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The New York Times
Underwater Volcano Erupts, Setting Off Tsunami Warnings Across Pacific
An underwater volcano erupted on Saturday near the remote Pacific nation of Tonga, triggering tsunami warnings across the Pacific and for the West Coast of the United States, and causing strong waves and currents in many coastal areas.
The volcano’s eruption was dramatic, sending plumes of gas and ash thousands of feet into the atmosphere, though early reports of damage were limited.
A four-foot tsunami wave was reported to have hit Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, sending people rushing to higher ground, and witnesses said ash had fallen from the sky. […]
The volcano, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, which is about 40 miles north of Tongatapu, had been relatively inactive for several years. It began erupting intermittently in December but by Jan. 3 the activity had decreased significantly, according to a report by the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.
Every Pore on Your Face Is a Walled Garden
Your skin is home to a thousand kinds of bacteria, and the ways they contribute to healthy skin are still largely mysterious. This mystery may be getting even more complex: In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, researchers studying the many varieties of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria on 16 human volunteers found that each pore was a world unto itself. Every pore contained just a single type of C. acnes.
C. acnes is naturally occurring, and the most abundant bacteria on skin. Its link to acne, the skin disease, is not clear, said Tami Lieberman, a professor at M.I.T. and an author of the new paper. If biologists want to unpack the relationship between your face’s inhabitants and its health, it will be an important step to understand whether varying strains of C. acnes have their own talents or niches, and how the strains are distributed across your skin.
To collect their samples, Dr. Lieberman and her colleagues used commercially available nose strips and old-fashioned squeezing with a tool called a comedone extractor.
The Oregonian
Oregon coast busy despite tsunami advisory: ‘I think more people came to the beach’
Oregonians got a startling start to the day after an undersea volcano erupted near the Pacific nation of Tonga, triggering a tsunami advisory for the entire West Coast.
The National Weather Service predicted waves of 1 to 3 feet Saturday in Oregon, with the largest reported swell cresting at 1.5 feet near Port Orford as of mid-afternoon.
News spread quickly — by way of official text message alerts, media reports and the head of public works for the city of Manzanita, who flipped over a beachside warning sign, according to authorities.
Plenty of people, seeing the news, flocked to the waves. […]
“I think more people came to the beach because there was a warning,” said Mollee Bidwell, a 55-year-old Canby resident. “As Americans, you know, we hear something like this is going to happen, and we run to it.”
Mongabay
Ocean warming hits another record high on climate change
The ocean is now warmer than it’s ever been in recent history, according to a new study. And this isn’t the first time such a record has been set. For the past six years, ocean temperatures have exceeded each previous year in a trend one scientist calls “inexorable.”
Human-induced climate change is to blame, says John Abraham, co-author of the new study published Jan. 11 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
“We should be very concerned,” Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, U.S, told Mongabay in a video interview. “But frankly, we should have been concerned years ago.”
World’s tallest begonia found in Tibet
When researchers found a begonia plant twice as tall as a person, they knew they had something extraordinary. Of the more than 2,000 known begonia species, most are the size of large herbs or small shrubs.
In late 2020, during surveys in Mêdog county in southern Tibet, Daike Tian and his colleagues from the Shanghai Chenshan Plant Science Research Center and the Chinese Academy of Sciences saw a massive begonia in bloom. After a quick check of the flowers, Tian says, he knew it was an undescribed species. The species, which they named Begonia giganticauli, is described in the journal PhytoKeys.
One of the largest begonia specimens the group found was 3.6 meters (11.8 feet) tall and close to 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) in diameter. To measure the plant, Tian stood on top of a vehicle. The unwieldy specimen had to be carried back to the lab in Shanghai cut into four sections. The staff of the Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden’s herbarium are currently applying for Guinness World Records for this specimen.
The Washington Post
Researchers find icefish colony the size of Malta in Antarctic waters
Researchers have discovered an icefish colony of “globally unprecedented” size in the Antarctic Ocean.
A team of biologists stumbled across an estimated 60 million fish nests while collecting data on the floor of the Weddell Sea last February. The researchers published their findings this week in the journal Current Biology.
