Here are some of this week’s interesting science news:
- Scientists train honeybees to stick out their tongues when they detect coronavirus.
- Some mammals can breath through their intestines in an emergency.
- Few realistic scenarios left to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
- Restoring forests can reduce zoonotic diseases.
- Interstellar space hums.
- Worldwide coronavirus death toll undercounted by a staggering amount.
- New theory explains weird dreams may be training us for life.
- First genetically modified mosquitoes released in U.S. are hatching now.
- There’s a loophole in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
- Cats take “if I fits, I sits' seriously.
Details and links to sources below the fold.
Since 2007, the Overnight News Digest has been a nightly, community series chronicling the new events of the day. This is an open thread. Everyone is encouraged to share articles, stories, and tweets in your comments.
584.845 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 156.2 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
The Washington Post
Scientists uncover longtime mystery about where some sea turtles go after hatching: The Sargasso Sea
When baby sea turtles wriggle out of their sandy nests on Atlantic beaches, they enact an age-old ritual and head for the open sea. Then what?
Scientists have never been sure. They know that after a few decades, sea turtles reach adulthood and return to the Atlantic coast. But the specifics of their journey — dubbed their “lost years” — have been unclear.
Now, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B explains where at least some sea turtles head after hatching: the Sargasso Sea.
Scientists may have found a new coronavirus rapid-testing method: Bees
The fight against the coronavirus pandemic has scientists tapping an unlikely resource: the finely tuned olfactory sense of bees.
Dutch researchers … said they have trained honeybees to stick out their tongues when presented with the virus’s unique scent, acting as a kind of rapid test.
Although it’s a less conventional method than lab tests, the scientists said teaching bees to diagnose the coronavirus could help fill a gap in low-income countries with limited access to more sophisticated technology, like materials for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
Los Angeles Times
Did the coronavirus escape from a lab? The idea deserves a second look, 18 scientists say
Eighteen scientists from some of the world’s most prestigious research institutions are urging their colleagues to dig deeper into the origins of the coronavirus responsible for the global pandemic.
In a letter published Thursday in the journal Science, they argue that there is not yet enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab in China, and they call for a “proper investigation” into the matter.
“We believe this question deserves a fair and thorough science-based investigation, and that any subsequent judgment should be made on the data available,” said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University who helped pen the letter.
Phys.org
Earth's oldest minerals date onset of plate tectonics to 3.6 billion years ago
Scientists led by Michael Ackerson, a research geologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, provide new evidence that modern plate tectonics, a defining feature of Earth and its unique ability to support life, emerged roughly 3.6 billion years ago. […]
The study, published May 14 in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters, uses zircons, the oldest minerals ever found on Earth, to peer back into the planet's ancient past.
Some mammals can breathe through anus in emergencies
Rodents and pigs share with certain aquatic organisms the ability to use their intestines for respiration, finds a study publishing May 14th in the journal Med. The researchers demonstrated that the delivery of oxygen gas or oxygenated liquid through the rectum provided vital rescue to two mammalian models of respiratory failure.
"Artificial respiratory support plays a vital role in the clinical management of respiratory failure due to severe illnesses such as pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome," says senior study author Takanori Takebe of the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. "Although the side effects and safety need to be thoroughly evaluated in humans, our approach may offer a new paradigm to support critically ill patients with respiratory failure."
Few realistic scenarios left to limit global warming to 1.5°C
Of the over 400 climate scenarios assessed in the 1.5°C report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), only around 50 scenarios avoid significantly overshooting 1.5°C. Of those only around 20 make realistic assumptions on mitigation options, for instance the rate and scale of carbon removal from the atmosphere or extent of tree planting, a new study shows. All 20 scenarios need to pull at least one mitigation lever at 'challenging' rather than 'reasonable' levels, according to the analysis. Hence the world faces a high degree of risk of overstepping the 1.5°C limit. The realistic window for meeting the 1.5°C target is very rapidly closing.
