The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
The Seattle Times
More than half of Seattle’s software developers were born outside U.S.
Just how important are foreign-born workers to Seattle’s tech-driven economy?
I looked at the most recent census data and came away with this resounding answer: really damn important.
In total, about 143,000 people in the Seattle-area civilian labor force are in IT occupations — software developers, computer programmers, systems analysts and so on. And nearly 57,000 of them, or 40 percent, were born in another country, according to my analysis of the 2016 data.
For software developers, in particular, the numbers are even more striking: Slightly more than half of the folks in this occupation were born abroad. Software developer is the No. 1 IT job in the Seattle area, nearly half of the total employment.
AP: Amtrak might stop service on tracks lacking speed controls
Amtrak is considering suspending service on tracks that don’t have sophisticated speed controls by a Dec. 31 deadline, the railroad’s top executive said Thursday, threatening to disrupt operations across the U.S. in a push to strengthen safety after a series of deadly wrecks.
President and CEO Richard Anderson told a House subcommittee that Amtrak is worried passengers are being put at risk by delays in installing Positive Train Control systems on tracks it uses but doesn’t own. Those tracks make up a majority of Amtrak’s network.
Railroads face a year-end deadline mandated by Congress for installing the GPS-based system, known as PTC, but some are asking regulators for an extension until 2020. That’s on top of a three-year delay granted in 2015. They’ve cited challenges including equipment problems and delays in testing to ensure it’s compatible with other railroads’ systems.
Miami Herald
‘No more guns’: Protesters escorted out of Paul Ryan fundraiser in Key Biscayne
Two protesters chanting “no more guns” were removed from a Republican fundraiser in Key Biscayne Friday night after confronting Speaker of the House Paul Ryan about the mass shooting that happened days earlier and miles up the road.
[…] Thorne said she found Ryan in the middle of the room — “I shook his hand and everything,” she said — and introduced herself as a teacher and Key Biscayner.
“Nice,” the Republican congressman replied.
“Nice?” Thorne said. “You’re here celebrating the death of 17 children.”
At that, Thorne said, Ryan told her he “didn’t want to talk politics” or argue. When Thorne tried to continue, security escorted her out. She chanted “No more guns!” on her way out the door, she said.
After school shooting, anger and grief dominate anti-gun rally
They showed up bearing homemade signs and placards that honored the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
They chanted and cheered and spoke of surviving a massacre that claimed 17 of their friends, teachers and loved ones. […]
But the most emotional moments of the rousing two-hour rally belonged to the survivors — specifically the Douglas High School students who expressed their grief and great fury by imploring the public to vote in the upcoming November elections.
“We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks,” said Emma Gonzalez, 18, a senior at Douglas High, her voice wavering between anger and tears. “Just like [the historic Supreme Court decision] Tinker V. Desmoines, we are going to change the law. That’s going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook, and it’s all going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most importantly, the students.”
In her electrifying speech, which has gone viral, Gonzalez called out the National Rifle Association, President Donald Trump and the neighbors and relatives of the gunman who knew about his erratic behavior but didn’t act on it.
The Washington Post
The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent
Not long after Marat Mindiyarov started working at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll factory indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, he began hearing about the coveted “Facebook Department.” There, workers could earn more money and work alongside a younger, hipper crowd. But to gain entry, job candidates had to prove they could seamlessly insinuate themselves into the American political conversation.
The English-language test, which Mindiyarov said he took in December 2014, included a question about vegetarianism and another about Hillary Clinton and the prospect that the Democratic front-runner would win the U.S. presidential election.
Mindiyarov, 43 and a teacher by training, wrote that Clinton had a good chance of winning, and that it would be a remarkable feat, making her the country’s first female president.
His bosses were not impressed.
Sea lions have made a magnificent comeback, and they want their beaches back
Just a few decades ago, the California sea lion seemed on the verge of becoming an endangered species. It was 1964, and hunting and fishing had caused the breeding population off the West Coast to shrink to just 35,000.
How times have changed. After the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 made it illegal to kill or harass sea lions, their ranks steadily grew — and grew, and grew. Now, according to recent estimates by the National Marine Fisheries Service, California sea lions number in the hundreds of thousands, making them comfortably within the range of what experts call the “optimal sustainable population.”
