Overnight News Digest: What a Joe Biden presidency would mean for five key science issues

Phys.org

Antarctic Peninsula at warmest in decades: study

The year 2020 is the hottest in the Antarctic Peninsula in the past three decades, a study by the University of Santiago de Chile out Friday found.

Between January and August, temperatures reached between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius (35.6 and 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on the peninsula, which is the northernmost part of mainland Antarctica, according to researchers at the Chilean Air Force's Frei Base on King George Island.

Those temperatures are "more than 2 degrees Celsius over typical values," climatologist Raul Cordero said in a statement released by the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH).

"In the far northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the average maximum temperature so far this year has been above 0 degrees. This had not happened for 31 years," Cordero added.

Egypt reveals 59 ancient coffins found near Saqqara pyramids

Egypt's tourism and antiquities minster said on Saturday archaeologists have unearthed dozens of ancient coffins in a vast necropolis south of Cairo.

Khalid el-Anany said at least 59 sealed sarcophagi, with mummies inside most of them, were found that had been buried in three wells more than 2,600 years ago.

"I consider this is the beginning of a big discovery," el-Anany said, adding that there is an unknown number of coffins that have yet to be unearthed in the same area.

CNN

Fall foliage faltering under 'extreme drought' conditions

Fall ushers in cooler temperatures, pumpkin spice everything and beautiful fall foliage. And thousands of Americans seek those vibrant colored leaves by traveling notable distances to view them.

But geography doesn't automatically prescribe vibrant colors -- weather often plays a more important role. So where has the weather been conducive for good leaf peeping this year?

Perfect foliage conditions rely on a good combination of temperatures (not too hot and not too cold) and moisture (not too wet or too dry). The problem is that some areas have experienced these extreme conditions, particularly in the West and New England.

​​​Gizmodo

Scientists Reveal More About Volcanic Eruption That Rocked the Ancient Maya

Using a combination of archaeological and geological evidence, scientists have finally pinpointed the date of the infamous Tierra Blanca Joven eruption, which likely devastated Maya communities in what is now El Salvador.

Ilopango volcano blew its stack 1,589 years ago—give or take a year or two—according to new research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That this volcano erupted well over 1,000 years ago was well established, but the new research finally firms up the date, in a paper that will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, geologists, and climate scientists.

The Ilopango caldera is situated within the Central American Volcanic Arc (CAVA), which stretches from Guatemala to Panama along the Pacific coast. So powerful was the Tierra Blanca Joven eruption that areas to within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the vent were rendered uninhabitable for years and possibly decades following the explosion.

The UK Could Be the First Country to Intentionally Give People Coronavirus to Test Vaccines

The UK is considering a controversial approach to testing potential vaccines for the coronavirus that causes covid-19: intentionally exposing volunteers to the virus, in a strategy known as challenge trials.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that the UK government will allow human challenge vaccine trials to begin by January 2021. In these trials, volunteers would be given an experimental vaccine and then later exposed to the coronavirus in a controlled setting. These trials, advocates say, will speed up the development of covid-19 vaccines, though other experts have worried about the potential health risks to volunteers.

At this point, however, the status of these trials still appears to be in flux. A spokesperson for the UK’s Department for Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy said in a statement to Gizmodo: “We are working with partners to understand how we might collaborate on the potential development of a COVID-19 vaccine through human challenge studies.”

Science

Europe is building a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to revolutionize climate forecasts

The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious “digital twin” of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, won’t stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.

"It’s a really bold mission, I like it a lot,” says Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By rendering the planet’s atmosphere in boxes only 1 kilometer across, a scale many times finer than existing climate models, Destination Earth can base its forecasts on far more detailed real-time data than ever before. The project, which will be described in detail in two workshops later this month, will start next year and run on one of the three supercomputers that Europe will deploy in Finland, Italy, and Spain.

Destination Earth rose out of the ashes of Extreme Earth, a proposal led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for a billion-euro flagship research program. 

Watch gray sharks get dinner by ‘bumming’ food from hard-hunting whitetips

There’s no honor among thieves—or thieving sharks, according to new research. In the warm waters off of French Polynesia, gangs of hundreds of gray reef sharks have been seen stealing the hard-won prey of whitetip reef sharks—in some cases, right out of their mouths. The new study, with accompanying video, is the first to show one species of sharks habitually “bumming” food off another shark species.

Getting the footage wasn’t easy, says Johann Mourier, a behavioral ecologist with the French Institute of Research for Development and one of the co-authors of the new study. He was part of an expedition that visited the islands every year from 2014 to 2018, and he made countless night dives near the southern pass of the Fakarava Atoll, a rectangular coral reef enclosing a small lagoon. The reef, which is part of the largest shark sanctuary in the world, is inhabited by a school of 900 reef sharks that feast every evening on groupers, parrotfish, and unicornfish.

