Here are some of this weekâs interesting science news:
- President Biden asks Congress to increase science spending.
- The endangered Eugeneâs anole lizards can breathe underwater.
- Climate change-resistant corals might be a lifeline to endangered reefs.
- Is communication possible between trees and people?
- Artificial superintelligence might actually destroy all humanity.
- Underground life may exist due to radioactive decay.
- Increasing number of plant pandemics could endanger global food supply.
- Seabirds are struggling, which is a red flag for oceanic health.
- Satellites may have been underestimating the planet's warming for decades.
- The history of watermelons.
Details and links to sources below the fold.
This is an open thread. Everyone is encouraged to share articles, stories, and tweets in your comments.
593,064Â PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 167.2 MILLIONÂ PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
Science
Biden seeks big increases for science budgets
President Joe Biden today asked Congress to give big budget increases to most civilian science agencies. But military research would take a cut under his administrationâs first spending request to Congress, which lawmakers are certain to revise.
The $6 trillion request calls for sweeping investments in infrastructure and social welfare programs in the 2022 fiscal year that begins 1 October. It also includes a 9% increase, or $13.5 billion, in total federal spending on R&D, bringing the total to $171 billion. Spending on basic research would rise by 10%, or $4.4 billion, to $47.4 billion, whereas applied research would get a  14% bump ($6.3 billion) to $51.1 billion.
The budget âproposes historic increases in funding for foundational R&D across a range of scientific agencies,â Biden said in a statement, including what he asserts is âthe biggest increase in non-defense research and development spending on record.
Batteries used in hearing aids could be key to the future of renewable energy
If necessity is the mother of invention, potential profit has to be the father. Both incentives are driving an effort to transform zinc batteries from small, throwaway cells often used in hearing aids into rechargeable behemoths that could be attached to the power grid, storing solar or wind power for nighttime or when the wind is calm. With startups proliferating and lab studies coming thick and fast, âZinc batteries are a very hot field,â says Chunsheng Wang, a battery expert at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Mongabay
Hold the scuba: These lizards can breathe underwater
Luke Mahler didnât exactly set out to study lizards that could breathe underwater. But when he and fellow scientist Rich Glor were out on a research expedition in Haiti in 2009, they noticed some peculiar behavior in some critically endangered Eugeneâs anoles (Anolis eugenegrahami) released into a shallow stream. It appeared, much to their disbelief, that they were breathing underwater.
âWe were very surprised to find rebreathing in anoles,â Mahler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, told Mongabay in an email. âAn underwater respiratory behavior like this had never previously been recorded in vertebrates.â
Chirp, chuckle and growl: Neotropical river otters call out to communicate
What growls, chirps, chuckles and swims in the swift flowing rivers of Central and South America? A new study reveals that neotropical river otters (Lontra longicaudis) have a rich repertoire of sounds that they use to communicate while fighting, playing, mating and more.
Researchers observed and recorded captive neotropical river otters at Projeto Lontra in Santa Catarina Island, Brazil, and characterized six distinct call types. Their findings, the first formal description of the neotropical river ottersâ vocal repertoire, were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Science Daily
Dark matter map reveals hidden bridges between galaxies
A new map of dark matter in the local universe reveals several previously undiscovered filamentary structures connecting galaxies. The map, developed using machine learning by an international team including a Penn State astrophysicist, could enable studies about the nature of dark matter as well as about the history and future of our local universe.
Dark matter is an elusive substance that makes up 80% of the universe. It also provides the skeleton for what cosmologists call the cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the universe that, due to its gravitational influence, dictates the motion of galaxies and other cosmic material. However, the distribution of local dark matter is currently unknown because it cannot be measured directly. Researchers must instead infer its distribution based on its gravitational influence on other objects in the universe, like galaxies.
Climate change-resistant corals could provide lifeline to battered reefs
[âŠ] Bleaching events are dismaying, but corals can sometimes recover, while others resist bleaching altogether. In a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Katie Barott of the University of Pennsylvania found that these battle-tested, resilient corals could thrive, even when transplanted to a different environment and subjected to additional heat stress. The findings offer hope that hardy corals could serve as a founding population to restore reefs in the future.
"The big thing that we were really interested in here was trying to experimentally test whether you an take a coral that seems to be resistant to climate chage and use that as the seed stock to propagate and put out on a different reef that might be degraded," Barott says. "The cool thing was we didn't see any differences in their bleaching response after this transplant."
