Here are some of this week’s science stories:
- Paleontologists are questioning whether or not fossilized dinosaur DNA has been discovered.
- Volcanic eruptions driven climate change may have allowed dinosaurs to thrive.
- BepiColombo spacecraft sends back stunning images of crater-pocked Mercury.
- Arctic sea ice has passed its minimum extent for this year. So much of the planet’s ice has melted, that the Earth’s crust is shifting.
- Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey and children born in 2020 will see a spike in climate disasters.
- Coffee bean prices are spiking, foreshadowing scarcity due to climate change.
- Xanthopan praedicta, a moth from Madagascar, has the longest tongue of any insect.
- Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’.
- The southern cassowary, the world’s most dangerous bird, was raised by humans 18,000 years ago.
- The moon is drifting away from us.
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.
699,544 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 214.3 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
Gizmodo
Some Paleontologists Think They've Found Fossilized Dinosaur DNA. Others Aren’t So Sure
Dinosaur researchers working on extremely well-preserved remains from the Jehol Biota in northeastern China recently reported that they had detected fossilized biomolecules in a feathered dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous.
The intriguing microscopic material was found in the femur of a Caudipteryx, a feathered, turkey-looking dino that lived between about 125 million and 113 million years ago. The team put cartilage from the femur under a microscope and stained it with chemicals called hematoxylin and eosin, which are used to highlight cell nuclei and cytoplasm in modern cells.
They also stained the cartilage of a chicken and found that the dinosaur and chicken cartilage lit up in the same way. The researchers say that nuclei and chromatin, the material our chromosomes are made of, were visible. The team’s research was published last week in the Nature journal Communications Biology.
So Much Ice Has Melted, That the Earth’s Crust Is Shifting in Weird, New Ways
Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets—the world’s two largest bodies of ice—are melting at an alarming rate, causing major problems for local ecosystems and coastal communities alike. Now, in yet more evidence that the climate crisis is changing everything in bizarre and profound ways, new research suggests that the meltdown is warping the Earth’s crust.
The new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month, analyzes satellite data of ice melt from 2003 to 2018. The authors paired this data with a model showing how changes in ice mass affect the crust. The model showed that much of the northern hemisphere moved horizontally because of melting ice in Greenland and the Arctic.
This happens because the planet’s outermost layer has a little more slack than you might think. When ice sheets build up, their weight causes the crust underpinning them to sink in order to compensate. When the ice melts, as it’s doing at a record rate due to rising temperatures, there’s less weight for the crust to bear so it rebounds.
EarthSky
Circumtriple planet suspected: a planet orbiting 3 stars
GW Orionis, or GW Ori, is a triple star system located at the head of Orion the Hunter. A massive protoplanetary disk surrounds the triple star system. This disk is a dense region of gas and dust that’s left over from the formation of these young stars and has not yet been blown away by their stellar winds. The reason scientists call it a protoplanetary disk is because the leftover material could coalesce and form planets. GW Ori’s protoplanetary disk has a prominent gap within it, and scientists announced in September that they believe a planet exists within this gap. If confirmed, it would be the first circumtriple planet known, or a planet that orbits three stars.
The scientists published their study on September 17, 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The circumtriple planet or planets, if they exist, lie about 1,300 light-years away from us.
Phys.org
Dinosaurs' ascent driven by volcanoes powering climate change
The rise of dinosaurs coincided with environmental changes driven by major volcanic eruptions over 230 million years ago, a new study reveals. The Late Triassic Carnian Pluvial Episode (CPE) saw an increase in global temperature and humidity—creating a major impact on the development of animal and plant life, coinciding with the establishment of modern conifers.
Researchers analyzed sediment and fossil plant records from a lake in northern China's Jiyuan Basin, matching pulses of volcanic activity with significant environmental changes, including the CPE's 'mega monsoon' climate, some 234 million to 232 million years ago.
The international research team, including experts at the University of Birmingham, today published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)—revealing four distinct episodes of volcanic activity during this time period, with the most likely source being major volcanic eruptions from the Wrangellia Large Igneous Province, the remnants of which are preserved in western North America.
