Overnight News Digest: By 2025, CO2 levels higher than at any time in the last 3.3 million years

The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.

131,914 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.

113 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION DAY

Native Americans Voyaged to Polynesia Long Before Europeans Reached the Americas, DNA Study Shows

Indigenous South Americans reached islands in the South Pacific some 300 years before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, according to new genetic evidence.

New genetic research published today in Nature links indigenous South Americans to Polynesian Islanders. Incredibly, it seems a group from what is today Colombia voyaged to the South Pacific around 1200 CE, reaching islands thousands of miles away. Once there, they mingled with the local Polynesian population, leaving their genetic and possibly cultural legacy behind, according to the new research, co-authored by Stanford University biologist Alexander Ioannidis.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have been wondering about this potential link for decades, but evidence has been limited, inconclusive, and speculative.

How to See the NEOWISE Comet, Now Visible to the Naked Eye

Comet NEOWISE has completed its close approach to the Sun and is now returning from whence it came. Visible comets like this don’t come around often, so you’re going to want to see this celestial wonder with your own eyes before it’s too late. Here’s how.

Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE reached perihelion on July 3, placing it just inside Mercury’s orbit. Its closest approach to the Sun complete, the comet is now heading back toward the outer reaches of the solar system. Its surface is still being warmed by the Sun, however, resulting in a glowing coma and two cometary tails, one consisting of gas and one of dust.

1,000-Year-Old Cat Skeleton Suggests Nomadic Herders Cared for Ailing Pet

Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered the well-preserved remains of a cat that died over 1,000 years ago along the Silk Road. The feline lived a tough life but was apparently cared for by pastoralists, in an unheard of practice given their nomadic lifestyles.

The nearly complete cat skeleton was found at an archaeological site within the medieval city of Dzhankent in southern Kazakhstan. An international research team, which included scientists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), Korkyt-Ata Kyzylorda State University in Kazakhstan, and other institutions, recovered the cat’s entire skull, lower jaw, parts of its upper body, legs, and four vertebrae.

Nature

Scientists make precise gene edits to mitochondrial DNA for first time

A peculiar bacterial enzyme has allowed researchers to achieve what even the popular CRISPR–Cas9 genome-editing system couldn’t manage: targeted changes to the genomes of mitochondria, cells’ crucial energy-producing structures.

The technique — which builds on a super-precise version of gene editing called base editing — could allow researchers to develop new ways to study, and perhaps even treat, diseases caused by mutations in the mitochondrial genome. Such disorders are most often passed down maternally, and impair the cell’s ability to generate energy. Although there are only a small number of genes in the mitochondrial genome compared with the nuclear genome, these mutations can particularly harm the nervous system and muscles, including the heart, and can be fatal to people who inherit them.

But it has been difficult to study such disorders, because scientists lacked a way to make animal models with the same changes to the mitochondrial genome. The latest technique marks the first time that researchers have made such targeted changes, and could allow researchers to do this. “It’s a very exciting development,” says Carlos Moraes, a mitochondrial geneticist at the University of Miami in Florida. “The ability to modify mitochondrial DNA would allow us to ask questions that, before, we could not.” The work was published on 8 July in Nature.

The mathematical strategy that could transform coronavirus testing

Scientists say that widespread testing is needed to get outbreaks of the new coronavirus under control. But in many regions, there’s a shortage of the chemicals needed to run tests. In several countries, health officials have started using a strategy that was first proposed in the Second World War: group testing. By testing samples from many people at once, this method can save time, chemical reagents and money, say researchers.

“In the current epidemic, there is a need to test an extremely large number of patients, making pooling an attractive option,” says Roy Kishony, a systems biologist at Technion — Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

China, India, Germany and the United States are already using group testing.

Science Daily

A tiny ancient relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs discovered

Dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs may be known for their remarkable size, but a newly described species from Madagascar that lived around 237 million years ago suggests that they originated from extremely small ancestors. The fossil reptile, named Kongonaphon kely, or "tiny bug slayer," would have stood just 10 centimeters (or about 4 inches) tall. The description and analysis of this fossil and its relatives, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain the origins of flight in pterosaurs, the presence of "fuzz" on the skin of both pterosaurs and dinosaurs, and other questions about these charismatic animals.

