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University of Delaware Daily
New 'game-changing' technology removes 99% of carbon dioxide from the air
University of Delaware engineers have demonstrated a way to effectively capture 99% of carbon dioxide from air using a novel electrochemical system powered by hydrogen. It is a significant advance for carbon dioxide capture and could bring more environmentally friendly fuel cells closer to market.
The research team, led by UD Professor Yushan Yan, reported their method in Nature Energy on Thursday, February 3… Yan… has been working for some time to improve hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, an economical and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells used today.
But HEM fuel cells have a shortcoming that has kept them off the road — they are extremely sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air. Essentially, the carbon dioxide makes it hard for a HEM fuel cell to breathe… Yan’s research group has been searching for a workaround for this carbon dioxide conundrum for over 15 years.
NASA
Photons Incoming: Webb Team Begins Aligning the Telescope
This week, the three-month process of aligning the telescope began – and over the last day, Webb team members saw the first photons of starlight that traveled through the entire telescope and were detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. This milestone marks the first of many steps to capture images that are at first unfocused and use them to slowly fine-tune the telescope. This is the very beginning of the process, but so far the initial results match expectations and simulations.
A team of engineers and scientists from Ball Aerospace, Space Telescope Science Institute, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will now use data taken with NIRCam to progressively align the telescope. The team developed and demonstrated the algorithms using a 1/6th scale model telescope testbed. They have simulated and rehearsed the process many times and are now ready to do this with Webb. The process will take place in seven phases over the next three months, culminating in a fully aligned telescope ready for instrument commissioning. The images taken by Webb during this period will not be “pretty” images like the new views of the universe Webb will unveil later this summer. They strictly serve the purpose of preparing the telescope for science.
Scientific American
Astronomers Find First Ever Rogue Black Hole Adrift in the Milky Way
Scientists have announced the first-ever unambiguous discovery of a free-floating black hole, a rogue wanderer in the void some 5,000 light-years from Earth. The result, which appeared January 31 on the arXiv preprint server but has not yet been peer-reviewed, represents the culmination of more than a decade of ardent searching. “It’s super exciting,” says Marina Rejkuba from the European Southern Observatory in Germany, a co-author on the paper. “We can actually prove that isolated black holes are there.” This discovery may be just the start; ongoing surveys and upcoming missions are expected to find dozens or even hundreds more of the dark, lonely travelers. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” says Kareem El-Badry from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the paper.
Nature
How sneezing hamsters sparked a COVID outbreak in Hong Kong
Pet hamsters probably carried the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 into Hong Kong and sparked a human COVID-19 outbreak, according to a genomic analysis of viral samples from the rodents. The research confirms earlier fears that a pet shop was the source of the outbreak, which has so far infected about 50 people and led to the culling of some 2,000 hamsters across the city.
Hamsters are highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and so are a popular model for studying the virus. But the Hong Kong study — posted online as a preprint and yet to be peer reviewed — is the first to show that hamsters can become infected outside the laboratory, and that they can pass the virus on to both other hamsters and humans.
Hamsters are only the second animal known to be able to infect people, after mink.
CNN
CDC unveils its latest weapon in Covid-19 detection: wastewater
[…] For more than a year, [Alexandria Boehm, a professor of civil engineering at Stanford University] and her team of 45 people at the Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, have been collecting and testing daily sludge samples from wastewater processing plants across Northern California, hunting for fragments of the new coronavirus.
Wastewater-based epidemiology has proven to be so reliable in dozens of pilot projects across the US that the government has invested millions to create the National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, a network of 400 testing sites spread across 19 states that is coordinated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Boehm's SCAN is part of that network, which has been quietly operating behind the scenes, generating data for public health departments across the country, since September 2020. For the first time, the CDC has published data that looks at how much coronavirus is turning up in the country's wastewater. It added this testing data to its Covid-19 dashboard.
Space.com
The chances of early life on Mars faced a meteorite problem
Early chances for life on Mars might have been diminished by meteorites.
A new study suggests that a period of heavy cratering on the Red Planet (and elsewhere in the solar system) persisted 30 million years longer than thought. Studies of the Late Heavy Bombardment, as this period is called, also has implications for the rise of life on Earth.
The new study is largely based upon a meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, nicknamed "Black Beauty." The meteorite includes part of the ancient crust of Mars during the period considered for study, which is nearly 4.5 billion years ago.
