Welcome to Overnight News Digest- Saturday Science. Since 2007 the OND has been a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of science 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 this edition include:
- Aztec communities farming on water
- JWST finds not-so-dead objects in “dead zone”
- Agrivoltaics reduce solar payback time
- Can’t install solar? No problem!
- Antarctic’s “melty” past revisited
- Baird’s Beaked Whales follow traditions
- Oldest man-made megastructure found in Baltic Sea
- Dark matter discovered dangling from the cosmic web for the first time
- Ten Black Inventors
- Fossilized eggs found in pit dating to Romans living in England
- Looking at Danish glacier photos from 1930s
All That’s Interesting
by Morgan Dunn
The Fascinating History Of Chinampas, The Mesoamerican Method Of Farming On Water
Favored by the Aztecs, chinampas are man-made islands used to grow crops in freshwater lakes — and the agricultural system is still used in Mexico today.
In the space of just under two centuries, the Aztecs built a civilization that made ingenious contributions not just to Mexican culture, but to the entire world. There seemed to be no problem for which this ancient people couldn’t come up with a solution, whether that was city-building, warfare, or devising an accurate calendar.
One such problem was food. As the Aztec Empire rose, the population of its capital, Tenochtitlan, exploded, putting pressure on the city to find a way to feed its citizens.
So the Aztecs adopted the Mesoamerican agricultural system known as chinampas, building an elaborate system of floating gardens that would revolutionize farming in the region.
Mashable
by Marc Kaufman
Webb telescope makes unexpected find in outskirts of our solar system
In our solar system's proverbial "no man's land," a deep space realm beyond the planets, scientists detected unexpected activity.
This remote area, inhabited by ice-clad worlds like Pluto (a dwarf planet), is called the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped region surrounding much of our solar system. It's a relatively little known place, but millions of frozen, "dead" objects are thought to orbit there. Now, astronomers pointed the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at some of these icy objects, and found evidence that they're not so dead after all.
"We see some interesting signs of hot times in cool places," Christopher Glein, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who researches icy worlds, said in a statement.
Glein, who previously conducted research into Saturn's geyser-shooting moon, Enceladus, led this new investigation into the Kuiper Belt objects, which was published in the planetary science journal Icarus.
Yale Climate Connections
by YCC Team
His roof wasn’t suitable for solar panels. Here’s what he did instead.
A few years ago, Indiana resident John Smillie wanted to put solar panels on his roof. There was just one problem:
Smillie: “It’s not really a good roof for solar.”
But Smillie was not to be deterred. He realized that solar panels might not work for his house, but they might work for a nearby youth-focused nonprofit with a flat, sunny roof.
So he donated the funds and helped find a vendor to install solar panels — which now help the nonprofit save money on their energy bills.
Smillie: “Where that goes is right back into their mission. You know, I got to invest in not only clean power but also in the Youth Service Bureau’s mission, which is serving the youth of the county.”
Yahoo News
by Anthony Cuthbertson
New solar panel concept reduces payback time to five years
Researchers have calculated that a new renewable energy concept could reduce the payback period for solar panels to less than five years.
A team from the University of Lisboa and the Military Academy in Portugal worked out that building solar farms alongside “shadow-friendly” crops through a system known as agrivoltaics, or Agri-PV, could help supercharge the transition to renewable energy sources.
The researchers said Agri-PV created a “union between agricultural and energy productions” that would also generate more value from the land than solar farms or agricultural production alone.
The concept is also boosted by the decreasing cost of solar panels in recent years, combined with population growth that requires new solutions for both food production and energy generation.
“These projects, besides the fact they increase the production of green energy and reduce the consumption of non-renewable energy sources, also decrease the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere,” the researchers noted.
Salon
by Matthew Rozsa
New research pinpoints Antarctica's melty past. Scientists warn it's happening again
Scientists have thoroughly demonstrated that we are overheating our planet by emitting greenhouse gases, with the vast majority of this (89%) coming from fossil fuels. As this process of climate change worsens, humans will continue to endure extreme weather events including intensified storms, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and floods.
That last category of natural disaster, floods, deserves particular attention because billions of humans live on or near coasts. Climate change is causing the Arctic and Antarctic alike to slowly melt, contributing to rising sea levels that will subject these residents to frequent flooding – and, in some cases, entirely submerge their communities under water.
"This is a study that shows how looking at the past can help us understand how the future may pan out."
To avoid or at least minimize this to the greatest extent possible, it is critical to understand the rate at which Earth's cryosphere (the Arctic and Antarctic "frozen" areas) is disintegrating. One way of doing so is to look at Earth's history, which is exactly what researchers from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey did recently.
