The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton. Tonight’s focus is on science!
Phys.org
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon up by more than double: data
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon in November surged by 104 percent compared to the sae month in 2018, according to official data released Saturday.
The 563 square kilometers (217 square miles) deforested that month is also the highest number for any November since 2015, according to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which provides official data on deforestation.
That is considered a significant increase, particularly during the rainy season, when deforestation generally slows.
For the first 11 months of the year—also the first months in office of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right leader who has eased restrictions on exploiting the Amazon's vast riches—deforestation totaled 8,974.3 square kilometers.
Leaving home is beneficial for male squirrels but not for females, study shows
In the world of squirrels, moving away from your home turf has better outcomes for males than for females, according to a new study by University of Alberta ecologists.
The study uses 30 years of data on a population of North American red squirrels in Yukon, Canada, examining how the number of offspring and total lifespan differed between squirrels who lived in the same area in which they were born and those who were newcomers to the area. And the results show that sex plays a major role.
"The benefits to living in a different population than you were born are sex-dependent," explained April Martinig, Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological Sciences and lead author on the study. "Males benefit from moving away, whereas females do not. We also found that the decision to move away or stay at home has an impact on offspring."
Nature
UK election dashes scientists’ hopes of staying in the EU
The United Kingdom is now firmly on the path towards leaving the European Union, after the Conservative party won a majority of 79 seats in yesterday’s general election — a result that has major implications for science. […]
“Given the pro-Remain sentiments of a large majority of the scientific and academic community, many people would have been clinging to the hope of some kind of second referendum or some attempt to try and reopen the fundamental question,” says James Wilsdon, director of the Research on Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK. “Clearly, that option has now gone.”www.nature.com/...
But the result does mean that, for the time being, researchers no longer face the prospect of a chaotic no-deal Brexit.
‘Marsquakes’ reveal red planet’s hidden geology
The marsquakes are coming fast and furious. From its landing site near the Martian equator, NASA’s InSight mission is detecting about two quakes per day — and the rate is going up.
“We have a lot,” said Bruce Banerdt, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and InSight’s principal investigator. He reported the findings on 12 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.
Since arriving on Mars just over a year ago, InSight has detected 322 marsquakes. They are the first quakes ever detected on Mars, and the first on any body other than Earth or the Moon. Scientists aim to use them to probe the Martian interior, including deciphering the planet’s guts into layers of crust, mantle, and core.
Science
Sweet potato can warn neighbors of insect attacks
Sweet potato plants don’t have spines or poisons to defend themselves. But some have evolved a clever way to let hungry herbivores know they aren’t an all-you-can-eat buffet, a new study finds. When one leaf is injured, it produces a chemical that alerts the rest of the plant—and its neighbors—to make themselves inedible to bugs. Sweet potato breeders could potentially engineer plants to produce the chemical as an all-natural pest defense.
Plant ecologists led by Axel Mithöfer of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, started to look into sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) defenses after they noticed something interesting about two varieties of the plant grown in Taiwan: The yellow-skinned, yellow-fleshed Tainong 57 is generally herbivore-resistant, but its darker orange cousin, Tainong 66, is plagued by insect pests.
Antarctic video reveals deepest canyon on Earth
Despite scientists’ best efforts to probe the land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets with radar, the continent’s sheer size and remoteness has left many gaps in existing surveys. That changed this week with a new map, called BedMachine Antarctica, released at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here and published yesterday in Nature Geoscience.
As shown in the video above, the map uses the flow and volume of ice to infer the land below. It has revealed the deepest canyon on Earth’s surface, plunging 3.5 kilometers below sea level under Denman Glacier in East Antarctica, nearly half as deep as Mount Everest is tall.
Gizmodo
Baby Orcas Are More Likely to Survive if They Live With Their Grandma
New research shows that post-menopausal orca grandmothers maintain an important role in their pods by boosting the survival rates of their grand-calves.
Orca calves without postmenopausal grandmothers experience higher rates of mortality than other calves, especially when food is hard to come by, according to new research published earlier this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors of the new study, led by marine biologist Daniel Franks from the University of York, believe postmenopausal grandmothers have the requisite experience, along with the extra time and resources, to increase the survival of their grandkids. And by doing so, the grandma orcas don’t just help keep their beloved grandkids alive—they also increase the chances that their genes will be passed down to further generations.
The Arctic Is Undergoing Changes Scientists 'Never Expected Would Happen This Soon'
Surprise, surprise: The Arctic didn’t do too well this past year. You can thank global warming for that.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual Arctic Report Card Tuesday, and the findings show a region in the midst of a rapid transformation. Wildlife populations are decreasing, sea ice is melting, and the Arctic is warming the fuck up. Even more ominously, the frozen soil that rings the region is now unleashing more carbon than it takes up speeding up climate change.
This year, however, the report card highlights some new points, including the impact of shifting wind patterns and how indigenous people in the Arctic are particularly vulnerable.
Science Daily
A week in the dark rewires brain cell networks and changes hearing in adult mice
Scientists have known that depriving adult mice of vision can increase the sensitivity of individual neurons in the part of the brain devoted to hearing. New research from biologists at the University of Maryland revealed that sight deprivation also changes the way brain cells interact with one another, altering neuronal networks and shifting the mice's sensitivity to different frequencies. The research was published in the November 11, 2019 issue of the journal eNeuro.