“It’s amazing—in the beginning, it was a bit scary,” Mourier says. The scientists were often in the middle of the hunting fray—at one point a 4-meter-long great hammerhead burst through the dive team as it chased after gray sharks. And when grays caught prey they couldn’t immediately swallow, they would often corkscrew toward the surface in an effort to finish their meal—as opportunistic thieves gave chase. “Sometimes [the sharks] are coming right at you,” Mourier adds. But the fish never bit the researchers, and only occasionally bumped into them.

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Science Daily

Plastic-eating enzyme 'cocktail' heralds new hope for plastic waste

The scientists who re-engineered the plastic-eating enzyme PETase have now created an enzyme 'cocktail' which can digest plastic up to six times faster.

A second enzyme, found in the same rubbish dwelling bacterium that lives on a diet of plastic bottles, has been combined with PETase to speed up the breakdown of plastic.

PETase breaks down polyethylene terephthalate (PET) back into its building blocks, creating an opportunity to recycle plastic infinitely and reduce plastic pollution and the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

The ancient Neanderthal hand in severe COVID-19

Since first appearing in late 2019, the novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, has had a range of impacts on those it infects. Some people become severely ill with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and require hospitalization, whereas others have mild symptoms or are even asymptomatic.

There are several factors that influence a person's susceptibility to having a severe reaction, such as their age and the existence of other medical conditions. But one's genetics also plays a role, and, over the last few months, research by the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative has shown that genetic variants in one region on chromosome 3 impose a larger risk that their carriers will develop a severe form of the disease.

Now, a new study, published in Nature, has revealed that this genetic region is almost identical to that of a 50,000-year old Neanderthal from southern Europe. Further analysis has shown that, through interbreeding, the variants came over to the ancestors of modern humans about 60,000 years ago.

The Atlantic

Biden’s Negative Test Result Isn’t Enough to Say He’s in the Clear

Trump could have infected him. We won’t know with certainty for another week.

“I don’t wear masks like him,” … Donald Trump said during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, deriding his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask.” But at nearly 1 a.m. eastern time today, Trump announced that he had tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.  

As president, Trump’s dire mishandling of the U.S. pandemic response has contributed to the deaths of about 200,000 Americans and at least 7.2 million infections. But now that he himself is sick, one has to wonder: How many people has Trump personally infected? And could Biden be one of them? Encouragingly, Biden tested negative for the virus today, but “a negative test doesn’t say he’s completely in the clear,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. Several factors suggest that he could have been exposed to the virus during the debate, and should continue to take precautions for at least another week.

First, there are the conditions of the debate itself. The coronavirus mostly spreads through the air, traveling from the nose and mouth of an infected person in either large, wet particles (droplets) or smaller, drier ones (aerosols). Most droplets fall to the ground within six feet of their source, and Trump and Biden were clearly standing farther apart than that. But “aerosols behave like cigarette smoke and don’t stop at six feet,” says Linsey Marr, who studies airborne-disease transmission at Virginia Tech. “Imagine Trump was smoking the whole time. Would Biden have been exposed to some of that?”

The Plant Pandemics Just Keep on Coming

[…] Tree-killing microorganisms, like the microfungus responsible for Dutch elm disease, have been criss-crossing the world for centuries, shipped along with exotic trees and shrubs, timber and wood products, even packaging. In the 20th century, a slew of epidemics hammered home the message that hitchhiking bacteria and fungi—the rusts and blights and their kin—and the fearful fungus-like phytophthoras are seriously bad news for agriculture, forestry, and natural wooded habitats. Yet despite those woeful experiences and the tougher biosecurity measures that they prompted, the number of arrivals is rising.

With wildfires growing fiercer and more frequent and world leaders vowing to plant trillions of trees to help restore nature and tackle the climate emergency, there’s an urgent need to find ways to fight future epidemics. The United Nations has declared this the International Year of Plant Health, so it’s a good time to see how we’re doing. And the blunt answer is: Badly, but with bright spots that offer some hope that things will improve.

“We are getting better at it because we are better equipped, but at the same time the challenges are increasing,” says plant-disease epidemiologist Stephen Parnell of the University of Salford in England, who presented the case for surveillance in the Annual Review of Phytopathology. “We need to get ahead of epidemics, not just monitor the damage. If we don’t, we stand to lose many more species and billions of trees that we depend on for so much.”

