Welcome to Overnight News Digest- Saturday Science. Since 2007 the OND has been a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes 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.
Topics in tonight’s digest include:
- Atlantic Ocean at risk of circulation collapse
- What is Utah doing upstream on the Colorado River?
- Incredible quantum entanglement discovery
- Ancient warrior buried with a mirror and sword
- New insights into the origin of Indo-European languages
- Help save your locality by following Climate Strike.
- ‘Perfectly preserved’ glassware found in 2,000 year old shipwreck
- Using Middle Eastern techniques to cool US cities
- Could there be a ninth planet?
- JWST facilitates new discoveries related to Jupiter’s moons
- How Benjamin Franklin used science to protect his paper money from counterfeiters
The Conversation
by Robert Marsh
The Atlantic is at risk of circulation collapse – it would mean even greater climate chaos across Europe
Amid news of lethal heatwaves across the Northern Hemisphere comes the daunting prospect of a climate disaster on an altogether grander scale. New findings published in Nature Communications suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc, could collapse within the next few decades – maybe even within the next few years – driving European weather to even greater extremes.
The Amoc amounts to a system of currents in the Atlantic that bring warm water northwards where it then cools and sinks. It is a key reason why Europe’s climate has been stable for thousands of years, even if it’s hard to recognise this chaotic summer as part of that stability.
There is much uncertainty in these latest predictions and some scientists are less convinced a collapse is imminent. Amoc is also only one part of the wider Gulf Stream system, much of which is driven by winds that will continue to blow even if the Amoc collapses. So part of the Gulf Stream will survive an Amoc collapse.
Mother Jones
by Stephanie Mencimer
The Colorado Provides Drinking Water to 40 Million People. Do They Know What Utah Does to It Upstream?
From the water, the White River canyon was a scene worthy of Ansel Adams. Swallows darted in and out of mud houses packed on the underside of the soaring sandstone cliffs. A lone elk wandered the hillside, while sheep noshed along the water, tended by a man on a horse striking an iconic Western pose up on the ridge. But then, as we drifted peacefully around a bend, the stench of oil and other volatile organic compounds engulfed our little flotilla of rubber rafts in an invisible cloud of toxic gasses, blotting out the scent of sagebrush that had followed us down the river for the past two days. Eventually, the reason for the headache-inducing fumes came into view, and it wasn’t the sheep.
Gas lines draped over the cliffs and crosshatched the swallow nests, serving as the most visible indication that high on the plateau above us lay the state of Utah’s most productive oil and gas fields. There are currently more than 13,000 active oil and gas wells in Eastern Utah’s Uinta Basin. Local environmentalists have dubbed this sparsely populated desert region “Mordor,” after J.R.R. Tolkien’s industrial hellscape. Hemmed in by high mountain ranges on three sides, the basin is home to only about 50,000 people stretched over 9,300 square miles. Yet it suffers Beijing-level air quality that frequently violates the Clean Air Act. “The place is completely decimated,” says Taylor McKinnon, the southwest director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s one of the oil and gas sacrifice zones in the US.”
PHYS.org
by The Max Planck Society
New insights into the Origin of Indo-European languages
An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population. The work is published in the journal Science.
For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the "Steppe" hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 6,000 years ago, and the "Anatolian" or "farming" hypothesis, suggesting an older origin tied to early agriculture around 9,000 years ago.
Previous phylogenetic analyses of Indo-European languages have come to conflicting conclusions about the age of the family, due to the combined effects of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the datasets they used and limitations in the way that phylogenetic methods analyzed ancient languages.
To solve these problems, researchers from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology assembled an international team of over 80 language specialists to construct a new dataset of core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient or historical languages. This more comprehensive and balanced sampling, combined with rigorous protocols for coding lexical data, rectified the problems in the datasets used by previous studies.
The Brighter Side of News
by Peter Jensen
Physicists make incredible quantum entanglement discovery
In a new breakthrough, researchers at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with Ruhr University Bochum, have solved a problem that has caused quantum researchers headaches for years. The researchers can now control two quantum light sources rather than one. Trivial as it may seem to those uninitiated in quantum, this colossal breakthrough allows researchers to create a phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement. This in turn, opens new doors for companies and others to exploit the technology commercially.
For years, researchers around the world have strived to develop stable quantum light sources and achieve the phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement – a phenomenon, with nearly sci-fi-like properties, where two light sources can affect each other instantly and potentially across large geographic distances. Entanglement is the very basis of quantum networks and central to the development of an efficient quantum computer.
