Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, 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.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes09OP0az coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Traditionally Saturdays provide us with a chance to catch up on science news you might have missed over the week. We begin tonight with news of humans and this, from IFLScience:
Music can be a powerful emotional memory cue.
You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory.
This experience – when music brings back memories of events, people and places from our past – is known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory. And it’s a common experience.
From Science Daily:
Dartmouth College
How well you synchronize to a simple beat predicts how well you synchronize with another mind, according to a new Dartmouth study published in Scientific Reports.
Previous work has demonstrated that the pupil dilation patterns of speakers and listeners synchronize spontaneously, illustrating shared attention. The team set out to understand how the tendency to synchronize in this way may vary at the individual level and generalize across contexts, as it has been widely debated whether one form of synchrony bears any relationship to another.
From Science Daily:
Tokyo Medical and Dental University
Sometimes the best things in life come by chance, when we happen to be in the right place at the right time. Now, researchers have found a way to ensure that new medications are delivered to the right place in the body and at the right point in time during disease progression, so that they have the best effect.
From IFLS:
Sounds like an old fishwives' tale, but this is no red herring.
BEN TAUB
Psychedelic toad slime may be all the rage these days, but it’s thought that people have been tripping on fish since Roman times. In particular, a species of sea bream called salema porgy has gained a reputation for its fishy side-effects, and is known in Arabic as “the fish that makes dreams”.
Found throughout the Mediterranean and along the east coast of Africa, salema porgy – or Sarpa salpa – is often served in restaurants along France’s Côte d'Azur, and while most diners experience no ill effects, some unlucky punters end up tripping balls for up to three days. Brings new meaning to the phrase "one man’s fish is another man’s poison."
From IFLS:
“I have eaten many strange things, but I have never eaten the heart of a king before.”
The “Geological Wizard” William Buckland was arguably one of the most eccentric scientists in history. He began his career focused on rocks, minerals, and fossils, but in his spare time enjoyed some adventurous gastronomical
If reports are to be believed, that included gorging on everything from fried dormice to alligators, as well as being able to identify dark splats of bat urine on a cathedral floor using just the tip of his tongue.
Animal news now, beginning with The Hill:
Monkeys in modern-day Thai forests create stone artifacts uncannily similar to those crafted by early humans — challenging the established narrative of human cultural evolution.
A new study published on Friday in Science Advances suggests the possibility that a critical hallmark of human tool use happened by accident — potentially blurring the line between tool use by early humans and our primate relatives.
From France24:
Scientists in Japan say they have succeeded in breeding mice with two fathers, using eggs originating from male cells. While the scientific breakthrough could pave the way for new fertility treatments, experts say it is still a long way from being used in humans.
Katsuhiko Hayashi, a renowned biologist at the University of Osaka, said his team had used chromosomal engineering to breed seven “healthy” mice pups, hailing a “first case of making robust mammal oocytes (eggs) from male cells”.
From IFLS:
No, this isn't a viral marketing campaign for the Cocaine Bear movie.
TOM HALE
In a bizarre case of wildlife imitating art, an African serval cat rescued from a tree in Ohio tested positive for cocaine, according to the animal rescue group who nursed the strung-out animal back to health. Rest assured, the story has a much happier ending than Cocaine Bear and the wild cat is now living its best life at Cincinnati Zoo.
Explaining the incident on Facebook, Cincinnati Animal CARE said their Hamilton County Dog Wardens division received reports of an "exotic cat" that was stuck in a tree in the early hours of January 28. They managed to capture the animal and called up their big cat expert to help deal with the situation.
From Live Science:
Fossils of a 70 million-year-old platypus relative called Patagorhynchus pascuali found in South America show that egg-laying mammals evolved on more than one continent.
Around 70 million years ago, a small, furry, platypus-like creature shuffled along the banks of an ancient lake. This would not have been a remarkable occurrence, except for one thing: The lake was in present-day Argentina, not Australia.
The creature, dubbed Patagorhynchus pascuali, is the oldest fossil of the egg-laying mammal group known as monotremes ever discovered in South America. The discovery may rewrite the story of where these oddball early mammals evolved. Today, all five species of living monotremes — which include the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) and three species of long-beaked echidnas (Zaglossus) — are found exclusively in Australia and a few of its surrounding islands. So how did a platypus ancestor wind up so far from Down Under?
From NPR:
Towering around nine feet tall – half of that neck – and weighing in at more than 300 pounds, ostriches are the biggest birds on the planet today.
But there once was an even bigger bird, which roamed Madagascar before dying out roughly 1,000 years ago: the elephant bird.
From ekathimerini.com:
Will Dunham
A dwarf elephant the size of a Shetland pony once roamed Cyprus. In the West Indies, a giant rat-like rodent tipped the scales at more than 180 kg, rivaling an American black bear.
