The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the decline of the Republic.
244,912 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.
Phys.org
Solar system formed in less than 200,000 years
A long time ago—roughly 4.5 billion years—our sun and solar system formed over the short time span of 200,000 years. That is the conclusion of a group of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists after looking at isotopes of the element molybdenum found on meteorites.
The material that makes up the sun and the rest of the solar system came from the collapse of a large cloud of gas and dust about 4.5 billion years ago. By observing other stellar systems that formed similarly to ours, astronomers estimate that it probably takes about 1-2 million years for the collapse of a cloud and ignition of a star, but this is the first study that can provide numbers on our own solar system.
"Previously, the timeframe of formation was not really known for our solar system," said LLNL cosmochemist Greg Brennecka, lead author of a paper appearing in Science.
Plastic pollution is everywhere. Study reveals how it travels
Plastic pollution is ubiquitous today, with microplastic particles from disposable goods found in natural environments throughout the globe, including Antarctica. But how those particles move through and accumulate in the environment is poorly understood. Now a Princeton University study has revealed the mechanism by which microplastics, like Styrofoam, and particulate pollutants are carried long distances through soil and other porous media, with implications for preventing the spread and accumulation of contaminants in food and water sources.
The study, published in Science Advances on November 13, reveals that microplastic particles get stuck when traveling through porous materials such as soil and sediment but later break free and often continue to move substantially further. Identifying this stop-and-restart process and the conditions that control it is new, said Sujit Datta, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and associated faculty of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. Previously, researchers thought that when microparticles got stuck, they generally stayed there, which limited understanding of particle spread.
Wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing ecosystem engineers
Beavers are some of the world's most prolific ecosystem engineers, creating, maintaining and radically altering wetlands almost everywhere they live. But what, if anything, might control this engineering by beavers and influence the formation of North America's wetlands?
In a paper to be published Friday in the journal Science Advances, researchers with the University of Minnesota's Voyageurs Wolf Project and Voyageurs National Park observed and demonstrated that wolves affect wetland ecosystems by killing beavers leaving their colonies to create new ponds. […]
This relationship between wolves and dispersing beavers shows how wolves are intimately connected to wetland creation across the boreal ecosystem and all the ecological processes that come from wetlands.
Gizmodo
Scientists Have Discovered an Ancient Lakebed Beneath Greenland’s Ice
Using radar and other ice-penetrating instruments, scientists have detected a “fossil lakebed” preserved beneath the Greenland ice sheet, in what is the first discovery of its kind.
Now a basin smothered by a gigantic sheet of ice, this former lake once measured 2,740 square miles (7,100 square kilometers) in size, which is an area comparable to Rhode Island and Delaware combined, according to a Columbia University press release. In some places it got as deep as 820 feet (250 meters), and it was fed by more than a dozen streams. Doesn’t sound very Greenland-ish today, but this is how the island likely looked millions of years ago.
Microbes Can Mine Valuable Elements From Rocks in Space
Recent experiments aboard the International Space Station have shown that some microbes can harvest valuable rare-earth elements from rocks, even when exposed to microgravity conditions. The unexpected finding shows how microbes could boost our ability to live and work in space.
On Earth, some microscopic organisms have shown their worth as effective miners, extracting rare-earth elements (REEs) from rocks. New experimental evidence published today in Nature Communications shows that, when it comes to leaching REEs from rocks, at least one strain of bacteria is largely unaffected by microgravity and low-gravity conditions. This is potentially good news for future space explorers, as biomining microbes could provide a means for acquiring REEs while in space, on the Moon, or on Mars.
Science Daily
Climate change causes landfalling hurricanes to stay stronger for longer
Climate change is causing hurricanes that make landfall to take more time to weaken, reports a study published 11th November 2020 in the journal Nature.
The researchers showed that hurricanes that develop over warmer oceans carry more moisture and therefore stay stronger for longer after hitting land. This means that in the future, as the world continues to warm, hurricanes are more likely to reach communities farther inland and be more destructive.
