A team of French researchers has found that the little-understood coelacanth can live for a century. Not only that, but the fish’s whole lifespan appears to be stretched, as it spends years in the womb and doesn’t fully mature until at least age 45.
Some previous estimates had the coelacanth pegged as a fast-growing, fast-spawning fish, with a lifespan of about 20 years. But some observations of the fish in the wild had raised suspicions that they actually lived much longer than that. The new research, published today in Current Biology, estimates their lifespan at 100 years, based on an inspection of the animal’s scales under polarized light.
Scientists have calculated that the #coelacanth, a giant fish from the time of dinosaurs, can live for 100 years and have a 5-year pregnancy. That gestation is “very strange” for fish or any animal, said Scripps' H.J. Walker, who wasn’t part of the study. https://t.co/AoWVrKaM6j
— Scripps Institution of Oceanography (@Scripps_Ocean) June 18, 2021
A team of physicists say they’ve managed to nearly freeze the motion of atoms across four suspended mirrors. It’s a mind-twisting feat that strains the very definitions of seemingly simple words like “object” and “temperature.” So buckle up.
The setting for this experiment was LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, where physicists look for ripples in space-time created by the collisions of massive objects like black holes. The observatory relies on four carefully suspended mirrors and laser beams to detect passing gravitational waves, which shift the mirrors ever so slightly, causing the laser beams to briefly wobble.The researchers behind the current experiment took advantage of a break period at LIGO last September to attempt something that had never been done before: cool a human-scale object so much that quantum observations could be made on it. Their results are published today in the journal Science.
[…] The Hubble Space Telescope, which in 2020 marked its 30th year in orbit, halted operations on Sunday (June 13) just after 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) after problems arose with one of the telescope's computers from the 1980s. The Hubble operations team suspects that the trouble could be due to a degrading memory module, according to a NASA statement. The team is hard at work trying to correct the issue, switching to one of the telescope's several backup modules.
"Assuming that this problem is corrected via one of the many options available to the operations team, Hubble is expected to continue yielding amazing discoveries into the late 2020s or beyond," the operations team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland told Space.com in an email. However, "there is no definitive timeline yet as to when this will be completed, tested and brought back to operational status," they added.
NASA is commemorating Juneteenth on Saturday (June 19) with a historic view from space.
Saturday, June 19 marks Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence day and also known as Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day and Black Independence Day, which celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S. […]
To honor the holiday, which was officially made a federal holiday yesterday (June 17) by President Joe Biden, NASA shared an image from space of Galveston, Texas shining bright at night.
Today we commemorate Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned of their emancipation. This view from the @Space_Station shows an illuminated Galveston in the lower righthand corner, and its surrounding areas: https://t.co/GvIQDFXbuypic.twitter.com/c5bBGuvt8n
The amount of heat trapped by Earth’s land, ocean, and atmosphere doubled over the course of just 14 years, a new study shows.
To figure out how much heat the earth was trapping, researchers looked at NASA satellite measurements that tracked how much of the Sun’s energy was entering Earth’s atmosphere and how much was being bounced back into space. They compared this with data from NOAA buoys that tracked ocean temperatures — which gives them an idea of how much heat is getting absorbed into the ocean.
The difference between the amount of heat absorbed by Earth, and the amount reflected back into space is called an energy imbalance. In this case, they found that from 2005 to 2019, the amount of heat absorbed by Earth was going up. Their results were published in Geophysical Research Letters this week.
Margit Schwikowski and her team were attempting to drill into the Corbassiére glacier in the Swiss Alps when the weather started to turn. They were camped among the soaring peaks of the Grand Combin massif. The only way off this vast sheet of ice in a storm is to descend a steep mountain wall or traverse the jagged glacier surface itself, which claims several lives a year. Instead, they retreated by helicopter before it was too late.
For Schwikowski, an environmental chemist at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, the risks of missions like this October 2020 expedition to Corbassiére are worth it. The team she was leading is part of an international enterprise that aims to preserve the “memories” frozen into mountain glaciers across the world, by drilling out long samples all the way from the young surface snow down to the old, compacted ice at the base of a glacier.
An analysis of 20 years of satellite data shows significant temperature differences on agricultural land in the southern Amazon, with extensively deforested commercial estates up to 3 °C (37.4 °F) warmer than surrounding forests, and smaller rural farms 1.85 °C (35,3 °F) warmer than the forests.
Loss of vegetation reduces transpiration of water from plants into the atmosphere, a process that provides 50% of the rainfall in the Amazon. Large-scale commodity farms saw major reductions in this “convective” rainfall, which were not observed in the atmosphere over rural farms.