It’s as good a success story as a species can hope for. But there’s a hitch: A robust population of barking sea lions is not particularly easy for people to live with.
The world's orangutan population shrank by half in 16 years
Bornean orangutans, the largest tree-dwellers on the planet, are vanishing. The population of these great apes was halved between 1999 and 2015, per an estimate published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. A survey of orangutan nests, coupled with a statistical analysis of habitat changes, indicates that more than 100,000 animals were lost in those 16 years. It is a dramatic drop for the animals who, because their genomes and unique physical characteristics so resemble ours, are among humans' closest living relatives.
Orangutans' exact numbers are uncertain. The animals are intelligent and shy and prefer thick forests. You could walk by an orangutan hiding in the canopy and never know the shaggy, 4-foot-tall creature was there, said Maria Voigt, an expert in sustainability and ape habitat at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Counting a population by sight would be a very difficult task.
Instead, surveyors tally orangutan nests. Orangutans, before they sleep, bend long branches into structures that look like leafy baskets. The nests are so large that researchers can use helicopters to spot them. Since 1999, surveyors have covered a total of 500 square miles in Borneo looking for their nests.
The Guardian
Stress in fathers may alter sperm and affect behaviour in offspring
Stressed fathers may end up with changes to their sperm that could affect behaviour in their offspring, research in mice has shown.
Previous work by the team found that male mice who were exposed to a mildly stressful event, such as being restrained, produced sperm that was richer in certain types of molecules called microRNAs.
Crucially, the higher levels of these microRNAs in the sperm seemed to result in offspring with a dampened response to stress. That, scientists have noted, could affect the mental health of offspring, since an inability to respond appropriately to stress has been linked to neuropsychiatric disorders such as PTSD and depression.
Artwork hidden under Picasso painting revealed by x-ray
Wrapped in a mustard coloured blanket with a white scarf and her head on one side, Pablo Picasso’s La Misereuse Accroupie (The Crouching Beggar) is a study of forlorn resignation. But researchers say that there is more to desolate character than meets the eye.
Beneath the mournful image lies another painting, a landscape, researchers have revealed after using non-invasive imaging techniques to examine the work.
The study has also shed light on previously hidden features of Picasso’s early attempts at his desolate figure.
Laser scanning reveals 'lost' ancient Mexican city 'had as many buildings as Manhattan'
Earlier this month researchers revealed it had been used to discover an ancient Mayan city within the dense jungles of Guatemala, while it has also helped archaeologists to map the city of Caracol – another Mayan metropolis.
Now, researchers have used the technique to reveal the full extent of an ancient city in western Mexico, about a half an hour’s drive from Morelia, built by rivals to the Aztecs.
“To think that this massive city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is kind of amazing,” said Chris Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University who is presenting the latest findings from the study at the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas, this week.
Live Science
Monster Antarctic Iceberg Gets Its Big Break in First-of-Its-Kind Video
The British Antarctic Survey has released the first-ever video footage of an enormous iceberg as it broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf in July 2017.
To capture the incredible video and stills, cameras carried by helicopters circled over and around the iceberg, called A-68, as it continued to move into the Weddell Sea, away from the Larsen C ice shelf. The massive iceberg weighs an estimated 1 trillion tons and spans more than 2,300 square miles (6,000 square kilometers). It has been described as about the size of Delaware, twice the size of Luxembourg or roughly four times the size of London.
This Martian Crater Has a Weirdly Earth-Like Secret
NASA's Mars rover Opportunity was exploring an uncharted Martian valley last month when it encountered a shockingly familiar sight: Streams of rocks and gravel stretched down the hillside of Perseverance Valley — a roughly 600-foot (183 meters) drop down the inner slope of a crater — in seemingly organized rows.
The patterns closely resemble so-called "rock stripes" seen on certain mountains on Earth, NASA said in a statement. These formations usually result when wet soil freezes and thaws repeatedly over many years, NASA said. Perseverance Valley is thought to have been carved hundreds of thousands of years ago by a combination of water, ice and wind — already making the spot unusual by Martian standards, NASA wrote. The presence of these newly discovered stripes further adds to the region's mystery, researchers said. [The 7 Most Mars-Like Places on Earth]
Bits of Famous, Lost (and Fake) 'Flying Saucer' Turn Up in British Science Museum
Pieces of a 50-year-old English "flying saucer" have turned up in the London Science Museum archive.
