The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the fall of the Republic.
237,106 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.
Nature
Scientists relieved as Joe Biden wins tight US presidential election
Joe Biden will soon be president of the United States, and scientists the world over are breathing a collective sigh of relief. But concerns remain: nearly half the country voted for … Donald Trump, whose actions have repeatedly undermined science and scientific institutions. Biden will have his work cut out for him in January as he takes the helm of a politically polarized nation.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School, quoting president Gerald Ford’s famous 1974 remarks about his predecessor Richard Nixon’s scandal-ridden term. “I couldn’t say it any better than that.”
The Atlantic
A Dreadful New Peak for the American Pandemic
The United States reported 103,087 cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, the highest single-day total on record, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. It marks the first time that the country—or any country in the world, for that matter—has documented more than 100,000 new cases in one day.
At the same time, states reported that more than 52,000 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus, the highest level since early August. The number of people hospitalized nationwide is increasing faster in November than it did in October, and—over the past 10 days—their ranks have risen by about 1,000 people a day.
The record officially marks what was already clear: As winter nears, the country’s third surge of infection is dangerously accelerating in almost every region of the country. This is the reality that the United States is facing, regardless of who will become its next chief executive: A deadly respiratory pandemic is spiraling out of control, and the number of hospitalized people—and deaths—is certain to rise over the next several months.
Gizmodo
Some People Already Have Antibodies That Recognize Covid-19, Thanks to Common Colds
A new study suggests that a small portion of the population carries antibodies that respond to the coronavirus behind covid-19 without having been infected—antibodies lifted from previous bouts with the common cold caused by related viruses.
The research is the latest to indicate that some people may have a degree of preexisting immunity to the coronavirus. But though it’s possible these findings could help explain some trends in the pandemic, such as children being less vulnerable to severe illness, it’s still unclear just how protective this borrowed immunity could really be.
The new study, published in Science on Friday, tested blood samples collected from adults and children in the UK prior to the known start of the pandemic in December 2019, as well as from people early on in the pandemic who tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for covid-19. These samples were compared to people who had confirmed covid-19.
Deutsche Welle
A quirk in human psychology that helps spread COVID-19
Breaking social distancing rules can feel less risky with people you know than with strangers. It's a cognitive bias that's driving coronavirus infections.
Passing by a coughing stranger on a sidewalk during a global pandemic or having coffee with a work friend — for most people, one of those two scenarios will sound considerably safer than the other.
We know the work friend, they know us. They don't appear unwell, and neither do we. Even if it may be risky to sit close together and remove our masks, it doesn't really feel threatening — unlike the coughing stranger.
But it's precisely those interactions between people who know each other that may be contributing to a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases.
Scientific American
Mark Kelly Becomes 4th Astronaut Elected to Congress
Mark Kelly has won a seat in the U.S. Senate, making him only the fourth NASA astronaut to be elected to Congress.
Kelly, who launched four times into space before pursuing a career in politics, was successful in his bid to represent the state of Arizona in the U.S. Senate. Kelly, a Democrat, ran against incumbent Martha McSally, a Republican and former U.S. Air Force combat pilot. The special election was held to complete the six-year term of Senator John McCain, who died in 2018 (McSally was temporarily appointed by Arizona's governor after McCain's death).
"When we launched this campaign from this very spot, right here, 619 days ago, I could have never anticipated just how many Arizonians would be part of this mission," said Kelly, addressing supporters at the Hotel Congress in Tucson on Tuesday night (Nov. 3). "This mission does not end when the last vote is counted. It is only the beginning."
Science
The Maya built the Western Hemisphere’s first water filtration system
The Maya city of Tikal is famous for its soaring palaces and temples. But something far more humble kept Tikal functioning: its water filtration system, the earliest known of its kind. Researchers recently discovered a volcanic mineral that captures microbes and heavy metals in one of Tikal’s largest reservoirs. Because the material is not found nearby, the finding suggests the presence of a deliberate filter.
The finding contradicts the long-standing idea that the ancient world’s technological prowess was concentrated in places such as Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China, says study co-author Kenneth Tankersley, an archaeological geologist at the University of Cincinnati (UC). “When it comes to purifying water, the Maya were millennia ahead.”