Experts have long warned that disruptions in rainfall patterns caused by deforestation in the Amazon could tip the entire biome into an irreversible transition into degraded savanna, with major knock-on effects for global climate and weather.
It started in October 2017. A swarm of microscopic algae called Karenia brevis amassed in the waters off Florida’s southwest coast, turning the ocean a rust-red hue. The algae, which are toxic to most marine life as well as humans, transformed Florida’s sea into a watery graveyard as the bodies of fish, manatees, dolphins and turtles washed ashore. The K. brevis didn’t recede until the winter of 2018 and 2019, prompting experts to deem the event, known as a “red tide,” as Florida’s worst in more than a decade.
This red tide was one of thousands of harmful algal blooms (HABs) that occurred in the world’s oceans in the past 35 years. HABs tend to be an issue of concern because of the way they kill off marine life, contaminate seafood, and wreak havoc on local economies. While some HABs are known to occur naturally, others are thought to be triggered by an overabundance of nutrients spilling into the ocean from farms and residential land. Some experts also say that climate change is, and will continue, to make algal blooms even worse.
But according to the authors of a new study published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, there are no global trends that would suggest that climate change is having a uniform impact on HABs throughout the world.
Peter Scholze wants to rebuild much of modern mathematics, starting from one of its cornerstones. Now, he has received validation for a proof at the heart of his quest from an unlikely source: a computer.
Although most mathematicians doubt that machines will replace the creative aspects of their profession anytime soon, some acknowledge that technology will play an increasingly important role in their research — and this particular feat could be a turning point towards its acceptance.
Scholze, a number theorist, set forth the ambitious plan — which he co-created with his collaborator Dustin Clausen from the University of Copenhagen — in a series of lectures in 2019 at the University of Bonn, Germany, where he is based. The two researchers dubbed it ‘condensed mathematics’, and they say it promises to bring new insights and connections between fields ranging from geometry to number theory.
Ingenuity, NASA’s pint-sized Mars helicopter, has kicked up some surprising science on its flights over the red planet. When whizzing through the Martian air, its blades sometimes stir up a dust cloud that envelops and travels along with the tiny chopper.
In several videos of Ingenuity’s flights, planetary scientists have seen dust whirling beneath the helicopter’s rotors — even when Ingenuity is flying as high as 5 metres above the Martian surface. That suggests that dust can get lifted and transported in the thin Martian air more easily than researchers had suspected.
“It’s really cool,” says Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The combination of sea level rise, tides, storm surge and waves has increased the overtopping of natural and artificial coastal protection by nearly 50% in the last two decades. This revelation comes from an international study coordinated by IRD, involving international partners . The study was published in Nature Communications on June 18th 2021.
By combining satellite data and digital models, the researchers have shown that coastal overtopping, and consequently the risk of flooding, is set to further accelerate over the 21st century, by up to 50-fold under a high emission global warming scenario, especially in the tropics. This increase is principally caused by a combination of sea level rise and ocean waves.
New research by University of Liverpool scientists and international collaborators has revealed how the world's smallest diving mammal—the water shrew—evolved to survive for long periods underwater without breathing.
"Water shrews are perhaps the most unlikely of all underwater foragers. Their low body oxygen stores coupled with the highest rates of oxygen use and loss of body heat among mammals provide formidable challenges to spending any time underwater," explains Liverpool researcher Dr. Michael Berenbrink.
The team's new study, published in the journal eLife, sampled DNA from 71 different shrew and mole species all belonging to a large group of related, insect-eating mammals called Eulipotyphla.
The term "doomscrolling" describes the act of endlessly scrolling through bad news on social media and reading every worrisome tidbit that pops up, a habit that unfortunately seems to have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The biology of our brains may play a role in that. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from information about an unwanted aversive event the individual likely has no power to prevent.
The findings, published June 11 in Neuron, could shed light on the processes underlying psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety -- not to mention how all of us cope with the deluge of information that is a feature of modern life.
“We’re living in a world our brains didn’t evolve for.” A new #WashUMed study sheds light on the biology behind why some of us can’t stop “doomscrolling.”https://t.co/HegogWHaFP
Chemical engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago and UCLA have answered longstanding questions about the underlying processes that determine the life cycle of liquid foams. The breakthrough could help improve the commercial production and application of foams in a broad range of industries.
Findings of the research were featured this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Foams are a familiar phenomenon in everyday lives -- mixing soaps and detergents into water when doing dishes, blowing bubbles out of soapy water toys, sipping the foam off a cup of lattes or milk shake. Liquid foams can occur in a variety of natural and artificial settings. While some foams are produced naturally, as in bodies of water creating large ocean blooms on the beaches, others arise in industrial processes. In oil recovery and fermentation, for example, foams are a byproduct.