Science Alert
by Michelle Starr
One of The World's Most Mysterious Whales Shows Signs of Holding Traditions
Repeated sightings of an elusive whale in a strange place could indicate a cultural tradition.
Scientists have repeatedly seen a group of Baird's beaked whales (Berardius bairdii) frolicking in shallow waters around the Commander Islands, at the border between the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. The strange part? Baird's beaked whales, like all beaked whales, are a deep-sea species.
Yet, between 2008 and 2019, a team led by marine scientist Olga Filatova and Ivan Fedutin of the University of Southern Denmark saw the group of whales appear every single year, in waters shallower than just 300 meters (984 feet).
"It is uncharacteristic for this species," Filatova says, in what might be something of an understatement.
Business Insider
by Mikhaila Friel
A strange wall submerged in the Baltic Sea may be the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe
A Stone Age wall discovered in the Baltic Sea may be the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe.
The strange, kilometer-long wall is thought to have been built more than 8,500 years ago to channel reindeer into different areas by hunter-gatherers.
The wall — referred to as the Blinkerwall by researchers — was discovered by chance in September 2021 by students on a training exercise with the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde in Germany.
It's less than a meter high and consists of several large rocks linked together by more than 1,500 smaller stones. The stones are aligned "so regularly that a natural origin seems unlikely," researchers said.
Space.com
by Robert Lea
Dark matter detected dangling from the cosmic web for 1st time
For the first time, astronomers have detected dark matter hanging from massive filaments that stretch across the universe and form a "cosmic web" that trap galaxies like morning dew on a spiderweb.
Researchers from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, used the Subaru Telescope — an 8.2-meter optical-infrared telescope near the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii — and an effect that gravity has on light to indirectly observe dark matter sitting on cosmic web filaments in the Coma Cluster.
This marks the first-ever detection of dark matter on the cosmic web, and could help confirm how this structure — with strands that run for tens of millions of light-years — has influenced the
evolution of the universe.
Also known as Abell 1656, the Coma Cluster is a collection of over a thousand galaxies and is located some 321 million light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices. Because of this tremendous size and relative proximity, the Coma Cluster is an ideal place for scientists to hunt dark matter on cosmic web strands.
Chicago Defender
by Black Information Network
10 Inventions Created By Black Inventors We Use Every Day
Innovation has been embedded in the very DNA of Black people everywhere for centuries. From making light shine to creating more efficient processes and a variety of gadgets that have revolutionized how we live life, Black people have forged many inventions using the fortitude found throughout our history.
Often in our past, the deficit of representation, ongoing oppression, and sheer genius have conjured inspiration to make things that had not previously existed. There have also been times when our creations have gone uncredited or without proper recognition.
In recent years, the patent system in the US started tackling the striking underrepresentation of Black inventors in patent ownership. The racist roots of the system stem back to the 1850s when slave owners could receive patent ownership on behalf of the enslaved person who actually made the invention, building a pipeline of erasure. The racist practices of the system continued well into the 1900s when Jim Crow-era laws prevented Black inventors from obtaining patents from all-white attorneys’ offices.
The result of this institutionalized racism is the absence of Black inventors in patent ownership now. Barriers such as the cost of obtaining a patent, lack of access to the process of obtaining a patent, and a lack of representation among science, math, information, engineering, and technology fields have all contributed to the decline in Black patent ownership.
Newsweek
by Aristos Georgieu
Archaeologists 'Amazed' by Discovery Inside Ancient Roman Egg
Researchers have been left "amazed" by a rare discovery inside a "unique" bird's egg preserved for more than 1,700 years—finding that it still contains liquid.
The egg was originally found during excavations that took place between 2007 and 2016 at a site known as Berryfields in Buckinghamshire, southeast England.
During the excavations, archaeologists uncovered a large, waterlogged pit or well dating between A.D. 270 and A.D. 300 during Britain's Roman period.
Inside the pit, archaeologists found pottery vessels, coins, leather shoes, animal bones and a woven basket with a cache of eggs inside it.
Yale Climate Connections
by YCC Team
Danish photos from the 1930s show what Greenland’s glaciers used to look like
In the 1930s, Danish pilots wearing suits made of polar bear fur flew open-cockpit planes along the coastline of Greenland. From the air, they took roughly 200,000 photographs.
The images were intended to be used for mapping. But now, scientists are using them to see how global warming has affected Greenland’s peripheral glaciers, which dot the land around the central ice sheet.
Larocca: “And these glaciers are really important to study because they contribute significantly to sea level rise.”
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