"The implications are very important, especially when considering policies that are put in place to cope with global warming," said Professor Pinaki Chakraborty, senior author of the study and head of the Fluid Mechanics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). "We know that coastal areas need to ready themselves for more intense hurricanes, but inland communities, who may not have the know-how or infrastructure to cope with such intense winds or heavy rainfall, also need to be prepared."
Tree rings may hold clues to impacts of distant supernovas on Earth
Massive explosions of energy happening thousands of light-years from Earth may have left traces in our planet's biology and geology, according to new research by University of Colorado Boulder geoscientist Robert Brakenridge.
The study, published this month in the International Journal of Astrobiology, probes the impacts of supernovas, some of the most violent events in the known universe. In the span of just a few months, a single one of these eruptions can release as much energy as the sun will during its entire lifetime. They're also bright -- really bright.
"We see supernovas in other galaxies all the time," said Brakenridge, a senior research associate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at CU Boulder. "Through a telescope, a galaxy is a little misty spot. Then, all of a sudden, a star appears and may be as bright as the rest of the galaxy."
The Guardian
Remains of new flying reptile species spotted in UK museum drawer
A fossil that been had languishing in a museum drawer in Brighton, wrongly labelled as a shark fin skeleton, has now been identified as a completely new species of prehistoric flying reptile that soared majestically over what are now the Cambridgeshire fens.
Roy Smith, a University of Portsmouth PhD student, identified the creature after realising it was much more unusual and interesting than its label suggested. He identified the fossil as the tip of the beak of a new species of pterosaur (from the Greek for “winged lizard”), a creature that existed 228m-66m years ago and the earliest vertebrate known to have evolved powered flight. […]
Smith discovered the creature during a trawl of fossil collections housed in the Booth Museum in Brighton. The fossils were originally unearthed by workmen digging for phosphates in the Fens in the 19th century, who sold them on for a little extra cash.
Two million-year-old skull of human cousin found by Australian team in South African cave
A two million-year-old skull from a large-toothed distant human cousin has been unearthed at an Australian-led archaeological dig deep in a South African cave system.
The discovery is the earliest known and best-preserved example of the small-brained hominin called Paranthropus robustus, La Trobe University researchers say.
The almost complete male skull, found in the Drimolen cave system near Johannesburg in 2018, may lead to a new understanding of human microevolution.
Science
Heat is killing more people than ever. Scientists are looking for ways to lower the risk
[…] “You can’t drink yourself out of a heat-related injury,” explains project leader Joseph Domitrovich, an exercise physiologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s National Technology and Development Program. “It’s not the magic bullet that people thought.”
Across the globe, researchers like Domitrovich are working to pin down how heat affects workers and vulnerable populations, such as the elderly. They are studying low-tech measures—sometimes nothing more than a splash of cold water on the skin—to make people safer and more comfortable in hot conditions. And they are exploring the body’s ability to adapt to the heat. “Deaths and illnesses caused by heat are largely preventable,” says June Spector, an occupational and environmental health physician-scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle.
The work has taken on urgency as global temperatures rise, heat waves become more frequent and intense, and casualties mount. Between 1999 and 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged 8081 heat-related deaths in the United States, one-third of them in people age 65 or older. Already, about one-third of the world’s population experiences conditions that create heat stress, says Nathan Bradley Morris, a human thermal physiologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Can an ambitious breeding effort save North America’s ash trees?
On a weekday morning in August, just one pickup truck sat in the sprawling visitors’ parking lot here at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Forestry Sciences Laboratory. A decadeslong decline in research funding had been slowly quieting the place—and then came the pandemic.
But in a narrow strip of grass behind a homely, 1960s-era building, forest geneticist Jennifer Koch was overseeing a hive of activity. A team of seven technicians, researchers, and students—each masked and under their own blue pop-up tent—were systematically dissecting 3-meter-tall ash trees in a strange sort of arboreal disassembly line. Over 5 weeks, the researchers would take apart some 400 saplings, peeling wood back layer by layer in search of the maggotlike larvae of the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), the most devastating insect ever to strike a North American tree. Since the Asian beetle was first discovered in Michigan in 2002, it has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across half the continent and caused tens of billions of dollars of damage.
