Here are some of this week’s science stories:
- Satellites might be able to be used to save ecosystems.
- NASA spacecraft will slam into asteroid in first planetary-defense test.
- Watch video of the Ingenuity helicopter zooming over Mars taken by Perseverance rover.
- Amazon deforestation unexpectedly surges 22% to highest level since 2006.
- The plague is more likely now due to climate change.
- Evidence found of genetic evolution in Europeans over the past several thousand years.
- Researchers struggle to save from extinction North America’s smallest rabbit, the Columbia basin pygmy rabbit.
- A 30-year-old Argentine woman may have cured herself of the HIV virus.
- Odd Martian meteorites are traced back to largest volcanic structure in the solar system.
- What will happen with invasive species in space?
Links and details below the fold.
This is an open thread. Everyone is encouraged to share articles, stories, and tweets in your comments.
770,193 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 196.1 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. ARE FULLY VACCINATED
Science
Jeannine Cavender-Bares began her scientific career with her hands in the dirt… In forest plots across the southeastern United States, she planted acorns to study how local conditions affect photosynthesis and growth of different oak species. She froze the seedlings’ stems to study how they transport water to leaves and climbed into the forest canopy to measure gases emitted by mature trees.
But such studies could only provide a snapshot of one forest at a time. To get the big picture of forests around the world, Cavender-Bares has sought a higher vantage. Now a plant ecologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Cavender-Bares has devised ways to translate light measured by spectrometers flown over forests into insights about their health and resilience. She and others have found this light, captured from an airplane or satellite, holds clues to intimate details such as photosynthesis levels, the genetic diversity of the trees, and even the microbial inhabitants of the soil they grow in.
Such remote sensing methods are not only revolutionizing how scientists such as Cavender-Bares study ecosystems, they’re also poised to become powerful new tools in the fight to protect them. Over the past year scientists have gathered to revise the most important international treaty aimed at conservation, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). With the loss of plant and animal species accelerating, some researchers say conservation efforts should turn to remote sensing to monitor biodiversity in near–real time across wide swaths of the globe—and help policymakers prioritize the most critical areas.
Europe’s declining butterflies find new refuge: old quarries and coal mines
It’s not every day that mining wins acclaim for its ecological benefits. But a new study suggests rock quarries in northern Germany have become wildlife refuges for Europe’s silver-studded blue butterfly, whose meadow habitat has been in severe decline for the past 100 years.
“It’s a bit unusual that quarries are a good thing,” muses Martin Warren, an ecologist at Butterfly Conservation Europe, who was not part of the research. The discovery is emblematic of the problems facing butterflies across Central and Western Europe—and it’s an argument to keep limestone quarries operational, some scientists say.
Nature
NASA spacecraft will slam into asteroid in first planetary-defence test
NASA is about to launch a multimillion-dollar spacecraft — and slam it into an asteroid. Rather than being a catastrophic error, however, it will be the first test of a way to protect Earth from killer asteroids.
The asteroid that NASA is smashing into, called Dimorphos, is not a threat to Earth. But researchers want to see whether they can change its trajectory, long before they might need to use such a strategy to deflect a truly dangerous asteroid.
“The odds of something large enough to be a problem, that we would have to deflect, are pretty slim in our lifetimes,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) in Laurel, Maryland, which built the spacecraft for NASA. “But sometimes your number comes up when you don’t expect it, and it’s good to have an insurance policy.”
Space.com
Watch Ingenuity Mars helicopter soar in amazing new videos from Perseverance rover
Ingenuity performed its 13th Martian flight on Sept. 4, cruising through the rugged "Séítah" region of the Red Planet's Jezero Crater on a scouting mission for its robotic companion, NASA's Perseverance rover.
During the 160-second flight, Ingenuity covered about 689 feet (210 meters) of horizontal distance, reached a maximum altitude of 26 feet (8 m) and performed a number of tricky maneuvers. For example, the rotorcraft snapped photos from multiple angles of an intriguing rocky outcrop that the Perseverance team may want to explore, Ingenuity team members said.
Mongabay
DNA assessment confirms Gabon as last stronghold of forest elephants
A new study has found that the small nation of Gabon is the “last stronghold” for the critically endangered African forest elephant.
Researchers reached this conclusion after conducting a DNA-based population assessment of forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) across Gabon, which involved extracting genetic material from fresh elephant dung. The results, published Nov. 18 in Global Ecology and Conservation, suggest there are more than 95,000 forest elephants present throughout the country, which represents about 60-70% of the species’ global population.
“Gabon has definitely experienced some poaching … particularly in the border area with Cameroon in the northeast of the country,” study co-author Emma Stokes, regional director for Central Africa at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), told Mongabay in a phone interview. “I guess we were quietly confident that the population status of elephants in the rest of the country was reasonably good. But I would say this [survey result] was definitely as good as we could have hoped for.”