Scientific team uncovers additional threat to Antarctica's floating ice shelves
Glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have examined the dynamics underlying the calving of the Delaware-sized iceberg A68 from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017, finding the likely cause to be a thinning of ice melange, a slushy concoction of windblown snow, iceberg debris and frozen seawater that normally works to heal rifts.
In a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that their modeling studies showed melange thinning to be a major driver of ice shelf collapse. The circulation of ocean water beneath ice shelves and radiative warming from above, they say, gradually deteriorate ice melange over the course of decades.
The Washington Post
European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury’s craters after a ‘flawless’ flyby
Europe’s space mission to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our solar system, Mercury, sent back its first images of the planet after a flyby.
The BepiColombo joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency comprises a spacecraft containing two orbiters. It was launched in 2018 and will take seven years to arrive at its destination in late 2025.
The black-and-white images were taken Friday and published Saturday after the spacecraft flew past the innermost planet of the solar system to undertake a gravity assist maneuver — essentially using gravitational pull to slow the spacecraft.
Nature
Arctic sea ice hits 2021 minimum
Arctic sea ice has passed its minimum extent for this year, shrinking to 4.72 million square kilometres on 16 September, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has reported.
Owing to a cool and cloudy Arctic summer, this year’s annual minimum was the highest since 2014 — ice covered nearly 1 million square kilometres more than last year’s extent of 3.82 million square kilometres, which was the second-lowest ever observed (see ‘Ice cover’). But it is still the twelfth-lowest sea-ice extent in nearly 43 years of satellite recordings, and scientists say that the long-term trend is towards lower ice cover.
“Even with global warming and the overall downward trend in sea ice, there is still natural variability,” says Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at NSIDC, who is based at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey
Climate change is causing distress, anger and other negative emotions in children and young people worldwide, a survey of thousands of 16- to 25-year-olds has found. This ‘eco-anxiety’ has a negative impact on respondents’ daily lives, say the researchers who conducted the survey, and is partly caused by the feeling that governments aren’t doing enough to avoid a climate catastrophe.
“This study provides arguments for anyone who has any connection to youth mental health — climate change is a real dimension into their mental-health problems,” says Sarah Ray, who studies climate anxiety at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.
The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.
Mongabay
Children born in 2020 will see spike in climate disasters, study says
In a world wracked by wildfires, deadly storms, and the now too-familiar drumbeat of dire climate warnings, statistical descriptions of the future humanity faces can seem at once too sterile and too overwhelming to process. What experiences lie in the as-yet-unrealized space between a world that is warming by 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) and one that is becoming 3°C (5.4°F) hotter for a human being born today? The question is existential and urgent for younger generations, whose lives will be lived in that margin and for whom the answers may come in the form of more concrete questions: “Will there be enough food this year?” “Can I go outside today?” and “Will I have to migrate?”
A new study released this week in the journal Science aims to shed some light on what young people should expect, and the picture it paints is an ominous one. At the rate of warming that is projected to take place under current global carbon reduction pledges, a person born in 2020 will live through two to seven times more climate-related disasters than one born in 1960.
That includes twice as many wildfires, three times as many crop failures, and seven times as many heat waves. The study’s authors say their projections are conservative, and didn’t measure the severity of those events.
New study identifies regions of greatest conservation potential for species, water quality, carbon
This year, decision-makers and leaders will gather to talk about the interconnected crises of biodiversity loss and climate change at a few key global conferences including the U.N. Biodiversity Conference (COP15) and the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26). As they deliberate, deciding where to prioritize conservation presents a challenge.
A group of researchers from more than 40 institutions have developed a way to consistently identify areas for conservation that “minimizes the number of threatened species, maximizes carbon retention and water quality regulation, and ranks terrestrial conservation priorities globally”, according to their new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“Our approach is novel in that is able to integrate various values of nature into a single map,” Martin Jung, the study’s lead author and research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) told Mongabay in an email. Past studies have looked at environmental factors individually and overlayed the results, he says, which can oversimplify findings.