The Atlantic
Our Solar System in True Color Is Really Something Else
Picture Venus. You know, the second planet from the sun, where the clouds are shot through with sulfuric acid and the surface is hot enough to melt lead.
What color is it?
For the longest time, I thought of Venus as caramel-colored, swirled with golds, yellows, and browns—warm colors that matched the planet’s reputation for being a scorching world covered in volcanoes. And then I saw a picture of Venus that James O’Donoghue, a planetary astronomer, shared online recently. It was not any toasty shade, not even close. It was milky-white and featureless. A big old space pearl. “This is what it looks like to a human being flying by,” O’Donoghue wrote in his post.
Whaaat? That couldn’t be right.
New Scientist
Satellite images show biggest methane leaks come from Russia and US
About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry’s methane emissions have been found to come from a group of “ultra-emitter” sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030.
While huge plumes of methane leaking from gas pipelines have been detected by satellites at individual sites, such as a gas well in Ohio and several pipelines in central Turkmenistan, little has been know about their extent globally.
Now, images captured by an instrument aboard a satellite have been run through an algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide.
Mongabay
Safe havens for coral reefs will disappear as oceans warm, study says
In 2015 and 2016, record ocean temperatures triggered coral bleaching events around the world — from Hawai‘i to the Caribbean to Australia — turning once-healthy polyps into ghostly skeletons. But some reefs managed to remain intact due to the cooling effects of upwelling and ocean currents.
According to a new study, these special coral reefs, called “refugia,” could disappear in the very near future as human-induced climate change continues to heat up the world.
Presently, about 84% of the world’s shallow coral reefs are places of thermal refugia, defined in the paper as places that have 10 years to recover from heat stress. But when the world heats up to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — which could happen in as little as six years if emissions are not curtailed, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — coral reef refugia will dwindle down to 0.2%, the study says. At 2°C (3.6°F) of warming, which could be reached in as little as 20 years, the study projects that there will be no thermal refugia left in the world.
Eos
A Hotter Earth Means Stronger Tornadoes
On 20 May 2013, at 2:56 p.m., a tornado touched down in central Oklahoma. Over the next 40 minutes, it ripped through the towns of Newcastle, Moore, and south Oklahoma City. The storm destroyed dozens of houses and cars, two farms, two elementary schools, a strip mall, and several other buildings as it killed 24 people and injured hundreds.
Climate change is known to affect many types of extreme weather, such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods. But until recently, few studies have addressed whether it will affect tornado outbreaks like the one that decimated central Oklahoma. Matthew Woods, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, aimed to fill that gap with his recent research in atmospheric sciences and meteorology.
“Climate change certainly raises the ceiling for future tornadoes, in terms of strength,” Woods said. Using a modeling framework called pseudo–global warming methodology, he predicted that the frequency of warm-season tornadoes will decrease slightly in the United States, but those that do occur may be stronger. Meanwhile, the cool season is likely to see both more frequent and more intense tornadoes. Woods will share his results at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2021 during a poster session on 13 December.
Popular Science
The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them
Future hurricanes will bring more extreme flooding to coastal cities in the eastern United States due to a double hit from worsening storm surge and heavy rainfall, scientists reported on February 3 in Nature Climate Change.
The researchers simulated how climate change could alter the impacts of tropical cyclones through the end of the 21st century. They found that the combined frequency of intense storm surge and rainfall that clobbers the coastline may increase by seven to 36 times in the southern US and 30 to 195 times in the Northeast.
“The results that are presented in the paper give us a pretty good idea of what to possibly expect in the future,” says Thomas Wahl, a coastal engineer at the University of Central Florida who wasn’t involved in the research. “There will likely be a pretty dramatic change in…the likelihood that different flooding drivers occur simultaneously.”
Smithsonian Magazine
Plants Are Blossoming a Month Early in the U.K. Because of Climate Change
Because of climate change, plants in the United Kingdom are flowering an average of 26 days earlier than they did before 1987, a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B finds.
Researchers examined over 400,000 records from Nature’s Calendar, a citizen science database with observations dating back to 1736. They looked at first flowering dates for 406 flowering plant species and compared those to temperature measurements. The researchers found the average first flowering date before 1987 was May 12, but from 1987 to 2019, that average shifted to April 16—almost a month earlier, per the study.
