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
Naming Pluto’s Features
When New Horizons passes by Pluto tomorrow it will collect the first-ever high-resolution images of the dwarf planet and its moons. This means that we’ll be able to see Pluto’s surface features in detail for the first time — and features, of course, need names. In anticipation of this naming bonanza, the New Horizons team solicited the public for name ideas, and votes, within a few broad categories. Take a look at the themes and the names they’ve cooked up here. skyandtelescope
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New Horizons Image Gallery
A great collection of the latest images and videos. - The Editor nasa
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Biology
Better Chocolate With Microbes
For decades, researchers have worked to improve cacao fermentation by controlling the microbes involved. Now, to their surprise, a team of Belgian researchers has discovered that the same species of yeast used in production of beer, bread, and wine works particularly well in chocolate fermentation. The research was published ahead of print July 6th in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. "Chemical analyses as well as tasting the chocolate showed that the chocolate produced with our best yeasts is much better and more consistent than the chocolate produced through natural fermentation," said Kevin Verstrepen, PhD, professor of genetics and genomics, the University of Leuven, and the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), Belgium. "Moreover, different yeasts yielded different chocolate flavors, indicating that it would be possible to create a whole range of specialty chocolates to match everyone's favorite flavor." After the harvest, cacao beans are collected and placed in large wooden boxes, or even piled on the soil at the farms where they are grown, said Verstrepen. At this point, the beans are surrounded by an unappetizing white, gooey, pulp composed of sugars, proteins, water, pectin, and small amounts of lignin and hemicellulose. Microbes that are present in the farm environment then go to work consuming the pulp through fermentation. Differences among the microbes at different farms result in differences in flavor and quality of the resulting chocolate, said Verstrepen. "Some microbes produce bad aromas that enter into the beans, giving rise to chocolate with a foul taste, while others do not fully consume the pulp, making the resulting beans difficult to process." "We were looking to find or develop the best microbes that result in the best chocolate," said Verstrepen. These, he said, could be added immediately at the onset of fermentation, allowing them to outcompete less desirable microbes, enabling consistent production of high quality chocolate. biologynews
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People Who Speak Two Languages Have More Gray Matter
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control." This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated. "Inconsistencies in the reports about the bilingual advantage stem primarily from the variety of tasks that are used in attempts to elicit the advantage," says senior author Guinevere Eden, DPhil, director for the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). "Given this concern, we took a different approach and instead compared gray matter volume between adult bilinguals and monolinguals. We reasoned that the experience with two languages and the increased need for cognitive control to use them appropriately would result in brain changes in Spanish-English bilinguals when compared with English-speaking monolinguals. And in fact greater gray matter for bilinguals was observed in frontal and parietal brain regions that are involved in executive control." Gray matter of the brain has been shown to differ in volume as a function of people's experiences. A prominent finding of this type was a report that London taxi drivers have more gray matter in brain areas involved in spatial navigation. sciencedaily
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Chemistry
Confirmation Of Buckyballs In The Milky Way
The presence of buckyballs in the Milky Way has been confirmed by scientists who matched the absorption spectra of C60+ ions to two previously unidentified absorption features in spectra of the interstellar medium that were identified over 20 years ago. In the early 1990s, shortly after the discovery of buckyballs, John Maier and colleagues at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who were specialists in electronic spectroscopy of polyatomic ions, developed a technique to measure the electronic absorption spectrum of C60+ in the condensed phase, using neon to dilute the C60 ions at low temperature. ‘A year later two astrophysicists looked in this region and found diffuse interstellar bands quite near in wavelength,’ says Maier. They suggested these bands – at 9632 Å and 9577 Å – could have been due to C60+ ions, but because the neon matrix used to measure the laboratory spectra caused some distortion, the match was not close enough to prove this unambiguously. ‘It took 20 years for us to develop the appropriate techniques to measure the electronic spectrum of C60+ under the conditions as in space to be able to make a direct one-to-one comparison,’ says Maier. The group synthesised a complex of C60+ and helium which enabled the spectrum to be measured in the gas phase at a temperature of just 5.8K. Their measurements show an almost exact match to the interstellar spectra, with band maxima at 9632.7Å and 9577.5Å. rsc
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Copper Clusters Convert Carbon Dioxide To Methanol
With the help of the right catalyst, carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-fuel power stations could be used as a chemical feedstock, rather than contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers have now found that tiny clusters of copper atoms can generate methanol from CO2 at an unusually low pressure (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5b03668). Copper is already used to catalyze industrial methanol production from syngas—a mixture of carbon monoxide, CO2, and hydrogen—at pressures of 10 to 100 atm and temperatures of a few hundred degrees C. But these conditions make the process energy-intensive and costly. “We wanted to use lower pressure to save energy,” says Larry A. Curtiss of Argonne National Laboratory. Curtiss—working with Peter Zapol, Stefan Vajda, and colleagues—calculated that copper clusters containing four atoms would offer higher catalytic activity than larger clusters or copper surfaces. The smaller clusters have more coordination sites available to bind reaction intermediates, offering a lower-energy reaction pathway. The team peppered a thin film of alumina with Cu4+ clusters, and then monitored reactions over this catalyst in a gas stream containing 1% CO2, 3% H2, and 96% helium at an overall pressure of 1.25 atm. As they increased the temperature to 125 ºC, the H2 reduced the copper clusters to catalytically active Cu40. Methanol production peaked at 225 ºC, giving the highest reported activity for CO2 reduction to methanol at such a low CO2 partial pressure, a pressure around one-twentieth of that in work with previous catalysts. acs