Nature
What the science says about lifting mask mandates
[âŠ] The evidence is clear that masks cut down on COVID-19 deaths, but nearly a year and a half into the pandemic and with vaccination coverage climbing in many places, public-health scientists and officials are still struggling to get people â particularly unvaccinated people â to wear masks at appropriate times. Average mask use across the United States has been declining since mid-February. Meanwhile, infection rates in some places have increased. A patchwork of policies and mixed messages from both politicians and public-health officials has resulted in confusion, consternation and a mess of data to interpret. âWeâre all over the map,â says Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. âThatâs been the problem this entire pandemic. Weâve been making it up as we go along.â [âŠ]
Mask use will continue for this pandemic, and itâs likely to become a common response to future outbreaks. So researchers are trying to get a handle on what the science says about how to encourage people to wear them. As the COVID-19 pandemic enters a new phase, scientists around the world are accessing the accumulated data and asking what makes some policies more effective than others, and probing when and how they need to change.
Divisive COVID âlab leakâ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers
Calls to investigate Chinese laboratories have reached a fever pitch in the United States, as Republican leaders allege that the coronavirus causing the pandemic was leaked from one, and as some scientists argue that this âlab leakâ hypothesis requires a thorough, independent inquiry. But for many researchers, the tone of the growing demands is unsettling. They say the volatility of the debate could thwart efforts to study the virusâs origins.
Global-health researchers also warn that the growing demands are exacerbating tensions between the United States and China ahead of crucial meetings at which world leaders will make high-level decisions about how to curb the pandemic and prepare for future health emergencies.Â
The Guardian
Branching out: is communication possible between trees and people?
Why canât we communicate with trees the same way we communicate with, say, elephants? Both live in social groups and look after not only their young but also their elders. That famous elephant memory is also found in trees, and both communicate in languages that we didnât even recognise at first. Trees communicate through their interconnected root systems, and elephants communicate using low-frequency rumbling below the range at which we can hear. We get a feeling of wellbeing when we run our fingers over the rough skin of both creatures, and what we would love above all is to get a reaction from them.
Is such communication possible between people and trees? First we have to take a closer look at what we mean by âcommunicateâ. It is not enough that we consciously or subconsciously eavesdrop, so to speak, on the scents trees use to communicate among themselves. We have a physical reaction when we breathe them in, but for communication to happen, the trees also need to react to our signals.
Investing 0.1% of global GDP could avoid breakdown of ecosystems, says UN report
The world needs to quadruple its annual investment in nature if the climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises are to be tackled by the middle of the century, according to a new UN report.
Investing just 0.1% of global GDP every year in restorative agriculture, forests, pollution management and protected areas to close a $4.1tn (ÂŁ2.9tn) financial gap by 2050 could avoid the breakdown of natural ecosystem âservicesâ such as clean water, food and flood protection, the report said. [âŠ]
More than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity but about a fifth of countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to the destruction of the natural world, according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re last year. Australia, Israel and South Africa were among the most threatened.
Gizmodo
Physicists Caught Two Atoms 'Talking' to Each Other
A team of physicists in the Netherlands and Germany recently placed a bunch of titanium atoms under a scanning tunneling microscope. Those atoms were in constant, quiet interaction with each other through the directions of their spins. In a clever feat, the researchers were able to home in on a single pair of atoms, zapping one with an electric current in order to flip its spin. They then measured the reaction of its partner.
When two atoms have spins that are interdependent, they are considered quantumly entangled. That entanglement means that the behavior of one atom has a direct impact on the other, and theory says this should remain true even when they are separated by great distances. In this case, the titanium atoms were a little over a nanometer (a millionth of a millimeter) apart, close enough for the two particles to interact with one another but far enough away that the interaction could be detected by the teamâs instruments.
âThe main finding is that we have been able to observe how atomic spins behave over time as a result of their mutual interaction,â said co-author Sander Otte, a quantum physicist at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
How an Artificial Superintelligence Might Actually Destroy Humanity
Iâm confident that machine intelligence will be our final undoing. Its potential to wipe out humanity is something Iâve been thinking and writing about for the better part of 20 years. I take a lot of flak for this, but the prospect of human civilization getting extinguished by its own tools is not to be ignored.
There is one surprisingly common objection to the idea that an artificial superintelligence might destroy our species, an objection I find ridiculous. Itâs not that superintelligence itself is impossible. Itâs not that we wonât be able to prevent or stop a rogue machine from ruining us. This naive objection proposes, rather, that a very smart computer simply wonât have the means or motivation to end humanity.
