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.
Stories in tonight’s digest include:
- Another Einstein theory confirmed
- Huge solar flare precedes “rowdy month ahead”
- Ancient DNA reveals offspring from parents of two different species
- How to roll the perfect joint, according to science
- The ignored connection between climate change and meat
- Coalition of nuns and Native women work to clean up polluted Shinnecock Bay with kelp
- Great white sharks numbers increasing off Cape Cod
- Cause of severe inflammatory bowel disease discovered
- Do the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans mix?
Inverse
by Jon Kelvey
Wild Astronomical Discovery Confirms Einstein Was Right About Time Itself
Time dilation: It’s a staple of science fiction, and whether you’re familiar with the term or not, you’ve probably encountered it in print or film. Fly fast enough to the speed of light, and your experience of time is slower than someone left behind on Earth, such that years can go by for them, while you experience just a few months.
Or travel deep enough into the gravity field of a massive object, such as the black hole in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, and those left in more typical gravity will age faster than you, their clocks spinning wildly while yours seemingly ticks away the seconds as usual.
Wild as time dilation effects may be, they stem from the more than 100-year-old theories of Albert Einstein. And scientists just confirmed one of the weirdest forms of time dilation of all — that in the early universe, time moved five times slower than it does on Earth today.
Science Alert
by Michelle Starr
The Sun Just Unleashed a Huge Solar Flare, Triggers Radio Blackout in US
The Sun recently erupted in a flare that caused a brief but intense radio blackout in the western US and the Pacific Ocean as it lashed Earth's upper atmosphere.
On 2 July 2023, at 7.14 PM Eastern Standard Time, an active sunspot region called AR 3354 unleashed an X-class solar flare – the most powerful category of which our Sun is capable.
[…]
As serious as it might sound, the impact on Earth was milder than it could have been as the flare died down without further incident. Astronomers saw no sign of a coronal mass ejection that commonly accompanies such events, which would have launched streams of plasma far into space.
The eruption was consistent with the upward trajectory of the current solar cycle, and suggests we have some rowdy months ahead as we head towards the impending 11-year peak of solar activity. According to the Royal Observatory of Belgium, sunspot counts have reached a 21-year high, with the average for June hitting 163 sunspots a day.
Bismarck Daily
by Amy Dillinger
Experts studying ancient DNA discovered girl ‘whose parents were two different species’!
According to the experts, the species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens. During a time of dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. Like other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved behaviors that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments. Anatomically, modern humans can generally be characterized by the lighter build of their skeletons compared to earlier humans. Modern humans have very large brains, which vary in size from population to population and between males and females.
DNA from just a single cave in Siberia revealed that it had been occupied by two archaic human groups that had interbred with the newly arrived modern humans. This included both the Neanderthals, whom we knew about previously, and the Denisovans, who we didn’t even know existed and still know little about other than their DNA sequences.
Scientific American
by Rachel Berkowitz
Science Reveals How to Roll the Perfect Joint
If you want to get very high quickly, you might think smoking cannabis with the greatest possible concentration of cannabinoids—such as the plant’s main intoxicating ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—is the best way to go. But new research suggests this is not so simple. Using a smoking machine to test the intensity of individual marijuana joints, researchers now find that how much active ingredient gets from such a cigarette to your mouth depends largely on how the joint is engineered.
Vox
by Kenny Torrella
Why the media too often ignores the connection between climate change and meat
Last weekend, Elon Musk posted one of his more outrageously false tweets to date: “Important to note that what happens on Earth’s surface (eg farming) has no meaningful impact on climate change.”
Musk was, as he has been from time to time, wrong. As climate experts rushed to emphasize, farming actually accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
[…]
Late last year, Madre Brava, an environmental research and advocacy group, commissioned a poll of 7,500 consumers across the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Brazil, asking which industries and environmental issues they thought were the biggest contributors to global warming. People generally ranked industrial meat production as one of the smallest contributors, even though it’s one of the largest.
The tens of billions of chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals we raise and slaughter for food annually account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from cow burps, animal manure, and the fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy they eat. More than one-third of the Earth’s habitable land is used for animal farming — much of it cleared for cattle grazing and growing all that corn and soy — making animal agriculture the leading cause of deforestationand biodiversity loss globally.
The Guardian
by Casey Kleczek
Saved by seaweed: nuns and Native women heal polluted New York waters using kelp
Early on a January morning, a dozen nuns hopped on a Zoom call and waited patiently for their turn to speak softly, sweetly to plants.
One of the sisters sang a song; another played the flute; several recited poetry and prayers. The intended audience of their kind words were dozens of kelp seedlings, which had a big task: grow big and healthy enough to be planted in the waters off the shores of Long Island, New York.
The sisters are a part of a unique collaboration: situated on the edge of a bay, they have helped a group of women from the Shinnecock, a local Indigenous tribe, start a kelp farm in the hopes of cleaning up the pollution in their shared backyard.
[…]
In 2019, six Shinnecock women decided to take matters into their own hands. They formed a kelp farming collective, and enlisted the Sisters of St Joseph. Together they are working to rescue the bay on which both communities are situated: the sisters on a bucolic, sprawling 200-acre retreat center on the bay’s west side, and the Shinnecock on a 900-acre peninsula to the east.
It might seem like a long shot, except that it’s working.
Live Science
by Meg Duff
Do the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean mix?
A handful of videos on YouTube and TikTok have been racking up likes by showing a strange line in the ocean, with dark water on one side and light water on the other.
Lines like this often appear where rivers or glaciers feed the ocean. But these popular videos also
claim that these lines show a boundary between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, and then use this as "evidence" to claim that the two oceans do not mix.
But is this actually true? Or do the Pacific and Atlantic oceans mix? "The short answer is yes! The waters are constantly mixing," said Nadín Ramírez, an oceanographer at the University of Concepción in Chile. The Pacific and Atlantic mix at different speeds in different places, and climate change may actually be changing those speeds.
Scientific American
by Jim Behnke
Great White Sharks Are Surging off Cape Cod
They’re here. Once rare in this area, great white sharks—hundreds of them—are hunting in the shallow waters along the beaches of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The upsurge over the past decade has caught just about everyone by surprise, including marine scientists. Renowned shark expert Greg Skomal, who has studied white sharks off the coast of New England since the early 1980s, says he didn’t encounter one anywhere near Cape Cod until 2004 and didn’t tag his first one there until 2009.
A new study shows that this peninsula’s eastern shoreline now hosts one of the largest seasonal white shark gatherings in the world and is the first such hotspot documented in the North Atlantic. Cape Cod joins established hotspots in South Africa, central California, Mexico’s Guadalupe Island and Australia’s Neptune Islands. The sharks are most concentrated by Massachusetts during June through October—the same time of year when more than three million vacationers regularly flock to the cape.
The Brighter Side
Researchers discovered the cause of severe inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)
Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder that affects the digestive tract. The disease is characterized by inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract, which can cause symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, and fatigue.
Perianal Crohn's disease is a complication of Crohn's disease that causes inflammation and ulceration of the skin around the anus, as well as other structures in the perianal area. Perianal Crohn's disease occurs in up to 40% of people with Crohn's disease and has limited treatment responses, resulting in a poor quality of life.
Cedars-Sinai investigators have identified a genetic variant that increases the risk of developing perianal Crohn’s disease, the most debilitating manifestation of Crohn’s disease.
According to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal GUT, the genetic variant generates changes to DNA that lead to a loss of protein function, which in turn, alters how the body recognizes and handles bacteria, making it less effective at fighting infections. This discovery addresses a significant area of unmet medical need, as the current therapies are not effective in treating this chronic inflammatory condition.
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.