Overnight News Digest: Iceland is capturing CO2 from the air and storing it in basalt rock

Links and details below the fold.

743,011 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 221.2 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE

CBC News

In Iceland, can a revolutionary new process actually help stop global warming?

The blackened lava fields and billowing steam vents of an active volcano near Reykjavik, Iceland, are the backdrop for a new venture that could help change the global calculation on climate change.

The facility, known as Orca, captures carbon dioxide, or CO2, right out of the air — essentially scrubbing the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas… The [Climeworks] plant in Iceland is the largest of its kind in the world. […]

The fans draw in the air from outside and the CO2 molecules chemically attach to the filters. The filters are heated,  shaking loose the captured gas, which is piped off for the next part of the process… handled by Carbfix, a publicly owned Icelandic company that is part of the electrical utility. […]

There… the CO2 is mixed with water and injected 800 metres below into the volcanic rocks, where it disperses. Over months, it interacts chemically with the basalt rock and petrifies, turning to stone.

Climate change means Arctic may no longer be a safe haven for nesting birds

Wildlife research scientist Paul Smith is a lot like the birds he studies: every spring, when the ice recedes, he migrates north to the Arctic. But while he's been able to adapt to the changing climate, the nesting birds have not been so lucky in the face of new threats.

Historically, in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, when migratory birds would sit on their nests in June and July to incubate their eggs, polar bears were still out on the ice eating seals.

These days, Smith has witnessed an earlier ice melt that leads to bears coming to shore sooner. That means the birds' breeding ground becomes a snack bar.

"The bears are swimming onto islands where there are nesting colonies of birds, and gobbling up thousands of eggs," said Smith, who works for the National Wildlife Research Centre at Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The New York Times

Why Scientists Have Spent Years Mapping This Creature’s Brain

The brain of a fruit fly is the size of a poppy seed and about as easy to overlook.

“Most people, I think, don’t even think of the fly as having a brain,” said Vivek Jayaraman, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. “But, of course, flies lead quite rich lives.”

Flies are capable of sophisticated behaviors, including navigating diverse landscapes, tussling with rivals and serenading potential mates. And their speck-size brains are tremendously complex, containing some 100,000 neurons and tens of millions of connections, or synapses, between them.

Since 2014, a team of scientists at Janelia, in collaboration with researchers at Google, have been mapping these neurons and synapses in an effort to create a comprehensive wiring diagram, also known as a connectome, of the fruit fly brain.

Madagascar’s Got Talent: Lemurs That Sing With Rhythm

Our distant primate relative, the Indri indri, is a critically endangered species of lemur found only in Madagascar. These black-and-white primates are the weight of a small dog and look like a cross between a cat and a koala. And they sound — depending on whom you ask — like the shriek of a balloon quickly releasing air.

Andrea Ravignani, a cognitive biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, disagrees with the balloon part.

“Every scientific discipline has its concept of beauty, but I think their vocalizations are beautiful,” he said. “And also quite complex.”

Gizmodo

1,000-Year-Old Gold Mask Found in Tomb Was Painted With Human Blood

A team of researchers recently investigated the paint coating a 1,000-year-old gold mask taken from an elite tomb of a community in western Peru that is today known as the Sicán. They were intrigued to find that the bright red paint contained human blood.

The pigment that gave the paint its color was identified as cinnabar more than 30 years ago, but the binder—the stuff that makes pigment spread and stick to a surface—remained a mystery. The interdisciplinary team took a sample of the paint and analyzed its proteomics, or its constituent proteins, by mapping the sample’s elements to a protein database. They turned up proteins from bird egg and human blood, as well as human saliva, keratin, and skin; their research was published last month in the Journal of Proteome Research.

“Blood proteins appeared in the first search against all natural proteins, which led to a search against the blood database, which yielded a match against chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes),” said Luciana Carvalho, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford specializing in organic residues on metal objects, in an email to Gizmodo. “As chimps are not found in Peru, we conducted a search against human blood protein database, which provided perfect matches.”

