Here are some of this week’s top science stories:
- IPCC will release a new climate report on Monday.
- How Canada geese came to dominate our urban landscapes.
- New study finds that agriculture is killing significantly more bees that previously thought.
- Minor volcanic eruptions could ‘cascade’ into global catastrophe.
- Only a small number of animal species host the majority of zoonotic viruses.
- Squirrels use amazing feats of gymnastics to navigate through the treetops.
- Wildfires are destroying forests corporations purchased for their carbon offsets.
- Oceanic dead zones spread along Oregon’s coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
- The earliest moments of a supernova are captured in detail for the first time.
- The world’s oldest coin mint unearthed in China.
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.
616,228 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 194.3 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
BBC News
Climate change: New report will highlight 'stark reality' of warming
UN researchers are set to publish their strongest statement yet on the science of climate change. The report will likely detail significant changes to the world's oceans, ice caps and land in the coming decades.
Due out on Monday, the report has been compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It will be their first global assessment on the science of global heating since 2013. […]
"We've seen over a couple of months, and years actually, how climate change is unfolding; it's really staring us in the face," said Dr Heleen de Coninck, from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, who is a coordinating lead author for the IPCC Working Group III.
"It's really showing what the impacts will be, and this is just the start. So I think what this report will add is a big update of the state of the science, what temperature increase are we looking at - and what are the physical impacts of that?"
CBC News
5 key things to watch for in the UN climate report
Here are five key things to watch for:
1. Scientific confidence […]
2. Five futures
This year's report will include five hypothetical scenarios used to project climate change over the next century, depending on when and by how much humans curtail greenhouse gas emissions. […]
3. Carbon budget
A key number in this report will be the revised carbon budget, or the amount of additional greenhouse gas emissions that can be released before the Paris Agreement's 1.5 C goal is pushed out of reach. […]
4. Regional details […]
5. Weather extremes
Another new section will focus on extreme weather, which has dominated headlines for years as governments contend with record-breaking floods, fires, heat waves and other deadly extremes.
How Canada geese came to dominate our urban landscapes
If you're seeing a lot of geese in your neighbourhood this summer, you're not alone. These large, black-necked birds have become ubiquitous in Canadian cities. And although these "honkers" are viewed by many as urban pests, the fact is that not too long ago, they were nearly extinct in North America.
"Canada geese are one of the greatest conservation success stories ever — to the point where you were lucky to find a goose back in the '50s, and now we're probably well over seven million geese estimated in North America," said Ralph Toninger, associate director of the restoration and resource management group with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. […]
The Canada geese population truly exploded in the 1970s with changes to our urban landscape. Manicured lawns, stormwater retention ponds and golf courses are ideal feeding and breeding grounds for them. In cities, Canada geese have no natural predators and can't be hunted.
Science Alert
Agriculture Is Killing Way More Bees Than We Realized, Huge Study Reveals
Exposure to a cocktail of agrochemicals significantly increases bee mortality, according to research Wednesday that said regulators may be underestimating the dangers of pesticides in combination.
Bees and other pollinators are crucial for crops and wild habitats and evidence of steep drops in insect populations worldwide has prompted fears of dire consequences for food security and natural ecosystems.
A new meta-analysis of dozens of published studies over the last 20 years looked at the interaction between agrochemicals, parasites and malnutrition on bee behaviors - such as foraging, memory, colony reproduction - and health.
Researchers found that when these different stressors interacted they had a negative effect on bees, greatly increasing the likelihood of death.
The study published in Nature also found that pesticide interaction was likely to be "synergistic", meaning that their combined impact was greater than the sum of their individual effects.
For The First Time, Researchers Just Watched How Plants Slurp Up Water
Plants thirst for water, just as we animals do, but exactly how they slurp it through their tissues has remained a bit of a mystery as attempting to see it happening impairs the process.
By applying a gentle imaging technique in a new way, University of Nottingham physicist Flavius Pascut and the team were able to watch plants' innards at work as they drank in real time.
"We've developed a way to allow ourselves to watch that process at the level of single cells," said University of Nottingham electrophysiologist Kevin Webb. "We can not only see the water going up inside the root, but also where and how it travels around."
Phys.org
Global economic policies driving toward a climate crisis
International research into global climate models involving the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) shows that current worldwide economic policies are in danger of leading nations away from emission and global warming targets.
The study, carried out by leading international academics and published in Nature Energy, shows that existing growth-driven economic scenarios rely heavily on increased energy use in the future, and the use of carbon capture and storage technologies which are as-yet untested on a commercial scale.
