. You might want to click away now.
That’s because, researchers say, our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise. A study found that the brain shields us from existential fear by categorising death as an unfortunate event that only befalls other people.
“The brain does not accept that death is related to us,” said Yair Dor-Ziderman, at Bar Ilan University in Israel. “We have this primal mechanism that means when the brain gets information that links self to death, something tells us it’s not reliable, so we shouldn’t believe it.”
Phys.orgEgypt unveils trove of ancient coffins excavated in Luxor
Egypt revealed Saturday a rare trove of 30 ancient wooden coffins that have been well-preserved over millennia in the archaeologically rich Valley of the Kings in Luxor.
The antiquities ministry officially unveiled the discovery made at Asasif, a necropolis on the west bank of the Nile River, at a press conference against the backdrop of the Hatshepsut Temple.
"This is the first discovery in Asasif by dedicated Egyptian hands, comprised of archaeologists, conservationists and workers," the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa al-Waziri, told reporters.
Scientists develop a lithium-ion battery that won't catch fire
A flexible lithium-ion battery designed by a team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and built to operate under extreme conditions—including cutting, submersion, and simulated ballistic impact—can now add incombustible to its résumé.
Current Li-ion batteries are susceptible to catastrophic fire and explosion incidents—most of which arrive without any discernible warning—because they are built with flammable and combustible materials. […]
With these batteries emerging as the energy storage vehicle of choice for portable electronics, electric vehicles, and grid storage, these safety advancements mark a significant step forward in transforming the way Li-ion batteries are manufactured and used in electronic devices.
Science DailyHumans have salamander-like ability to regrow cartilage in joints
Contrary to popular belief, cartilage in human joints can repair itself through a process similar to that used by creatures such as salamanders and zebrafish to regenerate limbs, researchers at Duke Health found.
Publishing online Oct. 9 in the journal Science Advances, the researchers identified a mechanism for cartilage repair that appears to be more robust in ankle joints and less so in hips. The finding could potentially lead to treatments for osteoarthritis, the most common joint disorder in the world.
"We believe that an understanding of this 'salamander-like' regenerative capacity in humans, and the critically missing components of this regulatory circuit, could provide the foundation for new approaches to repair joint tissues and possibly whole human limbs," said senior author Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology and Orthopedic Surgery at Duke.
Arthropods formed orderly lines 480 million years ago
Researchers studied fossilized Moroccan Ampyx trilobites, which lived 480 million years ago and showed that the trilobites had probably been buried in their positions -- all oriented in the same direction. Scientists deduced that these Ampyx processions may illustrate a kind of collective behavior adopted in response to cyclic environmental disturbances.
Though our understanding of the anatomy of the earliest animals is growing ever more precise, we know next to nothing about their behaviour. Did group behaviour arise recently or is it primeval? To answer this question, researchers from the CNRS, the University of Poitiers, UBO, Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University*, Cadi Ayyad University (Marrakech, Morocco), and the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) studied fossilized Moroccan Ampyx trilobites, which lived 480 million years ago. They showed that the trilobites had probably been buried in their positions -- all oriented in the same direction, in orderly lines, maintaining close contact with each other through their long spines -- during storms.
NatureHow evolution builds genes from scratch
In the depths of winter, water temperatures in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean can sink below zero. That’s cold enough to freeze many fish, but the conditions don’t trouble the cod. A protein in its blood and tissues binds to tiny ice crystals and stops them from growing.
Where codfish got this talent was a puzzle that evolutionary biologist Helle Tessand Baalsrud wanted to solve. She and her team at the University of Oslo searched the genomes of the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and several of its closest relatives, thinking they would track down the cousins of the antifreeze gene. None showed up. Baalsrud, who at the time was a new parent, worried that her lack of sleep was causing her to miss something obvious.
But then she stumbled on studies suggesting that genes do not always evolve from existing ones, as biologists long supposed. Instead, some are fashioned from desolate stretches of the genome that do not code for any functional molecules. When she looked back at the fish genomes, she saw hints this might be the case: the antifreeze protein — essential to the cod’s survival — had seemingly been built from scratch.
Why Japan imported Ebola ahead of the 2020 Olympics
Japan is preparing for tens of thousands of international tourists to descend on Tokyo for the Olympic Games next year — and that includes being ready for unwanted biological visitors.
Last month, Japan imported Ebola and four other dangerous viruses in preparation for a possible outbreak at the event. The Japanese health ministry says researchers will use the samples, which include Marburg virus, Lassa virus, and the viruses that cause South American haemorrhagic fever and Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever, to validate tests under development.
Popular ScienceGlobal warming is forcing species to reorganize their ecosystems
Depending on how you frame it, the biodiversity crisis looks very different. At a global level, we're losing species at an unprecedented rate. It's estimated that organisms are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times greater than they would if humans weren't around. And according to the UN, one million species are currently facing extinction.