In the animal kingdom, killer whales are social stars: They travel in extended, varied family groups, care for grandchildren after menopause, and even imitate human speech. Now, marine biologists are adding one more behavior to the list: forming fast friendships. A new study suggests the whales rival chimpanzees, macaques, and even humans when it comes to the kinds of “social touching” that indicates strong bonds.
The study marks “a very important contribution to the field” of social behavior in dolphins and whales, says José Zamorano-Abramson, a comparative psychologist at the Complutense University of Madrid who wasn’t involved in the work. “These new images show lots of touching of many different types, probably related to different kinds of emotions, much like the complex social dynamics we see in great apes.”
Audio and video recordings have shown how some marine mammals maintain social structures—including male dolphins that learn the “names” of close allies. But there is little footage of wild killer whales—which hunt and play in open water. Although the whales only swim at about 6 kilometers per hour, it’s hard to fully observe them from boats, and they might not act naturally near humans, Zamorano-Abramson says.
Some lovely coverage of our Proc B paper on killer whale social relationships in Science Magazine:https://t.co/5iH12x3yj0
Just a few weeks ago, the mood here at the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) was still decidedly somber. WHO had pushed hard for equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, yet a “grotesque” gap had formed between rich and poor nations, said WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Whereas several rich countries had enough vaccine to start to vaccinate teenagers, who are at very low risk of becoming severely ill, nurses and doctors in Africa remained unprotected.
“Have you got anyone left to vaccinate in your places?” Bruce Aylward, a top-level WHO official asks facetiously. “Are we going to vaccinate the goldfish next?”
But a meeting of the G7, held in Cornwall, U.K., last weekend, has changed the gloomy outlook. The leaders of the seven big industrialized democracies committed to donating 1 billion doses—870 million more than previously announced—by the end of 2022. The vast majority will move through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility, a nonprofit set up by WHO that Aylward is working with. COVAX has built a war chest of $9.6 billion solely for purchasing vaccine at discount prices for poor countries.
A new analysis of blood samples from 24,000 Americans taken early last year is the latest and largest study to suggest that the coronavirus popped up in the U.S. in December 2019 — weeks before cases were first recognized by health officials.
The analysis is not definitive, and some experts remain skeptical, but federal health officials are increasingly accepting a timeline in which small numbers of COVID-19 infections may have occurred in the U.S. before the world ever became aware of a dangerous new virus erupting in China.
“The studies are pretty consistent,” said Natalie Thornburg of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There is the leading hypothesis among scientists: The virus hopped from an animal — possibly a bat — to a human, or to some other animal, which later spread the disease to humans.
And then there is the lab leak hypothesis: The virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The debate over the origins is now burning hot, with increasing demand for an international investigation into the possibility of a lab leak. Media reports have fanned speculation, much of it based on circumstantial evidence like the cluster of illnesses among lab workers at the Wuhan lab, first reported on May 23 by The Wall Street Journal but denied by Shi Zhengli, a top scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in an interview with The New York Times this week.
Immortality and everlasting youth are the stuff of myths, according to new research which may finally end the eternal debate about whether we can live for ever.
Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn (£82.5bn) – and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 – scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing.
But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints.
A transparent metallic film allowing a viewer to see in the dark could one day turn regular spectacles into night vision googles. The ultra-thin film, made of a semiconductor called gallium arsenide, could also be used to develop compact and flexible infrared sensors, scientists say.
Though still a proof of concept, the researchers believe it could eventually be turned into a cheap and lightweight replacement for bulky night-vision goggles, which are used in military, police and security settings.
The film was developed by a team of Australian and European researchers, with details published in the journal Advanced Photonics. It works by converting infrared light – which is normally invisible to humans – into light visible to the human eye.
Footprints of what could be the last dinosaurs to have walked in Britain have been found in Kent, researchers say.
About 66m years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth and wiped out much of the Earth’s dinosaurs. But flooding rendered Britain’s dinosaurs extinct much earlier: about 110m years ago.
Back then, Britain was more or less where north Morocco or the south of Spain is now, sea levels were rapidly rising and space for dinosaurs to inhabit was disappearing. But this sandy beach in southern England near the white cliffs of Dover was idyllic.
About 25 million years ago, giant rhinos more than 16 feet tall roamed the Earth. They are considered the largest land mammal that ever lived — but their evolutionary history and dispersal across Asia have left scientists puzzled.
Paleontologists have now found fossils for a new, sixth species of the extinct giant rhino, Paraceratherium linxiaense, which are shedding light on how the animal moved across China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. The team of researchers, led by Deng Tao from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, published its 2015 findings in a new study this week in the journal Communications Biology.