They were examples of the “island effect,” a rule in evolutionary biology describing how large-bodied species tend to downsize on islands while small-bodied species upsize. These island dwarfs and giants – a menagerie also including pint-sized hippos, buffaloes and wolves – long have faced an elevated extinction risk that, according to a new study, is intensifying, imperiling some of Earth’s most unique creatures.
From CNN:
A little joey pokes a front paw and then its head out of its mother’s pouch. Dave White, a zookeeper at Chester Zoo, in England, points up to the mother perched on a branch and beams with pride. He has been watching the baby tree kangaroo develop since it was born the size of a jellybean – first tracking its growth with an endoscope camera placed inside the pouch, and now, seeing the 7-month-old emerge.
White has formed a close connection with the joey and its mother, visiting and feeding them each day. It’s the first birth of a Goodfellow’s tree kangaroo he’s witnessed, and indeed the first time in Chester Zoo’s 91-year history that it has bred the species. White says the birth is a sign of hope for the endangered species, which is threatened by hunting and habitat loss in its native Papua New Guinea.
From Science:
Zebra mussel found attached to a lake chub in Canada, sparking concerns about faster spread
RICHARD PALLARDYEmail
Zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) are one of the most catastrophic aquatic invasive species in North America. Native to Russia and Ukraine, these fingernail-size mollusks have spread around the world, often carried in ballast water—used to stabilize boats—as larvae, where they’ve caused billions of dollars of damage to fisheries, water treatment facilities, and other aquatic industries by clogging intake pipes and robbing nutrients from ecosystems. Now, researchers have discovered a new way they invade—by hitchhiking on fish.
The scientists made the observation while assessing fish communities in a lake in southeastern Quebec last year. They found a zebra mussel attached to a lake chub (Couesius plumbeus), a species of minnow typically about 12 centimeters long. The observation, reported this month in Biological Invasions, is the only time a nonlarval freshwater bivalve has been seen attached to a fish. The mollusk had latched onto the hapless minnow (pictured above) using protein fibers called byssal threads, which they also use to attach to plants, rocks, and concrete.
From IFLS:
The short answer is no, but here’s why.
DR. RUSSELL MOUL
If you’ve been using social media over the last ten years, you may have come across a dubious and stomach-turning claim about the origins of vanilla flavoring. According to this recurrent trend, the popular flavoring – in anything from ice cream to lattes, and a host of other sweet treats – comes from the anal glands of beavers! But before you run to the kitchen to banish all your favorite desserts, you should know that it is completely untrue – today, at least.
From Phys.org:
by Stanford University
Some corals live to be hundreds, and even thousands, of years old. They were born with genes that were successful back in their parent's generation, so how can these old corals still be successful now? Especially in a changing climate? It's possible that the generation and the filtering of mutations that occur in different parts of a big coral act as a proving ground for adaptive genetics for the future. The new study from Stanford, Hopkins Marine Station and the California Academy of Sciences shows a novel way that some very ancient animals might be surviving.
Environmental News, beginning with this from IFLS :
A government report warned that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers could run dry by 2040.
TOM HALE
In the Bible, it’s said when the Euphrates river runs dry then immense things are on the horizon, perhaps even the foretelling of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the rapture. Revelation 16:12 reads: "The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East."
Well, not to sound dramatic or anything, but it looks like that time is nigh.
From The Guardian:
Visible from space, an explosion of harmful seaweed now stretches like a sea monster across the ocean. Could robots save us from it – and store carbon in the process?
Seaweed has been having a moment. Eco-influencers and columnists rave about its benefits, in everything from beauty products to biofuels. Jamie Oliver has embraced it as a recipe ingredient; Victoria Beckham uses it to keep off the pounds. And they’re right: seaweed is packed with nutrition, it sucks up carbon and is an amazingly versatile addition to the green economy.
But one type of seaweed is not a benign force. Vast fields of sargassum, a brown seaweed, have bloomed in the Atlantic Ocean. Fed by human activity such as intensive soya farming in the Congo, the Amazon and the Mississippi, which dumps nitrogen and phosphorus into the ocean, the sargassum explosion is by far the biggest seaweed bloom on the planet. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, as it’s known, is visible from space, stretching like a sea monster across the ocean, with its nose in the Gulf of Mexico and its tail in the mouth of the Congo.
From Science:
“Mammoth” plan to control a coastal invader would benefit migratory birds
Along its 18,000 kilometers of coastline, China has been taken over by a green invader. Smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) grows tall and thick across tidal mudflats, depriving endangered migratory birds of habitat, clogging shipping channels, and ruining clam farms. Now, China aims to beat back 90% of the weed by 2025. “This is a mammoth undertaking,” says Steven Pennings, a coastal ecologist at the University of Houston. “It’s audacious.”