The colony probably covers roughly 93 square miles, the scientists found — about the size of the island of Malta. It is “the most spatially expansive continuous fish breeding colony discovered to date globally at any depth,” the researchers wrote — a finding that highlights the magnitude of biological mysteries and astonishments that remain undiscovered, even with so much of the planet thoroughly explored.
Israeli researchers have taught goldfish to drive, according to a study that offers new insights into animals’ ability to navigate — even when they’re literally fish out of water.
For the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioural Brain Research, the goldfish were trained to use a wheeled platform, dubbed a Fish Operated Vehicle. The FOV could be driven and have its course changed in reaction to the fish’s movements inside a water tank mounted on the platform.
Their task was to “drive” the robotic vehicle toward a target that could be observed through the walls of the fish tank. The vehicle was fitted with lidar, short for light detection and ranging, a remote sensing technology that uses lasers to collect data on its ground location and the fish’s location within the tank.
AP News
Study nixes Mars life in meteorite found in Antarctica
A 4 billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists reported Thursday.
In 1996, a NASA-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Andrew Steele.
Tiny samples from the meteorite show the carbon-rich compounds are actually the result of water — most likely salty, or briny, water — flowing over the rock for a prolonged period, Steele said. The findings appear in the journal Science.
Scientists see silver lining in fed’s efforts at Lake Powell
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced last week that it plans to adjust management protocols for the Colorado River in early 2022 to reduce monthly releases from Lake Powell in an effort to keep the reservoir from dropping farther below 2021′s historic lows. […]
“We need to be extra vigilant and careful, because we do not know what lies ahead,” said Jack Schmidt, director of Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies in response to Friday’s announcement. “Looking into the future, none of us can know precisely what’s going to happen this year. We have had times when we’ve looked great at the end of February, and then had an exceptionally dry March and the snowpack evaporated.”
Schmidt was the senior author of a white paper published by a group of hydrologists last February that analyzed the future of Colorado River flows under various climate change and use scenarios. Their findings predicted that, given drying trends and a growing western population, projected basin-wide rates of water consumption could result in Lake Mead or Lake Powell running dry as soon as 2050, halting hydropower operations and negatively impacting the Grand Canyon ecosystem.
NPR News
Scientists think they've found a big, weird moon in a far-off star system
The hunt for moons outside our solar system has just turned up another possible lunar world, a moon bigger than Earth that's orbiting a Jupiter-like planet.
The planet and its moon — if it really is a moon — orbit a Sun-like star that's over 5,000 light years away, according to a report in the journal Nature Astronomy.
"The moon is pretty alien compared to any moon in the solar system," says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. "We're not sure if it's rocky, we're not sure if it's gaseous. It's kind of in between the size of Neptune, which is gaseous, and the Earth, which is rocky."
Who gets to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope? Astronomers work to fight bias
The scientists who eventually get to peer out at the universe with NASA's powerful new James Webb Space Telescope will be the lucky ones whose research proposals made it through a highly competitive selection process.
But those that didn't make the cut this time can at least know that they got a fair shot, thanks to lessons learned from another famous NASA observatory.
Webb's selection process was carefully designed to reduce the effect of unconscious biases or prejudices by forcing decision-makers to focus on the scientific merit of a proposal rather than who submitted it.
BBC News
Huge fossilised ‘sea dragon’ found in UK reservoir
"I rang up the county council and I said I think I've found a dinosaur," explained Joe Davis, who works at Rutland Water Nature Reserve.
During landscaping work at the reserve's reservoir in February 2021, he had spotted something odd poking out of the mud. It wasn't a dinosaur. But it was the fossilised remains of a 10m-long sea predator called an ichthyosaur. And it was the largest of its type ever discovered in the UK.
"I looked down at what seemed like stones or ridges in the mud and I said this looks a bit organic, a bit different," Mr Davis told BBC News. "Then we saw something that looked almost like a jawbone."
Rutland sea dragon: How remarkable ichthyosaur fossil was protected
Fossil thieves, crumbling bones and large amounts of bird poo were just a few of the challenges faced by the team that uncovered a "sea dragon" in Rutland.
