The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
Reuters
Victoria Falls shrink to a trickle, feeding climate change fears
For decades Victoria Falls, where southern Africa’s Zambezi river cascade down 100 metres into a gash in the earth, have drawn millions of holidaymakers to Zimbabwe and Zambia for their stunning views. […]
“In previous years, when it gets dry, it’s not to this extent. This (is) our first experience of seeing it like this,” Dominic Nyambe, a seller of tourist handicrafts in his 30s said outside his shop in Livingstone, on the Zambian side. […]
Yet scientists are cautious about categorically blaming climate change. There is always seasonal variation in levels.
Harald Kling, hydrologist at engineering firm Poyry and a Zambezi river expert, said climate science deals in decades, not particular years, “so it’s sometimes difficult to say this is because of climate change because droughts have always occurred”.
“If they become more frequent, then you can start saying, ok, this may be climate change,” he added.
Centuries-old corals hold clues to climate shifts
Some 20 miles north of New York City, a team of scientists is searching for clues about how the environment is changing by studying organisms not usually found in the woods around here: corals.
In the labs of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a research unit of Columbia University overlooking the Hudson River, the scientists led by Professor Braddock Linsley pore over feet-long coral cores they extracted from far-away reefs.
For Linsley and his colleagues, corals are a precious repository of clues tmsnrt.rs/360ebeX about the past that may help predict future climate trends. They can also reveal how much and how fast environmental conditions have changed during a certain period of time.
Scientific American
Archaeologists Survey Seaplanes Sunk During Pearl Harbor Attack
For the first time, archaeologists have been able to map and image the sunken fleet of seaplanes destroyed in a prelude to the Pearl Harbor attack 74 years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Hawaii (U.H.) have released rare images of one of the sunken planes today.
The Empire of Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, destroyed 169 aircraft and sunk 19 ships. Although, the harbor’s sunken ships, where a rainbowlike sheen of ever-leaking oil reflects off the water’s surface, mark a unique memorial themselves, many forget that remnants of the attack also lurk in a nearby bay.
Minutes before attacking Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft bombed the nearby U.S. Naval Air Station on the east coast of Oahu, about 20 kilometers from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese air force successfully destroyed 27 and damaged six Catalina PBY-5 aircraft—common seaplanes used during World War II—on the ground and in Kneohe Bay.
Huge Lakes Abruptly Empty into Greenland Ice Sheet
There are few sights as peaceful as the lakes atop the Greenland ice sheet, tranquil pools of sapphire meltwater on a bed of sparkling white. But beautiful as they are, they don’t always last for long. These lakes have a habit of suddenly disappearing.
It’s a process researchers refer to as rapid draining. If a crack opens in the surface of the ice, the water can quickly rush thousands of feet to the bottom of the ice sheet, leaving a gaping hole behind. When it happens, entire lakes can drain in a matter of hours.
It’s a growing subject of interest among glacier experts. When water drains to the bottom of the ice sheet, it can lubricate the bedrock and cause the ice to slip over it at faster rates. This can temporarily speed up the flow of ice into the ocean, where it adds to the rising of global sea levels.
Science
Space budget boost puts Europe in lead to monitor carbon from spaceEven optimists at the European Space Agency (ESA) were startled last week when its member governments awarded it a €12.5 billion, 3-year budget, its largest ever and more than 20% above its previous 3 years of funding. With the unexpected windfall, ESA will develop a reusable space cargo capsule, support the International Space Station until 2030, and join NASA in retrieving rocks from Mars.
But one of the biggest winners, up 29% to €1.8 billion, is Copernicus, a program supporting a fleet of satellites that continuously tracks features of Earth's atmosphere and surface, including the contours of the sea surface and shifts in vegetation. The money will help Europe expand the fleet to observe humanmade sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) on a daily basis—making ESA the only space agency capable of monitoring pledges made under the Paris accord to cut greenhouse gases. Europe's CO2 monitoring plans are "unparalleled," says Christopher O'Dell, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "The Europeans are just running with this."