A new species of the ancient giant rhino, discovered in China's Gansu—Paraceratherium linxiaense, which lived 26.5 million years ago, weighed 21 tonnes, like 4 large African elephants. Its head could reach 23ft (7m) to graze treetops, taller than a giraffehttps://t.co/BSWSUfMdYo
— Alfons López Tena (@alfonslopeztena) June 18, 2021
Last year’s dramatic dimming of the star Betelgeuse — familiar to many as the ‘right shoulder’ of the constellation Orion — was caused by a cloud of dust spewed out by the star itself. Astrophysicists reached this conclusion, published on 16 June in Nature, using high-resolution imaging of Betelgeuse before and after the dimming, combined with computer simulations.
… many astrophysicists warned that the supernova speculation was wishful thinking. They pointed out that the dimming was likely to be caused by more mundane mechanisms, such as a blob of unusually cold matter appearing on the surface of the star in what’s known as a convective cell, or a cloud of dust crossing the line of sight to it.
Now, astrophysicist Miguel Montargès at the Paris Observatory and his collaborators have found that the reason for the ‘great dimming’ was probably a combination of both of those factors.
When the bright orange star #Betelgeuse star lost more than half of its brightness in late 2019 and early 2020, astronomers were puzzled. What could cause such an abrupt dimming? Astronomers now think they've solved the mystery: https://t.co/FmNaiymsK0 VidCredit: ESO/L. Calçada pic.twitter.com/NBg4Rx83vx
— Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (@CenterForAstro) June 16, 2021
Scientists were alarmed at the amount of dissolved mercury they found in rivers and fjords. The heavy metal raises concerns for the health of indigenous communities. And with global warming, the problem may get worse.
When British environmental geochemist Jon Hawkings arrived in Greenland for the first time in 2012, he was impressed. "It's mind-blowing: You look onto the horizon and it's just ice and it goes on for 150, 200 kilometers at least."
[…] Their goal was to investigate the relationship between nutrients entering coastal ecosystems from glacial meltwater. But the group's research took an unexpected turn.
The scientists analyzed samples from meltwater rivers and fjords and found concentrations of dissolved mercury among the highest ever recorded.
Plastic from take-out and convenience food is littering rivers and oceans - but straws are not the worst offenders, according to a new study.
Scientists analysed global inventories cataloguing more than 12 million pieces of litter found in and around rivers, oceans, shorelines and the seafloor.
They found eight out of 10 items listed were made of plastic. And 44% of this plastic litter related to take-out food and drinks. Single-use bottles, food containers and wrappers, and plastic bags made up the biggest share.
"It was shocking to find out that bags, bottles, food containers and cutlery together with wrappers account for almost half of the human-made objects on a global scale," said study leader Dr Carmen Morales of the University of Cadiz, Spain.
An international group of scientists has called on Norway to halt plans for acoustic experiments on minke whales.
They say the process of capturing the animals and subjecting them to noise will be "stressful and frightening".
The project, the largest of its kind ever attempted, is due to begin any day now. The Norwegian authorities say the aim is to get a better understanding of the levels of noise pollution that whales can hear.
Some 65 million years ago, a rock from outer space slammed into Earth, wreaking havoc on life in its wake and leaving a large crater on our planet’s surface. No, it’s not the one you’re thinking of.
Boltysh crater, a 15-mile-wide formation in central Ukraine, may not be as famous as the Chicxulub crater under the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, which is directly implicated in the death of the dinosaurs and many other species about 66 million years ago. Nevertheless, Boltysh has long led to debate among scientists. Some have suggested that the crater, which is buried under more than 1,000 feet of sediment, could have formed before or after the Chicxulub event, making its role in this cataclysmic period unclear.
Now, a team led by Annemarie Pickersgill, a research associate at the University of Glasgow, estimates that Boltysh formed about 650,000 years after the Chicxulub catastrophe. The refined age has implications for understanding how Boltysh affected this tumultuous time, and can shed light on our own era of sudden climate change.
Although an asteroid impact has long been the suspected cause of the mass extinction 66 million years ago, researchers think new evidence finally closes the case. https://t.co/VoBRYVuYe4
If someone created a flying machine capable of tracking you down by listening for your voice, you might be creeped out. But what if you were pinned under a pile of rubble after a natural disaster and first responders couldn’t locate you? Maybe then a human-seeking drone wouldn’t be such a terrible idea.
That concept is the focus for engineers at Germany’s Fraunhofer FKIE institute, who’ve built a drone prototype designed to find people by detecting human screams and listening for other signs of distress. One of the lead engineers, Macarena Varela, showcased their progress last week at an annual conference hosted by the Acoustic Society of America.
