Here are some of this week’s science stories:
- Bumblebees are all but extinct in 16 states, may be put in the endangered species list.
- A massive gap in Arctic sea ice opened this spring in the region that is predicted to be the last area to lose ice in the Arctic. Meanwhile, researchers predict polar bears may be extinct by 2100.
- Mysterious water vapor is detected on one side of Jupiter’s moon Europa and geysers are not responsible.
- COVID super-immunity is one of the pandemic’s great puzzles.
- A woman in British Columbia nearly missed being hit by a meteorite that crashed through her roof and landed on a pillow next to her.
- The Biden administration released a report on the climate crisis stating it was ‘serious risks’ to the economy. Elsewhere, scientists say climate projections should go beyond the year 2100 — where it gets really bleak.
- Cities may become death traps during future heat waves.
- Sea otters increase eelgrass genetic diversity.
- Climate models run on Venus suggest Earth’s neighbor never had oceans.
- Beethoven Sym-phony 10.1 created with the help of artificial intelligence.
Links and details below the fold.
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722,841 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 218.6 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
The Washington Post
Bumblebee’s declining population, other ills may put it on U.S. endangered list
Fuzzy, buzzy, yellow-and-black American bumblebees were once familiar sights on the nation’s plants and flowers.
But in 16 states, they are all but extinct.
Scientists have been warning about the decline of Bombus pensylvanicus for years. Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is listening — and is reviewing the status of the insect to determine whether it qualifies for Endangered Species Act protection.
The agency recently announced it has initiated a status review on the species, which once could be found in 47 of 48 states across the continental United States and used to be the nation’s most spotted bumblebee.
The New York Times
To Learn Bees’ Secrets, Count Them One by One
All through late summer and early fall, Max McCarthy, a graduate student at Rutgers University, walked around wetlands in northern New Jersey with a mesh net catching bees, which he marked with tiny colored pens. Three dots, each a different color, on the bees’ minuscule thoraxes before releasing them again. He wrote this information in his notebooks, counting up the insects one by one.
These are not just any bees. Mr. McCarthy is hunting a rare bee called Andrena parnassiae. The species is only found near a flowering plant called grass of Parnassus, which, in the Northeast United States, only grows in alkaline wetlands, or fens.
By tagging the bees, Mr. McCarthy, along with his adviser Rachael Winfree, an ecologist at Rutgers, is trying to see how easily these insects can move between habitat patches, and how far. As their ecosystem is disrupted by climate change, development and invasive species, how well will the insects adapt?
The researchers hope their data about this little-known species will shed light on an urgent and complex issue: pollinator decline.
NASA’s Lucy Launches on 12-Year Mission to Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids
NASA embarked on a 12-year mission to study a group of asteroids on Saturday with the launch of Lucy, a robotic explorer that will meander through the unexplored caverns of deep space to find new clues about the creation of our solar system.
The 5:34 a.m. Eastern time liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop an Atlas 5 rocket from United Launch Alliance was the first step of Lucy’s four-billion mile path into the orbital neighborhood of Jupiter. There, two swarms of asteroids known as the Trojans have hid for billions of years, leftover debris from the solar system’s early formation.
Gizmodo
Massive Rift Detected in Arctic’s ‘Last Refuge of Ice’
During spring 2020, a temporary gap the size of Rhode Island appeared in the sea ice to the north of Canada’s northernmost island. Troublingly, this rift is located in the so-called “Last Ice Area”—a frozen expanse that’s expected to host the last remnants of Arctic sea ice as our world gets continually warmer.
For a period of two weeks in May 2020, a giant hole in the sea ice known as a polynya appeared in a region where these sorts of gaps are not supposed to form. Polynyas are natural gaps that form in places normally covered in ice, but this particular rift was spotted in a region north of Canada’s Ellesmere Island—a place thought to be immune to this sort of occurrence.
At its peak, the polynya measured 60 miles (100 kilometers) long and 19 miles (30 kilometers) wide. It formed in a location to the north of Ellesmere Island and Greenland that’s “predicted to be the last region to lose its multi-year ice,” according to the new paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Recurring Water Vapor Potentially Found on Europa—but Just on One Side
The icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa appears to be continually feeding its thin atmosphere with water vapor, according to Hubble observations made from 1999 to 2015.
