If you’ve ever wanted to find a comet no one has ever seen before, search for fossils in Kenya, discover treasures hiding in the collections of some of the world’s great museums, help to save the Stellar sea lion, track forest elephants, or locate planets orbiting a distant star … you can do all those things this morning. And you can do them without donning a pith helmet or limbering up a telescope, thanks to Zooniverse.
Zooniverse is a site where science and history projects reach out to the public for help in sifting through information that is difficult to interpret in an automated manner. The people-powered projects might include looking at trap camera footage to help spy on some of Africa’s rarest animals in Tanzania. Or they might mean sorting images from the Spitzer Space Telescope to help map the Milky Way. Volunteer workers at Zooniverse have made legitimately important discoveries.
Discoveries like four new planets around a previously unexamined star.
Researchers discovered the K2-138 planetary system, home to at least five “sub-Neptune” planets between the size of Earth and Neptune, nearly 620 light years from Earth.
And a brown dwarf star.
One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star. Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project when it began in February — not knowing she would become one of four volunteers to help identify the project's first brown dwarf, formally known as WISEA J110125.95+540052.8.
Over the next few weeks, we’re hoping to usher in a “special relationship” between the people who make a home at Daily Kos and projects on Zooniverse that could genuinely use more sharp eyes and sharper minds. And we’ll be looking for ways to point out the work that volunteers from DK have contributed as well as special projects that might just benefit from the unprecedented mix of people and skills that pass through this site every day.
Below, you’ll find the normal weekly look at some freshly published papers, but also a peek into a couple of projects that will let you make a genuine contribution to scientific knowledge before you finish lunch.
Citizen Science
Snapshot APNR is a project to spot animals in a series of nature reserves bordering Kruger National Park in South Africa. You’ll be presented with a series of images, some of which contain no animals, some of which contain multiple animals. Here’s a picture I got this morning …
That’s the rear three quarters of a Kudu trying to escape the screen. But I caught him and identified him. To work on this project, you don’t have to know an aardwolf from a caracal. The tutorial and on-screen controls will walk you through, with tools to find animals by color, body shape, horns, and more. You’ll get a fascinating lesson in African wildlife, and you’ll be helping to discover the diversity and range of animals that frequent these reserves.
Exoplanet Explorers is one of those projects mentioned in the news. Volunteers can discover entire new worlds, and the project has just gotten in a fresh load of data from the Kepler Space Telescope. If you’ve ever wanted to find a planet to call your own, you may not get a better chance.
The work at Exoplanet Explorers involves sorting data by looking at light curves of distant stars for changes in brightness. Interpreting these light curves can be tricky, and there are plenty of other phenomena, including binary and variable stars, that can make spotting planets more challenging. However, there’s also a good collection of examples, a tutorial to get you started, and a forum for discussing results. So don’t be terrified if this looks like more that you can handle. Worlds are within your grasp.
Paleontology and Archeology
Neanderthals painted first
The cave paintings of sites like Chauvet are beautiful and intensely alive despite a gap of at least 30,000 years between today and the day when fingers applied pigment to stone. Cave art has always seemed like a way to make a unique connection with people who are separated from us by gulfs of time and experience, but still intrinsically human.
But the images on the walls of a cave in Spain tell a different story. A story that says something new about time, the origins of art, and who really made the breakthrough of turning thoughts in the mind into symbols on a wall.
Hoffmann et al. used uranium-thorium dating of carbonate crusts to show that cave paintings from three different sites in Spain must be older than 64,000 years. These paintings are the oldest dated cave paintings in the world. Importantly, they predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years, which suggests that they must be of Neandertal origin.
The images were known before, but dating of the carbonates covering them has led to the suggestion that they’re much older than previously thought. The paintings vary, ranging from patterns of dots and lines to sketches of animals. If the new dates are correct, they not only offer a fresh look at the capabilities and inner life of Neaderthals, but also suggest that the cave artists at other sites may have learned their skills from truly old masters.
Astronomy
Announcing the birth of a brand new, baby … system destroying supernova
The trouble with supernovae is that it’s difficult to predict when they will occur. Even stars that look like terrific candidates can linger for far longer than anyone can possibly observe. But a number of scientists in Argentina and Japan got lucky.
The electromagnetic emission during the first minutes to hours after the emergence of the shock from the stellar surface conveys important information about the final evolution and structure of the exploding star. However, the unpredictable nature of supernova events hinders the detection of this brief initial phase. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of a newly born, normal type IIb supernova (SN 2016gkg), which reveals a rapid brightening at optical wavelengths of about 40 magnitudes per day.