Amazon deforestation unexpectedly surges 22% to highest level since 2006
Deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest surged 22% to the highest level since 2006, according to official data released today by the Brazilian government.
Preliminary analysis of satellite data by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE shows that 13,235 square kilometers (5,110 square miles) of rainforest — an area nearly the size the land area of the state of Maryland or the country Montenegro — was cleared in the Brazilian Amazon between August 1, 2020 and July 31, 2021. Last year, 10,851 square kilometers of forest were chopped down.
The sharp increase came as a surprise: Data from INPE’s near-real-time deforestation alert system had set expectations for a modest year-over-year decline in the rate of forest destruction, though independent monitoring by Imazon, a Brazilian NGO, suggested Brazil’s forest loss would rise substantially.
Gizmodo
The Plague Is More Likely Now Thanks to Climate Change
The risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the western U.S. has increased since 1950 thanks to climate change, a new study has found. Importantly, the research gives valuable insights into how this deadly disease has historically moved and developed in the U.S., which can help us understand more about its future.
The Search for Life Around Alpha Centauri Just Took a Major Leap Forward
Our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light-years from Earth, which is super close from a cosmological perspective but achingly far from a human point of view. A new telescope promises to bring this intriguing star system, and any habitable planets it holds, into closer view.
The new mission, called TOLIMAN, was announced today in a press release. TOLIMAN is the ancient Arabic name for Alpha Centauri—the closest star system to Earth—but it’s also an acronym for Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood. Once in space, astronomers will use the orbital observatory to search for potentially habitable exoplanets around Alpha Centauri.
The Guardian
First known Covid case was Wuhan market vendor, says scientist
The first known Covid-19 case was a vendor at the live-animal market in Wuhan, according to a scientist who has scrutinised public accounts of the earliest cases in China.
The chronology is at odds with a timeline laid out in an influential World Health Organization (WHO) report, which suggested an accountant with no apparent link to the Hunan market was the first known case.
The latest report adds weight to the theory that the virus originated from wildlife sold at the market, rather than as a leak from a Wuhan virology lab, and raises questions about how the apparent error was overlooked in the joint WHO-China inquiry.
The report, by Michael Worobey, the head of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, will reignite the debate about the origins of the pandemic, which remains unresolved and continues to fuel tensions between China and the US.
Farmers tempt endangered cranes back – by growing their favourite food
Several years ago, I counted more than 300 cranes in the wetlands near my rice field,” says farmer Khean Khoay, as he reminisces about the regal-looking eastern sarus crane. Khoay’s village, Koh Chamkar in Kampot province, lies on the outskirts of the Anlung Pring protected landscape in south-west Cambodia, in the fertile and biodiverse Mekong delta.
The region has been enriched by centuries of silt deposited by the Mekong, the longest river in south-east Asia and a lifeline for millions who depend on its resources. But as more and more land is converted for agriculture and aquaculture, and the impacts of the climate crisis, such as erosion and saltwater intrusion, are felt, the area’s wildlife has become increasingly threatened.
Among the birds affected are the cranes that once visited the land near Khoay’s rice field in large numbers. NatureLife Cambodia, BirdLife International’s partner in the country, says only 91 eastern sarus cranes visited Anlung Pring this year. The future of these birds may lie in the hands of 16 farmers from Koh Chamkar village, including Khoay, who lease their land to NatureLife.
The Atlantic
Maybe Don’t Blow Up Satellites in Space
The astronauts were still asleep when NASA called the International Space Station. “Hey, Mark, good morning. Sorry for the early call,” a mission controller said in the early hours of Monday morning, speaking with Mark Vande Hei, one of four NASA astronauts on board. But the astronauts needed to get up, mission control said calmly, and move to the spacecraft docked to the station. They needed to be prepared to potentially escape and head back to Earth. This was an emergency.
NASA had just received word that a satellite had shattered into pieces. The cloud of debris was about to pass dangerously close to the space station, and everyone on board—four American astronauts, two Russian cosmonauts, and one German astronaut—had to hunker down.
The satellite, it turned out, was a Soviet machine from the 1980s. Russia had decided to blow it up in a test of the country’s anti-satellite technology. When the missile strike destroyed the satellite, the impact produced more than 1,500 fragments large enough to be tracked with military resources, and likely hundreds of thousands more too small to detect.
The Nature Conservancy
A Big Plan to Save a Tiny Rabbit
[…] With bodies about the size of a mango, they are North America’s smallest rabbit species, and among the only ones to dig their own burrows.
For thousands of years, these rabbits have lived on the Columbia Plateau, which stretches across eastern Washington and Oregon and into Idaho. Under normal circumstances, they play a critical role in the local food chain: They feast on the plateau’s pungent sagebrush for at least half of their diet, and in turn raptors, weasels and coyotes feast on them.