Early humans domesticated themselves, new genetic evidence suggests
When humans started to tame dogs, cats, sheep, and cattle, they may have continued a tradition that started with a completely different animal: us. A new study—citing genetic evidence from a disorder that in some ways mirrors elements of domestication—suggests modern humans domesticated themselves after they split from their extinct relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, approximately 600,000 years ago.
“The study is incredibly impressive,” says Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new work. It’s “a really beautiful test,” he adds, of the long-standing idea that humans look so different from our primate ancestors precisely because we have become domesticated.
Phys.org
How saving the ozone layer in 1987 slowed global warming
The Montreal Protocol, an international agreement signed in 1987 to stop chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) destroying the ozone layer, now appears to be the first international treaty to successfully slow the rate of global warming.
New research published today in Environmental Research Letters has revealed that thanks to the Protocol, today's global temperatures are considerably lower. And by mid-century the Earth will be—on average—at least 1°C cooler than it would have been without the agreement. Mitigation is even greater in regions such as the Arctic, where the avoided warming will be as much as 3°C—4°C.
"By mass CFCs are thousands of times more potent a greenhouse gas compared to CO2, so the Montreal Protocol not only saved the ozone layer but it also mitigated a substantial fraction of global warming," said lead author of the paper Rishav Goyal.
Dial-a-frog: Researchers develop the 'FrogPhone' to remotely call frogs in the wild
Researchers have developed the 'FrogPhone', a novel device which allows scientists to call up a frog survey site and monitor them in the wild. The FrogPhone is the world's first solar-powered remote survey device that relays environmental data to the observer via text messages, whilst conducting real-time remote acoustic surveys over the phone. These findings are presented in the British Ecological Society Journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution today.
The FrogPhone introduces a new concept that allows researchers to "call" a frog habitat, any time, from anywhere, once the device has been installed. The device has been developed at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra and the University of Canberra in collaboration with the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Region Frogwatch Program and the Australian National University.
Science Daily
Brain differences detected in children with depressed parents
The largest brain imaging study of children ever conducted in the United States has revealed structural differences in the brains of those whose parents have depression.
Depression is a common and debilitating mental health condition that typically arises during adolescence. While the causes of depression are complex, having a parent with depression is one of the biggest known risk factors. Studies have consistently shown that adolescent children of parents with depression are two to three times more likely to develop depression than those with no parental history of depression. However, the brain mechanisms that underlie this familial risk are unclear.
A new study, led by David Pagliaccio, PhD, assistant professor of clinical neurobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, found structural differences in the brains of children at high risk for depression due to parental depressive history.
BPA levels in humans dramatically underestimated
Researchers have developed a more accurate method of measuring bispehnol A (BPA) levels in humans and found that exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemical is far higher than previously assumed.
The study, published in the journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology on Dec. 5, provides the first evidence that the measurements relied upon by regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, are flawed, underestimating exposure levels by as much as 44 times.
"This study raises serious concerns about whether we've been careful enough about the safety of this chemical," said Patricia Hunt, Washington State University professor and corresponding author on the paper. "What it comes down to is that the conclusions federal agencies have come to about how to regulate BPA may have been based on inaccurate measurements."
Agence France-Presse
China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'
The gene editing performed on Chinese twins last year meant to immunize them against HIV may have failed in its purpose and created unintended mutations, scientists said Tuesday after the original research was made public for the first time.
Excerpts from the manuscript were released by the MIT Technology Review for the purpose of showing how Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui ignored ethical and scientific norms in creating the twins Lula and Nana, whose birth in late 2018 sent shockwaves through the scientific world.
He made expansive claims of a medical breakthrough that could "control the HIV epidemic," but it was not clear whether it had even been successful in its intended purpose -- immunizing the babies against the virus -- because the team did not in fact reproduce the gene mutation that confers this resistance.