Mongabay

World’s plants and fungi a frontier of discovery, if we can protect them: Report

Outer space, the ocean depths and quantum physics are areas ripe for discovery, the underexplored frontiers of science. But another frontier may be hidden in plain sight, right under your feet or out your window, in the kingdoms of plants and fungi.

In 2019 alone, 1,942 plants and 1,886 fungi were newly described by scientists. Some of these plants are in the family of garlic and onions, some new wild types of cassava, and some closely related to known medicinal species and potentially new sources of medicine.

However, nearly 40% of global plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction.

The “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020” report, released this week by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew), delves into a global assessment of plants and fungi as food, fuel, medicine, tools for urban resilience and stores of genetic diversity; the commercialization of plants; and whether conservation policies help or hinder scientific research. Also covered are states of both extinction and discovery.

Study finds a Mexico-sized swath of intact land lost to human pressure

Humans have not treaded lightly on the Earth. Over the centuries, we have left our mark on almost every ecosystem, contributing to a steady, and increasingly rapid, decline in the world’s natural places.

A new study published in One Earth found that more than half of the world is under moderate or intense pressure due to humanity, and that between 2000 and 2013, about 1.9 million square kilometers (734,000 square miles) of intact land — about the size of Mexico — has been modified to the point of devastation.

Lead author Brooke Williams, a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland in Australia, said the findings caught her by surprise.

“We were expecting there to be high levels of intact ecosystem and wilderness loss, but the results were shocking,” Williams told Mongabay in an email. “A lot of biodiversity requires intact land for survival, and people rely on the services that intact ecosystems provide. Climate change mitigation efforts are also undermined by these losses because intact lands make crucial contributions to the terrestrial carbon sink, so it really is cause for concern.”

The Washington Post

Survival of the friendliest: Male baboons enjoy health benefits from platonic bonds with females, researchers say.

A growing body of research hints that for nonhuman primates, purely platonic relationships come with big benefits.

A study that draws on decades of research about baboons is adding to a pile of cross-species evidence of the protective power of friendships.

Researchers have been watching how baboons in the Amboseli basin of southern Kenya interact with one another since 1971. They used decades of observations and a mathematical model to explore if social interactions between the animals predict their survival. Their research was recently published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Male baboons don’t just interact with females when they want to mate: They also engage in platonic grooming, a behavior known as a way for primates to bond and destress.

The Guardian

'Tiny wind turbine' can collect energy from a walker's swinging arm

Scientists have developed a “tiny wind turbine” that can scavenge energy from the breeze made while walking.

Imagine rubbing a balloon on your hair for a few seconds – can you hear the crackle of static electricity, see your hair stand on end? That energy, powered by the contact and separation of two materials, can be bottled up and stored for use, according to researchers working on the device.

Scientists in China hope the device can generate sustainable power in a low-cost, efficient manner. Once placed on a person’s swinging arm, the airflow is enough to generate power, the researchers said.

Global heating warming up 'nights faster than days'

The climate crisis is heating up nights faster than days in many parts of the world, according to the first worldwide assessment of how global heating is differently affecting days and nights.

The findings have “profound consequences” for wildlife and their ability to adapt to the climate emergency, the researchers said, and for the ability of people to cool off at night during dangerous heatwaves.

The scientists compared the rises in daytime and night-time temperatures over the 35 years up to 2017. Global heating is increasing both, but they found that over more than half of the world’s land there was a difference of at least 0.25C between the day and night rises.

National Geographic

How beavers became North America's best firefighter

The American West is ablaze with fires fueled by climate change and a century of misguided fire suppression. In California, wildfire has blackened more than three million acres; in Oregon, a once-in-a-generation crisis has forced half a million people to flee their homes. All the while, one of our most valuable firefighting allies has remained overlooked: The beaver.

A new study concludes that, by building dams, forming ponds, and digging canals, beavers irrigate vast stream corridors and create fireproof refuges in which plants and animals can shelter. In some cases, the rodents’ engineering can even stop fire in its tracks.

“It doesn't matter if there’s a wildfire right next door,” says study leader Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands. “Beaver-dammed areas are green and happy and healthy-looking.”

For decades, scientists have recognized that the North American beaver, Castor canadensis, provides a litany of ecological benefits throughout its range from northern Mexico to Alaska. Beaver ponds and wetlands have been shown to filter out water pollution, support salmon, sequester carbon, and attenuate floods. Researchers have long suspected that these paddle-tailed architects offer yet another crucial service: slowing the spread of wildfire.

The Economist

How hybrids have upturned evolutionary theory

In 1981 peter and Rosemary Grant, a husband-and-wife team of evolutionary biologists, spotted something odd on Daphne Major. Every year for the previous decade they had travelled from Princeton University to this island in the Galápagos, to study its three endemic tanager species, part of a group known colloquially as “Darwin’s finches”. On this occasion their eyes were drawn to an unusual male that sported dark feathers and sang a unique song. Genetic analysis later identified him as a large cactus finch, probably blown in from Española, another part of the archipelago that is over 100km away.