The Guardian
Gibraltar cave chamber discovery could shed light on Neanderthals’ culture
Researchers excavating a cave network on the Rock of Gibraltar have discovered a new chamber, sealed off from the world for at least 40,000 years, that could shed light on the culture and customs of the Neanderthals who occupied the area for a thousand centuries.
In 2012, experts began examining Vanguard Cave, part of the Gorham’s Cave complex, to determine its true dimensions and to see whether it contained passages and chambers that had been plugged by sand.
Last month the team, led by Prof Clive Finlayson, an evolutionary biologist who serves as director of the Gibraltar National Museum, came across a gap in the sediment, which they widened and crawled through. It led them to a 13-metre space in the roof of the cave where stalactites hung from the ceiling and broken curtains of rock suggested damage from an ancient earthquake.
Coffee bean price spike just a taste of what’s to come with climate change
Scientists have long warned climate change is coming for our morning coffee and a recent spike in global bean prices could be the first sign it’s actually happening.
Global coffee prices are forecast to jump to $4.44 a kilogram this year, according to IBISWorld, after a July cold snap in a major arabica coffee-producing region of Brazil wiped out a third of the crop.
Tom Baker, the founder of Sydney-based Mr Black Roasters and Distillers, noticed the spike when the first shipment this year arrived with a heavy price tag.
“The feeling was almost despair. We were expecting it because everything’s gone up. All our costs on every line item,” Baker said. “Glass, coffee, paper costs, label costs. It’s all gone up – and not just a small couple of percentages.”
Science
New species has longest tongue of any insect
On the island of Madagascar there lives a large moth with a tongue long enough to make Gene Simmons green with envy. Its name? Xanthopan praedicta. Its business? Sucking the pollen out of a very long and skinny orchid.
This moth’s whole history is absurd. Charles Darwin predicted its existence when he first saw the shape of the Angraecum sesquipedale orchid (which apparently prompted him to exclaim, “Good heavens, what insect can suck it?”). About 2 decades later, in 1903, the moth was actually discovered, and ever since, the Malagasy variant has been considered a subspecies of its mainland counterpart, X. morganii. But no longer.
Using a slew of morphological and genetic tests, scientists argue the island moth is substantially different enough from its mainland counterpart to merit its elevation to the species level, the Natural History Museum announced yesterday.
Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’
Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue. Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all.
“The question is, why?” says Dan Dediu, an evolutionary linguist at Lumière University Lyon 2. Now, he and his colleagues have found evidence for an unexpected answer: People with more exposure to sunlight are more likely to speak languages that lump green and blue together, under a term that linguists dub “grue.” That’s because of the effects of a lifetime of light exposure, the team speculates: Lots of Sun causes a condition called “lens brunescence” that makes it harder to distinguish the two hues.
CNN
Fossilized footprints show humans made it to North America much earlier than first thought
North and South America were the last continents to be settled by humans, but exactly when that started is a topic that has divided archaeologists.
The commonly held view is that people arrived in North America from Asia via Beringia, a land bridge that once connected the two continents, at the end of the Ice Age around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago. But more recent -- and some contested -- discoveries have suggested humans might have been in North America earlier.Now, researchers studying fossilized human footprints in New Mexico say they have the first unequivocal evidence that humans were in North America at least 23,000 years ago.
This solar event will halt communication with Mars missions for 2 weeks
Things are about to get a little quiet between NASA and its fleet of robotic Mars explorers. That's because an expected communication breakdown is about to happen, all thanks to the sun.
The Mars solar conjunction takes place between October 2 and 16, and this lapse of check-ins between Earth and Mars occurs for a couple of weeks every two years, when both planets are on opposite sides of the sun.
The NASA teams that manage Mars missions stop sending commands to the orbiters and rovers on the Martian surface until mid-October, but that doesn't mean all exploration on the red planet will grind to a halt.