La Palma’s Volcanic Ash Spreads Across Atlantic

The European Space Agency released fascinating imagery last week showing how the ash plume from the La Palma volcano eruption is charging westward across the Atlantic Ocean. The ash is passing through the atmosphere right at the tail end of peak hurricane season.

Considering that things have been (blessedly) quiet in the Atlantic for the past few weeks with regards to hurricanes, it makes sense to wonder about La Palma’s impact on hurricane season. While the ash is certainly something that can slow down hurricane season, we likely have other factors to blame, though.

Nature

The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and the complexity that in the evenings I would just watch them like I would watch a documentary,” recalls Kukulski, a biochemist at the University of Bern, Switzerland. […]

Every peek through the microscope is another chance to explore uncharted cellular terrain, says Grant Jensen, a structural biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “There’s definitely a great joy in being able to see something for the first time,” he says.

DNA reveals surprise ancestry of mysterious Chinese mummies

Since their discovery a century ago, hundreds of naturally preserved mummies found in China’s Tarim Basin have been a mystery to archaeologists. Some thought the Bronze Age remains were from migrants from thousands of kilometres to the west, who had brought farming practices to the area. But now, a genomic analysis suggests they were indigenous people who may have adopted agricultural methods from neighbouring groups.

As they report today in Nature, researchers have traced the ancestry of these early Chinese farmers to Stone Age hunter-gatherers who lived in Asia some 9,000 years ago. They seem to have been genetically isolated, but despite this had learnt to raise livestock and grow grains in the same way as other groups.

The study hints at “the really diverse ways in which populations move and don’t move, and how ideas can spread with, but also through, populations”, says co-author Christina Warinner, a molecular archaeologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Atlantic

After 30 Years of Breeding Condors, a Secret Comes Out

When you get to be as endangered as the California condor, your sex life becomes a highly public affair. Since 1983, when the number of California condors in existence was a mere 22, biologists have been carefully breeding the birds in captivity. They kept track of who mated with whom, how many offspring they had, and when those offspring were released into the wild. All of this is logged in the official California-condor “studbook.”

So it was quite a shock when, a few years ago, scientists conducting DNA tests as part of routine research found two condors with unexpected paternity. These two birds—known by their studbook numbers as SB260 and SB517—were not related to the fathers recorded in the studbook. Actually, they had no fathers at all. A full 100 percent of their DNA had come from their respective mothers. “We were confronted with this inexplicable data set,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

The only possible explanation was a strange one: The eggs that produced these two condors must have essentially fertilized themselves without any sperm. The phenomenon is known as parthenogenesis or, colloquially, “virgin birth.” (The two mothers in this case weren’t technically virgins; they had previously produced normal chicks with the male they were housed with. As I said, not much sexual privacy when you’re a California condor.) Parthenogenesis has been studied in other birds, like turkeys and chickens. It’s also been documented in snakes, lizards, sharks, rays, and bony fish—both in captivity and more recently in the wild. Many of these discoveries were accidental, and all of these accidents have scientists wondering if parthenogenesis is not as rare as once thought.

The Chile Capital of the World Is Running Out of Water

In the village of Hatch, New Mexico, at a chile shop cloaked in red ristras—the ornamental strings of chiles that adorn many doorways and windows in the state—Jessie Moreno, the young farmer who owns the store, tallies up sales, offers free samples, and cranks an iron basket-topped chile roaster.

“This little festival is like a gold mine for us,” said Moreno, 21, gesturing toward three hissing chile roasters. A smoky, pungent aroma rose from the tumbling specimens of Capsicum annuum and permeated the air. The town’s annual Hatch Chile Festival bolstered sales for two days, attracting about 15,000 chile connoisseurs and hobbyists from as far away as West Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida, in a welcome boost after last year’s pandemic-caused hiatus. Even so, Moreno and other local farmers couldn’t help worrying about the crop’s uncertain future and its profitability.

The continued drought and an unprecedented workforce shortage worsened by the coronavirus pandemic have rattled the agribusiness that is central to the state’s identity, says Stephanie Walker, a chile specialist at the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, one of a handful of research centers in the world dedicated to the plant. “We’re definitely at a breaking point now.”

