Welcome to the Saturday Science Edition of Overnight News Digest
Overnight News Digest is a regular daily feature which provides noteworthy news items and commentary from around the world. The editorial staff includes side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, and JML9999.
Neon Vincent is our editor-in-chief.
Special thanks go to Magnifico for starting this venerable series.
Astronomy
New Horizons Pluto Probe Heads Toward 2nd Flyby Target
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has begun chasing down another distant, icy object. New Horizons, which in July performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto, fired up its engines yesterday (Oct. 22) in the first of four maneuvers designed to send the probe zooming past a small object called 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019. [...] The views from the second flyby will be quite diffferent (if it happens), for 2014 MU69 is a very different world than Pluto. For example, scientists think 2014 MU69 is just 30 miles (48 km) wide or so, whereas New Horizons found Pluto's diameter to be 1,473 miles (2,370 km). Small Kuiper Belt objects are more pristine and primitive than dwarf planets like Pluto, so flying by 2014 MU69 could shed light on the raw materials that coalesced to form the planets 4.5 billion years ago, scientists have said. space.com
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Closest Star-Shredding Black Hole
I generally think of black holes as friendly. (Yes, I know I’m nuts.) The supermassive ones loll around in galactic centers, sloppily eating gas like big Labrador puppies — but even less efficiently. Stars are more likely to have a dour perspective of these spacetime beasts. If a star comes too close to an average supermassive black hole — a couple times the Earth-Sun distance or less — it will be ripped apart in a tidal disruption event (TDE). This gravitational tug of war is an intense version of the process by which the Moon creates tides on Earth. We’ve caught several of these star shredders in action. In the October 22nd Nature, Jon Miller (University of Michigan) and colleagues report another, ASASSN-14li (named after the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae that detected it), at the center of the galaxy PGC 043234. This one is the closest so far — it has a redshift of a mere 0.02, so the light has only been traveling about 290 million years to reach us. Since it’s so close, the astronomers could see what the star’s taffy-fied gas was doing. As gas falls in toward the black hole, friction heats it so much that it emits X-rays. ASASSN-14li’s glow was variable, and its glow can only vary as fast as the photons can travel from one side of the emitting object to the other — else the variation would be smeared out. In other words, the variability tells you how big the source object is. ASASSN-14li’s variability indicates that the gas formed an accretion disk right near the event horizon of a black hole “weighing” a couple million solar masses. There’s also, however, some sort of wind or filamentary debris: the X-ray spectra are blueshifted, meaning the wavelengths are shorter than we’d expect because the glowing stuff is moving toward us. The amount of shifting also changed over time. This gas isn’t moving fast enough to escape the black hole. It could be gas still stuck on the star’s elliptical orbit, swinging out the farthest it can get from the hole. Computer simulations do predict that leftover gas will take a while for its orbit to circularize, and that flows should be filamentary, even while gas much closer to the black hole quickly forms a disk that siphons material in past the event horizon. So these observations match what we’d expect. skyandtelescope.com
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Biology
Self-Medicating Monkeys Gobble Painkilling Bark
When a monkey has the sniffles or a headache, it doesn't have the luxury of popping a few painkillers from the medicine cabinet. So how does it deal with the common colds and coughs of the wildlife world? University of Georgia ecologist Ria R. Ghai and her colleagues observed a troop of more than 100 red colobus monkeys in Uganda's Kibale National Park for four years to figure out whether the rain forest provides a Tylenol equivalent. Monkeys infected with a whipworm parasite were found to spend more time resting and less time moving, grooming and having sex. The infected monkeys also ate twice as much tree bark as their healthy counterparts even though they kept the same feeding schedules. [...] The fibrous snack could help literally sweep the intestinal intruder out of the simians' gastrointestinal tracts, but Ghai suspects a more convincing reason. Seven of the nine species of trees and shrubs preferred by sick monkeys have known pharmacological properties, such as antisepsis and analgesia. Thus, the monkeys could have been self-medicating, although she cannot rule out other possibilities. The sick individuals were, however, using the very same plants that local people use to treat illnesses, including infection by whipworm parasites. And that “just doesn't seem like a coincidence,” Ghai says. scientificamerican.com
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How A Flying Bat Sees Space