The nationwide effort, launched last month, “is by far the largest action plan for wetland invasive species control in China and even in the world,” says Bo Li, an invasion ecologist at Fudan and Yunnan universities who was not involved in creating the plan. It won’t be simple or cheap, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, Li estimates. And schemes to dig up, drown, or poison the weed all have side effects. “It’s going to be really difficult,” says Sam Reynolds, a biologist at the University of Cambridge.
From The Guardian:
The modern oil industry was born in 1859, yet it would take more than 100 years – and the near-extinction of a species – before it replaced blubber. As we now seek to replace oil in turn, are there lessons to be learned?
Humpback whales can rhyme. Their songs are made up of individual themes, phrases and sounds – many of them ending similarly. These are repeated in patterns that create rhythms and structures. To human ears, the songs are a series of grunts, groans, sighs, burps and squeaks. But they are arranged by the whale in a highly elaborate manner.
The songs change over time, too: themes develop and are replaced, and phrases shift until every few years a completely new song emerges. Whales also adopt the songs of other whales – like a pop hit that everyone starts singing.
Also from CNN:
ive years ago, the river valleys and high plains that are now safeguarded by the Babanango Game Reserve in the KwaZulu Natal region of South Africa were virtually devoid of wildlife after decades of cattle grazing and unrestrained hunting.F
“All the big animals had been killed and most of the smaller ones had run away,” says Musa Mbatha, the reserve’s conservation and wildlife manager.
From The Guardian:
On the Lake District’s north-eastern fringe, two farmsteads are restoring the landscape with a commitment to conservation and providing jobs
Until the last male golden eagle died in 2015, Haweswater, on the rugged north-eastern fringe of the Lake District, was England’s final refuge for the bird of prey. “Even now, whenever I go up Riggindale, it feels like something is missing,” says Spike Webb, a long-serving RSPB warden at its Haweswater site.
Although the eagles are no more, Haweswater’s wildlife is nowadays being given the chance to make a full-throated comeback, thanks to interventions made by the RSPB, in collaboration with its landlords, the water company United Utilities.
Space News:
From Mashable:
And scientists have only seen four percent of the data so far.
A project to map the earliest structures of the universe has found 15,000 more galaxies in its first snapshot than captured in an entire deep field survey conducted 20 years ago.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the new preeminent observatory in the sky, saw about 25,000 galaxies in that single image, dramatically surpassing the nearly 10,000 shown in the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field Survey(Opens in a new tab). Scientists say that little piece of the space pie represents just four percent of the data they'll discover from the new Webb survey by the time it's completed next year.
From Gizmondo:
The crew will include three NASA astronauts and one Canadian astronaut for the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo.
We are soon going to learn the identities of the four astronauts who will strap into the Orion spacecraft and travel farther into space than any crew before.
NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will announce the astronauts for the upcoming Artemis 2 mission on April 3, according to a statement released on Friday. The highly anticipated announcement will take place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s Ellington Field in Houston at 11 a.m. ET and will air live on the space agency’s website and NASA Television.
From The News:
Sunsets on Mars can be quite spectacular, with the sky often turning different shades of blue, pink, and orange
In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander provided the first glimpse of a Martian sunset for humans. Since then, a number of additional robots from the Red Planet have sent back numerous images of Martian sunrises and sunsets.
After unwinding on Mars after a long day of labour, human explorers may someday see this, as shown in several colour-corrected, blue-hued images.
From Phys.org:
by Justin Jackson
Today Venus has a dry, oxygen-poor atmosphere. But recent studies have proposed that the early planet may have had liquid water and reflective clouds that could have sustained habitable conditions. Researchers at the University of Chicago, Department of Geophysical Sciences, have built a new time-dependent model of Venus's atmospheric composition to explore these claims. Their findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Water is everywhere in our solar system, usually in the form of ice or atmospheric gas, though occasionally in liquid form. On all of the planets, many of the moons, from the outer ring of the inner asteroid belt to the icy Kuiper Belt, and way out to the far distant Oort cloud two light years away, water is there.
From Live Science:
The newly discovered comet C/2023 A3 is making a close approach around the sun for the first time in 80,000 years, and might be as bright as a star in fall 2024.
A newly discovered comet may appear as bright as a star in the night sky by fall 2024.
The comet, known as C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), was first noted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope project in South Africa on Feb. 22, according to the
Minor Planet Center(opens in new tab). Astronomers at the Purple Mountain Observatory in China also discovered the comet independently on Jan. 9, so both observatories are cited in the comet's full name. Skywatchers around the world have since observed it in new and old images, with the earliest detection found in images taken by a wide-field camera on a telescope at Palomar Observatory in California on Dec. 12, 2022.