Science News
Ink analysis reveals Marie Antoinette’s letters’ hidden words and who censored them
In a world torn apart by the French Revolution, doomed Queen Marie Antoinette exchanged secret letters with a rumored lover. Someone later censored them — and now scientists know who.
Chemical analyses of the ink reveal not only the obscured words, but also the identity of the censor, researchers report October 1 in Science Advances.
From June 1791 to August 1792, as Marie Antoinette and the rest of the royal family were confined to Paris’ Tuileries Palace following an escape attempt, the queen managed a clandestine correspondence with Swedish Count Axel von Fersen.
Whether the correspondents exchanged words of love or state secrets was a longstanding mystery, says Anne Michelin, a chemist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Michelin and colleagues unraveled this mystery using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy.
All identical twins may share a common set of chemical markers on their DNA
Identical siblings are used to sharing a lot with their twin, including their DNA. But new research suggests all identical twins share a common signature of twinhood, not in their DNA, but on it.
This signature is part of the epigenome, chemical markers that dot many spots along DNA and influence the activity of genes without altering their sequence. Identical twins everywhere largely share a specific set of these marks that persists from birth to adulthood, researchers report September 28 in Nature Communications. These shared epigenetic tags could be used to identify people who were conceived as identical twins but lost their sibling in the womb or were separated at birth.
“This paper is absolutely fascinating,” says Nancy Segal, a developmental psychologist at California State University, Fullerton who has researched twins but wasn’t involved in the study. The research sets the groundwork for scientists to better understand “what might cause a fertilized egg to split and form monozygotic [identical] twins,” she says.
Science Alert
DNA Has Finally Revealed The Mysterious Origins of The Ancient Etruscans
DNA evidence has finally ended the debate about where the ancient Etruscans – an ancient civilization whose remains are found in Italy – came from.
According to almost 2,000 years worth of genomic data, collected from 12 sites across Italy, these enigmatic people did not emigrate from Anatolia (a region that's now part of Turkey), but shared genetic heritage with people who lived nearby in ancient Rome.
All were descended from pastoralists who moved into the region from the steppes during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. Given that the steppes are thought to be where Indo-European languages originated, the finding underscores another Etruscan mystery – that of their (now extinct) non-Indo-European language, which managed to persist for centuries.
The New York Times
The World’s Deadliest Bird Was Raised by People 18,000 Years Ago
The southern cassowary is often called the world’s most dangerous bird.
While shy and secretive in the forests of its native New Guinea and Northern Australia, it can be aggressive in captivity. In 2019, kicks from a captive cassowary mortally wounded a Florida man. They don’t take kindly to attempts to hunt them, either: In 1926, a cassowary attacked by an Australian teenager kicked him in the neck with its four-inch, velociraptor-like talons, slitting his throat.
Not a bird it’s advisable to spend too much time in close quarters with, in other words. But as early as 18,000 years ago, people in New Guinea may have reared cassowary chicks to near-adulthood — potentially the earliest known example of humans managing avian breeding.
This Parasite Turns Plants Into Zombies
A mustard plant infected with a certain parasite grows strangely, its development warped by tiny invaders. Its leaves take on odd shapes, its stems form a bushy structure called a witches’ broom and it may grow flowers that do not produce seed. Most peculiarly of all, it lives longer than its uninfected brethren, in a state of perpetual adolescence.
“It looks like it stays in a juvenile phase,” said Saskia Hogenhout, a scientist at the John Innes Centre in England, who studies the life cycle of the parasite, which is called Aster Yellows phytoplasma.
The plant’s neighbors grow old, reproduce and die, but the phytoplasma’s eerily youthful host persists. It becomes something like a mix between a vampire that never ages and a zombie host whose body serves the needs of its parasite, namely, tempting sap-sucking insects to feast on the plant’s bodily fluids as long as possible. When the insects ingest the parasite, they spread it to new hosts, and the whole “Night of the Living Dead-meets-Dracula” cycle repeats.