Today, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute published a new result in the highly esteemed journal Science, in which they succeeded in doing just that. According to Professor Peter Lodahl, one of the researchers behind the result, it is a crucial step in the effort to take the development of quantum technology to the next level and to "quantize" society’s computers, encryption and the internet.
Going from one to two is a minor feat in most contexts. But in the world of quantum physics, doing so is crucial.
DailyKos
by birches
Climate Strike — Energy (Week 38)
You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event, in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information.
This is the letter for week 38 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Act now while change still makes a difference,
or too soon it’ll be too late.
This week’s topic is ENERGY.
The Art Newspaper
by Maev Kennedy
Riddle of the Iron Age warrior buried with a mirror and sword is solved
The riddle of a person who died more than two millennia ago on the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago off the southwest of England, and was buried with a beautiful bronze mirror and a costly sword, has been solved. But the answer raises as many questions as it solves. The belief had been that only Iron Age women were buried with mirrors, and only warrior men with swords but the body now identified as a woman owned both, in death and presumably in life.
Archaeologists are now planning to look again at both sword and the much rarer mirror burials, and reconsider the sex of the dead person as well as what such finds tell us about their society.
Sarah Stark, a human skeleton biologist with Historic England, which led the international scientific study, says the discovery suggested a leading role for a woman in warfare on Iron Age Scilly. “Although we can never know completely about the symbolism of objects found in graves, the combination of a sword and a mirror suggests this woman had high status within her community and may have played a commanding role in local warfare, organising or leading raids on rival groups,” Stark says.
Time
by Anna Gordon
The U.S. Should Ditch AC and Use Middle Eastern Techniques to Cool Its Cities
As heat waves break records across the U.S., more Americans are relying on air conditioning than ever before. Approximately 88% of all households in the country use air conditioning units, which have become essential for both comfort and health as temperatures rise. That compares to 77% of households having AC in 2001.
But with air conditioning comes both environmental and socioeconomic consequences. Air conditioning is believed to cause 1,950 million tons of CO2 emissions per year around the world, accounting for almost 4% of global carbon emissions. It’s also drive [sic] up electricity bills, making it unaffordable for some low income people, who are more likely to require emergency room visits due to extreme heat.
It doesn’t have to be like this, though. In hot climates around the world, people have been designing sustainable buildings to withstand extreme heat for hundreds of years, says John Onyango, a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.
“In the U.S. we've been so used to feeding on cheap energy that we forgot to innovate,” says Onyango. “We have many techniques we can use to reduce heat, and we can actually borrow from what happens in the Middle East and look at Iran or look at Dubai and Turkey.”
Science Alert
by Sara Webb
A Giant Planet Seems to Be Lurking Unseen in Our Solar System
Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we're discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home.
Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets by 1846. But that doesn't stop us from looking for more. In the past 100 years, we've found smaller distant bodies we call dwarf planets, which is what we now classify Pluto as.
The discovery of some of these dwarf planets has given us reason to believe something else might be lurking in the outskirts of the Solar System.
[…]
There's a good reason astronomers spend many hundreds of hours trying to locate a ninth planet, aka " Planet Nine" or "Planet X". And that's because the Solar System as we know it doesn't really make sense without it.
GIZMODO
by George Dvorsky
Webb Space Telescope Unlocks Secrets of Jupiter's Moons
Two new studies associated with the James Webb Space Telescope’s Early Release Science program have been published, and both have to do with Jupiter’s moons, namely Ganymede and Io.
The first study, led by astronomer Samantha Trumbo from Cornell University and published in Science Advances, presents a fascinating first—the unprecedented detection of hydrogen peroxide on Ganymede. The second study, published in JGR: Planets, reveals another neat finding—sulfurous fumes, specifically sulfur monoxide, on Io.
Popular Science
by Laura Baisas
Benjamin Franklin used science to protect his money from counterfeiters
When he wasn’t busy inventing the lightning rod and bifocals, electrocuting turkeys, or serving as a diplomat to France during the American Revolution, 18th century polymath Benjamin Franklin was also innovating the printing of paper money. A study published July 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that Franklin may have printed almost 2,500,000 money notes for the colonies that would become eventually become the United States’ currency. And he came up with some highly original techniques to do it.
The study team analyzed about 600 notes from between 1709 through the 1790s, including some notes that Franklin printed in his network of printing shops, as well as some counterfeits.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the science news of the day. Please share your articles and stories in the comments.