"There's a general perception of dinosaurs as being giants," said Christian Kammerer, a research curator in paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a former Gerstner Scholar at the American Museum of Natural History. "But this new animal is very close to the divergence of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and it's shockingly small."

Bats offer clues to treating COVID-19

Bats are often considered patient zero for many deadly viruses affecting humans, including Ebola, rabies, and, most recently, the SARS-CoV-2 strain of virus that causes coronavirus.

Although humans experience adverse symptoms when afflicted with these pathogens, bats are remarkably able to tolerate viruses, and, additionally, live much longer than similar-sized land mammals. What are the secrets to their longevity and virus resistance?

According to researchers at the University of Rochester, bats' longevity and capacity to tolerate viruses may stem from their ability to control inflammation, which is a hallmark of disease and aging. In a review article published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the researchers -- including Rochester biology professors Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov -- outline the mechanisms underlying bats' unique abilities and how these mechanisms may hold clues to developing new treatments for diseases in humans.

MongaBay

Siberian heat drives Arctic ice extent to record low for early July

The record-setting heat wave that swept through Arctic Siberia in June has yielded a wide-range of deleterious effects in the expansive polar and sub-polar region, triggering raging wildfires, thawing permafrost, and now, spurring the rapid melt-out of Arctic sea ice.

Last month, Siberian temperatures spiked, reaching a record average more than 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than normal, according to recently released data from the European Union. The remote town of Verkhoyansk in northeast Siberia recorded a reading of more than 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 17, the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.

Under this metaphorical blow torch, ice extent in the seas that border Siberia has plummeted in recent days, pushing the Arctic region as a whole into the record books. Between July 2 and July 7, sea ice extent across the Arctic Ocean went from being at its fifth lowest extent for this time of year since satellite record-keeping began in 1979, melting into first place, slightly below even the calamitous year of 2012 which eventually saw sea ice hit a record low at the end of the summer melt season in September.

Deforestation rate climbs higher as Amazon moves into the burning season

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon climbed higher for the fifteenth straight month, reaching levels not seen since the mid-2000s, according to data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE. The news comes as the region moves into the dry season, when deforestation and forest fires typically accelerate.

Under pressure from big companies and the E.U. over rising deforestation and fire risk in the Amazon, the Bolsonaro Administration on Wednesday decreed a 120-day ban on fires in the Amazon. The administration had already deployed the army to the region to try to rein in burning, but fires are already well underway despite it being early in the dry season, according to analysis of satellite data by Amazon Conservation’s MAAP project.

The Guardian

Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms

Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.

Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.

The cases, published in the journal Brain, revealed a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept through Britain. At UCL’s Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three per week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication.

Scientists put forward plan to create universal species list

A plan to create the first universally recognised list of species on Earth has prompted hopes of an end to centuries of disagreement and confusion over how to classify the world’s library of life.

The 10-point plan aims to finally bring order with an authoritative list of the world’s species and a governance mechanism responsible for its quality. Researchers hope a single recognised list would improve global efforts to tackle biodiversity loss, the trade in endangered wildlife, biosecurity and conservation.

With at least 26 competing concepts, biologists have never reached agreement over what constitutes a species, the most basic classification of an organism. As a result, conservation organisations, national governments and scientists often use separate lists of mammals, fungi and other organisms with differing taxonomic descriptions.

Science

NSF campaign will drill for ice capturing West Antarctica’s last collapse

Scientists have long suspected that 125,000 years ago, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed, drowning a world not much warmer than today in 3 meters of rising tides. But hard evidence of whether such a collapse occurred—and if it did, how fast the melt went—has remained scarce.