Recordings from echolocating bat brains have for the first time given researchers a view into how mammals understand 3-D space. By training bats to fly around obstacles in a room, and sit patiently on a platform, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team were able to interpret how the animals use echolocation--a high-frequency sound navigation system that bats use to hunt--to sense their environment. The results were presented today at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The researchers focused on a particular portion of the bat brain, the mid-brain superior colliculus. All mammal brains have a superior colliculus, and it plays a role in "orienting behavior," or how species move through space. In humans, that means using visual cues. For bats, it means acoustic ones, or echolocation. Bats direct their sound beam to inspect objects in their environment, just as primates move their eyes to see their environment, said Cynthia Moss of Johns Hopkins University. She researches spatial perception, memory, motor behaviors and more. Her Batlab conducted the research. nsf.gov
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Chemistry
Blackest Material Ever Made Sets New Record
The perfect black body exists only in textbooks, absorbing as it does, theoretically, all energy hitting its surface and then subsequently emitting that energy without loss. Researchers in Saudi Arabia have taken a leaf out of that textbook to create the blackest material ever made. Their disordered nanostructured material exhibits almost ideal black body absorption of 98–99% across the visible and infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Moreover, neither the angle of incidence nor the light’s polarisation affects absorption. Andrea Fratalocchi of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and colleagues suggest that their broadband light absorbing material could open up new approaches to energy-harvesting devices and optical interconnects. The novel material is made of a nanorod attached to a nanosphere. This composite nanomaterial can, on average, absorb 26% more incident light than carbon nanotubes, which were previously considered the blackest known material and were being investigated by Nasa for use on satellites. [...] While earlier attempts to create black body materials have relied on organising carbon nanotubes into thin layers that can undergo resonance, this comes with the distinct disadvantage of making them receptive to irradiation at only a specific angle. The KAUST team avoids this limitation by taking inspiration from nature. The researchers were aware of natural materials that are ultra-white, such as the scales on the Cyphochilus beetle, native to south-east Asia. The whiteness is due to the microscopic photonic crystal structure of the scales. With their nanomaterial the team has inverted this ultra-white property using the concept of chaotic energy harvesting to allow them to design a material that would be as black, if not blacker, than those materials are white. Instead of the nanomaterial being ordered as they might be in a photonic crystal, the surface structure is disordered and offers incident light a random network of ‘pores’ made of infinitely long, metallic waveguides. Nevertheless, the use of an optical dye allows the material to re-emit incident light as if it were a resonant structure. The team points out that the engineered dark nanoparticles are versatile, can be easily dispersed in liquids or deposited on solid thin-film structures for a range of applications. The same particles might also lead scientists down new avenues of fundamental research into Bose–Einstein condensation of light and how that could relate to nanoplasmonics. rsc.org
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A Liquid Lens Could Improve Cataract Treatment
Every year, about 10 million patients get cataract surgery to replace the clouded crystalline lens in their eye with a clear artificial one. But these silicone or flexible plastic lenses can dislocate and cloud up again because of calcium deposits or epithelial cell growth on the lens surface. Researchers now report a liquid lens that could overcome those issues. The lens is made of a liquid droplet encapsulated between two 20-μm-thick poly(p-xylylene) polymer films. These biocompatible, water-repelling polymers are approved by the Food & Drug Administration as coatings on medical implants and devices. They resist calcium buildup, and their surfaces are easy to customize using functional groups. Hsien-Yeh Chen, a chemical engineer at National Taiwan University, and colleagues first used chemical vapor deposition to create a layer of vinyl poly(p-xylylene) on a quartz substrate. They then deposited droplets of liquids such as silicone oil and glycerol on the polymer. The liquids stick and spread on the surfaces to different extents, forming droplets of various shapes and curvatures. This should allow the lenses to be easily customized for near or far focus to accommodate patients’ differing vision prescriptions by varying the liquid composition, Chen says. The researchers covered the droplets with another vinyl poly(p-xylylene) layer and then cut out the individual lenses along with a pair of struts. Each device is 1 mm thick and has a 6-mm-diameter liquid lens region. The researchers then attached thiol-capped polyethylene glycol molecules on the lens region to resist epithelial cell growth, and cell-attracting peptide molecules on the struts to help the lens attach more firmly to the eye’s lens sac once implanted. [...] The new lenses showed no cell buildup when placed in eye epithelial cell cultures for 24 hours. And they showed no calcium deposits after being immersed in calcium phosphate solutions for 48 days. acs.org
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Earth Science
How Will Rising Sea Levels Impact The Phillippines?