Environmental impact of bottled water up to 3,500 times higher than tap water
What is the best option for individual water consumption if we take into account both health and environmental impacts? The answer to that question, according to a new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, is that, at least in the city of Barcelona, tap water is the option that offers more overall benefits. […]
This new study, published in Science of the Total Environment, was aimed at providing objective data about three different water consumption choices: bottled water, tap water and filtered tap water. […]
Since tap water quality might differ between cities or countries, the research team focused in the city of Barcelona, due to the robustness of available data. […]
Results showed that if the whole population of Barcelona decided to shift to bottled water, the production required would take a toll of 1.43 species lost per year and cost of 83.9 million USD per year due to extraction of raw materials. This is approximately 1,400 times more impact in ecosystems and 3,500 times higher cost of resource extraction compared to the scenario where the whole population would shift to tap water.
Science Daily
Minor volcanic eruptions could ‘cascade’ into global catastrophe
Currently, much of the thinking around risks posed by volcanoes follows a simple equation: the bigger the likely eruption, the worse it will be for society and human welfare.
However, a team of experts now argues that too much focus is on the risks of massive yet rare volcanic explosions, while far too little attention is paid to the potential domino effects of moderate eruptions in key parts of the planet.
Researchers led by the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) have identified seven "pinch points" where clusters of relatively small but active volcanoes sit alongside vital infrastructure that, if paralyzed, could have catastrophic global consequences.
These regions include volcano groups in Taiwan, North Africa, the North Atlantic, and the northwestern United States. The report is published today in the journal Nature Communications.
Major Atlantic ocean current system might be approaching critical threshold
The major Atlantic ocean current, to which also the Gulf stream belongs, may have been losing stability in the course of the last century. This is shown in a new study published in Nature Climate Change. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, transports warm water masses from the tropics northward at the ocean surface and cold water southward at the ocean bottom, which is most relevant for the relatively mild temperatures in Europe. Further, it influences weather systems worldwide. A potential collapse of this ocean current system could therefore have severe consequences.
"The Atlantic Meridional Overturning really is one of our planet's key circulation systems," says the author of the study, Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Freie Universität Berlin and Exeter University. "We already know from some computer simulations and from data from Earth's past, so-called paleoclimate proxy records, that the AMOC can exhibit -- in addition to the currently attained strong mode -- an alternative, substantially weaker mode of operation. This bi-stability implies that abrupt transitions between the two circulation modes are in principle possible."
Mongabay
New study finds that minority of animals host majority of zoonotic viruses
In May 2020, Shivaprakash Nagaraju, senior scientist at The Nature Conservancy in India, was working in New Delhi when he contracted COVID-19. […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across much of the world, Nagaraju’s new research paper in Current Biology has uncovered vital information: a small minority of animal species in the wildlife trade host the vast majority of known zoonotic viruses. Nagaraju and his team found that just 26.5% of mammals in the wildlife trade host 75% of known zoonotic viruses, “a level much higher than domesticated and non-traded mammals,” they write.
Primates, ungulates, carnivores and bats present the highest risk, as these four groups alone harbor 132 of the 226 currently known zoonotic viruses, or 58% overall. However, according to the researchers, bats, rodents and marsupials pose the greatest risk in the future given expected shifts in the wildlife trade.
More specifically, primates alone carry 77 known zoonotic virus, even-toed ungulates host 62, and carnivores 41, highlighting these three groups as particularly acute spillover threats for future pandemics.
New study says changes in clouds will add to global warming, not curb it
…for climate modelers, clouds are a major thorn in the side, and are the hard question. Scientists do know clouds wield an outsize influence on climate: Reducing Earth’s cloud cover by just 5% would have the same planet-wide warming effect as all the CO2 released into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age.
The big problem, however, is that as the earth warms, the effect of clouds changes too, and after decades of research and debate scientists can’t agree exactly how. Most think clouds will warm the earth overall, others think they could cool it, and no one is sure by how much either way. […]
Now that uncertainty range may have been narrowed down to a sliver, based on the findings of a new study by researchers at Imperial College, London. […]
Their results showed that the majority of climate modelers have it about right: global warming will result in a decline in low-level clouds and a rise in the altitude of high level clouds, implying a positive cloud feedback, meaning clouds will add to warming over time.
Nature
The world’s species are playing musical chairs: how will it end?