But human presence has battered their existence. The rabbits’ native habitat has been fragmented by development and farming. In 2001, biologists monitoring the rabbits could only find one colony, landing the species on the federal endangered species list. With fewer than 50 individuals left, the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit was a whisker away from extinction.
In the last two decades, hopeful state and federal wildlife biologists, rabbit fans, farmers and ranchers, conservation research zoos, and nonprofits have all come together to give the rabbits a fighting chance against seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s not easy—even when the species they’re trying to save can breed like, well, rabbits.
Phys.org
Evidence found of genetic evolution in Europeans over past several thousand years
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has found evidence of natural selection based evolutionary changes to people living in Europe over the past two to three thousand years. In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes their comparative study of people living in the U.K. today, with those living across Europe over the past several thousand years.
Noting that few studies have been conducted with the goal of learning more about evolutionary changes in people living in relatively modern times, the researchers designed a study that was meant to learn more about how natural selection has impacted people living in Europe over the past several thousand years. […]
In looking at the data, the researchers found evolution at work in 755 genes related to the traits they had selected over the past 2,000 to 3,000 years—and they included skin pigmentation, dietary traits and body measurements. All three traits were found to be under near constant selection pressure, leading to near constant changes to the genome.
Antarctic ice sheet destabilized within a decade
After the natural warming that followed the last Ice Age, there were repeated periods when masses of icebergs broke off from Antarctica into the Southern Ocean. A new data-model study led by the University of Bonn (Germany) now shows that it took only a decade to initiate this tipping point in the climate system, and that ice mass loss then continued for many centuries. Accompanying modeling studies suggest that today's accelerating Antarctic ice mass loss also represents such a tipping point, which could lead to irreversible and long-lasting ice retreat and global sea level rise. The study has now been published in the journal Nature Communications. […]
The team took sediment cores from the deep ocean in 3.5 km water depth from the area, dated the natural climate archive and counted the ice-rafted debris.
The scientists identified eight phased with high amounts of debris which they interpret as retreat phases of the Antarctic Ice Sheet after the Last Glacial Maximum about 19,000 to 9,000 years ago, when climate warmed and Antarctica shed masses of icebergs repeatedly into the ocean. The result of the new data-model study: each such phase destabilized the ice sheet within a decade and contributed to global sea-level rise for centuries to a millennium. The subsequent re-stabilization was equally rapidly within a decade.
CBC News
Eugenia Kuyda started building the Replika app when she was grieving.
After her best friend Roman was killed in a hit-and-run car accident, Kuyda found herself reading through the text messages they'd exchanged. Contained in those messages were some of the things that made Roman who he was, including his unique turns of phrase and sense of humour.
She wondered what would happen if she fed all of her conversations with Roman into an AI program for a chatbot to learn from.
"I found myself looking at these old text messages that we exchanged throughout our friendship, and it struck me all of a sudden that, you know, I have all these texts. What if I could build a chatbot so I could actually text him and get something back?" she says…
The Washington Post
A woman’s own body may have cured her of HIV, study finds
A 30-year-old Argentine woman appears to have become the second documented person whose body may have eliminated her HIV on its own, a study says.
Scans of more than 1 billion of the woman’s cells detected no viable virus, even though for most of the time she was not undergoing antiretroviral therapy meant to keep the virus from replicating. The finding raises the possibility that a person’s own immune system may in rare cases provide a sterilizing cure — the elimination of virus capable of copying itself — the researchers wrote.
“What happened is unique,” said Steven Deeks, an HIV researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not that she’s controlling the virus, which we do see, but that there’s no virus there, which is quite different.”
Scientific American
Half of the World’s Coastal Sewage Pollution Flows from Few Dozen Places
All around the world, sewage gushes out of pipes into rivers and the sea, threatening the health of humans and aquatic ecosystems. Though some individual sites have long been known to be major sources of coastal pollution, “we’ve never had a global understanding of how big the problem is,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He and his colleagues took a broad look at the issue by calculating the amounts of fecal pathogens and nitrogen—which can fuel harmful algal blooms and create oxygen-deprived dead zones—flushed into the ocean in human wastewater at nearly 135,000 sites around the world. They found that they could attribute about half of the nitrogen pollution to just 25 locations and that around half of the pathogens also came from 25 sources, in some cases the same ones.
The researchers say these findings, published this week in PLOS One, could inform international collaborations and help policy makers choose the most effective sewage treatment strategies for contaminated areas.
New Mineral Discovered in Deep-Earth Diamond
A diamond that formed deep in the earth’s mantle contains a mineral never seen before in nature. The discovery is a rare glimpse into the deep mantle and may help reveal new information about the structure of the planet at depths of more than 660 kilometers. This, in turn, can help geologists better understand how the mantle controls the earth’s plate tectonics.