More than 167,000 hectares of coastland -- about 0.6% of the country's total area -- are projected to go underwater in the Philippines, especially in low-lying island communities, according to research by the University of the Philippines. Low-lying countries with an abundance of coastlines are at significant risk from rising sea levels resulting from global warming. According to data by the World Meteorological Organisation, the water levels around the Philippines are rising at a rate almost three times the global average due partly to the influence of the trade winds pushing ocean currents. On average, sea levels around the world rise 3.1 centimetres every ten years. Water levels in the Philippines are projected to rise between 7.6 and 10.2 centimetres each decade. The Philippines government has been forced to take this into consideration. A number of governmental and nongovernmental organizations have sprung up in recent years to address the issue. The Department of Environment and National Resources has its own climate change office, which has set up various programs to educate communities in high-risk areas. One program, for example, teaches communities to adapt to rising sea levels by ensuring that public spaces, such as community halls and schools, are not built near the coast. enn.com
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Leaked Map Reveals Big Gas Eyeing Most Biodiverse Place On Earth
The map vaguely and ignorantly - or hopefully? Disdainfully? - calls Manu a “reserve”, where gas operations are permitted. Not so in national parks. Peru’s 1997 Law of Protected Natural Areas states “the extraction of natural resources is not permitted” in parks, while the 2001 regulations for “protected natural areas” states the “settlement of new human groups and the exploitation of natural resources is prohibited.” In addition, the 1993 Constitution “obliges” the government “to promote the conservation of biological diversity and protected natural areas.” Manu isn’t just any national park. It is home to members of several indigenous peoples - the Matsigenka, “Matsigenka-Nanti”, “Mashco-Piro”, Nahua, Quechua and Yine - while UNESCO, which has designated it a biosphere reserve and World Heritage Site, says that the biodiversity “exceeds that of any other place on earth.” In early 2014 scientists described Manu as “top of the [world’s] list of natural protected areas in terms of amphibian and reptile diversity”, and back in 2006 other scientists found that the number of bird and mammal species is the “largest for any similarly sized area in the world.” “For 10 years [Manu] has held the title as the world’s richest protected area for birds and mammals,” Bruce Patterson, from The Field Museum in the US, told the Guardian. [...] Why draw attention to it now? First, because the company which drew it, Pluspetrol, was given permission last year to expand its operations eastwards within a concession called Lot 88, marked on the map too. If the Camisea gas project, as operations there are known, continues to expand eastwards - i.e. beyond Lot 88, where it doesn’t currently have permission to operate - it would eventually involve Manu. Indeed, the protected areas authority within the Environment Ministry, SERNANP, expressed concern that the 2014-approved expansion within Lot 88 would impact Manu indirectly by making the migration of “nomadic populations” living in what Peruvian law calls “isolation” between Camisea and Manu “frequent”, leading to “new settlements being established” in Manu and possible conflict with “indigenous communities” there. In an article of mine in Truthout, Pluspetrol played down such concerns, saying that the “nomadic populations” are “always coming and going” and such migrations are “characteristic of the way they live.” Second, because of the current potential crisis situation in Manu’s buffer zone where, near the left bank of the upper River Madre de Dios, a group of indigenous people in “isolation” has effectively based itself since May 2011. The “Mashco-Piro”, as the group are known by many people, appear to usually base themselves much deeper, much more remotely in the park along right bank tributaries of the upper River Manu, avoiding contact and the potential transmission of fatal diseases. There are numerous possible reasons why this group is now where it is - e.g. internal division and/or loggers, colonists, narco-traffickers or other indigenous people entering their territories - but what about gas operations? theguardian.com