Popular Science

The oil and gas industry knew about climate change in the 1950s

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change—and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.

I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear.

What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world. […]

I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

BBC News

Human activity makes forests emit carbon

Ten of the world's most protected forests have become net emitters of carbon, as they are degraded by human activity and climate change. The alarming insight is from a study of  planet-warming gases emitted from and absorbed by forests in Unesco World Heritage sites.

It revealed 10  protected forests had emitted more carbon than they locked away over the past 20 years. World heritage forests span an area twice the size of Germany. […]

In recent years, what Unesco called "unprecedented wildfires", notably in Siberia, the US and Australia, have generated tens of millions of tonnes of CO2.

"It's a vicious cycle," Dr Carvalho Resende said. "More carbon emissions means more wildfires, which means more carbon emissions."

And wildfires are not the only climate-related threat.

Phys.org

Honeybees use social distancing to protect themselves against parasites

Honeybees increase social distancing when their hive is under threat from a parasite, finds a new study led by an international team involving researchers at UCL and the University of Sassari, Italy.

The study, published in Science Advances, demonstrated that honeybee colonies respond to infestation from a harmful mite by modifying the use of space and the interactions between nestmates to increase the social distance between young and old bees.

Co-author Dr. Alessandro Cini (UCL Center for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said: "Here we have provided the first evidence that honeybees modify their social interactions and how they move around their hive in response to a common parasite.

Plastic-eating bacteria could help aid global recycling efforts

Bacteria which have been shown to degrade and assimilate plastic, has been a key area of international research since 2016. Now a University of Manchester-based team of scientists have made a biotechnological breakthrough which may help humans to call on engineered bacteria cells to reduce our plastic waste. […]

Part of the reason plastic is difficult to break down is its chemical structure, which is made up of monomers—small molecules which are bonded together to form polymers. To date there have been many studies on the ability of bacteria to degrade PET plastic down into the constituent monomers. However, there has been limited study on the ability of these bacteria to recognize and uptake the corresponding monomers into their cells.

In new research published today in the journal, Nature Communications, researchers from The Manchester Institute of Biotechnology studied the recognition potential of a key protein involved in cellular uptake of the monomer terephthalate (TPA), by the solute binding protein TphC.

The Guardian

Climate experts warn world leaders 1.5C is ‘real science’, not just talking point

The 1.5C temperature limit to be discussed by world leaders at critical meetings this weekend is a vital physical threshold for the planet’s climate, and not an arbitrary political construct that can be haggled over, leading climate scientists have warned.

World leaders are meeting in Rome and Glasgow over the next four days to thrash out a common approach aimed at holding global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the lower of two limits set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

But some countries are unwilling to peg their emissions plans to the tougher goal, as it would require more urgent efforts. They prefer to consider long-term goals such as net zero by 2050.

Human species who lived 500,000 years ago named as Homo bodoensis

Researchers have announced the naming of a newly discovered species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis.

The species lived in Africa about 500,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene age, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans, according to scientists. The name bodoensis derives from a skull found in Bodo D’ar in the Awash River valley of Ethiopia.

Scientists said that the epoch is significant because it was when anatomically contemporary humans, Homo sapiens, appeared in Africa and the Neanderthals, known as Homo neanderthalensis, in Europe.

However, some paleoanthropologists have described this period as “the muddle in the middle” because human evolution during this age is poorly understood.

Science

‘If it’s alive, it sleeps.’ Brainless creatures shed light on why we slumber

Dive among the kelp forests of the Southern California coast and you may spot orange puffball sponges (Tethya californiana)—creatures that look like the miniature pumpkins used for pies. No researchers paid them much mind until 2017, when William Joiner, a neuroscientist at the University of California (UC), San Diego, decided to look into whether sponges take naps.

That’s not as silly a question as it seems. Over the past few years, studies in worms, jellyfish, and hydra have challenged the long-standing idea that sleep is unique to creatures with brains. Now, “The real frontier is finding an animal that sleeps that doesn’t have neurons at all,” says David Raizen, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Perelman School of Medicine. Sponges, some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth, fit that description. To catch one snoozing could upend researchers’ definition of sleep and their understanding of its purpose.

