Here are some of this week’s science stories:
- Scientists from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine are sharing their cheap, easily-stored, effective COVID-19 vaccine.
- Oregon health officials report a hospital outbreak of the potential deadly superbug yeast known as Candida auris.
- The Webb telescope launched successfully.
- Militias in the U.S. are becoming more violent and extreme, according to research.
- Airborne DNA from plants could reveal invasive species and show the impact of climate change.
- Great Britain got half of its genes from France 3,000 Years Ago.
- Egypt digitally “unwrapped” the mummy of Pharaoh Amenhotep I, without disturbing his funerary.
- Less ice in the Arctic could mean more wildfires in the United States.
- California's wildfires threaten to destroy the last remaining sequoia forests.
- Physicists captured, quantified the sound of champagne’s effervescence.
Links and details below the fold.
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Gizmodo
Texas Scientists Are Sharing the Design for Their New, Cheap Covid-19 Vaccine
Despite some truly important medical advances this year, the covid-19 pandemic is far from over, both in the U.S. and even more so in poorer countries with low vaccination rates. But there is hope on the immediate horizon. Cheap, easily stored, and effective covid-19 vaccines are set to be mass-produced and distributed around the world soon enough. That includes one particularly promising vaccine developed by Texas researchers that was just authorized in India this week.
On Tuesday, Indian health regulators granted an emergency use authorization to the Corbevax vaccine, created by scientists from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine. The vaccine was further developed and tested in partnership with the Indian pharmaceutical company Biological E, which will handle the local production of the vaccine. Clinical trials have shown that Corbevax is safe and estimates indicate that it’s more than 90% effective against the original form of the coronavirus, as well as more than 80% effective against the Delta variant.
Deadly Superbug Yeast Sickens Patients at Oregon Hospital
A hard-to-kill, occasionally deadly fungus has once again popped up in a U.S. hospital. This week, Oregon health officials reported a hospital outbreak of the hardy fungus known as Candida auris. Though C. auris infections remain rare in the U.S., its presence seems to be growing, with these being the first ever reported cases in the state.
The outbreak so far includes three patients at Seattle and Salem Hospital, according to the Oregon Health Authority and Department of Human Services. The first infection was discovered December 11, involving a patient who had “recent international health care exposures.” The other two patients hadn’t traveled recently but could have been exposed to the first patient, indicating local transmission within the hospital. The last case was confirmed Monday, just a day before Oregon health officials announced their investigation into the outbreak.
C. auris is a relatively new threat that may have only recently evolved to harm humans.
Nature
Webb telescope blasts off successfully — launching a new era in astronomy
The James Webb Space Telescope — humanity’s biggest gamble yet in its quest to probe the Universe — soared into space on 25 December, marking the culmination of decades of work by astronomers around the world. But for Webb to begin a new era in astronomy, as many scientists hope it will, hundreds of complex engineering steps will have to go off without a hitch in the coming days and weeks.
“Now the hard part starts,” says John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and former astronaut and head of science for NASA.
The US$10-billion Webb is the most complicated and expensive space observatory in history, and the successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has studied the Universe since 1990. Following its launch, Webb will now embark on the riskiest part of its mission — deploying all the parts required for its enormous mirror to peer deep into the cosmos, back towards the dawn of time.
The Atlantic
Every Night, Hordes of Sea Creatures Rise From the Deep
Every evening, after twilight gives way to dark, hordes of marine creatures—from tiny zooplankton to hulking sharks—rise from the deep to spend the night near the surface. They revel in the upper waters, feeding and mating, before retreating back down before dawn.
Known as the diel vertical migration, this mass movement is often heralded as the largest synchronous migration on Earth. As the planet spins on its axis and patches of ocean turn toward or away from the sun’s light, it happens in continual flux around the world.
The migration was first documented in the early 1800s, when the naturalist Georges Cuvier noted that plankton called “daphnia”—water fleas—were disappearing and reappearing in a daily cycle in a shallow freshwater lake. Then, during World War II, came the discovery of the “deep scattering layer”: a zone in the oceans that unexpectedly deflected pings of Navy sonar and mysteriously disappeared each night, like a phantom seabed.