Phys.org
A fiery past sheds new light on the future of global climate change
Centuries-old smoke particles preserved in the ice reveal a fiery past in the Southern Hemisphere and shed new light on the future impacts of global climate change, according to new research published in Science Advances.
"Up till now, the magnitude of past fire activity, and thus the amount of smoke in the preindustrial atmosphere, has not been well characterized," said Pengfei Liu, a former graduate student and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and first author of the paper. "These results have importance for understanding the evolution of climate change from the 1750s until today, and for predicting future climate."
One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to predicting the future impacts of climate change is how fast surface temperatures will rise in response to increases in greenhouse gases. Predicting these temperatures is complicated since it involves the calculation of competing warming and cooling effects in the atmosphere.
Curiosity rover captures shining clouds on Mars
Cloudy days are rare in the thin, dry atmosphere of Mars. Clouds are typically found at the planet's equator in the coldest time of year, when Mars is the farthest from the Sun in its oval-shaped orbit. But one full Martian year agoâtwo Earth yearsâscientists noticed clouds forming over NASA's Curiosity rover earlier than expected.
This year, they were ready to start documenting these "early" clouds from the moment they first appeared in late January. What resulted are images of wispy puffs filled with ice crystals that scattered light from the setting Sun, some of them shimmering with color. More than just spectacular displays, such images help scientists understand how clouds form on Mars and why these recent ones are different.
In fact, Curiosity's team has already made one new discovery: The early-arrival clouds are actually at higher altitudes than is typical.
Medical Xpess
Pfizer jab less effective, still protects against Indian strain: study
The Pfizer vaccine is slightly less effective but appears to still protect against the more transmissible Indian strain of the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study by France's Pasteur Institute.
"Despite slightly diminished efficacy, the Pfizer vaccine probably protects" against the Indian variant, according to laboratory test results, said Olivier Schwartz, the institute's director and co-author of the study that was published on the BioRxiv website ahead of peer review.
The Atlantic
Earthâs Underground Worlds May Run on Radioactive Decay
Scientists poke and prod at the fringes of habitability in pursuit of lifeâs limits. To that end, they have tunneled kilometers below Earthâs surface, drilling outward from the bottom of mine shafts and sinking boreholes deep into ocean sediments. To their surprise, âlife was everywhere that we looked,â says Tori Hoehler, a chemist and astrobiologist at NASAâs Ames Research Center. And it was present in staggering quantities: By various estimates, the inhabited subsurface realm has twice the volume of the oceans and holds on the order of 10^30 cells, making it one of the biggest habitats on the planet, as well as one of the oldest and most diverse.
Researchers are still trying to understand how most of the life down there survives. Sunlight for photosynthesis cannot reach such depths, and the meager amount of organic carbon food that does is often quickly exhausted. Unlike communities of organisms that dwell near hydrothermal vents on the seafloor or within continental regions warmed by volcanic activity, ecosystems here generally canât rely on the high-temperature processes that support some subsurface life independent of photosynthesis; these microbes must hang on in deep cold and darkness.
Two papers published in February by different research groups seem to have solved some of this mystery for cells beneath the continents and in deep marine sediments.Â
A Clue to Why the 1918 Pandemic Came Back Stronger Than Before
The three teenagersâtwo boys and a girlâcould not have known what clues their lungs would one day yield. All they could have known, or felt, before they died in Germany in 1918 was their flu-ravaged lungs failing them, each breath getting harder and harder. Tens of millions of people like them died in the flu pandemic of 1918; they happened to be three whose lungs were preserved by a farsighted pathologist.
A century later, scientists have now managed to sequence flu viruses from pea-size samples of the three preserved lungs. Together, these sequences suggest an answer to one of the pandemicâs most enduring mysteries: Why was the second wave, in late 1918, so much deadlier than the first wave, in the spring? These rediscovered lung samples hint at the possibility that the virus itself changed to better infect humans.
The Washington Post
Humans arenât the only organisms susceptible to pandemics. Plants can fall victim to new pathogens, too â and that could threaten the global food supply.
Thatâs the message of a group of plant pathologists who say we need better ways to detect, track and stop outbreaks of plant disease. In a commentary in the journal PNAS, the scientists sound the alarm on plant pandemics and make a variety of suggestions on how to monitor spreading plant pathogens.