As nations huddle in Madrid to try to neutralize the threat of global warming, warnings sound that the Earth is hurtling toward a "point of no return" in the climate crisis, with devastating effects for humanity.
AFP journalists have been on the frontline, documenting climate-related disasters that are becoming deadlier, more frequent and more devastating.
From fires burning out of control in Australia and California, to floods in Africa and Venice. From sinking islands in the US and Asia to orcas going further and further north in search of food. From mingling with scientists at a climate conference to hanging out with Nordic free spirits taking recycling to a new level by chisling a surfboard out of ice so that it melts back into the sea.
The Guardian
Why Texas’s fossil fuel support will ‘spell disaster’ for climate crisis
[…] Texas’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Act went into effect on 1 September, stiffening civil and criminal penalties specifically for protesters who interrupt operations or damage oil and gas pipelines and other energy facilities.
Within a couple of weeks, two dozen Greenpeace activists who dangled off a bridge over the Houston ship channel became the first people charged under the new law, which allows for prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines of up to $500,000 for protest groups.
Nasa's Parker Solar Probe beams back first insights from sun's edge
Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe, which has flown closer to the sun than any spacecraft, has beamed back its first observations from the edge of the sun’s scorching atmosphere.
The first tranche of data offers clues to long-standing mysteries, including why the sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface, as well as the precise origins of the solar wind.
“The first three encounters of the solar probe that we have had so far have been spectacular,” said Prof Stuart Bale, a physicist at the University of California, in Berkeley, who led the analysis from one of the craft’s instruments. “We can see the magnetic structure of the corona, which tells us that the solar wind is emerging from small coronal holes; we see impulsive activity, large jets or switchbacks, which we think are related to the origin of the solar wind. And we are also surprised by the ferocity of the dust environment.”
Nature
Two of the biggest US earthquake faults might be linked
Two of North America’s most fearsome earthquake zones could be linked.
A controversial study argues that at least eight times in the past 3,000 years, quakes made a one–two punch off the west coast of the United States. A quake hit the Cascadia fault off the coast of northern California, triggering a second quake on the San Andreas fault just to the south. In some cases, the delay between the quakes may have been decades long.
The study suggests that Cascadia, which scientists think is capable of unleashing a magnitude-9 earthquake at any time, could set off quakes on the northern San Andreas, which runs under the San Francisco Bay Area.
Did a million years of rain jump-start dinosaur evolution?
Alastair Ruffell could see there was something odd about the rocks near his childhood home in Somerset, UK. The deposits hail from the Triassic period, more than 200 million years ago, and most are a dull orange-red, signifying that they formed when the region was a parched landscape, baked by the sun. Nothing strange there. But outcrops on Somerset’s Lipe Hill have a thin stripe of grey running through the heart of the red stone. That band signals a time when arid desert disappeared and the region transformed into a swampy wetland. For some reason, an incredibly dry climate had turned wet, and stayed that way for more than a million years. […]
Three decades later, there is a growing consensus that they were right, after all. Something strange happened in the Late Triassic — and not just in Somerset. About 232 million years ago, during a span known as the Carnian age, it rained almost everywhere. After millions of years of dry climates, Earth entered a wet period lasting one million to two million years. Nearly any place where geologists find rocks of that age, there are signs of wet weather. This so-called Carnian pluvial episode coincides with some massive evolutionary shifts.
The Atlantic
Why Mammals Are So Good at Hearing (And Chewing)
One hundred and twenty million years ago, when northeastern China was a series of lakes and erupting volcanoes, there lived a tiny mammal just a few inches long. When it died, it was fossilized down to its most minuscule ear bones. And it is these ear bones that have so intrigued scientists: They are evidence of how evolution created the unique ear of mammals, giving modern mammals—including us—a finely tuned sense of hearing.