The UK's largest, most complete, skeleton of an ichthyosaur - an ocean-going reptile from the time of the dinosaurs - was found at Rutland Water was revealed to a fascinated public on Monday.
The discovery, made last February, has been hailed as "one of the greatest finds in British paleontological history".
The Guardian
Medieval warhorses no bigger than modern-day ponies, study finds
In films and literature they are usually depicted as hulking, foot-stomping, snorting beasts but a new study has claimed that the medieval warhorse was typically a much slighter, daintier animal.
A team of archaeologists and historians searching for the truth about the steeds that carried knights into battle has concluded that most were probably only the size of a modern-day pony.
The researchers examined the bones of about 2,000 horses dating from the fourth to 17th centuries found at castles, a medieval horse cemetery and other archaeological sites in England, as well as combing historical records and fictional stories of chivalry.
‘A Rosetta Stone’: Australian fossil site is a vivid window into 15m-year-old rainforest
The Australian paleontologist Matthew McCurry was digging for Jurassic fossils when a farmer dropped by with news of something he’d seen in his paddock – a fossilised leaf in a piece of hard brown rock.
Fossil leaves are not usually anything to write home about, but the spot was close, so McCurry and his colleague Michael Frese went to take a look
What they found in that dusty paddock near the New South Wales town of Gulgong five years ago has had paleontologists – at least those few who have known the secret – in awe.
Encased in the rocks are the inhabitants of a rainforest that existed in that now dry and arid spot about 15m years ago.
“There’s a whole ecosystem preserved,” says McCurry, curator of paleontology at the Australian Museum and a lecturer at the University of New South Wales.
Deutsche Welle
Multiple sclerosis caused by Epstein-Barr-Virus — study
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an unpredictable condition — an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord. […]
And until now researchers have not known conclusively what causes MS. There are treatments to make living with MS better, perhaps easier, but there is no cure.
But that may change now that researchers say they have found a link between Epstein-Barr-Virus and MS. That could open the door to better treatments and even preventative measures.
In a study conducted in the United States, researchers say they found that the Epstein-Barr-Virus (EBV) was definitely associated with all but one of 801 cases of multiple sclerosis.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Second hottest day in Australia’s history recorded as the east prepares for storms
Towns across Western Australia have recorded some of the hottest weather ever recorded in the country, while other parts of the nation are preparing for heavy rains, humid nights and the after-effects of an ex-tropical cyclone. […]
While Sydney’s ocean temperatures have been unusually warm this month, the city has also experienced above-average temperatures most nights. It has recorded an average of 21.3 degrees, 2.5 degrees higher than the monthly average. […]
Earlier this week, data found the past seven years had been the seven warmest on record despite the La Nina weather pattern. The report showed the world has already warmed between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Ocean temperatures set heat records, raising fresh concerns for marine life
The world’s oceans recorded their hottest year in more than 60 years with greenhouse gases driving increasing temperatures, amid concerns the ocean’s ecosystems will be unsustainable in the warmer climate.
The annual study, which draws on data between 1958 and 2021, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, found that ocean heat content during the past five years was the warmest in its records, driven largely by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
ANU institute for climate, energy and disaster solutions director Professor Mark Howden said oceans played a vital role in absorbing about 90 per cent of the heat and gases in the atmosphere.
San Francisco Chronicle
Endangered coho salmon are spawning in narrow Marin County creeks where they haven’t been seen for years, as heavy winter rains have made it possible for them to jump into culverts and bypass roads to get deeper into their historic habitat.
The coho salmon were recently spotted spawning in San Geronimo Valley’s Montezuma Creek — for the first time since 2004 — and Larsen Creek — for the first time since 2006 — according to biologists at Salmon Protection And Watershed Network, a program of the nonprofit Turtle Island Restoration Network.
Though there is a healthy population of coho salmon that regularly return from the Pacific Ocean in December and January to spawn in nearby Lagunitas and San Geronimo Creeks, recent downpours have made it possible for them to go even farther.
“This is the first time in a long time we’ve seen them way, way, way up in these tiny streams,” said Preston Brown, director of conservation at SPAWN. “They swim, leap, wriggle and jump — they’re pretty acrobatic actually. But they need enough water to carry them through.”