If all climate mitigation levers are pulled, it may still be possible to limit global warming to 1.5°C in line with the Paris Agreement. The findings could help inform the heated climate policy debate. "The emission scenarios differ in their reliance on each of the five mitigation levers we looked at. Yet all scenarios that we find to be realistic pull at least several levers at challenging levels," says lead author Lila Warszawski from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). "None of the realistic scenarios relies on a single silver bullet."
Mongabay
How settlers, scientists, and a women-led industry saved Brazil’s rarest primate
It all started with the monkeys. What began as a research effort to understand the black lion tamarin, one of the rarest of the New World monkeys, has blossomed into a network of forest corridors providing income for hundreds of families living alongside the last remnants of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.
“Fifteen or 20 years ago, the region was a horrible thing. We could see dead nature,” Maria Regina dos Santos, leader of a seedling nursery in the region, told Mongabay. “Today everything is very beautiful. It has improved for the community, nurseries and animals.”
Santos’s nursery supports the work of the Institute for Ecological Research (IPÊ), a Brazilian nonprofit that has, over the past 35 years, planted more than 2.7 million trees and reforested the largest Atlantic Forest wildlife corridor in Brazil.
Hantavirus study shows restoring forests can reduce zoonotic disease risk
The COVID-19 pandemic brought zoonotic diseases into the global spotlight in a way nothing has done for a century, even though zoonoses — diseases passed between humans and animals — have always posed a public health threat. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has forced us to confront the connection between human and environmental health and the painful consequences of that relationship breaking down.
Research has already linked deforestation to increased zoonotic disease risk, finding that as habitat is lost, ecological dynamics are no longer as adept at regulating disease. But can restoring forests perhaps protect us from zoonotic diseases? Possibly, says a recent study led by Paula Ribeiro Prist, a researcher at EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit based in New York.
Simulations run by Prist and colleagues found that restoring Brazil’s Atlantic Forest could lower the prevalence of hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, a highly lethal zoonotic disease, by reducing populations of the small mammals that harbor the disease.
Reuters
Faraway NASA probe detects the eerie hum of interstellar space
[…] Instruments aboard NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which nine years ago exited our solar system's outer reaches, have detected a faint monotonous hum caused by the constant vibrations of the small amounts of gas found in the near-emptiness of interstellar space, scientists said.
It essentially represents the background noise present in the vast expanse between star systems. These vibrations, called persistent plasma waves, were identified at radio frequencies in a narrow bandwidth during a three-year period as Voyager 1 traverses interstellar space.
"The persistent plasma waves that we've just discovered are far too weak to actually hear with the human ear. If we could hear it, it would sound like a single steady note, playing constantly but changing very slightly over time," said Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell University doctoral student in astronomy and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Nature
NASA reboots its role in fighting climate change
… Under US President Joe Biden, [NASA] intends to boost its reputation as a major player in studying Earth — especially with an eye towards fighting climate change.
“Biden made clear that climate is a priority,” says Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado. “There’s a clear role for NASA to play in that,” he says, given all the Earth-science research it funds and the Earth-observing satellites it launches. […]
The work is particularly crucial as climate change accelerates, agency officials say. “The demand for actionable information is going to increase pretty dramatically over the next decade or two,” says Karen St. Germain, head of NASA’s Earth-science division in Washington DC.
India’s neighbours race to sequence genomes as COVID surges
In early April, Neelika Malavige shut down her laboratory in Sri Lanka for ten days to celebrate Sinhalese New Year. Malavige, an immunologist at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Colombo, runs the only lab in the nation that sequences SARS-CoV-2 genomes. But case counts had dipped, hotspots had started to receive vaccines, and her team needed the break.