Today, mammals have three small bones in the ear that transmit sound from the eardrum: the malleus, incus, and stapes. A wealth of evidence from fossils and developing embryos suggests that two of these ear bones were once jawbones. Over millions of years of evolution, they shrank in relative size and detached completely from the jaw. Reptiles—like our nonmammalian ancestors, probably—hear by placing their jaw on the ground to pick up low-frequency vibrations. But mammals, with their three ear bones, can hear high-pitched sounds in the air: insects buzzing, wind rustling, birds squawking, music, speech.
In the 1960s, doctors counting the number of chromosomes in human white blood cells noticed a strange phenomenon. Frequently—and more frequently with age—the cells would be missing the Y chromosome. Over time, it became clear this came with consequences. Studies have linked loss of the Y chromosome in blood to cancer, heart disease, and other disorders.
Now a new study—the largest yet of this phenomenon—estimates that 20 percent of 205,011 men in a large genetic database called the UK Biobank have lost Y chromosomes from some detectable proportion of their blood. By age 70, 43.6 percent of men had the same issue. It’s unclear exactly why, but the authors think these losses might be the most glaring sign of something else going wrong inside the bodies of these men: They are allowing mutations of all kinds to accumulate, and these other mutations could be the underlying links to cancer and heart disease.
The Washington Post
What happens when hermit crabs confuse plastic trash for shells? An ‘avalanche’ of death.
A study that called attention to a remote cluster of islands off Australia’s coast was met with international concern when it published in May. In a harrowing account of their trip to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands two years prior, researchers recalled seeing beaches that were “literally drowning in plastic.”
An estimated 414 million pieces of it. But Jennifer Lavers and her research team now say they made another startling observation while digging through copious amounts of litter on that 2017 trip: Many of the bottles, cans and containers were not empty. Scores of hermit crabs, mostly dead, were trapped inside.
The scientists say plastic debris has caused the deaths of more than half a million hermit crabs on the Cocos Islands and the similarly remote Henderson Island in the South Pacific. Their findings illustrate yet another consequence of man-made waste that enters the world’s oceans and pollutes its beaches — defiling nature in ways that foster unsettling imagery. Turtles with straws in their nostrils. Sperm whales with pounds of garbage in their stomachs.
Birds are shrinking. These scientists say it’s a consequence of global warming.
Birds are getting smaller. So shows an analysis of migratory birds that died after colliding into buildings in Chicago and were collected as specimens for the Field Museum of Natural History.
David Willard, a Field Museum ornithologist, has measured the Windy City’s dead birds since 1978. Data from his calipers and scales reveal decades-long trends in bird bodies: Their legs, on average, are growing shorter. They have lost weight. Their wings are getting slightly longer.
These changes are present in nearly all of the species he measured, according to a study of 70,716 bird specimens from almost 40 years published Wednesday in the journal Ecology Letters. Morphing birds, Willard and his colleagues say, reflect a changing climate.
Live Science
A Tiny Leak Led to a Massive, Unexpected Collapse at Kilauea Volcano
The 2018 eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii featured the spectacular collapse of the volcano's caldera, creating a hole nearly as deep as One World Trade Center in New York City is tall at its summit. Now new research finds that this dramatic change was triggered by only a small leak of magma from the reservoir beneath the peak.
Instantaneous and explosive caldera collapses, such as the event that formed Oregon's Crater Lake 7,700 years ago, are a better known phenomenon. But the new findings suggest that slow-motion collapse events such as Kilauea's—which are vastly different in nature—may be occurring at volcanoes around the world. In fact, a comparable one occurred at Bardarbunga's caldera in Iceland between 2014 and 2015.
This Brainless, Single-Celled Blob Can Make Complex 'Decisions'
Tiny, brainless blobs might be able to make decisions: A single-celled organism can "change its mind" to avoid going near an irritating substance, according to new findings.