Phys.org
Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complex cosmic web. Today, scientists at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data. Their findings are published on November 6, 2020 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Galaxies are distributed throughout the universe in the form of a complex network of nodes connected by filaments, which are in turn separated by voids. This is known as the cosmic web. The filaments are thought to contain almost all of the ordinary (so-called baryonic) matter of the universe in the form of a diffuse, hot gas. However, the signal emitted by this diffuse gas is so weak that in reality 40 to 50% of the baryons go undetected.
These are the missing baryons, hidden in the filamentary structure of the cosmic web, that Nabila Aghanim, a researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) and Hideki Tanimura, a post-doctoral researcher, together with their colleagues, are attempting to detect. In a new study, funded by the ERC ByoPiC project, they present a statistical analysis that reveals, for the first time, the X-ray emission from the hot baryons in filaments.
More plant diversity, less pesticide
Increasing plant diversity enhances the natural control of insect herbivory in grasslands. Species-rich plant communities support natural predators and simultaneously provide less valuable food for herbivores. This was found by a team of researchers led by the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), who conducted two analogous experiments in Germany and the U.S. Their results were published in Science Advances and show that increasing plant biodiversity could help reduce pesticide inputs in agricultural systems by enhancing natural biological control.
Biodiversity, the biological diversity of all species on Earth, their interactions and the diverse ecosystems they form, is crucial for providing and maintaining ecosystem functions and services in planted and natural grasslands. With an increasing demand to feed the world's growing population by intensifying agriculture, these grasslands are put under pressure, too. Insect herbivores are causing an estimated 18-26% loss in global crop production, which has driven significant growth in the use of environmentally costly pesticides.
Science Daily
From hard to soft: Making sponges from mussel shells
Scientists have discovered a spongy form of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), a material found in limestone, chalk, marble, and the shells of mussels and other shellfish. While most forms of calcium carbonate are hard minerals, this new form is soft and absorbent. The researchers, reporting November 5 in the journal Matter, made the discovery while exploring new uses for leftover mussel shells.
"The local aquaculture industry here on the east coast of Canada got in touch and told us they were going to start growing more mussels in the ocean and producing more waste, and they asked us if there could be some use for it," says senior author Francesca Kerton, a professor of chemistry at Memorial University Newfoundland. "I hadn't really thought about inorganic materials in nature, so it was really a desire to use a food waste product rather than mining or drilling for minerals."
The New York Times
Iceberg Headed for Sub-Antarctic Island Could Threaten Wildlife
An iceberg roughly the size of Delaware that is headed toward the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia has experts worried about the possibility of it blocking wildlife from food sources and threatening the island’s ecosystem.
The iceberg, known as A68a, was about 400 kilometers, or about 250 miles, away from the coast of the British island territory of South Georgia as of Wednesday, the British Antarctic Survey said.
The iceberg may run aground near the island and be a few weeks out from the island’s coast, said Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing manager with the survey.
The Washington Post
Scientists long thought that the ground beneath the northern coasts of Alaska was permanently frozen. That was good news; permafrost stores large amounts of carbon, methane and other planet-warming gases, and coastal permafrost was thought to be a critical buffer against both global warming and coastal erosion.
That model could be very wrong. A new study documents an absence of permafrost along a coastal site in northeastern Alaska — and warns that coastal permafrost is more fragile than once thought. The study in the journal Science Advances documents efforts to map the subsurface of the Kaktovik Lagoon, a shallow bay at the edge of a large tundra underpinned by permafrost.
But electrical resistivity imaging of the beach and seafloor shows that both were ice-free to at least 65 feet. That leaves the area vulnerable to coastal erosion, since the land near the shore is not protected by the freeze.
A Biden victory positions America for a 180-degree turn on climate change
Joe Biden, the projected winner of the presidency, will move to restore dozens of environmental safeguards … Trump abolished and launch the boldest climate change plan of any president in history. While some of Biden’s most sweeping programs will encounter stiff resistance from Senate Republicans and conservative attorneys general, the United States is poised to make a 180-degree turn on climate change and conservation policy.
Biden’s team already has plans on how it will restrict oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters; ratchet up federal mileage standards for cars and SUVs; block pipelines that transport fossil fuels across the country; provide federal incentives to develop renewable power; and mobilize other nations to make deeper cuts in their own carbon emissions.
In a victory speech Saturday night, Biden identified climate change as one of his top priorities as president, saying Americans must marshal the “forces of science” in the “battle to save our planet.”
UPI
Female hunters were common in early hunter-gatherer groups
After discovering a 9,000-year-old female hunter buried in the Andes Mountains, researchers decided to undertake an expansive review of the literature on late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials.