The mineral, calcium silicate perovskite, only forms under the incredibly high pressures that occur deep in the earth. The newly identified sample likely formed between 660 and 900 km below the planet’s surface, says mineralogist Oliver Tschauner of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Though the mineral had previously been synthesized in the laboratory using 20 gigapascals of pressure (almost 200,000 times atmospheric pressure), it had immediately reverted to a different form when it was removed from that artificial high-pressure environment. So researchers had assumed it would be impossible to retrieve naturally occurring calcium silicate perovskite from the mantle. “The chances, we thought, of finding it were so low that we never really actively looked for it,” Tschauner says.
LiveScience
Wonderland of iridescent worms and hydrothermal vents found off Mexican coast
In the Gulf of California, off the coast of La Paz, Mexico, lies a mysterious world where searing hot water spews out of 80-foot-tall (24 meters) mounds and iridescent worms inch along the seafloor. Scientists recently discovered this hydrothermal wonderland, and as they explored the area, they also found at least six potential new animal species that haven't been seen before.
The international team, which included scientists from both the U.S. and Mexico, conducted the recent expedition aboard a 272-foot-long (83 m) research vessel called the Falkor, according to a statement from the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI). From the ship, the team deployed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), named SuBastian, to collect samples of hydrothermal vent fluid, mud, rocks and marine life and to take ultra-high definition videos. And using a sonar system on the ship, the team mapped out regions of the seafloor that will be explored more closely on future cruises.
Scientists figure out what happens to Earth's disappearing crust
Like a giant broken-up cookie whose pieces float atop a sea of scalding milk, Earth's outer shell is made of (less-tasty) rocky rafts that constantly bump into and dive beneath each other in a process called plate tectonics.
So what happens to those hunks of disappearing crust as they dive into Earth's milky interior?
It turns out that they get weak and bendy, like a slinky snake toy, but they don't disintegrate completely, new modeling shows. The models also suggested that plate tectonics, at least in its modern form, likely only got going in the past billion years. […]
The findings were published Nov. 10 in the journal Nature.
National Geographic
Odd Martian meteorites traced back to largest volcanic structure in the solar system
About a million years ago, an asteroid smacked into the normally tranquil surface of Mars. The impact released a fountain of debris, and some of the rocky fragments pierced the sky, escaping the planet’s gravity to journey through the dark.
Some of the rocks eventually found their way to Earth and survived the plunge through our planet’s atmosphere to thud into the surface–including a hefty 15-pound shard that crashed into Morocco in 2011. Now known to scientists as the depleted shergottites, this collection of more than a dozen space rocks makes up an intriguing portion of the 317 known Martian meteorites—the only material from Mars we have on Earth.
Determining what part of Mars these meteorites came from is a critical part of piecing together the planet’s history—but it’s proven to be a major scientific challenge.
Ars Technica
We know what invasive species can do on Earth—what about in space?
The Beresheet crash landed on Earth's Moon in 2019. Part of the ill-fated Israeli lunar lander's payload was a bunch of tardigrades, or "water bears." These organisms are under a millimeter long and can survive extreme cold and radiation by expelling nearly all their moisture before entering a nearly death-like state. The Beresheet tardigrades may have survived the crash and could, potentially, be resurrected by being reintroduced to water.
The tardigrades—sometimes called moss piglets—are safely asleep and probably not running amok on the surface of the Moon. But, in general, scientists, governments, and space agencies around the world agree that bringing Earth's life to extraterrestrial locales, or vice versa, isn't great.
A new paper builds on the growing body of literature about this cosmic no-no and draws on the burgeoning field of invasion science—the research of how, on Earth, non-native species spread to and alter new locations. The zebra mussel's spread across North America through its ability to outcompete native species is a classic example.
Keeping science reproducible in a world of custom code and data
It is often said that the difference between science and superstition is that science is reproducible. Unfortunately, many scientific papers aren't, making them about as reliable as superstition.
Since the mid-1600s, the output from a typical scientific study has been an essay-style journal article describing the results. But today, in fields ranging from astronomy to microbiology, much of the technical work for a journal article involves writing code to manipulate data sets. If the data and code are not available, other researchers can't reproduce the original authors' work and, more importantly, may not be able to build upon the work to explore new methods and discoveries.
Thanks to cultural shifts and funding requirements, more researchers are warming up to open data and open code. Even 100-year-old journals like the Quarterly Journal of Economics or the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society now require authors to provide replication materials—including data and code—with any quantitative paper. Some researchers welcome the new paradigm and see the value in pushing science forward via deeper collaboration. But others feel the burden of learning to use distribution-related tools like Git, Docker, Jupyter, and other not-quite words.