[…] Something odd is going on in biodiversity studies. Scientists have long warned that animal and plant species are disappearing at an alarming rate. In 2019, an international group of hundreds of researchers produced the most comprehensive report on biodiversity ever assembled, and they concluded that some one million animals and plant species are facing extinction. On top of that, humans have cleared landscapes and chopped down nearly one-third of the world’s forests since the Industrial Revolution — all of which bodes poorly for protecting species. […]
And a consensus is emerging that, even though species are disappearing globally at alarming rates, scientists cannot always detect the declines at the local level. Some species, populations and ecosystems are indeed crashing, but others are ebbing more slowly, holding steady or even thriving. This is not necessarily good news. In most places, new species are moving in when older ones leave or blink out, changing the character of the communities. And that has important implications, because biodiversity at the small scale has outsize importance; it provides food, fresh water, fuel, pollination and many ecosystem services that humans and other organisms depend on. […]
Scientists say it’s clear that there’s a biodiversity crisis, but there are many questions about the details.
After Trump, US researchers urge Biden to block political meddling in science
US researchers and science groups appealed to President Joe Biden’s administration last week to protect government science from political interference and to empower federal scientists to speak to the media and public. They made this request during public listening sessions hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — the first such sessions held since the science office kicked off a massive project to bolster scientific integrity in the federal government.
After four years in which former president Donald Trump’s administration sidelined science and scientists in government decisions, researchers were hopeful that Biden would safeguard independent scientific work and communication. In January, he made moves in this direction when he instructed the OSTP to review rules at all US agencies, with the goal of ensuring policies that “ban improper political interference in the conduct of scientific research” are in place. The OSTP convened a task force in May, comprised of nearly 50 representatives from several US agencies, to tackle the issue. The group has so far met in closed-door sessions and with scientific-integrity experts.
“This level of engagement has not really happened before in the federal government around the issue of scientific integrity,” says Alondra Nelson, OSTP’s deputy director for science and society, who co-chairs the task force.
Scientific American
Squirrels Use Gymnastics to Navigate Treetop Canopies
[…] In treetops all around the world, squirrels leap meters through the air to get from branch to branch. The stakes are different in this natural arena: the squirrels scurry around to find morsels of food, all the while trying to evade occasional airborne predators such as hawks. But the speed and ease with which they navigate the challenging and unpredictable canopy environment is “spectacular,” says University of California, Berkeley, biomechanics researcher Robert Full. The animals easily land leaps several times the length of their body. And we do not really know how they do it, Full says. “How do they know that they have the capability in their body to achieve those jumps?” he asks.
The coordination between a squirrel’s body and mind is not just a curiosity for human observers, Full explains. The well-executed moves could influence the design of smarter robots, incorporating some of the squirrels’ best physical traits: their flexible spine, grippy paws and grabby claws. And squirrels are not just daredevil acrobats; they are adept learners, too. “They have really good memories,” says Gregory Byrnes, who studies biomechanics at Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y. A squirrel you see scampering through the park has likely followed that same path before and mapped the route out in its brain, Byrnes says. And when the weather turns cold in the winter, the diligent rodents recall and retrieve the many caches of nuts they have stashed all over their territory. It is this squirreling away that differentiates them from other arboreal animals, such as some primates, says Nathaniel Hunt, who studies biomechanics at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Pair that learning ability with a responsive, flexible body, and you’ve got the makings of an extraordinary robot, he says.
Hunt and his colleagues wanted to evaluate three aspects of squirrels’ skills: their decision-making, learning and capacity for innovation. To capture the capabilities of free-ranging animals, the researchers decided to test these qualities in wild fox squirrels in an outdoor setup in the woods near U.C. Berkeley.
Tree by Tree, Scientists Try to Resurrect a Fire-Scarred Forest
When Phillip Tafoya was a young boy in the 1960s, the mountains astride Santa Clara Canyon in northern New Mexico were cloaked in deep green ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The people of Santa Clara Pueblo, Tafoya’s home, have relied on this forest for cultural uses, food, firewood and recreation for centuries. Today it is mostly gone. Ten years ago the Las Conchas fire—one of the largest in state history—scorched 156,000 acres in the pueblo and surrounding federal lands. The swift-moving flames were so intense in some places that even though these trees had evolved with low-level fires, almost all of them perished.
What remains is a vast tree graveyard. The land is dotted with dead “snags” surrounded by thick mats of crisscrossed fallen logs flanked by fireweed, a purple wildflower that thrives in the open spaces left by blazes. The only living trees are scattered, skinny aspens, which also flourish in this eerily bright and exposed landscape. “This place looks totally different than it did when I was young,” says Tafoya, a project manager for Santa Clara Pueblo, on a hot June day as he sits on one of the thousands of downed logs strewn across the mountainside. “Everything was trees. You could get lost. Now you can see a long ways. There’s no way you could get lost.”