Over a century ago, American zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings conducted an experiment on a relatively large, trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism called Stentor roeselii. When Jennings released an irritating carmine powder around the organisms, he observed that they responded in a predictable pattern, he wrote in his findings, which he published in a text called "Behavior of the Lower Organisms" in 1906.
Gizmodo
Deforestation Is a Death Sentence for Tropical Forest Animals
The wildlife who rely on tropical rainforests may be more screwed than we thought. A new study has found that tropical forest species are six times more sensitive to forest fragmentation than species in temperate ecosystems.
The research published in Science on Thursday takes a deep dive into the topic of forest fragmentation, which occurs when vast forestlands are cut up into smaller patches due to logging, farming, or fires. Forest fragmentation is bad for all of us but especially the species that inhabit it and other tropical rainforests also under siege.
That’s due to a number of reasons: less land for animals to call home, increased vulnerability to predators, and the cascade effects throughout the ecosystem. However, some species deal better with reduced tree cover and increased forest edge habitat—and that’s largely those that have had a chance to practice. The results have huge implications for conservation going forward.
Climate Models Have Been Right For Decades
Scientists have for decades created accurate models to predict the future impacts of global warming, a new study has found.
Published in Geophysical Research Letters on Wednesday, the research examines 15 climate models used between 1970 and 2007 to predict how warm the Earth was going to become. Now that the world has lived through the years for which those scientists were churning out global warming estimates, researchers were able to determine that their predecessors did a hell of a job building models that could accurately predict the global surface temperature rise associated with greenhouse gas emissions.
Space
The Universe Remembers Gravitational Waves — And We Can Find Them
Gravitational waves slosh throughout the universe as ripples in space-time produced by some of the most cataclysmic events possible.
With facilities like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo, we can now detect the strongest of those ripples as they wash over the Earth. But gravitational waves leave behind a memory — a permanent bend in space-time — as they pass through, and we are now on the verge of being able to detect that too, allowing us to push our understanding of gravity to the limits.
NASA's New Climate Science Recruits Are Elephant Seals with Fancy Hats
Maybe you'd like to deride this seal's fashion choices. Here's why you shouldn't: While this isn't the most ornate fascinator ever to grace a photo shoot, it sparkles with science.
That's because the headpiece consists of an antenna plus a sensor that tracks the temperature of the ocean water the seal dives through. A NASA scientist is using data gathered by this sensor and others like it to better understand how oceans and currents are storing energy as the climate warms.
Ars Technica
No one knows why rocks are exploding from asteroid Bennu
Floor pavements in Pompeii illustrate surveying technologyFor the last year, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been circling a large asteroid named Bennu that regularly passes uncomfortably close to Earth. The spacecraft has been painstakingly mapping the asteroid's rocky surface using a suite of cameras and other instruments that will help it determine where to land next year. Once NASA selects a final landing site, OSIRIS-REx will kiss Bennu just long enough to scoop up a sample to bring back to Earth in 2023.
Many scientists expect the Bennu sample to revolutionize our understanding of asteroids, especially those that are near Earth and pose the greatest threat from space to life as we know it. But as detailed in a paper published this week in Science, NASA has already started making surprising discoveries around this alien world. Earlier this year, the OSIRIS-REx team witnessed particles exploding from the asteroid's surface—and the team's not sure why.
Decorative pavements in the floor of a recently unearthed Roman house in Pompeii offer a glimpse into the life and work of an ancient land surveyor. The pavements depict a stylized drawing of an ancient surveyor’s tool called a groma, along with a diagram of a surveying technique and the plan of a construction project in Pompeii. So far, they’re the only original Roman illustrations of the tools and techniques the Romans used to help build an empire and its infrastructure.
Only a few metal fragments of a Roman groma exist today (also recovered from Pompeii), and archaeologists have found only a few images carved into surveyors’ tombstones. Otherwise, we know the tool only from descriptions in medieval versions of ancient Roman surveying manuals.