While extinction is a global issue, individual biomes—tropical seas, temperate forests, arctic tundra—face a different dilemma. Instead of a loss in the total number of species. we're seeing a reshuffling of life at local habitats, as a study published Thursday in Science reports. "It's certainly true at a global scale that we're losing many species," says Shane Blowes, lead author of the study and an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. "[But] at small scales we don't see the same ubiquitous loss of species." Instead, the species present in a given location are changing—and fast.
Gender and class inequalities haven't really changed for 4,000 years
Imagine you’re a sixteen-year-old girl living in New York City. One day, your mother decides that it’s time for you to leave the nest. You’re going to meet your new husband for the first time, she says. But to get to your new home, you have to walk all the way to Richmond, Virginia. That’s 342 miles away.
Similar treks may have sustained a small community in southern Germany for nearly seven centuries, according to a new study in Science examining the 4,000-year-old group's DNA. By uniting cutting-edge genetic techniques and traditional archeology, researchers reconstructed family trees and traced migration patterns across Europe to reveal a depth of social complexity and inequality that had previously been lost to time.
The study focuses on 104 individuals who lived during the early Bronze Age, when humanity was beginning to swap stone tools for more sophisticated instruments crafted from metal. The pyramids had just been built, the mighty Babylonian empire was in its infancy, and the Code of Hammurabi was soon to be written. "People in the past were very mobile and very much interconnected," says archeologist and lead researcher Philipp Stockhammer. "It's a myth that people were very isolated and simple."
Science How the world’s largest geode grew to half the size of a small bedroomMost geodes—hollow, crystal-lined rocks—can fit in the palm of your hand. But the giant Pulpí Geode, which is about half the size of a small bedroom, fills part of an abandoned mine in southeastern Spain. Now, researchers have analyzed some of its crystals to figure out its age—and how this real-life Fortress of Solitude came to be so big.
The 11-cubic-meter geode—the largest in the world, the researchers say—was discovered in 1999, in a long-closed mine near its namesake town. Some of the crystals are several meters long and are so pure that they’re transparent, despite their thickness.
Although the geode is embedded in rocks that are about 250 million years old, the crystals themselves are much younger than that. Radioactive dating of some of the oldest suggests they formed less than 5.6 million years ago but probably no more than 2 million years ago, the researchers report this week in Geology.
xhttps://t.co/fG6StiTAex💎 How the world’s largest geode grew to half the size of a small bedroombySid PerkinsMost geodes-hollow, crystal-lined rocks-can fit in the palm of your hand. But the giant PulpàGeode, which is about half the size of a small bedroom, fills part of... pic.twitter.com/3cCzlujgLc
— Druse Labs (@druselabs1) October 20, 2019New wrinkle on origami turns designing folding structures into child’s play
Most people associate origami with colorful cranes and decorative frogs, but the ancient Asian art of folding paper may be a whole lot more useful than that. Scientists have used it to make tiny robots and other self-folding 3D devices, for example. Now, a team of soft-matter physicists has invented a method for designing origami by essentially assembling puzzle pieces that encode the various points or vertices where folds meet. The approach could make designing folding robots much easier.
“It’s a big advance, and I’m pretty excited about it,” says Christian Santangelo, a theoretical physicist at Syracuse University in New York who was not involved in the work.
Sci-NewsSuper Spirals Spin Faster Than Expected, Astronomers Say
Super spirals are very luminous — they can shine with anywhere from 8 to 14 times the brightness of our Milky Way Galaxy.
They are also giant and massive, with a diameter up to 450,000 light-years and stellar mass between 30 and 340 billion solar masses. Only about 100 super spiral galaxies are known to date.
“Super spirals are extreme by many measures. They break the records for rotation speeds,” Dr. Ogle said.
Dr. Ogle and co-authors analyzed data for 23 super spiral galaxies collected with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), the 5-m Hale telescope of the Palomar Observatory, and NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
Giant Dinosaurs Evolved Various Brain-Cooling Mechanisms: Study
“Small dinosaurs could have just run into the shade to cool off, but for giant dinosaurs, the potential for overheating was literally inescapable,” said Professor Lawrence Witmer, co-author of the study.
“They must have had special mechanisms to control brain temperature, but what were they?”
Professor Witmer and his colleague, Dr. Ruger Porter, looked to the modern-day relatives of dinosaurs, birds and reptiles, where studies indeed showed that evaporation of moisture in the nose, mouth, and eyes cooled the blood on its way to the brain.
Scientific AmericanMolecules in Blood Spike Hours before Seizures
More than 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and one of its harshest aspects is its unpredictability. Sufferers rarely know when a seizure will occur.
But molecular biologist Marion Hogg of FutureNeuro, a research institute hosted at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and her colleagues have found molecules whose levels in the bloodstream differ before and after a seizure. This discovery could lead to a blood test that gauges when seizures are likely to strike, enabling patients to take fast-acting preventive drugs. The study, published in July in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, may even offer clues about epilepsy's causes.
Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov has started gene editing in eggs donated by women who can hear to learn how to allow some deaf couples to give birth to children without the genetic mutation that impairs hearing. The news, detailed in an e-mail he sent to Nature on 17 October, is the latest in a saga that kicked off in June, when Rebrikov told Nature of his controversial intention to create gene-edited babies resistant to HIV using the popular CRISPR tool.
Rebrikov’s latest e-mail (see box) follows a September report in Russian magazine N+1 that one deaf couple had started procedures to procure eggs that would be used to create a gene-edited baby — but the eggs that Rebrikov has edited are from women without the genetic mutation that can impair hearing. He says the goal of the experiments is to better understand potentially harmful ‘off-target’ mutations, which are a known challenge of using CRISR–Cas9 to edit embryos.
The Sydney Morning HeraldWhy 'doomism' is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars
Once if you were a climate scientist the chief enemy was denial. Now, says Michael E. Mann, it’s more likely to be “doomism”: the idea that taking action to reduce the threat of runaway climate change is pointless because it’s already too late.
Doomism, argues the internationally renowned climate scientist, is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars - a new tool being exploited by those resisting change in the way the world does business.
It sits alongside what he calls “soft denialism” (climate change is happening but it's OK, we can adapt) and “deflection” (sowing division by making it all about individual lifestyle choices). Such tactics, he says, are in some ways “even more pernicious” than the old arguments flatly rejecting human-induced climate change.
Scientists discover big storms can create 'stormquakes'
Scientists have discovered a mash-up of two feared disasters - hurricanes and earthquakes - and they're calling them "stormquakes".
The shaking of the sea floor during hurricanes and cyclones can rumble like a magnitude 3.5 earthquake and can last for days, according to a study in this week's journal Geophysical Research Letters. The quakes are fairly common, but they weren't noticed before because they were considered seismic background noise.
A stormquake is more an oddity than something that can hurt you, because no one is standing on the sea floor during a hurricane, said Wenyuan Fan, a Florida State University seismologist who was the study's lead author.
BBC NewsSatellites to monitor whale strandings from space
Scientists developing techniques to count great whales from space say the largest ever recorded mass stranding event was probably underestimated.
The carcasses of 343 sei whales were spotted on remote beaches in Patagonia, Chile, in 2015 - but this survey work was conducted from planes and boats, and carried out many weeks after the deaths actually occurred.
However, an analysis of high-resolution satellite images of the area taken much closer in time to the stranding has now identified many more bodies.
It's difficult to give a precise total for the number of whales involved but in one sample picture examined by researchers, the count was nearly double.
Snowy 2.0: Australia's divisive plan for a vast underground 'battery'
Far beneath a national park in one of the coldest parts of Australia is where the government wants to build a hugely ambitious project: a power station capable of generating 10% of the nation's energy.
It is part of a bold - and expensive - hydro electricity scheme in the Kosciuszko National Park in south-east New South Wales.
The Snowy 2.0 project has ambitions to carve tunnels through 27km (17 miles) of rock to make a huge pipeline linking two reservoirs. The difference in elevation of 700m (2296ft) is what gives the plan its extraordinary might.
It is simple enough in concept, but elaborate in design, and challenging in practice.
Ars TechnicaArchaeologists unearth a Bronze Age warrior’s personal toolkit
Three-thousand years ago, at least 140 fighters died in a battle along the banks of Germany’s Tollense River. One of the fallen dropped a small kit containing tools and a handful of bronze scraps. Based on the types of artifacts archaeologists found in this kit, they've concluded that at least some of the combatants in the prehistoric battle probably came from hundreds of kilometers away in Central or even Southern Europe.
According to University of Göttingen archaeologist Tobias Uhlig and his colleagues, that suggests that large-scale battles between far-flung groups began long before people in Europe had developed a system of writing to record the history of their conflicts.
The EPA has approved the first-ever bee-distributed pesticide for the US market
Bees’ fuzzy yellow bodies and hairy legs are custom-built for picking up pollen. Nothing can distribute the yellow powder more efficiently—something farmers that shell out for commercial beehives every growing season know all too well. And starting with this fall’s growing season, bees may be given some cargo to carry on their outbound journey to the blossoms: pesticides.
On August 28, the EPA approved the first-ever bee-distributed organic pesticide for the US market—a fungus-fighting powder called Vectorite that contains the spores of a naturally occurring fungus called Clonostachys rosea (CR-7). CR-7 is completely harmless to its host plant and acts as a hostile competitor to other, less innocuous fungi. It has been approved for commercial growers of flowering crops like blueberries, strawberries, almonds, and tomatoes.
The beauty of Vectorite is that it mimics a “locally appropriate natural system,” said Vicki Wojcik, director of Pollinator Partnership Canada. “It’s an interesting twist… where care for the health of the pollinator is actually vital because it is your actual vector.”