Scientists have often defined sleep as temporary loss of consciousness, orchestrated by the brain and for the brain’s benefit. That makes studying sleep in brainless creatures controversial… But others in the field are pushing for a much more inclusive view: that sleep evolved not with modern vertebrates as previously assumed, but perhaps a half-billion years ago when the first animals appeared. 

Why do dogs tilt their heads? New study offers clues

Of all the cute things dogs do, cocking their head to one side while they look at you may be the most endearing. Yet surprisingly little research has looked into why they do it. Now, a new study of “gifted” canines—those capable of quickly memorizing multiple toy names—shows they often tilt their heads before correctly retrieving a specific toy. That suggests the behavior might be a sign of concentration and recall in our canine pals, the team suggests.

The researchers stumbled upon their find by chance while conducting a study of “gifted word learner” dogs. Most dogs can’t memorize the names of even two toys, but these talented pups—all border collies—could recall and retrieve at least 10 toys they had been taught the names of. One overachiever named Whisky correctly retrieved 54 out of 59 toys he had learned to identify.

Over the course of several months, the researchers tested the dogs’ abilities to learn and recall labels for toys, comparing their skills with those of 33 “typical” dogs. Owners placed toys in another room and asked for them by name. Only the seven gifted dogs were able to rapidly learn and remember names. But these dogs shared something else in common: the head tilt.

The pattern was too consistent to be pure coincidence, says Andrea Sommese, an animal behavior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University who led the study. “So we decided to dig into it.”

Science Daily

Twenty-four trillion pieces of microplastics in the ocean and counting

[…] A global team of oceanographers led by Kyushu University researchers has calibrated and processed data from these expeditions to build a publicly available dataset for more accurately assessing the abundance of microplastics -- and their long-term trends -- in the world's oceans. […]

Categorized as small pieces of degraded plastic less than five millimeters in size, microplastics can travel thousands of miles in the open sea and, depending on their degradation, remain at various depths of the ocean surface. […]

The team estimates there are 24.4 trillion pieces of microplastics in the world's upper oceans, with a combined weight of 82,000 to 578,000 tons -- or the equivalent of roughly 30 billion 500-ml plastic water bottles.

Meanders in river beds help the climate

River beds that can shift naturally are more efficient carbon sinks than straightened rivers.

It takes about 8500 years for a grain of sand from the Andes to be washed across the Argentine lowlands into the Río Paraná. The 1200-kilometer journey in the river called Río Bermejo is interrupted by many stops in river floodplains, where the grain is deposited, sometimes over thousands of years, and then washed free again. The sand is accompanied by organic carbon, washed in from soil and plants. The transport in water thus gains relevance for the climate: Rivers carry the carbon, which was previously removed from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, as sediment into the sea, where it is stored for thousands of years without harming the climate.

Researchers at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have now quantified the individual processes of the journey for the first time and report on them in the journal Nature Geoscience. An important result of the work: It is in particular undisturbed meandering sections of a river where carbon is deposited and reabsorbed, and then transported further into the sea. In river sections with straight, stable banks, on the other hand, only the suspended particle load passes through, while the carbon in the river floodplains is slowly decomposed again to CO2 by microorganisms.

The Washington Post

Sitting Bull’s great-grandson identified through DNA from 130-year-old hair

The great-grandson of Sitting Bull, the famed Lakota leader, has been identified through a novel method of analyzing DNA of long-dead people by examining the 19th-century Native American legend’s hair, researchers announced Wednesday.

The results, published in the journal Science Advances, conclude Ernie LaPointe, 73, of South Dakota, is the closest living descendant of Sitting Bull, who died more than 130 years ago. […]

LaPointe, of Lead, S.D., said he felt vindicated by the study’s results after speaking out about his relationship to Sitting Bull for years. The findings could also help LaPointe in his ongoing fight to move Sitting Bull’s remains from his burial site in Mobridge, S.D., to another location the descendant says would have more of a significant connection to the culture he represented.