If nature is left to its own devices, most of the aspens will likely eventually give way to shrubs as hotter and drier conditions tax the trees. Without intervention, the forest of Tafoya’s youth may never return.
Inside Climate News
US Forest Fires Threaten Carbon Offsets as Company-Linked Trees Burn
Forests in the United States that generate the carbon offsets bought by companies including BP and Microsoft are on fire as summer blazes rage in North America.
Corporate net-zero emission pledges rely on such projects to compensate for the carbon dioxide generated by companies that are unable to make sufficient cuts to their actual emissions. In principle each offset represents a ton of carbon that has been permanently removed from the atmosphere or avoided. Offsets generated by projects that plant or protect trees, which absorb carbon, are among the most popular.
But forestry projects are vulnerable to wildfires, drought and disease—permanent threats that are being exacerbated by global warming.
“We’ve bought forest offsets that are now burning,” Elizabeth Willmott, Microsoft’s carbon program manager, told attendees at an event hosted by Carbon180, a non-profit organization that focuses on carbon removal.
Science
Watch female dragonflies wrestle away unwanted males in mid-air
When it comes to avoiding sexually aggressive males, some female dragonflies play dead. Others, according to a new study, wrestle the males away in midair.
The work concerns blue-eyed darners (Rhionaeschna multicolor), a colorful dragonfly found widely across North America. When males of this species want to mate, they try to seize the female’s head with a special anal appendage. If she consents, the female folds her long abdomen back toward him and the pair flies together in a heart-shaped wheel formation.
But if she isn’t in the mood, the female starts to tussle, researchers report in Ecology.
What does the Delta variant have in store for the United States? We asked coronavirus experts
The United States is standing at a dire inflection point, with pandemic coronavirus cases surging and only 50% of the population fully vaccinated. Driving the latest wave is the highly contagious Delta variant, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) caused between 80% and 87% of all U.S. COVID-19 cases in the last 2 weeks of July—up from 8% to 14% in early June. The variant’s exceptional infectiousness has driven cases from a 7-day average of 13,500 daily cases in early June to 92,000 on 3 August. At the same time, an internal CDC document that leaked last week says the variant may make people sicker, citing published reports from Singapore and Scotland and a preprint from Canada.
The good news is that severe disease and death are highly unlikely among the vaccinated—and U.S. vaccination rates are beginning to increase once again, if modestly.
The Washington Post
A beached killer whale was in dire straits. People scrambled to buy it time.
A young, 20-foot-long orca had stranded itself on jagged rocks in Alaska.
Mere feet from the open water, where its pod called for it, the 13-year-old killer whale was in dire straits as the hours passed on Thursday morning. The whale, stuck near the eastern shore of Prince of Wales Island, caught the attention of people on a passing boat, who called the U.S. Coast Guard before 9 a.m., said Julie Fair, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokeswoman, in an email to The Washington Post. The stranded whale was four to five feet above the tide line when NOAA first learned about it.
The agency authorized crew members to spray the whale with seawater to keep it wet and to fend off birds, Fair said.
That’s when good Samaritans came to the rescue: Over slick rocks, helpers scrambled with buckets, collecting water and tossing it over the beached whale, according to a TikTok video. Once they had attached a hose to a pump, the group sprayed water across the whale’s back.
The Guardian
Dead zones spread along Oregon coast and Gulf of Mexico, study shows
Scientists recently surveyed the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico around Louisiana and Texas and what they discovered was a larger-than-average area of oxygen-depleted water – a “dead zone” where nothing can live.
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists announced their findings this week: about 4m acres of habitat in the Gulf are unusable for fish and bottom-dwelling species. The researchers had estimated a smaller dead zone this year, predicting an average-sized area.
“The distribution of the low dissolved oxygen was unusual this summer,” Nancy Rabalais, the professor at Louisiana State University who led the study, said in a statement. “The low oxygen conditions were very close to shore with many observations showing an almost complete lack of oxygen.”
But the Gulf isn’t the only coastal region experiencing dead zones this summer.
Champagne moment as supernova captured in detail for the first time
The earliest moments of a supernova – the cataclysmic explosion of a massive star – have been observed in unprecedented detail, in a development researchers say could help us better understand what happens to stars when they die.
Using data collected from Nasa’s Kepler space telescope in 2017, astrophysicists recorded the initial light burst from a supernova as a shockwave blasted its way through a star.
In a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists suggested the star that exploded was likely a yellow supergiant, which is more than 100 times bigger than our sun.