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Physics
Scientists Predict Cool New Phase Of Superionic Ice
Scientists have predicted a new phase of superionic ice, a special form of ice that could exist on Uranus and Neptune, in a theoretical study performed by a team of researchers at Princeton University. "Superionic ice is this in-between state of matter that we can't really relate to anything we know of—that's why it's interesting," Salvatore Torquato, a Professor of Chemistry who jointly led the work with Roberto Car, the Ralph W. '31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry. Unlike water or regular ice, in superionic ice the water molecules dissociate into charged atoms called ions, with the oxygen ions locked in a solid lattice, while the hydrogen ions move like the molecules in a liquid. [T]he research revealed an entirely new type of superionic ice that they call the P21/c-SI phase, which occurs at pressures even higher than in the interior of giant ice planets of our solar system. Two other phases of superionic ice thought to exist on the planets are body centered cubic superionic ice (BCC-SI) and, close-packed superionic ice (CP-SI). Each phase has a unique arrangement of oxygen ions that gives rise to distinct properties. For example, each of the phases allows hydrogen ions to flow in a characteristic way. The effects of this ionic conductivity could be observed by planetary scientists in search of superionic ice. "These unique properties could essentially be used as signatures of superionic ice," said Torquato, "so now that you know what to look for, you have a better chance of finding it." Unlike Earth, which has two magnetic poles (north and south), ice giants can have many local magnetic poles, which leading theories suggest may be due to superionic ice and ionic water in the mantle of these planets. In ionic water both oxygen and hydrogen ions show liquid-like behavior. Scientists have proposed that heat emanating outward from the planet's core may pass through an inner layer of superionic ice, and through convection, create vortices on the outer layer of ionic water that give rise to local magnetic fields. phys.org
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Light Goes Infinitely Fast With New Material
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"Light doesn't typically like to be squeezed or manipulated but this metamaterial permits you to manipulate light from one chip to another, to squeeze, bend, twist and reduce diameter of a beam from the macroscale to the nanoscale," said Mazur. "It's a remarkable new way to manipulate light."
Although this infinitely high velocity sounds like it breaks the rule of relativity, it doesn't. Nothing in the universe travels faster than light carrying information -- Einstein is still right about that. But light has another speed, measured by how fast the crests of a wavelength move, known as phase velocity. This speed of light increases or decreases depending on the material it's moving through. When light passes through water, for example, its phase velocity is reduced as its wavelengths get squished together. Once it exits the water, its phase velocity increases again as its wavelength elongates. How much the crests of a light wave slow down in a material is expressed as a ratio called the refraction index -- the higher the index, the more the material interferes with the propagation of the wave crests of light. Water, for example, has a refraction index of about 1.3. [...] In a zero-index material, there is no phase advance, meaning light no longer behaves as a moving wave, traveling through space in a series of crests and troughs. Instead, the zero-index material creates a constant phase -- all crests or all troughs -- stretching out in infinitely long wavelengths. The crests and troughs oscillate only as a variable of time, not space. This uniform phase allows the light to be stretched or squished, twisted or turned, without losing energy. A zero-index material that fits on a chip could have exciting applications, especially in the world of quantum computing. sciencedaily.com
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