Next week, the National Science Foundation will fund a 5-year project, costing more than $3 million, that will seek evidence of this collapse from gases trapped in tiny bubbles encased in a 2.5 kilometer-long tube of ice. The core drilling, likely to start in 2023, will target Hercules Dome, an expanse of ice 400 kilometers from the South Pole. Hercules sits at the saddle between the continent’s western and eastern ice sheets; if the western one collapsed, “Hercules Dome would be sitting on the waterfront, so to speak,” says Eric Steig, the project’s principal investigator and a glaciologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The Eemian, the last warm period between the ice ages, lasting from 129,000 to 116,00 years ago, is one of the best analogs for modern Earth. Temperatures were about 1° warmer than now, yet sea levels were 6 meters to 9 meters higher. And recent work, some still unpublished, has suggested much of this melt must have come from Antarctica

The biggest flipping challenge in quantum computing

In October 2019, researchers at Google announced to great fanfare that their embryonic quantum computer had solved a problem that would overwhelm the best supercomputers. Some said the milestone, known as quantum supremacy, marked the dawn of the age of quantum computing. However, Greg Kuperberg, a mathematician at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in quantum computing, wasn’t so impressed. He had expected Google to aim for a goal that is less flashy but, he says, far more important.

Whether it’s calculating your taxes or making Mario jump a canyon, your computer works its magic by manipulating long strings of bits that can be set to 0 or 1. In contrast, a quantum computer employs quantum bits, or qubits, that can be both 0 and 1 at the same time, the equivalent of you sitting at both ends of your couch at once. Embodied in ions, photons, or tiny superconducting circuits, such two-way states give a quantum computer its power. But they’re also fragile, and the slightest interaction with their surroundings can distort them. So scientists must learn to correct such errors, and Kuperberg had expected Google to take a key step toward that goal. “I consider it a more relevant benchmark,” he says.

The Atlantic

The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay

Many American public-health specialists are at risk of burning out as the coronavirus surges back.

Saskia popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb. “It has almost become white noise,” she told me.

For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has become white noise—old news that has faded into the background of their lives. But the crisis is far from over. Arizona is one of the pandemic’s new hot spots, with 24,000 confirmed cases over the past week and rising hospitalizations and deaths. Popescu saw the surge coming, “but to actually see it play out is heartbreaking,” she said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Popescu is one of many public-health experts who have been preparing for and battling the pandemic since the start of the year. They’re not treating sick people, as doctors or nurses might be, but are instead advising policy makers, monitoring the pandemic’s movements, modeling its likely trajectory, and ensuring that hospitals are ready.

Lockdowns Could Be the ‘Biggest Conservation Action’ in a Century

Spring is a bloody season on American roads. Yearling black bears blunder over the asphalt in search of their own territories. In the West, herds of deer, elk, and pronghorn scamper across highways as they migrate from winter pastures to summer redoubts. A smaller-scale but no less epic journey transpires in the Northeast, where wood frogs, spotted salamanders, and eastern newts emerge from their winter hideaways and trek to ephemeral breeding pools on damp March nights, braving an unforgiving gantlet of cars along the way.

Among all creatures, it’s these amphibians—tiny, sluggish, determined—that are most vulnerable to roadkill. This year, though, their journey was considerably safer.

Science Alert

NASA Issues Two New Directives to Stop Humans Contaminating Mars And The Moon

…NASA has published updated guidelines to try and ensure that we don't end up having a negative impact on the celestial bodies we visit next.

These guidelines are known as planetary protection policies – instructions for preventing other planets from catching our bugs and indeed for preventing any contamination coming back the other way as well. Future NASA missions will have to abide by these recommendations before they get the all clear.

The updates are actually relaxing some of the previous rules, however, not tightening them – it's long been argued that the guidelines have to change for crewed missions to proceed, as putting humans on the surface of the Moon or Mars without any microbes at all going along with them is just about impossible.

Study Reveals Just How Bad Syphilis Got in London in The Late 18th Century

As many as one in five Londoners had syphilis by their mid-30s during the late 18th century, according to a detailed new study on the sexually transmitted infection (STI) and its spread in the capital of the United Kingdom.

Researchers used data from hospital admissions and workhouse infirmaries to reach their figures, making allowances for duplicate records, private treatments, and the possibility of syphilis numbers getting mixed in with other diseases like gonorrhea or chlamydia.