Archaeologists unearth ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ discovery of complete Roman statues in U.K.

In a small village in southeast England, at an abandoned medieval church along a high-speed railway, archaeologists have made what they call an “astonishing” discovery: complete Roman busts of a man and a woman, as well as another statue of the head of a child.

“This site has not stopped surprising us the whole way through,” said lead archaeologist Rachel Wood. One find was already rare, she said in a video release, but “to have found two complete ones with a third head is just utterly remarkable for us as archaeologists.”

The statues are “exceptionally well preserved,” Wood said in a statement. “You really get an impression of the people they depict — literally looking into the faces of the past is a unique experience.”

England was a part of the Roman empire from AD 43 to about AD 410.

Space.com

A NASA spacecraft just saw the north pole of Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, for the first time

We finally know what the north pole of Jupiter's moon Europa looks like, from a distance.

The distant view from NASA's Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter captures the previously unseen region of the icy moon, which has water vapor apparently arising from plumes and which may have habitable conditions in its ocean.

The image was taken from nearly 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) away while Juno was performing its primary mission to examine Jupiter's atmosphere. The resolution is admittedly quite rough, as individual pixels are rendered at roughly 31 to 37 miles (50 to 60 km) each. But you can see changes in the albedo, or light reflectivity, on an otherwise very bright moon.

A NASA spacecraft just saw the north pole of Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, for the first time https://t.co/X05AQbKRXspic.twitter.com/hDmt3DZw4c

— SPACE.com (@SPACEdotcom) October 30, 2021

The Scientist

The Genes Vampires Lost

ampire bats have an extravagant diet. As their name suggests, they feed exclusively on blood from other animals that they hunt in the dark. Getting all of their nutrients from this gory source is not easy, though. Blood is rich in protein, but notably light on fat and sugars. Previous studies, including an earlier reference genome, have sought to understand how vampire bats adapted to live off this peculiar diet, but an analysis of a new, even more complete and accurate genome sequence for the species, uploaded as a preprint to bioRxiv October 19, lends new insights into this question.

Comparing the newly assembled, reference-quality genome of the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus)—one of the three extant vampire bat species—to 25 genomes for other kinds of bats revealed 13 genes that were missing exclusively in this species. These losses may have contributed to the vampire bats’ preference and ability to dine on blood and to other traits, such as their remarkable cognitive aptitudes. […]

The new analysis, which has not yet undergone peer review, compared D. rotundus with 25 bat species, 16 more than were available at the time of the previous genome sequence. In particular, the new study included six recently sequenced species from the vampire bat’s family, the leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae).

The Conversation

Dune: we simulated the desert planet of Arrakis to see if humans could survive there

Dune, the epic series of sci-fi books by Frank Herbert, now turned into a movie of the same name, is set in the far future on the desert planet of Arrakis. Herbert outlined a richly-detailed world that, at first glance, seems so real we could imagine ourselves within it.

However, if such a world did exist, what would it actually be like?

We are scientists with specific expertise in climate modelling, so we simulated the climate of Arrakis to find out. We wanted to know if the physics and environment of such a world would stack up against a real climate model.

Ars Technica

Spiders are much smarter than you think

People tend to associate intelligence with brain size. And as a general guideline, this makes sense: more brain cells, more mental capabilities. Humans, and many of the other animals we’ve come to think of as unusually bright, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, all have large brains. And it’s long been assumed that the smallest brains simply don’t have the capacity to support complex mental processes. But what if they do?

The vast majority of Earth’s animal species are rather small, and a vanishingly small portion of them have been studied at all, much less by cognition researchers. But the profile of one group of diminutive animals is rapidly rising as scientists discover surprisingly sophisticated behaviors among them.

“There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.”

Behaviors that can be described as “cognitive,” as opposed to automatic responses, could be fairly common among spiders, says Dimitrov, coauthor of a study on spider diversity published in the 2021 Annual Review of Entomology. From orb weavers that adjust the way they build their webs based on the type of prey they are catching to ghost spiders that can learn to associate a reward with the smell of vanilla, there’s more going on in spider brains than they commonly get credit for.