When the researchers returned to work, however, what they found was dizzying. Of 78 samples that they sequenced from people with COVID-19 in late April, 66 contained the highly transmissible B.1.1.7 variant. Since 17 April, the number of new COVID-19 cases in Sri Lanka — which hit 2,672 on 9 May — has been breaking records almost every day. Hospitals are filling up and Malavige is bracing for a looming wave of deaths. “The situation in Sri Lanka is looking very grim,” she says.
Vox
How the world missed more than half of all Covid-19 deaths
The world may have undercounted Covid-19 deaths by a staggering margin, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The actual count may actually be 6.9 million deaths, more than double official tolls.
The United States alone is estimated to have had 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, vastly more than the 579,000 deaths officially reported, and more than any other country. The calculation is based on modeling of excess mortality that has occurred during the pandemic. […]
Researchers who weren’t involved with the analysis say it confirms what many already presumed: that official death counts were far, far off.
Science
Bills to give NSF massive spending boost advance in Senate and House, but hurdles remain
Two key congressional committees this week endorsed the idea of a sizable spending increase for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Separate pieces of legislation—one approved by a Senate panel, the other by a committee of the House of Representatives—would more than double NSF’s budget over 5 years as part of a broader push to outinnovate China and the rest of the world through a massive federal investment in research.
But research advocates aren’t popping any corks yet. The two votes represent an important step in a 20-year push to bring the $8.5-billion-a-year NSF closer to parity with the $43 billion National Institutes of Health. However, legislators must still reconcile competing visions of NSF’s role in maintaining U.S. global leadership in science in order for some version of either bill to become law. And then they would have to convince their colleagues to appropriate at least some portion of the additional money Congress has authorized.
Female elephant seals hunt nonstop, sleeping just 1 hour a night
There’s no 9-to-5 for female northern elephant seals. After the winter breeding season, the animals spend more than 19 hours—and up to 24 hours—per day hunting in the northern Pacific Ocean, killing up to 2000 small fish daily to survive, according to a new study of these elusive animals. The work, made possible by cameras and devices attached to the seals’ heads, could also help scientists monitor other deep-ocean life.
“This study is fascinating,” says Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University who was not part of the research. “The advanced technology provides unprecedented levels of detail on where and when the elephant seals forage in a deep, dark ocean.”
Gizmodo
Our Weirdest Dreams Could Be Training Us for Life, New Theory Says
[…] Dreams can be deeply weird, no doubt about it. So weird, in fact, that we’re tempted to dismiss them as nothing more than quasi-random crap spewed out by our brains while we’re sleeping. Dreams might feel purposeless, but as Tufts University neuroscientist Erik Hoel argues in his new paper, published today in Patterns, there’s a method to this apparent madness. Bizarre and hallucinatory dreams, he says, help us to process and generalize experiences during our waking life, improving our ability to adapt to situations.
“Life is boring sometimes,” said Hoel in a release. “Dreams are there to keep you from becoming too fitted to the model of the world.”
There Are Reasons to Worry About the Great Unmasking, but Vaxxed People Spreading Covid Isn't One
This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped a bombshell, announcing it would lift nearly all recommendations on mask-wearing for Americans who are fully vaccinated against covid-19. The move drew mixed emotions from many, including concerns that it could impede the pandemic’s decline. But one fear people shouldn’t have, based on the evidence to date, is that vaccinated people taking their masks off will drive greater transmission of the virus. […]
Real-world evidence has… made the answer to this question abundantly clear, at least for the mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer that nearly all vaccinated Americans have taken: The vaccines are incredibly effective at preventing both illness and infection. Multiple studies, looking at different populations like health care workers and college employees, have all found very low rates of confirmed infection among the fully vaccinated—as low as less than 1% for some studies.
For the First Time, Archaeologists Identify Sailor From Doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition
A genetic and genealogical analysis has allowed a team of archaeologists to identify the skeletal remains of a sailor who died during the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to map the Northwest Passage in 1845.