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Earth Science
Going To The Beach May Require Hand Sanitizer In Addition To Sunscreen
“No swimming” signs have already popped up this summer along coastlines where fecal bacteria have invaded otherwise inviting waters. Some vacationers ignore the signs while others resign themselves to tanning and playing on the beach. But should those avoiding the water be wary of the sand, too? New research in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology investigates reasons why the answer could be “yes.” Sewage-contaminated coastal waters can lead to stomach aches, diarrhea and rashes for those who accidentally swallow harmful microbes or come into contact with them. But over the past decade, scientists have been finding fecal bacteria in beach sand at levels 10 to 100 times higher than in nearby seawater. Tao Yan and colleagues wanted to find out why. In the lab, the researchers created microcosms of beach sand and seawater contaminated with sewage to see how the overall bacterial populations, including fecal dwellers responsible for causing illness, would change over time. They found that microbial communities tended to decay much slower in the simulated beach sand environment than in the water, which could help explain why more fecal bacteria are found on sandy beaches affected by wastewater pollution than in the waves. enn
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Big Hydro Threatens To Wipe Out Little Hydro In Malaysia
Nestled within the rain forest of Malaysian Borneo, a handful of villages are so remote they don't even have roads. They do, however, have electricity. The villages draw on the nearby Papar River's current to generate enough power to run lights, refrigerators, and phone-chargers for up to 50 households. The systems, dubbed "microhydro," are small-scale versions of the same hydroelectric dams that help power large cities. Now, however, a controversial proposal to build a bigger dam threatens to wipe out at least six villages with such systems that are either installed or almost complete. The Kaiduan dam would provide drinking water and electricity for urban areas on the west coast. The government has said it would relocate some 2,000 people whose homes would be flooded in building the Kaiduan, but critics say similar promises made for the Bakun dam to the south went unfulfilled. As part of Kaiduan construction, about (7.5 square miles) 12 square kilometers of land would be intentionally flooded. nationalgeographic
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Physics
Weyl Points: Long-Sought Phenomenon Finally Detected
Part of a 1929 prediction by physicist Hermann Weyl—of a kind of massless particle that features a singular point in its energy spectrum called the "Weyl point,"—has finally been confirmed by direct observation for the first time, says an international team of physicists led by researchers at MIT. The finding could lead to new kinds of high-power single-mode lasers and other optical devices, the team says. For decades, physicists thought that the subatomic particles called neutrinos were, in fact, the massless particles that Weyl had predicted—a possibility that was ultimately eliminated by the 1998 discovery that neutrinos do have a small mass. While thousands of scientific papers have been written about the theoretical particles, until this year there had seemed little hope of actually confirming their existence. "Every single paper written about Weyl points was theoretical, until now," says Marin Soljači, a professor of physics at MIT and the senior author of a paper published this week in the journal Science confirming the detection. (Another team of researchers at Princeton University and elsewhere independently made a different detection of Weyl particles; their paper appears in the same issue of Science). Ling Lu, a research scientist at MIT and lead author of that team's paper, says the elusive points can be thought of as equivalent to theoretical entities known as magnetic monopoles. These do not exist in the real world: They would be the equivalent of cutting a bar magnet in half and ending up with separate north and south magnets, whereas what really happens is you end up with two shorter magnets, each with two poles. But physicists often carry out their calculations in terms of momentum space (also called reciprocal space) rather than ordinary three-dimensional space phys.org
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LHCb Claims Discovery Of Two Pentaquarks
The best evidence yet for the existence of a new type of particle called a pentaquark has been unveiled by physicists working on the LHCb experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Containing five bound quarks, pentaquarks were first predicted to exist in the late 1970s, and evidence for their existence emerged from several labs in the 2000s, only to be contradicted by experiments done elsewhere. While this latest evidence from LHCb is very strong, the data do not reveal exactly how the five quarks are bound together – something that will be the subject of further studies at CERN. Most known hadrons are either mesons, which contain a quark and an antiquark, or baryons, which comprise three quarks. A proton contains two "up" quarks and one "down" quark, while a positive kaon contains an up quark and a "strange" antiquark. But the theory of the strong force – quantum chromodynamics (QCD) – allows for other types of baryons, providing that the number of quarks minus the number of antiquarks is a multiple of three. In particular, it allows for particles containing four quarks and one antiquark. [...] LHCb physicist Tim Gershon of the University of Warwick in the UK explains why he is confident of the result: "The LHCb analysis is significantly different from those of previous experiments that found hints of [pentaquarks] that were later disproved." He adds that "LHCb has analysed all of the available information in the decay distribution to prove that the peak in the mass distribution cannot be a fake caused by other processes." Subatomic molecules The LHCb data do not, however, reveal how the five quarks are bound within the pentaquark. The five quarks could be tightly bound within a single structure, for example. Another possibility is that a quark and antiquark are bound together to form a meson and the remaining three quarks form a baryon. The meson and baryon could then be bound to each other to create a structure resembling a subatomic molecule. physicsworld
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