New research published in Geophysical Research Letters describes a stable water atmosphere on Europa. Strangely, this apparent water vapor was only detected on the moon’s tailing hemisphere, that is, the side that faces away from its orbital direction. Astronomer Lorenz Roth from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden is the paper’s lone author. […]
The water vapor described in the new study is not coming from… geysers. Rather, it’s coming directly from the surface, as the solid ice turns directly into gas. This appears to be a continual process resulting in the perpetual replenishment of water vapor in Europa’s atmosphere.
Live Science
Polar bears could vanish by the end of the century, scientists predict
[…] The most optimistic scenario, in which carbon emissions are immediately and drastically curbed to prevent the worst warming, could result in a limited portion of the ice surviving in the region. In the most pessimistic scenario, in which emissions continue at their current rate of increase, the summer ice — and the polar bears and seals that live on it — could disappear by 2100, researchers reported in a new study.
"Unfortunately, this is a massive experiment we're doing," study co-author Robert Newton, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a statement. "If the year-round ice goes away, entire ice-dependent ecosystems will collapse, and something new will begin."
Mysterious Mexican mangrove forest is 'trapped in time' hundreds of miles from the coast
Scientists have uncovered the origin of a mysterious landlocked mangrove forest in the heart of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
Normally, trees of this species — known as red mangroves, or Rhizophora mangle — grow only in salt water, along tropical coastlines. But this forest is located near the San Pedro River in the state of Tabasco, more than 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the nearest ocean. Somehow, these mangroves have adapted to live exclusively in this freshwater environment in southeast Mexico.Exactly how this ecological enigma came about has baffled scientists. But now, an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers has revealed that this out-of-place ecosystem began growing around 125,000 years ago, when sea levels were much higher and the ocean covered most of the region.
The Guardian
‘Sensational’: skeleton buried in Vesuvius eruption found at Herculaneum
The partially mutilated remains of a man buried by the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Herculaneum, the ancient Roman town close to Pompeii, have been discovered in what Italy’s culture minister described as a “sensational” find.
Archaeologists said the man, believed to have been aged between 40 and 45, was killed just steps away from the sea as he tried to flee the eruption.
His skeleton was found on what would have been the ancient town’s beach with the head pointing back in the direction of the sea, and surrounded by carbonised wood, including a roof beam, that might have crushed his skull, the Italian news agency, Ansa, reported.
Climate crisis poses ‘serious risks’ to US economy, Biden administration warns
Joe Biden’s administration on Friday issued a 40-page report warning that the climate crisis “poses serious and systemic risks to the US economy and financial system” and setting out steps for action as “climate impacts are already affecting American jobs, homes, families’ hard-earned savings, and businesses”.
Under the new plan, the federal government will weigh up climate risks for employee benefit and retirement plan investments, incorporate climate disasters into lending and budgeting decisions and revise building standards for homes at risk of flooding. Government-backed mortgages for public housing will factor in the risk of calamitous floods, wildfires and other climate impacts.
“The intensifying impacts of climate change present physical risk to assets, publicly traded securities, private investments, and companies,” the US president said in the report. The climate crisis “threatens the competitiveness of US companies and markets, the life savings and pensions of US workers and families, and the ability of US financial institutions to serve communities”, he added.
The Canadian Press
Ruth Hamilton was sound asleep last week when she was awoken by her dog barking, the sound of a crash through her ceiling and the feeling of debris on her face, the resident of Golden, said Monday.
She said she jumped out of bed and turned on the light to figure out what had happened, and discovered a hole in her ceiling. […]
“I was in shock and I just sat here for a few hours shaking,” she said. “The odds of that happening are so small so I’m pretty grateful to be alive.”
Phys.org
Sea otter populations found to increase eelgrass genetic diversity
A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Canada and one in the U.S. has found that eelgrass genetic diversity increases when sea otters live in eelgrass meadows. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of eelgrass meadows under different conditions. Joe Roman, with the University of Vermont, has published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the work by the researchers in this new effort.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the shores off the western coast of North America were filled with sea otters. Sadly, hunters drove them to near extinction over the ensuing century. In this new effort, the researchers have looked at the impact that sea otters have on eelgrass meadows when they are reintroduced by environmentalists.