Warrant Officer John Gregory, an engineer aboard the HMS Erebus, will go down in archaeological history as the first member of the Franklin Expedition to have his skeletal remains positively identified by DNA analysis. An all-Canadian team from the University of Waterloo, Lakehead University, and Trent University matched the sailor to his great-great-great grandson, who currently lives in South Africa.
The research, which now appears in the science journal Polar Record, is adding some new color to the bedeviled voyage.
Science Daily
Sharks use Earth's magnetic fields to guide them like a map
Sea turtles are known for relying on magnetic signatures to find their way across thousands of miles to the very beaches where they hatched. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 6 have some of the first solid evidence that sharks also rely on magnetic fields for their long-distance forays across the sea.
"It had been unresolved how sharks managed to successfully navigate during migration to targeted locations," said Save Our Seas Foundation project leader Bryan Keller, also of Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory. "This research supports the theory that they use the earth's magnetic field to help them find their way; it's nature's GPS."
Standing dead trees in 'ghost forests' contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, study finds
A new study from North Carolina State University finds that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from standing dead trees in coastal wetland forests -- colloquially called "tree farts" -- need to be accounted for when assessing the environmental impact of so-called "ghost forests."
In the study, researchers compared the quantity and type of GHG emissions from dead tree snags to emissions from the soil. While snags did not release as much as the soils, they did increase GHG emissions of the overall ecosystem by about 25 percent. Researchers say the findings show snags are important for understanding the total environmental impact of the spread of dead trees in coastal wetlands, known as ghost forests, on GHG emissions.
Scientific American
First Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Released in U.S. Are Hatching Now
This week, mosquito eggs placed in the Florida Keys are expected to hatch tens of thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes, a result of the first U.S. release of such insects in the wild. A biotechnology firm called Oxitec delivered the eggs in late April as part of a federally approved experiment to study the use of genetic engineering—rather than insecticides—to control disease-carrying mosquito populations. The move targets an invasive species, called Aedes aegypti, that carries Zika, dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and other potentially deadly diseases, some of which are on the rise in Florida.
The experiment relies on a genetic alteration that will be lethal to a large number of future offspring. In this case, male mosquitoes have been modified to carry a gene that makes their female progeny dependent on the antibiotic tetracycline—and thus fated to die in the wild. As the mating cycle repeats over generations, female numbers are depleted, and the population is suppressed. The modified insects eventually die off, making this approach self-limiting.
Brood X Cicadas Are Emerging at Last
At this very instant, in backyards and forests across the eastern U.S., one of nature’s greatest spectacles is underway. Although it may lack the epic majesty of the wildebeest migration in the Serengeti or the serene beauty of cherry blossom season in Japan, this event is no less awe-inspiring. I’m talking about the emergence of the Brood X cicadas.
Every 17 years the billions of constituents of Brood X tunnel up from their subterranean lairs to spend their final days partying in the sun. This generation got its start back in 2004, when Facebook existed only at Harvard University and Friends aired its last episode. The newly hatched cicada nymphs fell from the trees and burrowed into the dirt. They have been underground ever since, feeding on sap from the rootlets of grasses and trees and slowly maturing. All of that preparation has been leading up to this moment when they surface in droves—up to 1.4 million cicadas per acre—to molt into their adult form, sing their deafening love song and produce the next generation before dying just a few weeks later.
The Atlantic
The Surprise Hiding in the DNA of Pet Betta Fish
In 1975, scientists tried spaying a few hundred female betta fish. We all know what happens to spayed cats and dogs: They become sterile. Betta fish are different. A third of the surviving bettas regenerated an ovary—which, okay, interesting enough. But the remaining two-thirds did something much, much stranger: They grew testes. They turned brighter and darker in color too—like male bettas. They grew elongated fins—like males. They even started making sperm—like males, obviously. When mated with other female betta fish, these females-turned-males produced offspring that looked perfectly healthy. The only notable oddity was that the resulting broods were usually, but not always, exclusively female.
From this, the scientists essentially concluded that we understand nothing about fish sex. How fish become male or female is far weirder and more varied than the XX-female, XY-male chromosome system of humans. […]
Betta fish, it turns out, might be a case study in how a novel sex strategy emerges. Two new studies suggest that pet betta fish evolved a sex-determination gene that does not work the same way in wild bettas of the same or closely related species. “The way that sex is determined changes very, very quickly across the evolutionary tree,” says Hannes Svardal, now a biologist at the University of Antwerp who co-authored one of the new studies. And betta fish, he adds, seem like an “extreme case” of sex determination changing within a species. In our bid to breed more beautiful and fiercer fish, we might have given them a sex gene too.
A Milwaukee Suburb Is Full of Ultrarare Fossils
Some 440 million years ago, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb of Waukesha was unrecognizable. Where malls and breweries now stand was a shallow, tropical sea resembling a Bahamian cay. A hundred million years removed from the Cambrian explosion, when the diversity of life skyrocketed, this area teemed with alien creatures like spiny worms and armored trilobites. But look closer, and this primeval ocean takes on a familiar feel: Here, some of the first scorpions scuttled alongside the earliest leeches. There were even conodonts—eel-like creatures sporting a shadow of a spine, making them some of our earliest relatives.
The amateur paleontologists Jerry Gunderson and Ron Meyer discovered these fossils at a Waukesha quarry in 1984. After splitting open rocks from a thin layer known as the Brandon Bridge Formation, they uncovered ultrarare fossilized soft tissue. Soft tissue, such as skin and organs, tends to be the first thing to decay after death. Knowing they had found something special, Gunderson and Meyer frantically shaved off slabs of the fossil-bearing rock, preventing them from being pulverized in the pursuit of limestone. They donated their find to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, where thousands of Waukesha specimens now fill drawer after drawer.
ABC (Australia) News
China's Mars landing makes it the third country to land a rover on the Red Planet
[…] On Saturday morning, dozens of Chinese engineers and scientists were nervously waiting from ground control as a Chinese spacecraft lost contact for around 17 minutes after landing on Mars.
The spacecraft, known as Tianwen1, had already gone through what state television described as "nine minutes of terror", a nerve-wracking period as the lander approached the Martian surface at a pace too fast for the signals to Earth to keep up with.
The compact car-sized lander then spent 17 minutes unfolding its antenna and solar panels before it could send signals from the Red Planet confirming its success.
Live Science
Rare plutonium from space found in deep-sea crust
A rare version of the radioactive element plutonium embedded in Earth's crust below the deep sea is providing new clues as to how heavy metals form in the stars.
The new research finds that the isotope, called plutonium-244, may arrive on Earth in tandem with iron-60, a lighter metal known to form in supernovas, explosions that occur during the death throes of many types of stars. This finding suggests that supernovas may create both heavy metals — although it's possible that other events, such as the mergers of neutron stars, are responsible for at least some of the plutonium-244.
Scientist find a loophole in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
Quantum mechanics has brought its fair share of disquieting revelations, from the idea that objective reality is an illusion to the realization that objects can be in two states at once (both dead and alive, for instance). Such freaky quantum behavior doesn’t end when small objects become big — it’s just that our senses and our instruments aren’t able to detect it. Now, by banging on two sets of tiny drums, two teams of physicists have brought the scale at which we can observe quantum effects into the macroscopic realm.
The findings demonstrate a bizarre quantum effect called "entanglement" on a much larger scale than previously seen, as well as describing a way to use this effect — when particles remain connected to one another even if separated by great distances — to evade pesky quantum uncertainty. This knowledge could be used to probe quantum gravity and design quantum computers with calculative powers far beyond classical devices, according to researchers.
Wired
Geology Students Did Video Game Fieldwork During Covid. It Rocked
If you decide to pursue a degree in geology, be prepared to spend some time in the wilderness, where you will be asked to find and analyze rocks that will help teach you how the planet works. You will sketch curious outcrops, smash stone to pieces, peer at crystals through a hand lens, and, every now and then, even lick rocks, if it comes to that, all under the watchful, judging eye of your instructors.