“We have contests for who can successfully pull out the smallest larvae and the biggest larvae,” Koch says. “People get pretty excited and competitive about it. You have to do something, because it is very tedious—and [the larvae] are really gross.
Martian dust storms parch the planet by driving water into space
Two years ago, Mars went undercover. Martian dust storms are common, but every decade or so, for reasons unknown, a monstrous one goes global, veiling the planet. The storms can be a mortal threat to exploration: The one in 2018 killed off NASA’s Opportunity rover by coating its solar panels in dust. But now, researchers say the storms may also be one of the culprits in the ultimate martian cold case: how the once-wet planet lost its water.
Fossilized rivers and deltas etched across Mars suggest water flowed there billions of years ago. Most of it must have somehow escaped to space—yet researchers thought water vapor could not travel high in the frigid, thin atmosphere without condensing into snow and falling back to the surface. New data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, published today in Science, show how churning dust storms may in effect pump water into space. “These escape processes are an effective way to make Mars dry,” says Anna Fedorova, a planetary scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Nature
COVID mink analysis shows mutations are not dangerous — yet
Health officials in Denmark have released genetic and experimental data on a cluster of SARS-CoV-2 mutations circulating in farmed mink and people, days after they announced the mutations could jeopardize the effectiveness of potential COVID-19 vaccines.
News of the mutations prompted the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to announce on 4 November plans to end mink farming for the foreseeable future — and cull some 17 million animals — sparking a fierce debate about whether such action was legal. But scientists were careful not to raise the alarm until they saw the data.
Now, scientists who have reviewed the data say the mutations themselves aren’t particularly concerning because there is little evidence that they allow the virus to spread more easily among people, make it more deadly or will jeopardize therapeutics and vaccines. “The mink-associated mutations we know of are not associated with rapid spread, nor with any changes in morbidity and mortality,” says Astrid Iversen, a virologist at the University of Oxford, UK.
What Pfizer’s landmark COVID vaccine results mean for the pandemic
It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.
New York City-based drug company Pfizer made the announcement on 9 November. It offers the first compelling evidence that a vaccine can prevent COVID-19 — and bodes well for other COVID-19 vaccines in development. But the information released at this early stage does not answer key questions that will determine whether the Pfizer vaccine, and others like it, can prevent the most severe cases or quell the coronavirus pandemic.
“We need to see the data in the end, but that still doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm. This is fantastic,” says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who is one of the trial’s more than 40,000 participants. “I hope I’m not in the placebo group.”
Mongabay
Biden’s election is good news for the climate. But what comes next?
Few images captured the mood of climate activists this week more vividly than a video posted to Twitter of Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, jubilantly dancing in circles after receiving word that outgoing … Donald Trump had lost his bid for reelection. With the victory of Joe Biden, the U.S. is now poised to rejoin the agreement, and for the first time since 2017 will be not be led by a climate science denier.
Biden’s climate agenda, which has been described as the most ambitious of any presidential candidate in U.S. history, is balm for advocates who have struggled to move the global agenda forward without the participation of one of the world’s leading carbon emitters.
But challenges loom ahead: Biden is likely to be governing with a conservative Republican Senate that will curtail his options in Congress, giving him a narrow rope to walk between the demands of progressives in his own party and the limitations imposed on him by his political opponents.
Still, analysts say his election represents the best chance in years to decarbonize the U.S. economy, and will provide a desperately needed shot in the arm for international efforts to slow climate change.
Scientists in Costa Rica are growing new corals to save reefs
Like a mermaid on an underwater picnic, she floats gently in the current as slivers of sunlight reveal a garden of corals in the Golfo Dulce, in southern Costa Rica. Holding a basket filled with round, spiked corals, she collects one last specimen, then begins her ascent. As she breaks the surface, Socorro Avila, a research assistant who grew up on this gulf, joins Joanie Kleypas and Tatiana Villalobos – two more mermaids – and they swim towards the boat that idles nearby.