Mongabay
Burnt pellets complicate impact of plastic spill off Sri Lanka, study finds
There was little relief from the scorching sun on the beach, but the volunteers kept at their work, scouring the sand for small plastic pellets known as nurdles.
The nurdles, the basic building blocks for all kinds of plastic items, have fouled a massive arc of coastline along Sri Lanka’s south and west after they fell off the stricken X-Press Pearl cargo ship when it caught fire and sank in May. On the beach, these white pellets have been mixed with darker, natural-looking detritus. The cleanup volunteers initially ignored the latter, but a closer look revealed that these were, in fact, burnt nurdles.
Large nurdle spills due to ship accidents aren’t new, but the X-Press Pearl accident is unprecedented as huge quantities of the plastics were burned in the fire that engulfed the ship. And while experts had warned of an unprecedented environmental disaster from that initial spill, a newly published paper highlights how burnt nurdles complicate the environmental challenges — making cleanup operations harder and much more complex, besides proving highly detrimental to marine life.
Scientific American
An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets
[…] The lump is known as the Antikythera mechanism, an extraordinary object that has befuddled historians and scientists for more than 120 years. Over the decades the original mass split into 82 fragments, leaving a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle for researchers to put back together. The device appears to be a geared astronomical calculation machine of immense complexity. Today we have a reasonable grasp of some of its workings, but there are still unsolved mysteries. We know it is at least as old as the shipwreck it was found in, which has been dated to between 60 and 70 B.C.E., but other evidence suggests it may have been made around 200 B.C.E.
In March 2021 my group at University College London, known as the UCL Antikythera Research Team, published a new analysis of the machine… Our paper posits a new explanation for the gearing on the front of the mechanism, where the evidence had previously been unresolved. We now have an even better appreciation for the sophistication of the device—an understanding that challenges many of our preconceptions about the technological capabilities of the ancient Greeks. […]
It took months to understand these gears. When I did, the results were astonishing. These gears turned out to calculate the variable motion of the moon in a very beautiful way.
Citizen Militias in the U.S. Are Moving toward More Violent Extremism
[…] I am a sociologist, and at that time I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan just beginning in-depth fieldwork and interview research about the militia movement in the U.S… My fieldwork in Michigan, as well as in-depth interviews that included groups in other states, continued through 2013. Since then, I have maintained regular contact with militia members, especially in Michigan, and they update me with their activities and responses to political and social events…
I have learned that there is important variation across militia groups. They fall on a spectrum. At one end are units whose activities are largely limited to outings for “grown-up Boy Scouts,” as several members described themselves at the Field Day event I went to years ago. At the other end are units that are openly angry, whose members plot violence against government officials and advocate overt white supremacy. Some of the latter stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021…
Across this spectrum, however, militia groups share certain similarities. Their members are almost exclusively white men, and they espouse values of nationalism as well as yearnings to restore “better times” from this country’s past. I and other sociologists refer to them as nostalgic groups. Their values are often entwined with racist and sexist attitudes, in part because they deny or disregard the hostility directed at minority groups and women during that idealized history. A metaphor I like to use to explain the connection across these groups is that it is like having multiple trees on the same small plot of land. They are separate entities, but their roots grow in the same soil. Their branches intermingle when the wind blows just right, occasionally getting close enough so that you cannot tell where one tree stops and another begins.
Medical Xpress
HIV patients 'cured' by their own unique biology may harbor secrets to end the global scourge
Some people diagnosed with HIV are able to eradicate the virus without antiretroviral medications or even stem cell transplants, possessing the ability to naturally suppress the virus and achieve a medically verifiable cure.
Scientists call this small population elite controllers, a moniker that reflects their unique ability to keep one of the most notorious viruses at bay.