"This study reinforces what we are learning about how manipulating vision can have a significant effect on the ability of an animal to hear long after the window for auditory learning was thought to have closed," said Patrick Kanold, professor of biology at UMD and senior author of the study.
When penguins ruled after dinosaurs died
What waddled on land but swam supremely in subtropical seas more than 60 million years ago, after the dinosaurs were wiped out on sea and land?
Fossil records show giant human-sized penguins flew through Southern Hemisphere waters -- along side smaller forms, similar in size to some species that live in Antarctica today.
Now the newly described Kupoupou stilwelli has been found on the geographically remote Chatham Islands in the southern Pacific near New Zealand's South Island. It appears to be the oldest penguin known with proportions close to its modern relatives.
It lived between 62.5 million and 60 million years ago at a time when there was no ice cap at the South Pole and the seas around New Zealand were tropical or subtropical.
The Washington Post
The oldest story ever told is painted on this cave wall
Archaeologists working in Indonesia say they have discovered the earliest artwork that depicts a story. It is a tale told in red pigment on a cave wall. The scene, in the scientists’ interpretation, shows supernatural people hunting wild animals.
People living on the island of Sulawesi drew this image of pigs and horned animals as long as 44,000 years ago, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Surrounding the animals are people or humanlike figures. This artwork predates the charcoal cave art in Europe by thousands of years.
Ancient Sulawesi people, like European cave painters, drew lots of wildlife. On the limestone walls, animals loom larger than the other characters, who are nearly as spindly as stick figures. In one section, those figures cluster in front of a buffalo. They appear to face off against the animal. Lines connect their small arms to the buffalo’s chest.
Americans broadly accept climate science, but many are fuzzy on the details
Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change.
The rising alarm is one of the poll’s most dramatic findings. In just five years, the percentage of people calling climate change a “crisis” jumped from 23 percent to 38 percent.
More than 3 in 4 U.S. adults and teenagers alike agree that humans are influencing the climate. The overwhelming majority of them said it’s not too late for society to come up with solutions, but a third of adults who say humans are causing climate change don’t think they can personally make a difference, the poll found.
AP News
Whales are just the right size to eat their prey as efficiently as possible
Whales are big, but why aren’t they bigger? A new study says the key factor is how many calories they can take in.
Researchers came to this conclusion after using small boats to chase down 300 whales of various species around the world. They reached out with long poles to attach sensors to the creatures with suction cups, allowing them to record what the animals were doing as they dove for food.
The results suggest whale body size is controlled by how the animals capture prey and how much food is available, according to the report Thursday in the journal Science.
UN chief warns against ‘survival of the richest’ on climate
Failure to tackle global warming could result in economic disaster, the United Nations Secretary-General warned Thursday in Madrid, as negotiators at the U.N. climate talks remained deadlocked over key issues.
António Guterres said unrestrained climate change would allow only the “survival of the richest,” while former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the “absence of leadership” from Washington was a big obstacle in the talks.
“It’s very difficult to get this done if the United States of America isn’t there,” the veteran diplomat told The Associated Press during an interview in the Spanish capital, adding that he felt negotiators were holding their breath until the next U.S. presidential election at the end of 2020.
The Guardian
Dinosaurs had feathers ruffled by parasites, study finds
Dinosaurs may have been fearsome and intimidating creatures that dominated the prehistoric earth – but it did not stop them having their feathers ruffled by parasites, researchers have found.
Scientists have discovered ancient pieces of amber, dating from about 99m years ago, that contain dinosaur feathers riddled with louse-like insects. One of the feathers even shows signs of having been nibbled.
The team said it is the first time feather-eating insects have been discovered from that era – despite many non-avian dinosaurs and early birds having been identified as having plumage.
Thousands of 'penis fish' appear on California beach
Following a bout of winter storms in northern California, “thousands” of pink, throbbing, phallic creatures wound up pulsating along a beach about 50 miles north of San Francisco, Bay Nature reported.
According to the nature magazine, these 10in wrigglers are marine worms called fat innkeeper worms, but they are known colloquially as exactly what you’d want to call them: penis fish.
These penile figures typically burrow under the sand, far beneath the feet of beachgoers, but the recent storms brought on some waves that swept away the layers, leaving them exposed.
Ars Technica
Heatwaves on multiple continents linked by jet stream tendency
Summer 2018 saw some notably extreme weather in multiple locations around the Northern Hemisphere. There were heatwaves in the Western United States, Western Europe, the Caspian region through Siberia, and Japan as well. That’s not necessarily interesting on its face, as there’s always weird weather going on somewhere. But this was not a coincidence, as all these events were physically linked by the physics of the jet stream. It's a linkage that could contribute to a crisis for food production.
The Northern Hemisphere jet stream is a band of strong winds that marks a boundary between cold Arctic air and warmer mid-latitude air. As the jet stream slides farther north or south, it brings changes in temperatures with it, via the cold and warm fronts that can bring rain.
Data from the International Space Station confirms: Lightning is insane
Lightning is such a common phenomenon that people often overlook just how powerful it is (provided it doesn't hit you, obviously). But over the past decade, research has gradually revealed just how extreme lightning is. This everyday phenomenon is powerful enough to produce antimatter and transform atoms, leaving a radioactive cloud in its wake. Understanding how all of this happens, however, is a real challenge, given just how quickly multiple high-energy events take place.
Now, researchers have used an instrument attached to the International Space Station to track the physical processes that are triggered by a lightning strike. The work tracks how energy spreads out from the site of a lightning bolt into the ionosphere via an electromagnetic pulse.