Emerging plant diseases are growing in frequency and are expected to become even more severe because of increases in global commerce and climate change. In turn, that is predicted to affect crop yields, taking a toll on farmers, reducing the availability of staple foods, and harming both small farmers and large agricultural producers.
AP News
Navigation error sends NASAâs Mars helicopter on wild ride
A navigation timing error sent NASAâs little Mars helicopter on a wild, lurching ride, its first major problem since it took to the Martian skies last month.
The experimental helicopter, named Ingenuity, managed to land safely, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported Thursday.
The trouble cropped up about a minute into the helicopterâs sixth test flight last Saturday at an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters). One of the numerous pictures taken by an on-board camera did not register in the navigation system, throwing the entire timing sequence off and confusing the craft about its location.
Senate R&D bill to counter China shelved by Republican opposition
A sweeping Senate bill aimed at making the United States more competitive with China and shoring up domestic computer chip manufacturing with $50 billion in emergency funds was abruptly shelved Friday after a handful of Republican senators orchestrated a last-minute attempt to halt it.
Votes on the American Innovation and Competition Act were postponed until June 8, when senators are scheduled to return from a weeklong Memorial Day recess.
The emerging final product has enjoyed broad, bipartisan support and would be one of the more comprehensive investments in U.S. research and development in recent years. But the bill became weighted down by the sheer scope of the effort. It swelled to more than 2,400 pages drawing, sharp opposition from a core group of Republican senators who kept the Senate in a nearly-all-night session as they insisted on more time to digest the bill and make changes.
The Gothamist
Humpbacks Caught Singing In NY Waters Raise New Mysteries About Their Lifestyles
Humpback whales caught singing in New Yorkâs waterways during winter seasons raise intriguing questions about the mammalsâ captivating behaviors and how the Northern Hemisphere is adapting to climate change.
The whales in this region spend most of their year in the North Atlantic but then head south for the winter. These aquatic snowbirds roost in the Caribbean, where they sing and breed in the tropical waters.
New York waters were previously considered a thoroughfare for this annual migration--but lately humpback sightings are occurring in the mid-Atlantic during the winter, too. The stateâs Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had previously recorded humpback singing during the winter of 2017-2018 in the New York Bight, an area of the Atlantic Ocean from New York Harbor east to Fire Island and south to the Manasquan Inlet. The state monitors whale activity there, in a roughly 16,740-square-mile zone south from Long Island to the Outer Continental Shelf.
Scientific American
Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests
[âŠ] Researchers have now taken on the question of how long we can live if, by some combination of serendipity and genetics, we do not die from cancer, heart disease or getting hit by a bus. They report that when omitting things that usually kill us, our bodyâs capacity to restore equilibrium to its myriad structural and metabolic systems after disruptions still fades with time. And even if we make it through life with few stressors, this incremental decline sets the maximum life span for humans at somewhere between 120 and 150 years. In the end, if the obvious hazards do not take our lives, this fundamental loss of resilience will do so, the researchers conclude in findings published on May 25 in Nature Communications.
âThey are asking the question of âWhatâs the longest life that could be lived by a human complex system if everything else went really well, and itâs in a stressor-free environment?ââ says Heather Whitson, director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, who was not involved in the paper. The teamâs results point to an underlying âpace of agingâ that sets the limits on lifespan, she says.
Struggling Seabirds Are Red Flag for Ocean Health
Seabirds are âsentinelsâ of ocean health. If marine ecosystems are suffering, the birds will be among the first to show it.
Now a major study finds that seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere are already struggling. And without extra precautions, those in the Southern Hemisphere might be next.
The findings point to broader patterns of environmental change across the worldâs oceans. Climate change, combined with pollution, overfishing and other human activities, is steadily altering marine food webs. Food sources are shifting. Some fish populations are dwindling or migrating to new areas.
Live Science
Satellites may have been underestimating the planet's warming for decades
The global warming that has already taken place may be even worse than we thought. That's the takeaway from a new study that finds satellite measurements have likely been underestimating the warming of the lower levels of the atmosphere over the last 40 years.
Basic physics equations govern the relationship between temperature and moisture in the air, but many measurements of temperature and moisture used in climate models diverge from this relationship, the new study finds.
That means either satellite measurements of the troposphere have underestimated its temperature or overestimated its moisture, study leader Ben Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, said in a statement.