When the pandemic kicked into gear back in March 2020, these both scintillating and stressful field schools were no more. Geology instructors across the world were at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Many understandably concluded that there was no way to replicate this hands-on learning experience and just made do, but Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London (ICL), had an epiphany.
By happenstance, he had taken up the hobby of video game design a decade earlier. “It’s pure problem solving,” he says. “You get that achievement buzz when you make something work or overcome some challenge.”
NPR News
Cats Take 'If I Fits I Sits' Seriously, Even If The Space Is Just An Illusion
If you've spent any time around cats, you've probably noticed that they love to curl up in small, cozy boxes. What you may not know is that they'll also go sit inside the two-dimensional outline of a square box on the floor. What's more, a new study has found that pet cats will also spontaneously sit inside an optical illusion that merely looks like a square.
Believed to be the first of its kind, the study enlisted volunteers to observe cats in their homes, a strategy to avoid what has historically been the main impediment to studying feline cognition in the lab — cats' notoriously uncooperative nature.
For Coastal Cities, Humble Dirt Has Become A Hot Commodity
In a hotter climate, dirt is a hot commodity.
With sea levels expected to rise three to six feet by the end of the century, coastal communities are moving fast to construct major shoreline projects to protect themselves. As the size of these projects expands, the primary building materials--dirt and mud --are getting scarce.
Dirt (what you dig up on land) and mud or sediment (the wetter variety already in rivers and bays) are the raw materials of climate change adaptation. They're used to build levees, the massive earthen barriers that hold back waves, and to raise elevation so buildings can sit higher than the floodplain.
The Guardian
A starfish is born: hope for key species hit by gruesome disease
Scientists in a San Juan Island laboratory in Washington state have successfully raised sunflower sea stars, or starfish, in captivity for the first time, in an effort to help save these charismatic ocean creatures from extinction.
Sunflower sea stars, whose colours vary widely, can grow as big as a bicycle wheel and have about 20 legs. They were once abundant in coastal waters from Alaska to Mexico, but since 2013, nearly 6 billion of these now critically endangered animals have died from a gruesome wasting disease linked to warming seas. Populations have plummeted by more than 90%.
Third of global food production at risk from climate crisis
A third of global food production will be at risk by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current rate, new research suggests.
Many of the world’s most important food-growing areas will see temperatures increase and rainfall patterns alter drastically if temperatures rise by about 3.7C, the forecast increase if emissions stay high.
Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have calculated that about 95% of current crop production takes place in areas they define as “safe climatic space”, or conditions where temperature, rainfall and aridity fall within certain bounds.
Ars Techncia
Mount Vesuvius victims died just moments away from rescue
When Mount Vesuvius destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii in 79 CE, the eruption also killed hundreds of people huddled on the shores of nearby Herculaneum. A recent study of the remains of one victim, who died on the beach not far from a small naval vessel, suggests that he might have been a senior naval officer. If so, archaeological director Francesco Sirano and his colleagues suggest, the man may have been a rescue mission leader who arrived just in time to die with the people he was trying to save.
Researchers force two mice to hang out and induce FOMO in a third
Since its advent in 2005, a technique called optogenetics has made it vastly easier to link neural activity with behavior and to understand how neurons and brain regions are connected to each other. Neuroscientists just pick the (animal) neurons they’re interested in, genetically engineer them to express a light-responsive protein, and then stimulate them with the right type of light. This technique can be used to inhibit or excite a select subset of neurons in living, breathing, moving animals, illuminating which neural networks dictate the animals' behaviors and decisions.
Taking advantage of work done in miniaturizing the optogenetic hardware, researchers have now used optogenetics to alter the activity in parts of the brain that influence social interactions in mice. And they’ve exerted a disturbing level of control over the way the mice interact.