Nature
COVID super-immunity: one of the pandemic’s great puzzles
People who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have a stronger immune response after being vaccinated than those who have never been infected. Scientists are trying to find out why.
Around a year ago — before Delta and other variants entered the COVID-19 lexicon — virologists Theodora Hatziioannou and Paul Bieniasz, both at the Rockefeller University in New York City, set out to make a version of a key SARS-CoV-2 protein with the ability to dodge all the infection-blocking antibodies our body makes.
The goal was to identify the parts of spike — the protein SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect cells — that are targeted by these neutralizing antibodies in order to map a key part of our body's attack on the virus. So the researchers mixed and matched potentially concerning mutations identified in lab experiments and circulating viruses, and tested their Franken-spikes in harmless ‘pseudotype’ viruses incapable of causing COVID-19. In a study published this September in Nature, they reported that a spike mutant containing 20 changes was fully resistant to neutralizing antibodies made by most of the people tested who had been either infected or vaccinated — but not to everyone’s.
Those who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs harboured antibodies capable of defanging the mutant spike, which displays much more resistance to immune attack than any known naturally occurring variant. These peoples’ antibodies even blocked other types of coronaviruses. “It’s very likely they will be effective against any future variant that SARS-CoV-2 throws against them,” says Hatziioannou.
Science News
Earth is reflecting less light. It’s not clear if that’s a trend
The amount of sunlight that Earth reflects back into space — measured by the dim glow seen on the dark portions of a crescent moon’s face — has decreased measurably in recent years. Whether the decline in earthshine is a short-term blip or yet another ominous sign for Earth’s climate is up in the air, scientists suggest.
Our planet, on average, typically reflects about 30 percent of the sunlight that shines on it. But a new analysis bolsters previous studies suggesting that Earth’s reflectance has been declining in recent years, says Philip Goode, an astrophysicist at Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. From 1998 to 2017, Earth’s reflectance declined about 0.5 percent, the team reported in the Sept. 8 Geophysical Research Letters.
Giant ground sloths may have been meat-eating scavengers
Modern sloths may be dedicated vegetarians, but at least one of their massive Ice Age cousins chowed down on meat when it had the chance. Darwin’s ground sloth — which could grow to over 3 meters long and weigh as much as about 2,000 kilograms — may have been an opportunistic scavenger, chemical analyses of fossil sloth hair suggest.
Paleontologist Julia Tejada of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues analyzed the chemical makeup of two amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, within the fossil hair of two giant ground sloth species: Darwin’s ground sloth (Mylodon darwinii) of South America and the Shasta ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) of North America. The team compared these with samples from living sloths, anteaters and other modern omnivores.
Science Daily
By 2500 Earth could be alien to humans: climate projections should not stop at year 2100
To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tropical, and India too hot to live in, according to a team of international scientists.
"We need to envision the Earth our children and grandchildren may face, and what we can do now to make it just and liveable for them," says Christopher Lyon, a Postdoctoral Researcher under the supervision of Professor Elena Bennett at McGill University. "If we fail to meet the Paris Agreement goals, and emissions keep rising, many places in the world will dramatically change."
The scientists ran global climate model projections based on time dependent projections of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations for low, medium, and high mitigation scenarios up to the year 2500. Their findings, published in Global Change Biology, reveal an Earth that is alien to humans.
Smoke from nuclear war would devastate ozone layer, alter climate
The massive columns of smoke generated by a nuclear war would alter the world's climate for years and devastate the ozone layer, endangering both human health and food supplies, new research shows.
The international study paints an even grimmer picture of a global nuclear war's aftermath than previous analyses. The research team used newly developed computer climate modeling techniques to learn more about the effects of a hypothetical nuclear exchange, including complex chemistry interactions in the stratosphere that influence the amounts of ultraviolet (UV) radiation that reach the planet's surface.