Two of these patients have garnered fame in the scientific literature in recent months, each known mostly by a code name: the San Francisco Patient, and another called the Esperanza Patient. Both are women who have been spotlighted in medical journals and at scientific conferences for having eradicated HIV from their bodies.
Phys.org
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has found evidence that suggests early humans gained an energy budget by increasing their rate of energy acquisition, not by taking advantage of adaptive strategies. In their paper published in the journal Science, they describe their study of energy expenditure versus energy intake in early humans.
In this new effort, the researchers noted that humans long ago diverged in significant ways from the other great apes. They wondered how this happened and decided to look at energy intake and expenditure. People and other animals have to put in a certain amount of work (expenditure) to receive an energy intake. Climbing a tree to fetch a banana is a simple example. The amount of energy required to climb a tree far outweighs the potential benefit of eating a single banana. But if a single person is able to throw down multiple bananas, then the overall energy intake may surpass the effort of climbing a tree a single time. To learn more about how energy intake and expenditure might have led to modern human characteristics, the researchers studied two groups of modern people—hunter gatherers in Tanzania and forager-horticulturalists in a Bolivian rain forest.
Science
Airborne DNA from plants could reveal invasive species, impact of climate change
Inventorying the plants in a tract of woods or fields or searching for invasive species can take days of hot, hard work slogging through thorny brush and tick-infested grass. Now, researchers have shown that simply capturing and analyzing the DNA plants release into the air can work as well as putting boots on the ground—and in some cases even better.
“Airborne DNA could be a game changer in our ability to monitor and study biodiversity,” says Kristine Bohmann, a molecular ecologist at the University of Copenhagen who was not involved with the work. The approach could help track how climate change is altering the makeup of plant communities, researchers say, and provide early warning of invading species.
Reported last month in BMC Ecology and Evolution, the work takes the study of environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material shed, defecated, coughed up, or otherwise released into the environment—into a new realm. Aquatic eDNA is now a proven tool for identifying fish and other marine and freshwater organisms, with no need to catch them. In soil, eDNA can reveal the presence of people and animals, current or ancient. “The time is right to look at another source,” says Elizabeth Clare, a molecular ecologist at York University who has tracked animal species with airborne eDNA.
Gene pinpointed that helps put human hearts in the right place
From the outside, humans are pleasingly symmetrical, with arms, legs, and eyes that have matching right and left sides. But inside, it’s a different story: our heart is on the left; our liver is on the right. Lungs and kidneys are also asymmetric. Now researchers have pinned down a gene that helps developing organs find their proper place.
Scientists have identified other genes that break the initial symmetry of a developing round embryo, and help organs pick sides. But the way researchers tracked this one down was unique, says Daniel Grimes, a developmental biologist at the University of Oregon who was not involved with the work but calls it “exceptional.” The research, he says, could lead to a better understanding of why organ formation goes awry, as it does in some people. […]
The researchers discovered five such genes, they report this month in Nature Genetics. [Developmental biologist Bruno Reversade from the Genome Institute of Singapore] knew his team was on the right track because three of these genes were already known to be important in flow-induced loss of symmetry. Of the two new genes, the researchers focused first on one called CIROP, which no one had ever described before.
The New York Times
3,000 Years Ago, Britain Got Half Its Genes From … France?
Three years ago in the journal Nature, a vast international research team led in part by Harvard geneticist David Reich shined a torchlight on one of prehistoric Britain’s murkier mysteries. […]
In a paper published Wednesday in Nature, Dr. Reich again targeted the genomic history of Britain, the country from which geneticists have mined more ancient samples than any other. The study, which has 223 co-authors, documents a subsequent and previously unknown major migration into Britain from 1,300 B.C. to 800 B.C.
Analyzing DNA from 793 individuals, the investigators discovered that a massive Late Bronze Age movement displaced around half the ancestry of England and Wales and, possibly solving another longstanding riddle about British history, may have brought early Celtic languages to the island from Europe.