The findings show a much higher incidence in London than elsewhere in the country at the time – other studies show 'the pox' was half as prevalent in the city of Chester, and up to 25 times less common in rural parts of England and Wales during the late 1700s.

Vox

Why Arizona is suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the US

The US is struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus in the South and West. But the severity of Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak is in a league of its own.

Over the week of June 30, Arizona reported 55 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people per day. That’s 34 percent more than the second-worst state, Florida. It’s more than double Texas, another hard-hit state. It’s more than triple the US average.

Arizona also maintained the highest rate of positive tests of any state at more than 25 percent over the week of June 30 — meaning more than a quarter of people who were tested for the coronavirus ultimately had it. That’s more than five times the recommended maximum of 5 percent. Such a high positive rate indicates Arizona doesn’t have enough testing to match its big Covid-19 outbreak.

To put it another way: As bad as Arizona’s coronavirus outbreak seems right now, the state is very likely still undercounting a lot of cases since it doesn’t have enough testing to pick up all the new infections.

NPR News

Nation's Pediatricians Walk Back Support For In-Person School

The American Academy of Pediatrics once again plunged into the growing debate over school reopening with a strong new statement Friday, making clear that while in-person school provides crucial benefits to children, "Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics." The statement also said that "science and community circumstances must guide decision-making."

The AAP is changing tone from the guidance it issued just over two weeks ago. Then, the organization made a national splash by recommending that education leaders and policymakers "should start with a goal of having students physically present in school."

The Trump administration this week repeatedly cited the AAP in pressuring school leaders to reopen. Dr. Sally Goza, the association's president, appeared at a White House roundtable with President Trump. She later told Morning Edition's David Greene that local coronavirus infection rates and hot spots have to be taken into consideration to safely reopen schools.

Ars Technica

How small satellites are radically remaking space exploration

At the beginning of this year, a group of NASA scientists agonized over which robotic missions they should choose to explore our Solar System. Researchers from around the United States had submitted more than 20 intriguing ideas, such as whizzing by asteroids, diving into lava tubes on the Moon, and hovering in the Venusian atmosphere.

Ultimately, NASA selected four of these Discovery-class missions for further study. In several months, the space agency will pick two of the four missions to fully fund, each with a cost cap of $450 million and a launch late within this decade. For the losing ideas, there may be more chances in future years—but until new opportunities arise, scientists can only plan, wait, and hope.

This is more or less how NASA has done planetary science for decades. Scientists come up with all manner of great ideas to answer questions about our Solar System; then, NASA announces an opportunity, a feeding frenzy ensues for those limited slots. Ultimately, one or two missions get picked and fly. The whole process often takes a couple of decades from the initial idea to getting data back to Earth.

CERN has discovered a very charming particle

The quark model was an intellectual revolution for physics. Physicists were faced with an ever-growing zoo of unstable particles that didn't seem to have a role in the Universe around us. Quarks explained all that through an (at least superficially) simple set of rules that built all of these particles through combinations of two or three quarks.

While that general outline seems simple, the rules by which particles called "gluons" hold the quarks together in particles are fiendishly complex, and we don't always know their limits. Are there reasons that particles seem to stop at collections of three quarks?

With the advent of ever-more powerful particle colliders, we've found some indications that the answer is "no." Reports of four-quark and even five-quark particles have appeared in different experiments. But questions remain about the nature of the interactions in these particles. Now, CERN has announced a new addition to growing family of tetraquarks, a collection two charm quarks and two anti-charm quarks.

WHO still skeptical SARS-CoV-2 lingers in air—despite what the NYT says

If you happened to read The New York Times this week, you may be under the false impression that the World Health Organization significantly changed its stance on whether the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spreads by lingering in the air.

Around midday Thursday, the paper declared: “W.H.O., in Reversal, Affirms Virus May Be Airborne Indoors.” The paper also called it an “admission” and, in a subsequent article, said the WHO had “conceded.” The articles both noted that a group of more than 200 researchers had also published a commentary piece this week urging the WHO and other public health bodies to acknowledge and address the potential for airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

The problem: the WHO did not change its stance on airborne transmission. And, as such, it did not issue any new recommendations or guidance on how people can stay safe.