The three scientists deliver their bounty, passing round, spiked corals into the waiting boat. Handling each piece requires patience — some trail along a clear fishing line, while others twist into woven strands of a rope. As they untangle each precious item, the corals’ branches jostle, tinkling like porcelain dolls colliding. The team board the boat, doff their scuba gear, and head further into the gulf — one step closer to understanding these mysterious species.
The Atlantic
Sexual Attraction Is the Oldest Story on Earth
It’s pretty hard to catch single-celled organisms in the middle of sex.
“It’s sort of like if you put a male and a female together in the zoo. You can’t necessarily get them to do the thing,” John Logsdon, an early-eukaryotic-sex expert at the University of Iowa, told me. “If you were a Martian looking down on Earth and asking if humans were sexual or not, if you couldn’t look through the windows, you’d never see humans having sex. Well, rarely.”
Lots of single-celled creatures can reproduce both asexually (cloning themselves) and sexually (combining DNA with another organism to create offspring), and they generally prefer cloning.
Really, it’s very strange that anything would have sex at all. Having sex puts organisms in a vulnerable position. Plus, they spend tons of energy attracting mates and going through the complicated process of mixing their DNA with someone else’s.
One of Jupiter’s moons might be glowing in the dark. At first glance, this is perhaps unsurprising. Our own moon glows in the dark, reflecting the light of the sun. Jupiter is far away from here, but our star still illuminates the planet and its many moons, including the moon Europa.
But Europa is different from the others. According to new research, Europa might glow even on its night side, producing an ethereal glimmer without the help of the sun.
The glow arises from the special nature of Europa’s cosmic home. Jupiter’s magnetic field is the largest of any other planet in the solar system, and the radiation within its boundaries is many millions of times more intense than the radiation near Earth. The high-energy particles constantly bombard Europa, a world slightly smaller than our moon, with a wispy atmosphere. And when those particles strike the moon’s ice-covered surface, a quirk of chemistry could make it glow in the dark.
Ars Technica
This farmer’s field was once a powerful stronghold in Iron Age Norway
In June, archaeologists began unearthing a Viking ship from a farmer’s field in eastern Norway. The 1,000- to 1,200-year-old ship was probably the grave of a local king or jarl, and it once lay beneath a monumental burial mound. A 2018 ground-penetrating radar survey of a site called Gjellestad, on the fertile coastal plain of Vikiletta, revealed the buried ship.
The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, or NIKU, announced the ship find in 2018, and it announced earlier in 2020 that excavations would begin over the summer to save the vessel from wood-eating fungus. NIKU archaeologist Lars Gustavsen and his colleagues’ recent study is the first academic publication of the survey results, and it includes the previously announced Gjellestad ship burial as well as the other ancient tombs and buildings. In the recently published paper, the radar images reveal the ghosts of an ancient landscape surrounding the royal tomb: farmhouses, a feasting hall, and centuries of burial mounds.
Altogether, the buried structures suggest that over several centuries, from at least 500 BCE to 1000 CE, an ordinary coastal farming settlement somehow grew into an important seat of power on the cusp of the Viking Age.
A look at the psychological burdens of COVID lockdowns
With the dramatic rise in infections in the United States, there's increasing discussion of whether states need to go back to severe social restrictions or even lockdowns, in which only essential workers are allowed to leave their homes. But many people aren't happy about the idea of re-entering lockdowns because lockdowns exact both an economic and an emotional cost.
While we're likely to get lots of hard data on economic costs eventually, some researchers in New Zealand decided to look at the emotional toll. They performed a detailed survey at the height of lockdown and found that, as expected, the restrictions had an impact on people trapped in their houses for weeks. But the impact was more pronounced on the young and those who had experienced psychological distress previously.