"In addition to all the fatalities that would happen almost immediately, the climate effects and the UV effects would be widespread," said lead author Charles Bardeen, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "These aren't local to where the war occurs. They're global, so they would affect all of us."
Scientific American
Beethoven's Unfinished 10th Symphony Brought to Life by Artificial Intelligence
Nearly 200 years after his death, the German composer’s musical scratch was pieced together by machine—with a lot of human help.
Every morning at five o’clock, composer Walter Werzowa would sit down at his computer to anticipate a particular daily e-mail. It came from six time zones away, where a team had been working all night (or day, rather) to draft Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony—almost two centuries after his death.
The e-mail contained hundreds of variations, and Werzowa listened to them all. “So by nine, 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s like I’m already in heaven,” he said.
Risk of Dangerous Heat Exposure Is Growing Quickly in Cities
Cities are famously sweltering places during heat waves, with pavement and buildings radiating heat back into the air and elevating temperatures compared to nearby rural areas. Add in global warming and an increasingly urban population, and you have a recipe for quickly ratcheting up the number of humans exposed to health-endangering heat. This exposure has tripled in recent decades—a faster rise than previous research suggested—a new study finds.
In what the authors say is a first, the study has produced a city-by-city breakdown of how much of that increased exposure is a consequence of population growth, and how much is from physical heating (a combination of climate change and the so-called urban heat island effect). The aim, the scientists say, is to help policy makers better target strategies to protect vulnerable people. “Our study is a jumping-off point to start helping those in need,” says co-author Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
Mongabay
Forest biomass-burning supply chain is producing major carbon emissions: Studies
Two new studies released this week — both aimed at influencing U.S., U.K. and E.U. policymakers in the runup to the November COP26 Scotland climate summit — conclude that the harvesting of trees to produce wood pellets in the United States and burning them for energy overseas is undermining the promised carbon emissions reduction targets urgently needed to slow the rate of global warming and prevent worsening climate change. […]
The studies, one produced by London policy institute Chatham House in tandem with the Woodwell Climate Research Center in the U.S., and the other created by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), make clear that national policy decisions in the U.S., U.K. and E.U. have resulted in biomass emissions not being recorded and counted all along the supply chain and at smokestacks in any of the parties’ annual greenhouse gas emission inventories reported under the Paris Agreement.
The result is an appearance that forest biomass production and burning is carbon neutral, which allows for an erroneous accounting by the U.S., U.K. and E.U. that will help them to hit their Net Zero emissions goals.
CNN
Venus may be a sweltering wasteland today, but scientists have questioned whether the planet was always so inhospitable. While previous studies suggested Venus might have once been covered in oceans, new research has found the opposite: Venus has likely never been able to support oceans.
Researchers also determined that a similar story could have played out on Earth as well had things been just a bit different. […]
They used climate models -- similar to what researchers use when simulating climate change on Earth -- to peer back in time at young Venus and Earth. Their new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Ars Technica
How a mass extinction resulted in the rise of the snakes
The doom of the dinosaurs was good news for snakes. According to new research, snake biodiversity began increasing shortly after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction—you know, the one brought about by a huge asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The asteroid caused around 75 percent of all species, and all of the non-avian dinosaurs, to go extinct.
But the impact gave primordial snake species opportunity and space to flourish, and they did. Currently, there are around 4,000 species of the elongated, legless reptiles. To study this evolutionary change, a team of researchers examined the diets of existing snake species to get a glimpse into the past. “After the K–Pg extinction, [snakes] just underwent this massive ecological explosion,” Michael Grundler, one of the paper’s authors and a post-doc researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, told Ars.
The proof’s in the poop: Austrians have loved beer, blue cheese for 2,700 years
Ancient Iron Age miners in what is now Austria were quite fond of beer and blue cheese, according to a new analysis, published in the journal Current Biology, of preserved paleo-poop. The researchers found evidence of two fungal species commonly used to produce blue cheese and beers, along with evidence that the miners' diet was particularly rich in carbohydrates in the form of cereal grains.
“Genome-wide analysis indicates that both fungi were involved in food fermentation and provide the first molecular evidence for blue cheese and beer consumption during Iron Age Europe,” said co-author Frank Maixner of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. "The miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry."