Welcome to the Overnight News Digest, Saturday Science with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, Rise above the swamp and jeremybloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to: Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Topics in this digest include:
- John F. Clauser wins Nobel Prize in physics
- Vitamin D and brain function
- What came before the Big Bang?
- World’s oldest DNA discovered
- Low-carbon concrete
- Will hemp save the climate?
- Positive impact of learning to play a musical instrument
- Climate change solutions will not solve biodiversity crisis
- Outdoor cats are an invasive species
- Best science and nature books of 2022
- Artist’s interpretation of 500 year-old syphilis-ravaged face
- 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite
- Health benefits of planting trees
- Artificial sweeteners that kill “superbugs”
- Brain changes discovered in people who get migraines
- Citizen science projects
Live Science
by Jonas Enander
Nobody took John F. Clauser's quantum experiments seriously. 50 years later, he's collecting a Nobel Prize
On Oct. 4, 80-year-old John F. Clauser woke up in his California home to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He will receive the prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10 together with Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect for their work on quantum entanglement.
It was a moment of celebration for Clauser, whose groundbreaking experiments with particles of light helped to prove key elements of
quantum mechanics.
"Everybody wants to win a Nobel Prize," Clauser said. "I'm very happy."
[…]
In the 1960s, Clauser was a graduate physics student at Columbia University. By chance, he found an article in the university library that would shape his career and lead him to pursue the experimental work that eventually earned him the Nobel Prize.
The article, written by Irish physicist John Stewart Bell and published in the journal Physics in 1964, considered whether quantum mechanics gave a complete description of reality or not. At the heart of the question was the phenomenon of
quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement happens when two or more particles link up in a certain way, and no matter how far apart they are in space, their states remain linked.
Neuroscience News
by Tufts University
Brains with more Vitamin D function better
Researchers at Tufts University have completed the first study examining levels of vitamin D in brain tissue, specifically in adults who suffered from varying rates of cognitive decline. They found that members of this group with higher levels of vitamin D in their brains had better cognitive function.
The study was published December 7 in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
“This research reinforces the importance of studying how food and nutrients create resilience to protect the aging brain against diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias,” said senior and corresponding author Sarah Booth, director of the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts and lead scientist of the HNRCA’s Vitamin K Team.
Vitamin D supports many functions in the body, including immune responses and maintaining healthy bones. Dietary sources include fatty fish and fortified beverages (such as milk or orange juice); brief exposure to sunlight also provides a dose of vitamin D.
[…]
However, experts caution people not to use large doses of vitamin D supplements as a preventive measure. The recommended dose of vitamin D is 600 IU for people 1-70 years old, and 800 IU for those older—excessive amounts can cause harm, and have been linked to the risk of falling.
BigThink
by Ethan Siegel
Why we’ll never see back to the beginning of the universe
- In the original model of the Big Bang, you could extrapolate the expanding Universe back to a single point, a singularity, that marked the birth of space and time.
- But this model was shown to be flawed, and the hot Big Bang has since been shown to be preceded by the inflationary Universe, which leaves its imprints on our cosmos.
- Unfortunately, only the final tiny-fraction-of-a-second of inflation remains to be seen, with anything that happened before "inflated away," removing any hope we have of discovering our Universe's original beginnings.
PHYS.org
by University of Cambridge
Discovery of world's oldest DNA breaks record by one million years
Two-million-year-old DNA has been identified for the first time—opening a 'game-changing' new chapter in the history of evolution.
Microscopic fragments of environmental DNA were found in Ice Age sediment in northern Greenland. Using cutting-edge technology, researchers discovered the fragments are one million years older than the previous record for DNA sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone.
The ancient DNA has been used to map a two-million-year-old ecosystem which weathered extreme climate change. Researchers hope the results could help to predict the long-term environmental toll of today's global warming.
The discovery was made by a team of scientists led by Professor Eske Willerslev and Professor Kurt H. Kjær. Professor Willerslev is a Fellow of St John's College, University of Cambridge, and Director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Center at the University of Copenhagen where Professor Kjær, a geology expert, is also based.
The results of the 41 usable samples found hidden in clay and quartz are published today in Nature.
Professor Willerslev said: "A new chapter spanning one million extra years of history has finally been opened and for the first time we can look directly at the DNA of a past ecosystem that far back in time.
Knowable Magazine
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
The road to low-carbon concrete
Nobody knows who did it first, or when. But by the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, Roman engineers were routinely grinding up burnt limestone and volcanic ash to make caementum: a powder that would start to harden as soon as it was mixed with water.
They made extensive use of the still-wet slurry as mortar for their brick- and stoneworks. But they had also learned the value of stirring in pumice, pebbles or pot shards along with the water: Get the proportions right, and the cement would eventually bind it all into a strong, durable, rock-like conglomerate called opus caementicium or — in a later term derived from a Latin verb meaning “to bring together” — concretum.
The Romans used this marvelous stuff throughout their empire — in viaducts, breakwaters, coliseums and even temples like the Pantheon, which still stands in central Rome and still boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
Two millennia later, we’re doing much the same, pouring concrete by the gigaton for roads, bridges, high-rises and all the other big chunks of modern civilization. Globally, in fact, the human race is now using an estimated 30 billion metric tons of concrete per year — more than any other material except water. And as fast-developing nations such as China and India continue their decades-long construction boom, that number is only headed up.
Unfortunately, our long love affair with concrete has also added to our climate problem. The variety of caementum that’s most commonly used to bind today’s concrete, a 19th-century innovation known as Portland cement, is made in energy-intensive kilns that generate more than half a ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of product. Multiply that by gigaton global usage rates, and cement-making turns out to contribute about 8 percent of total CO2 emissions.
The Guardian
by Jeremy Plester
Could hemp be key tool in the fight against climate change?
In all the debates on how to curb climate change, hemp is hardly mentioned. Better known as cannabis, modern varieties of hemp are too weak to use as narcotics, but they are extremely efficient at absorbing and locking up carbon.
Hemp is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world and can grow 4 metres high in 100 days. Research suggests hemp is twice as effective as trees at absorbing and locking up carbon, with 1 hectare (2.5 acres) of hemp reckoned to absorb 8 to 22 tonnes of CO2 a year, more than any woodland. The CO2 is also permanently fixed in the hemp fibres, which can go on to be used for many commodities including textiles, medicines, insulation for buildings and concrete; BMW is even using it to replace plastics in various car parts.
But unlike many other countries, the UK still classifies industrial hemp as a controlled drug, and growing the plant needs a Home Office licence. Cultivation in Britain is only about 800 hectares but work at the University of York and Biorenewables Development Centre aims to increase this to 80,000 hectares and make hemp a leading UK crop.
Neuroscience News
by University of Bath
Playing the Piano Boosts Brain Processing Power and Helps Lift the Blues
A new study published by researchers at the University of Bath demonstrates the positive impact learning to play a musical instrument has on the brain’s ability to process sights and sounds, and shows how it can also help to lift a blue mood.
Publishing their findings in the academic journal Nature Scientific Reports, the team behind the study shows how beginners who undertook piano lessons for just one hour a week over 11 weeks reported significant improvements in recognising audio-visual changes in the environment and reported less depression, stress and anxiety.
In the randomised control study, 31 adults were assigned into either a music training, music listening, or a control group. Individuals with no prior musical experiences or training were instructed to complete weekly one-hour sessions. Whilst the intervention groups played music, the control groups either listened to music or used the time to complete homework.
The researchers found that within just a few weeks of starting lessons*, people’s ability to process multisensory information – i.e., sight and sound – was enhanced. Improved ‘multisensory process’ has benefits for almost every activity we participate in – from driving a car and crossing a road, to finding someone in a crowd or watching TV.
The Intercept
by Christopher Ketcham
Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”
Conservation biology finds itself in a terrifying place today, witness to mass extinction, helpless to stop the march of industrial Homo sapiens, the pillage of habitat, the loss of wildlands, and the impoverishment of ecosystems. Many of its leading figures are in despair. “I’m 40 years into conservation biology and I can tell you we are losing badly, getting our asses kicked,” Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Barack Obama, told me recently. “There are almost no reasons to be optimistic.”
This might explain the discipline’s desperate hitching of its wagon to the climate movement. Climate, after all, is the environmental cause du jour, eclipsing all other sustainability concerns, increasingly attractive as a rallying cry for a public that has canonized it as one of the major political, social, and economic issues of our time. Mainstream climate activism of the Bill McKibben variety points toward a grandly hopeful end within the confines of acceptable capitalist discourse: decarbonization of the global economy, with technologies driven by profit-seeking corporations subsidized by governments. Taking up this banner of optimistic can-do-ism, the environmental movement has convinced itself, and sought to convince the public, that with a worldwide build-out of renewable energy systems, humanity will power its dynamic industrial civilization with jobs-producing green machines while also — somehow — rescuing countless species from the brink.
“But this happens to be a lie,” Ashe told me. “The lie is that if we address the climate crisis, we will also solve the biodiversity crisis.”
Salon
by Matthew Rozsa
Outdoor cats are an invasive species and a threat to themselves
A free-roaming cat is not a happy cat. In fact, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, free-roaming domesticated cats are a downright menace to local wildlife — and this is the case largely due to the irresponsibility of their human owners. The new research contributes to an ever-growing body of literature on how humanity's love for cats is changing the natural world.
"Cats are like using a grenade for hunting when a bullet would suffice. Cats kill everything they can. They don't target specific species."
This particular study was conducted by American and Canadian researchers, who used a camera trap survey to examine the interactions of free-roaming domesticated cats in the Washington, D.C. area over a period of three years.
The scientists also analyzed the interactions of eight native mammal species, five of which are commonly preyed upon by cats and three of which are notorious vectors of disease. They found that where there are more humans, there are more likely to be cats — and where there are more cats, there are more likely to be cat interactions with disease-carrying mammals like raccoons and red foxes. Additionally, where there are more cats, there are white-footed mice and eastern cottontails being preyed upon by ferocious felines.
The Guardian
by Alok Jha
Best science books of 2022
Preventing future pandemics, the secrets of the Higgs boson and the surprising roots of plastic surgery
Live Science
by Jennifer Nalewicki
See how syphilis ravaged a woman’s face 500 years ago, in an artistic interpretation
During the 16th century, a young woman lived with a face covered with sores that hinted that she likely had tertiary syphilis, a late-stage infection that can often lead to death. Her case of the sexually transmitted infection was so severe that centuries later, her skull remains riddled with bone lesions. Now, researchers have created a facial approximation of the woman as part of a new study(opens in new tab).
While not much is known about the woman's identity, she lived to be between 25 and 30 years old and her body was excavated from a cemetery at the Skriðuklaustur monastery in Iceland about a decade ago. In addition to having syphilis, her
skeleton revealed that she had osteoarthritis and dental enamel hypoplasia, a tooth defect caused by malnutrition in childhood, according to an analysis of a
3D model(opens in new tab) of the skull provided by the Northern Heritage Network, an online archive of historical skeletons.
Cícero Moraes(opens in new tab), a Brazilian graphics expert and one of the study's authors, was struck by the lesions marking her skull and realized that he was looking at his next study subject.
Science Alert
by Jacinta Bowler
Man Keeps Rock For Years, Hoping It's Gold. It Turns Out to Be Far More Valuable
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.
To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget.
As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.
Science Alert
by Russell McLendon
People in Portland planted trees. Decades later a stunning pattern emerged
Money may not grow from trees, but something even better does.
In a new study led by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, researchers found that each tree planted in a community was associated with significant reductions in non-accidental and cardiovascular mortality among humans living nearby.
On top of that, the study's authors conclude the yearly economic benefits of
planting trees dramatically exceed the cost of maintaining them, by a factor of more than 1,000.