This Sea Lizard Had a Grand Piano-Size Head and a Big Appetite
About 246 million years ago, a sea lizard with a skull the size of a grand piano died in the ancient ocean that is now Nevada. It was an ichthyosaur, and its body was most likely the size of a modern sperm whale. […]
It took whales 45 million years of living in the ocean to evolve their most giant body sizes. This new species of giant ichthyosaur appeared only three million years after the first ichthyosaurs took to the seas, suggesting the sea lizards evolved big bodies at a breakneck speed. This early giant lived before small dinosaurs were common on land; the terrestrial world would not see a giant this size for about 40 million more years, with the emergence of sauropods in the Jurassic.
A group of scientists describe the new ichthyosaur, which they named Cymbospondylus youngorum, and reconstructed its food webs in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science.
LiveScience
We may finally be able to test one of Stephen Hawking's most far-out ideas
We may soon be able to test one of Stephen Hawking's most controversial theories, new research suggests.
In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most matter in the cosmos, may be made of black holes formed in the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
Now, three astronomers have developed a theory that explains not only the existence of dark matter, but also the appearance of the largest black holes in the universe.
Scientists create never-before-seen isotope of magnesium
Scientists have just created the world's lightest form of magnesium — a never-before-seen isotope with just six neutrons in its atomic nuclei — inside a giant atom smasher.
And while the substance disintegrates too quickly to be measured directly, the researchers expect their discovery will help scientists better understand how atoms are constructed. That's because such exotic isotopes — versions of chemical elements with either more or fewer neutrons in their nuclei than usual — can help define the limits of the models that scientists use to figure out how atoms work.
"By testing these models in making them better and better we can extrapolate out to how things work where we can't measure them," said Kyle Brown, a chemist at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "We're measuring the things we can measure to predict the things we can't."
The Guardian
Egyptian pharaoh’s mummified body gives up its secrets after 3,500 years
With his narrow chin, small nose and curly hair he physically resembles his father, said radiologist Sahar Saleem. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who lived about 3,500 years ago, he also has strikingly good teeth.
Saleem is talking about the mummified body of the pharaoh Amenhotep I, a warrior king who has been something of an enigma in that he is one of the few royal mummies not to be unwrapped in modern times.
Until now, that is. Saleem, a professor of radiology at the faculty of medicine at Cairo University, is part of a team which has successfully unwrapped Amenhotep I not physically but digitally.
The results, using 3D computed tomography (CT) scanning technology, are unprecedented and fascinating. They provide details about his appearance and the lavishness of the jewellery he was buried with.
World’s oldest family tree revealed in 5,700-year-old Cotswolds tomb
An analysis of DNA from a 5,700-year-old tomb has revealed the world’s oldest family tree, shedding “extraordinary” light on the importance of family and descent among people who were some of Britain’s first farmers.
A research team has examined the bones and teeth of 35 people in one of Britain’s best preserved neolithic tombs, near the village of Hazleton in the Cotswolds. The results, said Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, are nothing short of “astounding”.
The researchers have discovered that 27 were biological relatives from five continuous generations of a single extended family. The majority were descended from four women who all had children with the same man.
Science News
Vikings may have fled Greenland to escape rising seas
In 1721, a Norwegian missionary set sail for Greenland in the hopes of converting the Viking descendants living there to Protestantism. When he arrived, the only traces he found of the Nordic society were ruins of settlements that had been abandoned 300 years earlier.
There is no written record to explain why the Vikings left or died out. But a new simulation of Greenland’s coastline reveals that as the ice sheet covering most of the island started to expand around that time, sea levels rose drastically, researchers report December 15 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.
These shifting coastlines would have inundated grazing areas and farmland, and could have helped bring about the end of the Nordic way of life in Greenland, says Marisa Borreggine, a geophysicist at Harvard University.
Popular Science
Less ice in the Arctic could mean more wildfires in the US
While human-induced global warming is an obvious culprit in the worsening wildfires seen across the planet, a group of researchers have found evidence of one surprising factor in particular: ice loss in the Arctic could be adding fuel to infernos in the Western United States.