While it’s easy to imagine human-seeking drones in a sci-fi horror movie, Varela says the gadget would be ideal for post-disaster scenarios, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires. They could hover over an area that rescue crews have difficulty getting to and pinpoint where people may be trapped.
Mangrove rivulus fish hate enforced water aerobics. Despite her best efforts, Giulia Rossi, a biologist who recently received her doctorate from the University of Guelph, cannot coax the fish to swim against a current in a laboratory tank. “They refuse to exercise in water,” she told me. “They just let themselves hit the back mesh.”
When plucked out of water, however, the stubborn swimmers quickly whip themselves into shape. Rossi boops their snoots with a clicky ballpoint pen, and the fish—which are amphibious, and can survive on land for weeks at a time—backflip out of reach.
In goading the rivulus into these workouts, Rossi becomes a trainer of both body and brain. Terrestrial CrossFit, she and her colleagues have found, is an excellent way to juice up the piscine mind. Just a few minutes of flopping each week was enough to spark a round of brain-cell growth and improve their ability to solve tricky mazes for a worm reward. The team’s findings, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are a ringing endorsement of the benefits of cardio. They also provide a potential glimpse, the researchers argue, into the colonizing tactics of our long-gone fish ancestors, who might have eased their transition from water to land by first hopping back and forth—and reaping the cognitive rewards.
Here, at least, is the standard story: The past decade has been abysmal for climate-change policy in the United States. In 2009, a handsome new president took office pledging to pass a comprehensive climate bill in Congress. He did not. The Environmental Protection Agency sought to meaningfully reduce carbon pollution from power plants. It did not. The United States joined the Paris Agreement. Then we elected President Donald Trump, and we left.
Yes—and here, the narrator always inserts a gale-force sigh—America knows what it needs to do: Pass a carbon fee or tax, some kind of policy that nudges people to reduce their use of fossil fuels. Yet America refuses. And so the 2010s, once greeted as a “new era” for climate action, now seem unexceptional, the third decade in a row that the United States understood the dangers of climate change but failed to act. Meanwhile the seas rose, wildfires raged, and the Earth saw its hottest 10 years on record.
You have probably heard this tale before; it is a popular and undeniably accurate read of recent history. It has just one flaw: America is decarbonizing anyway.
I wrote about a new game plan for US decarbonization, an approach that fuses politics, business, and engineering. Meet the “green vortex”: https://t.co/Jyt1VVoukH
In 1993, a media studies professor at Fordham University named Edward Wachtel visited several famous caves in southern France, including Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles, and La Mouthe. His purpose: to study the cave art that has justly made these caves famous. Wachtel was puzzled by what he called "spaghetti lines" on the drawings, partially obscuring them. There were also images of, say, an ibex with two heads, a mammal with three trunks, or a bull drawing superimposed over the drawing of a deer.
His guide for the La Mouthe tour was a local farmer, and since there were no electric lights in this cave, the farmer brought along a gas lantern. When the farmer swung the lantern inside the cave, the color schemes shifted, and the engraved lines seemed to animate. "Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly," Wachtel recalled. "It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared." As for those mysterious spaghetti lines, "they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then reveled the animals within."
Wachtel subsequently published a paper entitled, "The First Picture Show: Cinematic Aspects of Cave Art," in which he concluded that the cave drawings were meant to be perceived in three dimensions—one of them being time. These could have been the first "protomovies," he thought.
The species was named for the freckles around the perimeter of its umbrella. https://t.co/rminrezM2y
Streetlights lure mayflies by the millions to their deaths—but can scientists help insects survive their fatal attraction to light at night? #WeekendReadshttps://t.co/mvkhV9ziWr
— News from Science (@NewsfromScience) June 19, 2021
— Jesse Walters #TeamSulfur (@thegeojesse) June 17, 2021
Adriana L. Romero-Olivares’s (@fungi_lovers) PhD research is “one of the first studies to explicitly test how microbes evolve in response to climate change. It’s almost a whole new field.” —Kathleen Treseder, UCIrvine https://t.co/rAtEMPuaWO
An extreme heat wave that has already shattered temperature records across the U.S. Southwest threatened on Friday to push power systems to the brink of failure as residents cranked up air conditioners. https://t.co/RcG0yzlJba
— Reuters Science News (@ReutersScience) June 18, 2021
Much of the Northwest Atlantic, especially the Gulf of Maine, has been warming faster than elsewhere in the world’s oceans—99 percent faster, according to one study https://t.co/Fzz7LsgC95