The Atlantic
The Moon is leaving us, and we can’t stop it
The moon is drifting away from us. Each year, our moon moves distinctly, inexorably farther from Earth—just a tiny bit, about an inch and a half, a nearly imperceptible change. There is no stopping this slow ebbing, no way to turn back the clock. The forces of gravity are invisible and unshakable, and no matter what we do or how we feel about them, they will keep nudging the moon along. Over many millions of years, we’ll continue to grow apart.
Given this rather melodramatic description, you might wonder: Don’t you have better things to think about than the moon? Well no, not really, because I’m a space reporter and it’s my job to contemplate celestial bodies and write about them. And also because a representation of this phenomenon recently played out in China during festivities for the Mid-Autumn Festival, which marks the full moon closest to the fall equinox. A giant balloon designed to resemble the moon, craters and all, broke free and rolled into the street. Video footage of the unscripted moment shows two people running after the massive moon as it tumbles away. Bye!
Studying sea slugs in the group Sacoglossa can mean being on the receiving end of some very imaginative emails. Sidney K. Pierce, of the University of South Florida, retired a few years ago. “But to this day,” he told me, “I get questions from little kids in their science classes” who have stumbled upon the marvelous mollusks—and want to know if they could help “end world hunger.”
The answer, Pierce assured me, is no. But the proposal isn’t totally outlandish. Several sacoglossan sea slugs can harvest energy from the sun’s rays and, using only the contents of their cells, turn it into chemical packages of food. In other words, they photosynthesize—arguably the plantiest thing that earthly plants and algae do.
Except sea slugs are, of course, not plants or algae. They’re standard-issue animals that have blurred the boundaries between biological kingdoms, thanks to a spectacular act of thievery: They steal photosynthesizing machinery—in-cell structures called chloroplasts—from the algae they eat, and store the green, light-converting blobs in their body for extended periods. Some species can reap the nutritional benefits of these self-replenishing snack packs for months, perhaps for longer than a year. One sea slug that Pierce has studied extensively, Elysia chlorotica, can go the rest of its life without eating—moseying, mating, vibing—after just one algae-rich binge in its youth. “We collect them in the field,” he told me, “and we never feed them again.”
Scientists test medieval gunpowder recipes with 15th-century cannon replica
Gunpowder—as opposed to modern smokeless powder—isn't used much these days in current weaponry, although it's still useful for historical weapons and remains popular for fireworks and other pyrotechnics. An interdisciplinary team of chemists and historians wanted to learn more about how various recipes for gunpowder evolved over the centuries as master gunners tweaked the basic components to achieve better results. The researchers described their findings in a recent paper published in the journal ACS Omega. They even tested a few of the recipes by firing a replica of a 15th-century stone-throwing cannon at a West Point firing range—you know, for science.
Also known as black powder, gunpowder is simple enough, chemically speaking. It's a mix of sulfur and charcoal (carbon), which serve as fuels, and potassium nitrate (KNO3), an oxidizer also known as saltpeter. First used for warfare around 904 CE in China, its use had spread throughout Europe and Asia by the late 13th century. Modern black powder recipes call for 75 percent saltpeter, 15 percent charcoal, and 10 percent sulfur. But medieval master gunners experimented with many different recipes over the centuries, many of which included additives such as camphor, varnish, or brandy—the purpose of which is still unknown.
International climate pledges may be on the right track—maybe
After Joe Biden won the US presidential election, he pledged that the country would cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030. And the US is hardly alone in this ambition. According to new research by Climate Analytics—part of the Climate Action Tracker consortium—131 countries are either discussing, have announced, or are implementing net-zero targets. The paper notes that, if fully implemented, these would cut 72 percent of global emissions.
The extent to which national climate goals can help realize the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting global temperature increase to 1.5° C is an open question. But according to Matthew Gidden, one of the recent paper’s authors, these climate goals are having (and could indeed continue to have) a marked impact on the climate of the future.
“The clear message from my point of view is that the window has not closed,” he told Ars. “However, it needs significant and real action, especially by the developed countries of the world and the largest emitters in the world, to really make movement.”