As the BBC reported Feb. 9, David Clarke, a journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, examined the metal shards and determined that they came from a famous 18-inch (45 centimeters) metal saucer. The object captivated the U.K. press in 1957 after it turned up in Silpho Moor near Scarborough, Yorkshire, England. Then, after being chopped up into bits for examination, it gradually disappeared in the intervening decades..
Three men originally discovered the object in the moor, the Yorkshire Post reported Feb. 8, just three weeks after Russia launched Sputnik — the first satellite of the Earth created by humans. As the Post reported, its copper bottom was covered in hieroglyphics, very much like the saucer discovered in Roswell, New Mexico a decade earlier.
Reuters
SpaceX gets U.S. regulator to back satellite internet plan
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, fresh off the successful launch this month of the world’s most powerful rocket, won an endorsement on Wednesday from the top U.S. communications regulator to build a broadband network using satellites.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed the approval of an application by SpaceX to provide broadband services using satellites in the United States and worldwide.
“Satellite technology can help reach Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach,” Pai said in a statement.
Robots take to the slopes on sidelines of Winter Games
While Alpine skiers fought high winds at the Pyeongchang Games on Monday, there were no such problems for robots competing in their own “Olympics” ski challenge.
Robots of all shapes and sizes skied, and in some cases tumbled, down a course at the Welli Hilli ski resort, an hour’s drive west of Pyeongchang.
Eight robotics teams from universities, institutes and a private company competed for a $10,000 prize in the Ski Robot Challenge.
Ars Technica
A solar panel on every roof in the US? Here are the numbers
When you’re scoping out possible futures, it’s useful to ask a lot of “what if?” questions. For example, what if we could install solar panels on every suitable roof in the United States? How much electricity would they generate?
Plenty of research has followed this line of thought, though much of it has necessarily focused on working out the details for individual cities or regions. But now with enough of these studies in the bank, a group of researchers from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory decided to take another whack at a national estimate. […]
In total, they estimate that there are a little over 8 billion square meters of suitable roofs in the US. Cover that in solar panels, and you would produce about 1,400 terawatt hours of electricity each year—about two-thirds of which would come from small residential buildings. The total production is equal to nearly 40 percent of the total electricity currently sold by utilities in the US.
Oxygen ions may be an easy-to-track sign of life on exoplanets
The search for extraterrestrial life is fairly synonymous with the search for life as we know it. We're just not that imaginative—when looking for other planets that could host life, we don’t know what to look for, exactly, if not Earth-like conditions. Everything we know about life comes from life on Earth.
But conditions that clearly favor life here—liquid water, surface oxygen, ozone in the stratosphere, possibly a magnetic field—may not necessarily be prerequisites for its development elsewhere. Conversely, their presence does not guarantee life, either. So what can we look for that's an indication of life?
Op-ed: The story behind the satellite that Trump wants dead
There were plenty of striking things about Monday's budget news, given that it contained lots of draconian cuts that were simultaneously restored because Congress had boosted spending the week before. But perhaps the most striking among them was an item in the proposed budget for NASA: Trump wants to block the follow on to a highly successful NASA mission.
To truly appreciate just how awful this is, you have to understand the history of that satellite and what it means to the scientific community as a whole. So let's step back and take a look at why the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (or OCO) exists in the first place. It turns out it was built specifically to handle some outstanding questions of the sort that people in the administration say are important, and killing its successor would mean the existing mission never lives up to its full potential.
Nature
Ocean-wide sensor array provides new look at global ocean current
The North Atlantic Ocean is a major driver of the global currents that regulate Earth’s climate, mix the oceans and sequester carbon from the atmosphere — but researchers haven’t been able to get a good look at its inner workings until now. The first results from an array of sensors strung across this region reveal that things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed.
Researchers with the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) presented their findings this week at an ocean science meeting in Portland, Oregon. With nearly two years of data from late 2014 to 2016, the team found that the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — which pumps warm surface water north and returns colder water at depth — varies with the winds and the seasons, transporting an average of roughly 15.3 million cubic metres of water per second.