Previous studies have linked exposure to nature with an array of human health benefits. Access to nature is a major factor for mental health, and that doesn't necessarily require the greenery to be primeval wilderness. Research shows urban forests and street trees can offer comparable benefits.
Several longitudinal studies have shown that exposure to more vegetation is associated with lower non-accidental mortality, the authors of the new study note, and some have also linked exposure to greenery with reduced cardiovascular and respiratory mortality.
"However, most studies use satellite imaging to estimate the vegetation index, which does not distinguish different types of vegetation and cannot be directly translated into tangible interventions," says Payam Dadvand, a researcher with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and senior author of the new study.
For their study, Dadvand and his colleagues capitalized on a well-documented tree-planting campaign that unfolded in Portland, Oregon, between 1990 and 2019. During those three decades, the nonprofit group Friends of Trees planted 49,246 street trees in Portland.
ScienceFocus.com
by Jason Goodyer
Artificial sweeteners in sugar-free foods can kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria
The key to beating antibiotic-resistant bacteria could have been hiding in plain sight on our supermarket shelves.
Three artificial sweeteners that are commonly used in diet drinks, yoghurts and desserts can dramatically halt the growth of multidrug-resistant bacteria, a study carried out at Brunel University London has found.
The bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, cause pneumonia and sepsis. They are on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of ‘priority pathogens’ that urgently need new antibiotic treatments thanks to the deadly threat they pose to those with compromised immune systems.
ScienceAlert
by Michelle Star
Mysterious changes identified in the brains of people who get migraines
Scientists may have just found a major new clue that could help solve the frustrating and ongoing mystery of the migraine.
Using ultra-high-resolution MRI, researchers found that perivascular spaces – fluid-filled spaces around the brain's blood vessels – are unusually enlarged in patients who experience both chronic and episodic migraine.
Although the link to or role in migraine is yet to be established, the finding could represent an as-yet unexplored avenue for future research.
The discovery was presented at the 108th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
"In people with chronic migraine and episodic migraine without aura, there are significant changes in the perivascular spaces of a brain region called the centrum semiovale," says medical scientist Wilson Xu of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Zooniverse
This week we're launching two new projects, an addition to the Notes from Nature organisation (An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles), and another focussed on Jellyfish Galaxies. Read on below to hear from the project teams about how you can help out.
Calling all biodiversity lovers! We need your help transcribing information from beetle museum specimens. Beetles are one of the most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Our goal is to document the distribution of the thousands of species of beetles, both in time and in space, taking advantage of the data associated with millions of specimens in natural history collections. This information will enable us to monitor and anticipate expansions and contractions in geographic distributions, long-term changes in beetle diversity, and the appearance of invasive species.
Your participation in this project will help create digital data for researchers, students or anyone else to use. We are kicking it off with Tiger beetles, which are some of the most voracious and beautiful beetles in the world. Please take a few minutes to try out our new beetle project on Notes from Nature called An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles!
We are excited to announce a new project: “Fishing for Jellyfish Galaxies”, which will recruit the help of the public to search for the peculiar "jellyfish" galaxies in astronomical images. These rare, striking galaxies are characterised by long tails of material which can resemble marine jellyfish. A galaxy can become jellyfish-like when it falls into the dense environment of a galaxy cluster, and experiences a drag force which can effectively strip the gas from the galaxy, leaving a tail of material trailing behind it. This process of transformation is known as “ram-pressure stripping” and is key for understanding galaxy evolution.
With your help, we’ll be able to increase the number of known jellyfish galaxies (currently in the hundreds) by searching through thousands of images from DECaLS, the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, maximising our chances of finding these spectacular and elusive objects. Each new jellyfish galaxy identified provides a snapshot of a key moment of the evolution of that galaxy, in a specific instant of cosmic time. As we find and observe more and more of them, we can piece together the timeline and conditions of galaxy evolution in cluster environments.
Our research collaboration has members from different places around the world, so we’re excited to be offering this zooniverse project in multiple languages! Come and join us in the search for these fascinating objects!
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.