Nature
COVID vaccines safely protect pregnant people: the data are in
[…] When the vaccines were first administered to the public in late 2020, little was known about their effect on pregnant people, who hadn’t been represented in the original clinical trials that tested the shots. Although that is standard practice, it left pregnant people grappling with whether getting a jab was the best decision for themselves and their babies.
But the data are now solid. They show that the risks of COVID-19 during pregnancy — including maternal death, stillbirth and premature delivery — far outweigh the risks of being vaccinated. And yet, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only around 40% of pregnant people in the United States had been vaccinated against COVID-19 by 1 January 2022 (see ‘Slow uptake’). The numbers are similarly low across the globe — causing sick pregnant people to turn up at hospitals, and health-care workers to struggle to find solutions.
Science
Loss of seed-hauling animals spells trouble for plants in warming world
A slow death is creeping through Earth’s forests and other green landscapes. As animals are killed by hunters or forced away by logging, for example, the plants that depend on them to carry their seeds begin to disappear. Over time, trees and other plants may vanish. Climate change is accelerating this process, a new study suggests—and it may ultimately harm not just biodiversity, but the ability of ecosystems to store carbon and provide food and clean water.
“This is a very impressive, sobering finding,” says ecologist Rodolfo Dirzo of Stanford University, who was not involved with the work.
Rooted in place, many plants need help to move about the world. Although the seeds of dandelions and other plants take to the air with feathery wings, about half of all species rely on birds and mammals to eat or carry their fruits and nuts to new places. When these partners disappear, forests and plant communities can struggle to regenerate.
Climate change is making things worse.
Here’s how scientists pulled off the first pig-to-human heart transplant
Surgeons announced this week they had performed the first transplant of a pig heart to a human. The 7 January surgery was a milestone for research on transplants between species, known as xenotransplantation. It’s still unclear how well or how long the heart will function, but researchers hope the technique can someday make up for a shortage in human organs for ailing patients.
The procedure, done by a team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), was a major test for several experimental innovations designed to keep the pig heart functioning in a human chest, including 10 genetic changes in the pigs, a novel immunosuppressant given to the recipient, and a cocaine-laced solution used to incubate the heart. Here’s how science and ethical considerations informed the complex procedure.
The transplant recipient, 57-year-old David Bennett, had advanced heart failure and a type of arrhythmia called ventricular fibrillation. Because he had not taken steps to control his high blood pressure and other health problems, physicians at the University of Maryland Medical Center and nearby institutions deemed him ineligible for a human heart transplant, says Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of the cardiac xenotransplantation program at UMSOM. “A human organ is considered a very precious thing,” he says. “The main concern was whether to give the heart to a person who may not be able to take care of it.”
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Earth on trajectory to Sixth Mass Extinction say biologists
Mass biodiversity extinction events caused by extreme natural phenomena have marked the history of life on Earth five times. Today, many experts warn that a Sixth Mass Extinction crisis is underway, this time entirely caused by human activities.
A comprehensive assessment of evidence of this ongoing extinction event was published in Biological Reviews by biologists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France.
“Drastically increased rates of species extinctions and declining abundances of many animal and plant populations are well documented, yet some deny that these phenomena amount to mass extinction,” said Robert Cowie, lead author of the study and research professor at the UH Mānoa Pacific Biosciences Research Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. “This denial is based on a highly biased assessment of the crisis which focuses on mammals and birds and ignores invertebrates, which of course constitute the great majority of biodiversity.”
University of Birmingham (UK)
Damaging microplastic particles stay trapped in rivers
Swirling river waters can trap lightweight microplastics that otherwise might be expected to float – depositing them in riverbeds where it can take up to seven years to transport them just a kilometre further towards the ocean, a new study reveals.
As rivers are in near-constant motion, researchers had previously assumed that lightweight microplastics were swept rather swiftly towards the ocean and rarely interacted with riverbed sediments.
But researchers from the University of Birmingham, Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago, in the United States, have discovered that hyporheic exchange — a process in which surface water mixes with water in the riverbed — can trap lightweight microplastics in sediment.