From NPR:
As U.S. clocks shift forward this weekend, many earthlings will find themselves momentarily confused about what time it is. But scientists say a far larger temporal problem is looming on the horizon: With multiple missions to the moon in the planning phase, it's time to set a Lunar time standard.
"We need to define a time on the moon," says Javier Ventura-Traveset of the European Space Agency (ESA). Without it, Ventura-Traveset warns, docking spacecraft could tumble into each other, astronauts might get lost on the lunar surface, and of course, nobody will know when they can take their lunch break.
From EarthSky:
End life on Earth with a planet?
If a planet had formed between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroid belt now reigns, it might have meant the end of life on Earth. That’s the conclusion of a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, who said on March 7, 2023, that he has now looked closely at this realm of our solar system. He said his computer simulations suggest that an Earth-like planet – orbiting between Mars and Jupiter – would have pushed Earth out of the solar system and wiped out life on this planet.
Astrophysicist Stephen Kane is the sole author on the peer-reviewed study, which attempts to understand two different sorts of “gaps.” The Planetary Science Journal published Kane’s study on February 28, 2023.
And finally, ARCHAEOLOGY NEWS!!!!
From Ancient Origins:
The data books have a fantastic new entry – Europe’s oldest murder victim on record, in a cave in southwest France. Subject of a new study, this presumably assassinated individual’s battered skull was probably met with a blunt object, like a stone axe. What’s worse is that the blunt force trauma unlikely achieved its objective instantly – scientists speculate that it might have taken an entire month for the individual to succumb to these wounds.
This early homo sapiens violence, not uncommon, was recorded at the famed Cro-Magnon rock shelter in Vézère Valley, Dordogne, which contains the remains of eight homo sapiens individuals in total, from between 31,000 and 33,000 years ago. These four adults and four children are representations of the earliest evidence of modern humans ever discovered in Europe. Just earlier this year, a digital reconstruction of Cro-Magnon 1’s face revealed a benign tumor in the forehead area.
From NBC News:
The discovery came against the backdrop of a resurgence of archaeology in a country often referred to as the "cradle of civilization."
BAGHDAD — An international archaeological mission has uncovered the remnants of what is believed to be a 5,000-year-old restaurant or tavern in the ancient city of Lagash in southern Iraq.
The discovery of the ancient dining hall — complete with a rudimentary refrigeration system, hundreds of roughly made clay bowls and the fossilized remains of an overcooked fish — announced in late January by a University of Pennsylvania-led team, generated some buzz beyond Iraq’s borders.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
For decades, as archaeologists dug into the history buried in the Valley of the Kings, Egyptians were laborers, never discoverers. Not on this dig.
By
Taylor Luck
On a mild, late November morning, almost completely hidden behind the 5-foot-high walls of a sprawling, yellow-gray mud-brick city rising from the ground, a dozen members of an archaeological team survey and brush away soil.
In a nearby tent, carefully holding jagged pottery shards in one gloved hand under a lens, Asmaa Ebrahim painstakingly scribbles down notes on the 3,000th piece of pottery.
From the Dorset Echo (via MSN News):
Story by Cristiano Magaglio
An archaeological excavation into the 17th-century Dorset home of the world’s first modern chemist has officially been completed.
Excavation of the well of Robert Boyle's Dorset home in Stalbridge (Image: Dorset Diggers Community Archaeology Group)© Provided by Dorset Echo
Dorset Diggers Community Archaeology Group and the Stalbridge History Society announced today that they have completed the excavation of the home of 17th-century scientist Robert Boyle, who, along with Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, was a founder member of the Royal Society, patronised by King Charles II.
In 1643, Boyle inherited Stalbridge House in Stalbridge, north Dorset, from his father, Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork. It was considered the fifth-largest house in the county at that time.
From CNN (Reuters):
A flock of grazing sheep is helping archaeologists to preserve the ancient ruins of Pompeii, the Roman city that was buried under meters of pumice and ash in the calamitous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
Archaeologists have uncovered only around two thirds of the 66-hectare (163 acres) site at Pompeii since excavations began 250 years ago.
Preserving the unexplored sections of the ancient city against erosion by nature and time is a priority for those who manage the site.
From Cpital Daily:
Non-fiction book shares traditional, archaeological wisdom
By Nina Grossman
That’s one of the messages local archaeologist Nicole Smith hopes to share with middle-grade youth through her new book, Dig Deep: Connecting Archaeology, Oceans and Us.
Rooted in history, marine archaeology, and traditional Indigenous wisdom from around the world, Smith’s new non-fiction book is about helping youth connect with marine archaeology and long-held knowledge, while also illuminating the fact that humans are not separate entities from the environment, but are, in fact, a part of the environment themselves.