The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
The Washington Post
Cats do have facial expressions, but you probably can’t read them
We generally assume a purring cat is a contented cat. It’s safe to say a hissing cat, its ears drawn back, is not pleased. […]
“Cats are telling us things with their faces, and if you’re really skilled, you can spot it,” said author Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “Some people can do it — that means there’s something there. That means that cats are hard to read,” but not wholly inscrutable, she said.
Scientists have long known that humans greatly depend on smiles, eyebrow raises, furrowed brows and other facial movements to judge how other people feel. Since a 2010 study on the grimace-like faces mice make when in pain, researchers have grown increasingly interested in understanding animal expressions, Mason said.
Several studies have focused on dogs. But Mason and her colleagues located just one peer-reviewed paper on the facial expressions of cats, despite their popularity as pets. That study focused on cats in pain.
Gizmodo
Toxic Coastal Fog Linked to Dangerously High Levels of Mercury in Mountain Lions
An unlikely culprit is being blamed for elevated mercury levels found in mountain lions living along the California coast: marine fog.
Marine fog appears to be responsible for elevated levels of mercury in coastal terrestrial food webs, and it’s trickling all the way to the top, according to new research published this week in Scientific Reports. Pumas living in the fog belt of the Santa Cruz Mountains have three times the amount of mercury in their systems compared to their cohorts living outside of the fog zone. It’s yet another threat to a species already at risk.
Environmental toxicologist Peter Weiss-Penzias from UC Santa Cruz led the new research, and it’s the first time scientists have tracked the neurotoxin from its presence in the air through to its presence in an apex predator. Delivered by marine fog, the mercury first contaminates plants, namely lichen. These plants are then eaten by herbivores such as deer, who are in turn consumed by mountain lions. It’s the circle of life, but with a dash of despair in the form of methylmercury—a particularly toxic water-soluble form of the chemical element.
Gigantic Dust Towers on Mars Could Explain How the Red Planet Lost its Water
Sprawling towers of dust can reach heights of 50 miles during global-scale dust storms on Mars, according to new research. Acting like a space elevator, the phenomenon might explain how water escaped from the Red Planet during its ancient past.
On Earth, storms tend to be highly localized events, but things are a bit different on Mars. About once a decade, Mars experiences a colossal dust storm that impacts the planet on a global scale. Known as planet-encircling dust events (PEDEs), these storms affect the planet’s weather for months at a time. Such a storm occurred in 2018—a massive global dust storm that enveloped the entire planet, casting it in a dull yellowish haze and putting an end to NASA’s Opportunity rover mission.
Phys.org
New algorithms to determine eigenstates and thermal states on quantum computers
Determining the quantum mechanical behavior of many interacting particles is essential to solving important problems in a variety of scientific fields, including physics, chemistry and mathematics. For instance, in order to describe the electronic structure of materials and molecules, researchers first need to find the ground, excited and thermal states of the Born-Oppenheimer Hamiltonian approximation. In quantum chemistry, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation is the assumption that electronic and nuclear motions in molecules can be separated.
A variety of other scientific problems also require the accurate computation of Hamiltonian ground, excited and thermal states on a quantum computer. An important example are combinatorial optimization problems, which can be reduced to finding the ground state of suitable spin systems.
Model: Possible simultaneous impact of global warming on agriculture and marine fisheries
An international team of researchers has built a model that shows the possible simultaneous impact of global warming on agriculture and marine fisheries. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes what their model showed developing over the rest of this century.
As global temperatures continue to rise (just last week the World Meteorological Organization reported that greenhouse gas emission hit an all-time high last year) as we humans fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, scientists continue to carry out studies designed to help us better understand what will happen if we do not change our ways. In this new effort, the researchers have sought to demonstrate what will happen to our two main sources of food—agriculture and fisheries—when looked at simultaneously. They note that other studies have looked at the impact of climate change on both sources, but until now, none of them have looked at what will happen to food availability when both are impacted at the same time.
Science Daily
Scientists inch closer than ever to signal from cosmic dawn
Around 12 billion years ago, the universe emerged from a great cosmic dark age as the first stars and galaxies lit up. With a new analysis of data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope, scientists are now closer than ever to detecting the ultra-faint signature of this turning point in cosmic history.
In a paper on the preprint site ArXiv and soon to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers present the first analysis of data from a new configuration of the MWA designed specifically to look for the signal of neutral hydrogen, the gas that dominated the universe during the cosmic dark age. The analysis sets a new limit -- the lowest limit yet -- for the strength of the neutral hydrogen signal.
"We can say with confidence that if the neutral hydrogen signal was any stronger than the limit we set in the paper, then the telescope would have detected it," said Jonathan Pober, an assistant professor of physics at Brown University and corresponding author on the new paper. "These findings can help us to further constrain the timing of when the cosmic dark ages ended and the first stars emerged."
Genetic discovery holds implications for better immunity, longer life
Wrinkles on the skin of a microscopic worm might provide the key to a longer, healthier life for humans.
Working with Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent nematode found in soil, researchers at Washington State University's Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine were the first to find that the nervous system controls the tiny worm's cuticle, a skin-like exterior barrier, in response to bacterial infections. Their study was published today in Science Advances.
Often used in biologic research as a model organism, the C. elegans nematode has a relatively simple structure while still sharing several genetic similarities with more complex mammals including humans, so this discovery holds implications for human health as well.
The Guardian
Bad luck may have caused Neanderthals' extinction – study
Perhaps it wasn’t our fault after all: research into the demise of the Neanderthals has found that rather than being outsmarted by Homo sapiens, our burly, thick-browed cousins may have gone extinct through bad luck alone.
The Neanderthal population was so small at the time modern humans arrived in Europe and the Near East that inbreeding and natural fluctuations in birth rates, death rates and sex ratios could have finished them off, the scientists claim.
The findings suggest that the first modern humans to reach Europe were not superior to the Neanderthals, as some accounts argue, and that anyone encumbered by survivors’ guilt may have good reason to unburden themselves.
Most dolphins are 'right-handed', say researchers
Dolphins, like humans, have a dominant right-hand side, according to research.
About 90% of humans are right-handed but we are not the only animals that show such preferences: gorillas tend to be right-handed, kangaroos are generally southpaws, and even cats have preferences for a particular side – although which is favoured appears to depend on their sex.
Now researchers have found common bottlenose dolphins appear to have an even stronger right-side bias than humans.