Arctic sea ice has been declining since the 1970s, and according to one dire estimate, this drop will leave the ocean nearly ice-free by the 2050s. The loss of this Arctic ocean cover may have profound effects much further south. Climate scientists refer to such a link as a teleconnection—the effect that two different climate conditions located in distant regions can have on each other. Hailong Wang, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab and one of the co-authors of the study, explains that atmospheric circulation patterns drive the bulk of these phenomena.
In this case, the researchers say, a reduction in sea ice cover leads the ocean to absorb a lot more sunlight during the summer. Later on, when the season cools and that heat is released into the atmosphere, it interacts with the cold air to create a low pressure system. This cyclonic rotation can then move south, creating a polar jet stream that is diverted from its usual course and draws moisture away from the Western US, in turn creating a high pressure system somewhere else. This ushers in hotter and drier weather, leading to fire-favourable conditions such as increased fuel aridity, which is a measure of how dry combustible material like grasses and trees are.
BBC News
California's fires threaten to ravage mighty sequoia forests
California's giant sequoias are symbols of permanence - with some living for thousands of years. But the fierce wildfires ravaging the state threaten even these mighty trees, which are among the longest-lived organisms on Earth. […]
"They make you feel deep time", sighs Christy Bingham, as she looks up at the biggest tree in the world - known as the General Sherman.
"You can just sense standing here that this tree was born before Jesus."
Christy lowers her voice as she says this, as if out of respect. She's in charge of conserving these magnificent trees in the Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains - their last redoubt.
Futurism
Space Colonists Will Likely Resort to Cannibalism, Scientist Says
As if things weren’t going to be tough enough for future space colonists, experts now say that they’re likely going to face food troubles — and that might just turn them into cannibals.
Charles Cockell, professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, spoke to Metro about the challenges astronauts will face if and when humans attempt to colonize places such as Jupiter’s moon Callisto and Saturn’s moon Titan.
Specifically, Cockell stressed that if the farming and crop systems failed, the colonizers would likely face very dire consequences unless they received regular supplies from Earth. If they’re far away enough — or if Earth collapses completely — this might not be possible.
Ars Technica
Noblewoman’s tomb reveals new secrets of ancient Rome’s highly durable concrete
Among the many popular tourist sites in Rome is an impressive 2000-year-old mausoleum along the Via Appia known as the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, a noblewoman who lived in the first century CE. […]
“The construction of this very innovative and robust monument and landmark on the Via Appia Antica indicates that [Caecilia Metella] was held in high respect,” said co-author Marie Jackson, a geophysicist at the University of Utah. “And the concrete fabric 2,050 years later reflects a strong and resilient presence.” […]
Jackson and her colleagues found that the secret to that longevity was a special recipe, involving a combination of rare crystals and a porous mineral. Specifically, exposure to sea water generated chemical reactions inside the concrete, causing aluminum tobermorite crystals to form out of phillipsite, a common mineral found in volcanic ash. The crystals bound to the rocks, once again preventing the formation and propagation of cracks that would have otherwise weakened the structures.
Physicists captured, quantified the sound of champagne’s effervescence
There's nothing quite like the distinctive crackling and fizzing sound of a glass of freshly served champagne. It's well established that the bursting of the bubbles produces that sound, but the specific physical mechanism isn't quite clear. So physicists from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, decided to investigate the link between the fluid dynamics of the bursting bubbles and the crackly fizzy sounds. They described their work in a paper published back in January in the journal Physical Review Fluids.
As we've reported previously, the first mention of a sparkling wine dates back to 1535 in the Languedoc region of France. The classic brand Dom Perignon gets its name from a 17th-century monk who had the job of getting rid of the bubbles that developed in his abbey's bottled wine, lest the pressure build up so much they exploded. Legend has it that upon sipping such a bubbly wine, the monk realized the bubbles might not be such a bad thing after all, declaring, "Come quickly, brothers, I am drinking stars!"