Ocean tides could have driven ancient fish to walk
Tides that left fish high and dry hundreds of millions of years ago could have kick-started the evolution of land-walking vertebrates.
New calculations suggest that, around 400 million years ago, many coastlines experienced two-week tidal cycles that varied in height by four metres or more. Such a huge range could have stranded fish in tidal pools for a couple of weeks. Only the ones with fins strong enough to muscle themselves out would have been able to journey back into the ocean and survive. Fossil evidence for the earliest known land vertebrates comes from places that had such wide tidal ranges.
Hannah Byrne, who led the work while at Bangor University, UK, and is now a doctoral student at Uppsala University in Sweden, reported the findings on 15 February at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon.
The quantum internet has arrived (and it hasn’t)
Before she became a theoretical physicist, Stephanie Wehner was a hacker. Like most people in that arena, she taught herself from an early age. At 15, she spent her savings on her first dial-up modem, to use at her parents’ home in Würzburg, Germany. And by 20, she had gained enough street cred to land a job in Amsterdam, at a Dutch Internet provider started by fellow hackers.
A few years later, while working as a network-security specialist, Wehner went to university. There, she learnt that quantum mechanics offers something that today’s networks are sorely lacking — the potential for unhackable communications. Now she is turning her old obsession towards a new aspiration. She wants to reinvent the Internet.
The ability of quantum particles to live in undefined states — like Schrödinger’s proverbial cat, both alive and dead — has been used for years to enhance data encryption. But Wehner, now at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and other researchers argue that they could use quantum mechanics to do much more, by harnessing nature’s uncanny ability to link, or entangle, distant objects, and teleporting information between them. At first, it all sounded very theoretical, Wehner says. Now, “one has the hope of realizing it”.
Science
America’s Corn Belt is making its own weather
The Great Plains of the central United States—America’s Corn Belt—is one of the most fertile regions on Earth, producing more than 10 billion bushels of corn each year. It’s also home to some mysterious weather: While the rest of the world has warmed, the region’s summer temperatures have dropped as much as a full degree Celsius, and rainfall has increased up to 35%, the largest spike anywhere in the world. The culprit, according to a new study, isn’t greenhouse gas emissions or sea surface temperature—it’s the corn itself.
This is the first time anyone has examined regional climate change in the central United States by directly comparing the influence of greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture, says Nathan Mueller, an earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved with this study. It’s important to understand how agricultural activity can have “surprisingly strong” impacts on climate change, he says.
The Corn Belt stretches from the panhandle of Texas up to North Dakota and east to Ohio. The amount of corn harvested in this region annually has increased by 400% since 1950, from 2 billion to 10 billion bushels. Iowa leads the country for the most corn produced per state.
“Acoustic lighthouses” could prevent birds from hitting buildings
Millions of birds slam into buildings, wind turbines, and other structures every year—a problem that could be lessened by erecting “acoustic lighthouses” to warn them of their impending doom, according to a study presented here today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes Science. People have tried warning birds with things they can see, like window markings and lights, but that doesn’t always work.
This Roman 'gate to hell' killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide
Is it possible to walk through the gates of hell and live? The Romans thought so, and they staged elaborate sacrifices at what they believed were entrances to the underworld scattered across the ancient Mediterranean. The sacrifices—healthy bulls led down to the gates of hell—died quickly without human intervention, but the castrated priests who accompanied them returned unharmed. Now, a new study of one ancient site suggests that these “miracles” may have a simple geological explanation.
Rediscovered just 7 years ago, the gate to hell at the ancient city of Hierapolis, in modern-day Turkey, is a stone doorway leading to a small cave-like grotto. The gate was built into one wall of a rectangular, open-aired arena, topped by a temple and surrounded by raised stone seating for visitors. The city itself sits in one of the region’s most geologically active areas; 2200 years ago, its thermal springs were believed to have great healing powers. But a deep fissure running beneath Hierapolis constantly emits volcanic carbon dioxide, which pours forth as a visible mist. The gate—also known as the Plutonium, for Pluto, the god of the underworld—is built directly above it. In 2011, archaeologists showed that the gate is still deadly: Birds that fly too close suffocate and die.