Being able to study this initial burst of light has given new insights into the expanding shock wave of the supernova and how the ex-star transitions through different phases of activity.
Physics
A video game for teaching quantum behavior
Just about everything about quantum mechanics seems to defy the sorts of standard behaviors that we see in the everyday world. but a video game may help to demystify actions that seem altogether counter-intuitive.
In a video game called Quantum Moves, the players’ goal is straightforward: Move an atom from one place to another as quickly and efficiently as possible while a timer counts down the seconds. Atoms in the game aren’t represented as mini solar systems with electron “planets” moving around them, like those you see in a middle-school textbook. Rather, they’re liquid-like waves sloshing in a roughly U-shaped curve. To move the atoms, players have to move the curve.
I haven’t tried this yet, but I promise a report in the near future.
Biology
Bad news for naked mole rats
Only two weeks ago came an article suggesting that naked mole rats were forever young, and essentially immortal sans the intervention of accidents, disease, and predators. But things are not perfect in the tiny tunnels of mole rat land.
The naked mole rat (NMR) is the longest-lived rodent with a maximum life span of over 30 years. Furthermore, NMRs are resistant to a variety of age-related diseases and remain fit and active until very advanced ages. The process of cellular senescence has evolved as an anticancer mechanism; however, it also contributes to aging and age-related pathologies. Here, we characterize cellular senescence in the NMR. We find that naked mole rat cells undergo three major types of cellular senescence: developmental, oncogene-induced, and DNA damage-induced.
So the cells of a mole rat are indeed aging, and in fact seem to pick up damage at a rate not dissimilar to everything else. When it comes to damage induced by radiation, mole rats seemed particularly resistant, but …
We conclude that the NMR displays the same types of cellular senescence found in a short-lived rodent.
So why do they live so long and stay so apparently young? Stay tuned for more delightful NMR-centric research.
Agriculture
It takes a lot less energy and input to produce calories of plant material than it does to raise animals, so for a long time it’s been assumed that reducing meat-eating would allow agriculture to feed far more people. But a previously posted study suggested that removing animals from American agriculture would actually reduce the productivity and increase greenhouse gases.
This week, that study is the subject of a lot of argument.
American agriculture and a feedlot diet.
White and Hall suggest that removing animals from US agriculture would create a food supply incapable of supporting the United States population’s nutritional requirements and increase nutritional deficiencies compared with the current food system. However, their analysis suffers from an uncritical use of nutritional values and optimization algorithms, and a highly unrealistic and narrow scenario design.
This is science-speak for “they screwed up just about every way possible.”
Plant-based diet and climate
Unfortunately, their study provides a misleading message. Reducing animal-based food is needed to meet climate goals and future global food demands. Hence, it is important to assess impacts of dietary changes. However, to be useful, assessments—or at least their interpretations—need to be realistic. By only discussing a situation without animal-based agriculture, White and Hall neglect a wide spectrum of diets. Importantly, their conclusions implicitly assume linear trends between current diet and an animal-free scenario.
Essentially, the original study simply popped animals out of the picture, then assumed people would eat more of the same plants produced the same way to make up the difference, which doesn’t match the diversity of actual plant-based diets around the world. They also made some predictions about land use that don’t seem very reasonable.
Reply from the original authors
In our paper, we allocate tillable land used for animal feed to food production assuming crops in the same proportions as currently grown. If it were economically desirable to grow higher value crops, it is unlikely that the United States would be importing 51% and 39%, respectively, of the fruits and vegetables we consume.
In other words, the authors are declaring that people aren’t growing these crops now, or using all the agricultural land now, because of market pricing. So they feel justified in saying they would not grow them if we stopped eating animals. Which would seem to completely ignore the enormous market disruption that dropping animal consumption would cause. Which … makes this a pretty awful argument.
This has been this week’s installment of “scientists like to argue.”
Science Policy
Florida legislators looking to remove science from science classrooms
The bills build on a law enacted in June 2017, which enables any Florida resident to challenge the textbooks and other educational tools used in their district as being biased or inaccurate. In the five months after the state's governor approved the law, residents filed at least seven complaints, including two that challenge the teaching of evolution and human-driven climate change, according to the Associated Press.
If that sounds bad, it gets worse. The new bills allow people to not only challenge, but suggest “alternatives,” like nice creation-based material, or explanations of how CO2 is so good for the planet.
Just think of this as “Citizen Anti-science.”