After reviewing documented accounts of 429 individuals from 107 burial sites, researchers were able to identify 27 female individuals buried with big-game hunting tools.
The analysis confirmed the Wilamaya Patjxa female, unearthed in the Andes in 2018, as the oldest known hunter burial in the Americas.
The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, suggest labor among early human societies in the Americas was shared relatively evenly by men and women.
BBC News
Enigmatic fast radio burst pinned on magnetised dead star
At last, we're making headway in deciphering some of the Universe's most enigmatic signals. Scientists have managed to trace a very short, very bright burst of radio waves to a type of highly magnetised dead star, known as a magnetar.
It's the first time a so-called fast radio burst, or FRB, has been pinned on a specific source. FRBs were first detected in 2007, and have been one of the hottest topics in astronomy ever since.
The new discovery, reported in the journal Nature, was made by two independent radio telescope arrays in North America.
The Irish News
Gentoo penguins should be reclassified as four different species, scientists say
Gentoo penguins should be reclassified as four separate species, scientists have said.
Researchers from the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath analysed the genetic and physical difference between penguin populations around the southern hemisphere. They say that counting the birds into four separate species will help their conservation, as it will be easier to monitor any decline in numbers.
Gentoo penguins, which have the Latin name Pygoscelis papua, live in a range of latitudes in the southern hemisphere and are currently split into two subspecies, P. p. ellsworthi and P. p. papua.
The researchers say these two subspecies should be raised to species level, and two new species created named P. poncetii and P. taeniata.
Their work is published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
The Guardian
Fossil amphibian hints at earliest evidence of 'slingshot' tongue
Scientists have uncovered the oldest evidence of a “slingshot” tongue, in fossils of 99m-year-old amphibians.
The prehistoric armoured creatures, known as albanerpetontids, were sit-and-wait predators who snatched prey with a projectile firing of their “ballistic tongues”.
Although they had lizard-like claws, scales and tails, analysis indicates that albanerpetontids were amphibians and not reptiles, the team said.
They believe the findings, published in the journal Science, redefine how the tiny animals fed. Albanerpetontids were previously thought of as underground burrowers.
MIT Technology Review
Half the Milky Way’s sun-like stars could be home to Earth-like planets
Nearly 4,300 exoplanets have been discovered by astronomers, and it’s quite obvious now our galaxy is filled with them. But the point of looking for these new worlds is more than just an exercise in stamp collecting—it’s to find one that could be home to life, be it future humans who have found a way to travel those distances or extraterrestrial life that’s made a home for itself already. The best opportunity to find something like that is to find a planet that resembles Earth.
And what better way to look for Earth 2.0 than to search around stars similar to the sun? A new analysis of exoplanet data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which operated from 2009 to 2018, has come up with some new predictions for how many stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are comparable to the sun in temperature and age are likely to be orbited by a rocky, potentially habitable planet like Earth. When applied to current estimates of 4.1 billion sun-like stars in the galaxy, their model suggests there are at minimum 300 million with at least one habitable planet.
The model’s average, however, posits that one in two sun-like stars could have a habitable planet, causing that figure to swell to over 2 billion. Even less conservative predictions suggest it could be over 3.6 billion.
The new study has not yet been peer-reviewed, but it will be soon, and it is due to be published in the Astronomical Journal.
Mongabay
‘Don’t give up!’ The last known Loa water frogs produce 200 tadpoles
In 2019, the last known 14 Loa water frogs (Telmatobius dankoi) were evacuated from a swiftly vanishing stream in northern Chile. Now, after more than a year of meticulous care, they have produced 200 tadpoles.
“The zoo’s specialists not only nursed the animals back to health after they were discovered malnourished and near-death in the wild last year, but they have now succeeded in breeding a new generation of a species that has very nearly vanished,” Lina Valencia, Global Wildlife Conservation’s Andes conservation officer, said in a statement.
Ars Technica
The weird genomes of domesticated fish
Humans have domesticated a large number of animals over their history, some for food, some as companions and protectors. A few species—think animals like rabbits and guinea pigs—have partly shifted between these two categories, currently serving as both food and pets. But one species has left its past as a food source behind entirely. And, in another rarity, it ended up serving not so much as a companion but as a decoration.
We're talking goldfish here, and we've now gotten a look at their genome. And it's almost as weird as the fish themselves are.