BBC News
Mount Everest: Mountain's highest glacier melting rapidly, new study shows
Climate change is causing the highest glacier on Mount Everest to melt at a rapid pace, a new study has found.
Researchers led by the University of Maine found that the South Col Glacier has lost more than 180ft (54m) of thickness in the last 25 years.
The glacier, which sits around 7,906m (25,938 ft) above sea-level, is thinning 80 times faster than it first took the ice to form on the surface. The rate of decline has been blamed on warming temperatures and strong winds.
Scientists leading the study found that since the 1990s, ice that took around 2,000 years to form has melted away.
The Washington Post
Climate change is altering the smell of snow
[…] Snow has a scent, and researchers say that scent depends on what’s in the ground and the air. And as both the atmosphere and the land are getting warmer, the scent of snow is getting stronger.
Johan Lundstrom, a professor of clinical neuroscience who describes himself as a “smell researcher” at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said because snow’s smell reflects the impurities in the air, the flakes in Wisconsin smell different from snow in Sweden, and from snow in a city.
Lundstrom said that people notice smells more in the summer because the humid and warmer air intensifies odor molecules, in the same way perfume smells more intense and different on the skin than when it is sprayed in the air. But the cold and dry air of winter makes for a “poor odor environment.”
Phys.org
Record heat, forest fires in Colombia's Amazon in January
January of this year was the hottest month in the Colombian Amazon in a decade, leading to an increase in forest fires in the southeastern region and very likely impacting air quality in the capital Bogota, according to an Environment Ministry report seen by AFP Friday.
It said the month of January recorded the "highest hot spot values in the last 10 years" in the Colombian Amazon.
The phenomenon occurs, the ministry said, when the country goes through a season of low rainfall, and is due to "anthropic activities," that is to say human activities, of which "the most important is associated with deforestation fronts."
At least 80 percent of the "hot spots" were forest fires, a ministry spokesman told AFP.
Vox
Ending meat and dairy production would “pause” the growth of greenhouse gas emissions for 30 years.
If the world were to end all meat and dairy production and transition to a plant-based food system over the next 15 years, it would prevent enough greenhouse gas emissions to effectively cancel out emissions from all other economic sectors for the next 30 to 50 years.
That’s according to new research published today in the journal PLOS Climate. The paper’s authors say such a shift would “substantially alter the trajectory of global warming,” as animal agriculture is estimated to account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Pat Brown, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford University and the founder and CEO of the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, and Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics and development at the University of California Berkeley, modeled the long-term “climate opportunity cost” of continuing business-as-usual meat and dairy production. (Seafood’s environmental impact was not included in the analysis.)
Science
Massive wolf kill disrupts long-running study of Yellowstone park packs
Hunters are killing gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains in numbers not seen since the animals were driven to near extinction in the continental United States in the 20th century. The killing of more than 500 wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming in recent months—including nearly 20% of the wolves that sometimes range outside of Yellowstone National Park—threatens to undermine a decades-old effort to restore the predators to the landscape and disrupt a long-term Yellowstone research project that has produced influential findings on how wolves help shape ecosystems. Researchers and conservation groups are calling on government officials to rethink the hunts, which have eliminated about 16% of the wolves living in the three states.
The loss of the Yellowstone wolves “is a huge setback,” says wildlife biologist Doug Smith of the National Park Service, who leads the park’s wolf restoration and study project, which began in 1995. “We had in Yellowstone one of the best models for understanding the behaviors and dynamics of a wolf population unexploited by humans.” Now, he says, researchers will “do what we can to keep the science going—what we have left of it.”
The killings are the result of a change in legal protections for Canis lupus.
The Guardian
Failure to prevent pandemics at source is ‘greatest folly’, say scientists
Preventing future pandemics at source would cost a small fraction of the damage already caused by viruses that jump from wildlife to people, according to scientists.
Each year on average more than 3 million people die from zoonotic diseases, those that spill over from wildlife into humans, new analysis has calculated. Stopping the destruction of nature, which brings humans and wildlife into greater contact and results in spillover, would cost about $20bn a year, just 10% of the annual economic damage caused by zoonoses and 5% of the value of the lives lost.