NPR News
Biden Administration Strikes A Deal To Bring Offshore Wind To California
The Biden administration plans to open the California coast to offshore wind development, ending a long-running stalemate with the Department of Defense that has been the biggest barrier to building wind power along the Pacific Coast.
The move adds momentum to the administration's goal of reaching 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035, coming just weeks after the country's first large-scale offshore wind farm was approved off the coast of New England. Today, the country has just a handful of offshore wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean, with around a dozen wind farms being developed in federal waters off the East Coast.
Scientists Say These Monkeys Use An 'Accent' To Communicate With Their Foe
In the Brazilian Amazon, a species of monkey called the pied tamarin is fighting for survival, threatened by habitat loss and urban development.
But the critically endangered primate faces another foe: the red-handed tamarin, a more resilient monkey that lives in the same region.
They compete for the same resources, and the red-handed tamarin's habitat range is expanding into that of the pied tamarins'. Their clashes sometimes end in violent altercations.
But in a recent study, scientists have discovered that the red-handed tamarin is altering its vocal calls to better communicate with the pied tamarin.
Wired
A New Math Shortcut Helps Describe Black Hole Collisions
Last year, just for the heck of it, Scott Field and Gaurav Khanna tried something that wasnât supposed to work. The fact that it actually worked quite well is already starting to make some ripples.
Field and Khanna are researchers who try to figure out what black hole collisions should look like. These violent events donât produce flashes of light but rather the faint vibrations of gravitational waves, the quivers of space-time itself. But observing them is not as simple as sitting back and waiting for space to ring like a bell. To pick out such signals, researchers must constantly compare the data from gravitational wave detectors to the output of various mathematical modelsâcalculations that reveal the potential signatures of a black hole collision. Without reliable models, astronomers wouldnât have a clue what to look for.
The trouble is, the most trustworthy models come from Einsteinâs general theory of relativity, which is described by 10 interlinked equations that are notoriously difficult to solve.
National Geographic
Honeybees are accumulating airborne microplastics on their bodies
As honeybees make their way through the world, they are ideally suited to pick up bits and pieces of it along the way. Bees are covered with hairs that have evolved to hold tiny particles that the bee collects intentionally or simply encounters in its daily travels. These hairs become electrostatically charged in flight, which helps attract the particles. Pollen is the most obvious  substance that gets caught up in these hairs, but so do plant debris, wax, and even bits of other bees.
Now, another material has been added to that list: plastics. Specifically, 13 different synthetic polymers, according to a study of honeybees and microplastics in Denmark. The study was published earlier this year in Science of the Total Environment.
SciTech Daily
A Seedy Slice of History: Hereâs Where Watermelons Actually Came From
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rewrites the origins of domesticated watermelons.
Using DNA from greenhouse-grown plants representing all species and hundreds of varieties of watermelon, scientists discovered that watermelons most likely came from wild crop progenitors in northeast Africa.
The study corrects a 90-year-old mistake that lumped watermelons into the same category as the South African citron melon. Instead, researchers, including a first author now at Washington University in St. Louis, found that a Sudanese form with non-bitter whitish pulp, known as the Kordofan melon (C. lanatus), is the closest relative of domesticated watermelons.
The genetic research is consistent with newly interpreted Egyptian tomb paintings that suggest the watermelon may have been consumed in the Nile Valley as a dessert more than 4,000 years ago.
Nearly 40 years ago, scientists first predicted the existence of helium rain inside planets composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, such as Jupiter and Saturn. However, achieving the experimental conditions necessary to validate this hypothesis hasnât been possible â until now.
In a paper published on May 26, 2021, by Nature, scientists reveal experimental evidence to support this long-standing prediction, showing that helium rain is possible over a range of pressure and temperature conditions that mirror those expected to occur inside these planets.
âWe discovered that helium rain is real, and can occur both in Jupiter and Saturn,â said Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and co-author on the publication. â
Ars Technica
Wolves create a âlandscape of fear,â slowing deer-car collisions
Deer don't seem to understand that large, fast-moving vehicles can lead to their untimely demise. According to the Insurance Information Institute, there were 1.9 million animal (not just deer) collision claims in the US between July 2019 and the end of June 2020.
The ungulates seem to be capable of recognizing other threats, though. Deer understand that they should steer clear of wolves. And new research suggests that regions with wolves tend to have a markedly lower rate of deer-automobile collisions, as the predators scare their prey away from roadways. According to the study's researchers, this indirect benefit of managing wolves in a region can save humans a lot of money.