Publishing their findings today in Science Advances, the experts set out a new model describing processes that influence particles, including hyporheic exchange, and focuses on hard-to-measure but widely abundant microplastics at 100 micrometers in size and smaller.
University of Minnesota
Beavers support freshwater conservation and ecosystem stability
One of the most comprehensive studies conducted on beavers has conclusively demonstrated that beavers are essential for freshwater conservation and ecosystem stability by creating and preserving aquatic and wetland environments in Minnesota. This new research from the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) at the University of Minnesota Duluth was recently published in the journal Ecography.
“Although there are many studies on how beavers change ecosystems, the scale of this study—spanning 70 years across five different watersheds—is really unprecedented and, as a result, gave us the unique opportunity to understand how beavers transform and engineer ecosystems over long time periods and large spatial scales,” said Tom Gable, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Minnesota Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology. “We think this work will be of value to many conservationists, scientists and citizens who want to understand how reintroduced or recovering beaver populations can positively affect their ecosystems.”
Gizmodo
Newly Discovered Tarantula Lurks Inside Bamboo
Researchers have described a new species and genus of tarantula in Thailand. The jumbo spiders nest inside of bamboo stalks, in a behavior never documented before in tarantulas.
New research in ZooKeys describes the previously unknown tarantula, which inhabits the forests of Thailand’s Tak province. Named Taksinus bambus, the tarantulas crawl inside the stalks of Asian bamboo (Gigantochloa), where they build their silken burrows.
“These animals are truly remarkable,” Narin Chomphuphuang, a co-author of the new study and a researcher at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, wrote in a guest post for the Pensoft blog. “They are the first known tarantulas ever with a bamboo-based ecology.”
How Beer and Drugs Empowered an Ancient Andean Empire
Archaeological evidence from Peru suggests elite members of the Wari Empire mixed a hallucinogenic drug with a beer-like beverage in order to cultivate and preserve political control.
During feasts, Wari elites added vilca, a powerful hallucinogen, to chicha, a beer-like beverage made from fruit. Together, the concoction made for a potent party drug, which the researchers say helped those in power bond with their guests and consolidate relationships. And because vilca could only be produced by the elites, these psychedelic feasts served to boost their social and political importance. Such are the findings of a new study published today in Antiquity.
Ars Technica
2021 obeyed physics, was one of the warmest years on record
We are still in the midst of running a dangerous experiment on Earth’s climate system, and we get to periodically check in on the results—like laboratory rats peering at the graphs on a whiteboard across the room. And it’s that time again.
Every year, global temperature can be compared to the predictions born of the physics of greenhouse gases. A number of groups around the world maintain global surface temperature datasets. Because of their slightly differing methods for calculating the global average and slightly differing sets of temperature measurements fed into that calculation, these datasets don’t always arrive at exactly the same answer. Lean in close enough and you’ll see differences in the data points, which can translate into differences in their respective rankings of the warmest years. The big picture, on the other hand, looks exactly the same across them.
NASA, NOAA, and the Berkeley Earth group each released their end-of-year data for 2021 today, while the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) numbers were already out. They all came up with similar rankings this year. All but ECMWF placed it as the sixth warmest year on record, while ECMWF ranked it in fifth place. It was very close to 2015 and 2018, so fifth through seventh are roughly tied. What is true for all of the datasets is that the last seven years are the warmest seven years on record.
We don’t know why, but being in space causes us to destroy our blood
Space isn’t easy on humans. Some aspects are avoidable—the vacuum, of course, and the cold, as well as some of the radiation. Astronauts can also lose bone density, thanks to a lack of gravity. NASA has even created a fun acronym for the issues: RIDGE, which stands for space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity fields, and hostile and closed environments.
New research adds to the worries by describing how being in space destroys your blood. Or rather, something about space—and we don’t know what just yet—causes the human body to perform hemolysis at a higher rate than back on Earth.
This phenomenon, called space anemia, has been well-studied. It’s part of a suite of problems that astronauts face when they come back to terra firma, which is how Guy Trudel—one of the paper’s authors and a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at The Ottawa Hospital—got involved. “[W]hen the astronauts return from space, they are very much like the patients we admit in rehab,” he told Ars.