Space.com
Scientists find chunk of blown-apart star hurtling through Milky Way at breakneck speed
A chunk of stellar shrapnel is careering toward the edge of our Milky Way galaxy at almost 2 million mph (3.2 million kph), a new study reports.
"The star is moving so fast that it's almost certainly leaving the galaxy," study co-lead author J.J. Hermes, an associate professor of astronomy at Boston University, said in a statement.
The star, known as LP 40-365, currently lies about 2,000 light-years from Earth. And calling it a star may be a bit generous, actually; Hermes and his colleagues think it's a hunk of a superdense stellar corpse called a white dwarf that was blown apart in a violent supernova explosion after gobbling up too much mass from a companion.
NASA's 1st attempt to collect Mars samples with Perseverance rover comes up empty
The Perseverance rover's first sample-snagging attempt didn't go according to plan. […]
The NASA rover drilled its first sample-collecting hole on Friday (Aug. 6), a major milestone for the $2.7 billion mission. But data beamed back to Earth by Perseverance indicate that no Mars rock or dirt made it into the sampling tube, NASA officials announced on Friday afternoon.
"While this is not the 'hole in one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. (Perseverance's mission is the first step in a Mars sample-return campaign, which has never been done before.)
Gizmodo
U.S. Has Worst Health Care, Highest Infant Mortality Rate Among Wealthy Countries, Report Finds
A new report from the Commonwealth Fund provides a sobering if unsurprising assessment of the health care system in America. Compared to similarly wealthy countries, the U.S. scored dead last in most measures of decent health care, which included having the highest infant and maternal mortality rate.
Since 2004, the Commonwealth Fund—a nonprofit organization focused on health care reform founded in 1918—has been periodically publishing its Mirror, Mirror report, a comparison of the U.S. health care system to those in other high-income countries (the last was in 2017). The latest version was published this week and matched up the U.S. to 10 other countries, including Norway, the UK, Switzerland, and France. All of the nations were measured on five basic aspects of health care, from access to equity to concrete health outcomes, based on recent and publicly available data.
World’s Oldest Known Coin Mint Unearthed in China
Archaeologists in China have discovered a foundry that dates back to between 640 and 550 BCE. In addition to tools, ornaments, and spare parts, the foundry produced standardized coins, making it the oldest known mint in the archaeological record.
They don’t look like conventional coins, but these artifacts, called hollow-handle spade coins, served that very purpose thousands of years ago. New research published in Antiquity details the discovery of an ancient mint that manufactured this irregularly shaped currency between 640 and 500 BCE. Archaeologist Hao Zhao from Zhengzhou University, China, led the new research.
Ars Technica
Holding a mirror to life’s key molecules
The central dogma of molecular biology holds that DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which then gets translated into proteins. Of course, there are exceptions—some viruses, like coronaviruses, forego DNA altogether and encode their genetic information in RNA genomes. Other viruses, like HIV, have RNA genomes that must be copied into DNA and then transcribed back into RNA before being made into proteins. But as a general rule, "DNA to RNA to protein" describes how information moves within cells.
A unique property of biological molecules is that they have handedness. Naturally occurring molecules occur in roughly equal mixtures of left- and right-handed varieties. This means that molecules can have identical atoms and shapes but cannot be superimposed one upon the other. Instead, they are mirror images of each other, like our right and left hands. […]
Unlike naturally occurring molecules, biological molecules are all one-sided. Our nucleic acids are all right-handed (referred to as D, from the Latin dexter), and proteins are all left-handed (L for laevus). This is such a unique feature of biological molecules that SETI uses it as a hallmark signature when it is searching for life. Louis Pasteur first noticed this one-sidedness in 1848, and scientists have been speculating about mirror life ever since. Now, they have gotten one step closer to creating it.
Researchers announce the smallest exoplanet discovered yet
Most of the exoplanets we've discovered have been identified by large surveys like the Kepler mission or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). While these projects are great at spotting stars that host planets, they mostly just tell us that the planets are there. Understanding an exosolar system and its planets requires multiple follow-up observations—and the telescope time that goes with them. Here, the phenomenal success of the surveys has given us far more to observe than we can get to conveniently.
But the follow-ups can provide critical information, as a study released this week makes clear. In it, the researchers describe observations of a three-planet system discovered by TESS. Using the additional observations, the researchers find that there are likely to be two other planets that TESS couldn't see and that one it spotted is the least massive exoplanet described to date.
The system is called L 98-59, and it has a couple of properties that make it a great candidate for follow-on observations. One plus is that it's fairly close, at least in galactic terms, being only about 35 light-years from Earth.