Intrigued, the Grants followed the castaway as he explored his new home. They watched him mate with a local female medium ground finch. That produced five fit, healthy offspring. Those offspring were also surprisingly sexually selective. A single male excepted, they and their descendants mated only among themselves—and they have continued to do so ever since.

Despite this heavy inbreeding, the hybrids… have been successful. They have carved out a niche in which they use their size and their deep beaks to exploit the large woody fruits of the Jamaican feverplant, which grows locally. They have, to all intents and purposes, become another species of Darwin finch, of which 13 were previously recognised. Though they do not yet have a Latinised scientific name, they are known to all as the “Big Bird” lineage.

Scientific American

Sloths Slowly Cavort By Day Now

The disappearance of their predators in a disturbed ecosystem has turned Atlantic forest sloths from night creatures to day adventurers.

Somewhere in this forest you hear, there are sloths. Those sloths live in Brazill’s Atlantic Forest. If you’re a tourist, watching sloths isn’t that exciting. But if you’re a scientist—well, it’s also not that exciting. But there’s a big upside:

“So, they’re actually a great study animal for the wild, because you can collect a lot of data on them.” — Giles Duffield, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame, who studies circadian rhythms.

“I mean the ecology work that i used to do several years back in Bolivia was focused on bird conservation and bird ecology and, you know, you’d see some parrots and you’d make some notes and then they were gone and you wouldn’t see them again for another 24 hours.”  

But Duffield and colleagues now collect data on the brown-throated three-toed sloth in the Atlantic Forest. Duffield says the sloths can stay in sight—or even in the same tree—for nearly 24 hours. The animals are at rest anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of the time. But they’re coping with a damaged ecosystem.

What Research in Antarctica Tells Us about the Science of Isolation

Over the past few months, the phrase “social distancing” has entered our lexicon. Many of us have found ourselves separated from family and friends—or at least from our normal social lives. As humans grapple with pandemic-induced isolation, science is starting to offer insight into what may be happening in our brains when our social contact with others is dramatically reduced.

That insight happens to come from a place with more penguins than people.

Tim Heitland of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Germany spent 14 months in Antarctica between 2016 and 2018. When he returned, daily life felt overwhelming—everything from the colors and vegetation to all the other people. Part of the shock may have come from returning with a different brain than the one he left with.

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Ars Technica

Greenland is about to lose ice faster than any time since the last ice age

While the GRACE satellites were active, their incredibly precise gravity measurements tracked a loss of about 280 billion tons of ice from Greenland each year. That's glacial land ice that raises sea level as it flows into the ocean—and it's vanishing at a remarkable clip. But just how remarkable is that clip? We don't have such excellent measurements going back too far into Greenland's history.

A new study led by the University of Buffalo's Jason Briner takes this question on. We have lots of paleoclimate records of climate conditions in Greenland, the position of the ice on the landscape, and even changes in sediments carried into the sea by meltwater. None of that directly tells you how much ice was accumulating or disappearing. To put the pieces together and calculate that, you need to combine that data with a model.

The researchers used a high-resolution ice-sheet model simulating (roughly) the southwest quadrant of Greenland. There's a good reason for that: the ice sheet mostly melts before reaching the ocean here, making it the simplest area to simulate. Since we've been tracking things, the year-to-year growth or losses of the ice sheet here nicely mirror the Greenland-wide total. So simulate this area well, and at high resolution, and your numbers should scale to the whole ice sheet.

Studying clay-pot residues could help scientists recreate ancient recipes

Archaeologists are fascinated by many different aspects of cultures in the distant past, but determining what ancient people cooked and ate can be particularly challenging. A team of researchers spent an entire year analyzing the chemical residues of some 50 meals cooked in ceramic pots and found such cookware retained not just the remnants of the last meal cooked, but also clues as to earlier meals, spanning a pot's lifetime of usage. This could give archaeologists a new tool in determining ancient diets. The researchers described their results in a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

According to co-author Christine Hastorf, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the project has been several years in the making. Hastorf has long been interested in the relationships between people and plants throughout history, particularly as they pertain to what people ate in the past. Back in 1985, she co-authored a paper examining the isotopes of charred plant remains collected from the inside of pots. She has also long taught a food archaeology class at UCB. A few years ago, she expanded the course to two full semesters (nine months), covering both the ethnographic aspects as well as the archaeological methods one might use to glean insight into the dietary habits of the past.