The scientists heavily criticise approaches by global bodies and governments that focus only on preventing the spread of new viruses once they have infected humans, rather than tackling the root causes as well. “That premise is one of the greatest pieces of folly of modern times,” said Prof Aaron Bernstein, of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University, who led the new assessment.
It details three key actions: global surveillance of viruses in wildlife, better control of hunting and trade in wildlife, and stopping the razing of forests. These actions would also pay huge dividends in fighting the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis.
AP News
US backs rare flower habitat amid Nevada lithium mine fight
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed designating critical habitat for a Nevada wildflower it plans to list as endangered amid a conflict over a mine to produce lithium batteries for electric vehicles critical to the Biden administration’s plans to combat climate change.
The agency on Wednesday proposed designating critical habitat for Tiehm’s buckwheat on a high-desert ridge near the California line halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.
It’s the only place in the world the delicate, 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter) wildflower with yellow blooms is known to exist.
It’s also the site where Ioneer USA Corp. plans to build a big lithium mine.
Undark
The Gold Rush Returns to California
In the outskirts of the northern California town of Grass Valley, a massive concrete silo looms over the weeds and crumbling pavement. Nearby, unseen, a mine shaft drops 3,400 feet into the earth. These are the remains of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine, a relic from the town’s gold mining past. Numerous mines like this one once fueled Grass Valley’s economy, and today, Gold Rush artifacts are part of the town’s character: A stamp mill, once used to break up gold-bearing rock, now guards an intersection on Main Street, and old ore carts and other rusty remnants can be spotted in parking lots and storefronts around town.
Gold still exists in the veins of the abandoned mine, and Rise Gold, the mining corporation that purchased the mine in 2017, has reason to believe that reopening it makes financial sense. When the mine shut down in 1956, it wasn’t because the gold was drying up; it was because of economic policy. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement had established a new international monetary system to create stability in exchange rates. As part of the effort, the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce. Gold mining became unprofitable in the U.S. […]
Now, with inflation rising and renewed economic uncertainty over the omicron variant of the coronavirus, demand for gold remains high, even despite some recent dips.
The Current — University of California at Santa Barbara
Healthy Oceans Need Healthy Soundscapes
[…] A global team of researchers set out to understand how human-made noise affects wildlife, from invertebrates to whales, in the oceans, and found overwhelming evidence that marine fauna, and their ecosystems, are negatively impacted by noise. This noise disrupts their behavior, physiology, reproduction and, in extreme cases, causes mortality. The researchers call for human-induced noise to be considered a prevalent stressor at the global scale and for policy to be developed to mitigate its effects.
The research, led by Carlos M. Duarte, distinguished professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), and published in the journal Science, is eye-opening to the global prevalence and intensity of the impacts of ocean noise. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have made the planet, the oceans in particular, noisier through fishing, shipping, infrastructure development and more, while also silencing the sounds from marine animals that dominated the pristine ocean.
“The landscape of sound — or soundscape — is such a powerful indicator of the health of an environment,” noted Ben Halpern, a coauthor on the study and director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. “Like we have done in our cities on land, we have replaced the sounds of nature throughout the ocean with those of humans.”
NPR News
How a hyperactive cell in the brain might trigger Alzheimer's disease
[…] Over the past couple decades, researchers have identified numerous genes involved in various immune system functions that may also contribute to Alzheimer's.
Some of the prime suspects are genes that control humble little immune cells called microglia, now the focus of intense research in developing new Alzheimer's drugs.
Microglia are amoeba-like cells that scour the brain for injuries and invaders. They help clear dead or impaired brain cells and literally gobble up invading microbes. Without them, we'd be in trouble.
In a normal brain, a protein called beta-amyloid is cleared away through our lymphatic system by microglia as molecular junk. But sometimes it builds up. Certain gene mutations are one culprit in this toxic accumulation. Traumatic brain injury is another, and, perhaps, impaired microglial function.
University of Washington News
Beating the bite of mosquitoes this spring and summer could hinge on your attire and your skin. New research led by scientists at the University of Washington indicates that a common mosquito species — after detecting a telltale gas that we exhale — flies toward specific colors, including red, orange, black and cyan. The mosquitoes ignore other colors, such as green, purple, blue and white. The researchers believe these findings help explain how mosquitoes find hosts, since human skin, regardless of overall pigmentation, emits a strong red-orange “signal” to their eyes.
“Mosquitoes appear to use odors to help them distinguish what is nearby, like a host to bite,” said Jeffrey Riffell, a UW professor of biology. “When they smell specific compounds, like CO2 from our breath, that scent stimulates the eyes to scan for specific colors and other visual patterns, which are associated with a potential host, and head to them.”
The results, published Feb. 4 in Nature Communications, reveal how the mosquito sense of smell — known as olfaction — influences how the mosquito responds to visual cues. Knowing which colors attract hungry mosquitoes, and which ones do not, can help design better repellants, traps and other methods to keep mosquitoes at bay.
Medical Xpress
The struggle to define psychedelics
Psychoactive drugs include all manner of hallucinogens, deliriants, hypnotics and psychedelics. But what is a psychedelic, really? […]
There is a curious push to define psychedelics as compounds that alter consciousness by acting on serotonin receptors in the brain, most notably 5-HT2A receptors. However, that is a terribly parochial definition that clearly suffers from a narrow perspective—surely, many receptors, and likely many non-receptor effects, can create what is already commonly understood as a psychedelic effect.
A timely attempt to bring further order to the world of psychedelic molecules was recently put forward in the journal Current Biology. The authors offer a divide-and-conquer approach that assigns psychedelics to one of three classes based on their chemical structure: tryptamines, ergolines and phenethylamines. The tryptamines, to which 5Ht (serotonin) belongs, yield familiar molecules including psilocybin, psilocin, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT via the addition of methyl groups to the ethylamine chain, as well as the addition of other critical side groups, to the core fused indole benzene-pyrrole ring system.
The Conversation
Did male and female dinosaurs differ? A new statistical technique is helping answer the question
In most animal species, males and females differ. This is true for people and other mammals, as well as many species of birds, fish and reptiles. But what about dinosaurs? In 2015, I proposed that variation found in the iconic back plates of stegosaur dinosaurs was due to sex differences.
I was surprised by how strongly some of my colleagues disagreed, arguing that differences between sexes, called sexual dimorphism, did not exist in dinosaurs.
I am a paleontologist, and the debate sparked by my 2015 paper has made me reconsider how researchers studying ancient animals use statistics.
The limited fossil record makes it hard to declare if a dinosaur was sexually dimorphic. But I and some others in my field are beginning to shift away from traditional black-or-white statistical thinking that relies on p-values and statistical significance to define a true finding. Instead of only looking for yes or no answers, we are beginning to consider the estimated magnitude of sexual variation in a species, the degree of uncertainty in that estimate and how these measures compare to other species. This approach offers a more nuanced analysis to challenging questions in paleontology as well as many other fields of science.
Gizmodo
Human Spines Threaded Onto Posts Found at 500-Year-Old Burial Site in Peru
Archaeologists working along the southern coast of Peru have unearthed nearly 200 reed posts adorned with human vertebrae. Sound macabre, but these spines on spikes may have been a response to the Colonial-period looting of graves.
The human vertebrae-on-posts were discovered in the Chincha Valley of Peru and radiocarbon dated to between 1450 and 1650 CE. A total of 192 examples, in which the vertebrae of adults and juveniles were used exclusively, were found across the entire valley, revealing the surprising extent of this practice. This was a tumultuous time for the ancient Chinchorro culture, as it marked the end of Inca rule and the onset of European colonization. Details of this discovery have been published today in Antiquity.
Ars Technica
A new database reveals how much humans are messing with evolution
Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection.
But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong—at least about the timescale. […]
In the late 1990s, biologist Andrew Hendry noticed similarly quick changes in phenotype while studying salmon. (Phenotype refers to the trait that actually exists in the animal, even if it’s not reflected by a change in its underlying genetic code.) “We had this impression that, well, actually, maybe this rapid evolution thing is not so exceptional,” says Hendry, now a professor at McGill University in Montreal. “Maybe it’s actually occurring all the time, and people just haven’t emphasized it.”
With a colleague, Michael Kinnison (now at the University of Maine), Hendry pulled together a database of examples of rapid evolution and wrote a 1999 paper that kickstarted interest in the field. Now, Hendry and colleagues have updated and expanded the original data set with more than 5,000 additional examples: everything from the cranial depth of the common chaffinch to the lifespan of the Trinidadian guppy. Scientists are using this data to answer questions about how fast and far the natural world is changing and how much of the change is due to humans.