In every single month after February 1985, the average global temperature has been warmer than normal — 400 months in a row. Anyone born after that month has never experienced a “cool” month for Earth, let alone a normal one.
It’s certainly a milestone for the planet, but it’s not surprising and it’s nothing new.
“We live in and share a world that is unequivocally, appreciably and consequentially warmer than just a few decades ago, and our world continues to warm,” NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt told USA Today. “Speeding by a ‘400’ sign only underscores that, but it does not prove anything new.”
Humans are causing massive changes in the location of water around the world, NASA says
A 14-year NASA mission has confirmed that a massive redistribution of freshwater is occurring across Earth, with middle-latitude belts drying and the tropics and higher latitudes gaining water supplies.
The results, which are probably a combination of the effects of climate change, vast human withdrawals of groundwater and simple natural changes, could have profound consequences if they continue, pointing to a situation in which some highly populous regions could struggle to find enough water in the future.
“To me, the fact that we can see this very strong fingerprint of human activities on the global water redistribution, should be a cause for alarm,” said Jay Famiglietti, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the authors of a study published in Nature on Wednesday.
TIME
Why Men Need to Stop Relying on Non-Verbal Consent, According to a Neuroscientist
As a woman, I’m immediately skeptical that men can’t tell the difference between consensual and nonconsensual activity. It seems like an easy out.
Reading through the awful details of the #MeToo cases, some claims of consent seem clear-cut, like the Bill Cosby case, which involved drugging a woman before sex. Others are more complex, as with Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, where an encounter might have begun consensually but allegedly veered into coercion and assault. Eric Schneiderman, who resigned as attorney general of New York after being accused of slapping and strangling several women, claimed the sexual encounters were consensual. His accusers, obviously, did not agree.
As a neuroscientist, however, I’m forced to consider another alternative, however distasteful. The human brain is wired so that people see what they believe. In many cases, without verbal consent, two peoples brains can perceive exactly the same events very differently. They can, in effect, be experiencing different situations.
Scientists Discover Why Hair Turns Gray and Goes Bald
Scientists have pinpointed the cells that cause hair to turn gray and to go bald in mice, according to a new study published in the journal Genes & Development.
Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center accidentally stumbled upon this explanation for baldness and graying hairs—at least in mouse models—while studying a rare genetic disease that causes tumors to grow on nerves, according to a press release from the center.
They found that a protein called KROX20 switches on skin cells that become a hair shaft, which then causes cells to produce another protein called stem cell factor. In mice, these two proteins turned out to be important for baldness and graying. When researchers deleted the cells that produce KROX20, mice stopped growing hair and eventually went bald; when they deleted the SCF gene, the animals’ hair turned white.
Popular Science
Green bones, green hearts, can’t lose: these lizards survive with toxic green blood
In the forests of New Guinea, lizards scurry around with green bones, green hearts, green tongues, and green blood. At least six species share this enigmatic trait, which didn’t originate from one bizarre mutation but evolved four different times, according to new research in Science Advances.
These lizards have green insides because their bile carries super high levels of a deadly compound called biliverdin, the product of old red blood cells. People make the same pigment—you can see it when you get a gnarly, green-tinged bruise—but our livers filter it from our blood. Trace amounts of biliverdin cause jaundice, a disease common in infants and adults with liver failure. The levels found in these lizards would kill us. But for these lizards, well, it sure is easy being green.
“It’s possible there is no adaptive value,” says biologist Christopher Austin at Louisiana State University, “but it’s hard to imagine.” Over the course of 27 years, Austin, one of the authors of the study, has traveled to New Guinea in search of the bright green creatures. He’s captured hundreds of lizards by clamoring up trees and grabbing the critters. In his fieldwork, he discovered two new species, but he’s sure there are more. “New Guinea is like this black hole for biological discovery,” Austin says. “There’s no field guide.”
Octopuses are not aliens, but boy are they a bunch of beautiful weirdos
We have to stop taking away Mother Nature’s achievements. Every time a creature is quirky or bizarre people say that it must be an alien, when the reality is that evolutionis capable of creating some of the strangest, creepiest organisms you could ever fathom.
This includes octopuses, which for the record is the correct pluralization of octopus. (It can also be octopodes, since the word is Greek in origin, but never octopi.)
Octopuses seem to be particularly prone to alien theories. The most recent is thanks to a group of scientists—none of whom study zoology and many of whom don’t even study anything biological—wrote a paper in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology that claimed to show octopuses might come from space. In fact, they say that the entire Cambrian explosion (a period 541 million years ago when animal diversity rapidly expanded, producing early forms of many creatures alive today) originated with an influx of viruses from the cosmos. Thirty-three authors co-signed their names to this paper, including the man who originally proposed this highly controversial idea in the 1970s. They use an octopus as an example, noting that “The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common Octopus are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form” and that therefore “it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”
How scientists can be sure that Kilauea won’t turn into the next Mount St. Helens
Ever since Kilauea started its latest eruptive phase, with fissures of lava opening in a neighborhood on the Hawaiian volcano’s flank, people around the world have been mesmerized by the incredible pictures of the Earth in action.
Yesterday, Kilauea had its biggest explosive event yet at the summit, sending ash 30,000 feet into the air just before dawn. The column stretched above the cloud tops, providing an observatory on Mauna Loa with this amazing view of the plume.
This was a fascinating event, and it's not even the most energetic explosion that Kilauea could produce, though the ash column was very high. But even the largest possible explosive event from Kilauea would still be tiny compared to other volcanoes around the world, from Krakatoa to Mount St. Helens to Vesuvius. In comparison to those massive fireworks, Kilauea’s explosive efforts are like those tiny bang snaps you’d throw against the driveway on the 4th of July.
National Geographic
No, Hawaii's Volcano Won't Trigger a Mega-Tsunami
Hawaii's famously active volcano Kilauea has been oozing, belching, and releasing gas since early this month, and after several warning signs, the summit finally erupted explosively today. The full of extent of today's eruption is still being determined, but experts from the U.S. Geological Survey expect ash to blanket the surrounding area and are advising residents to take safety precautions.
The volcano's lava lake in the crater has been steadily falling, raising the risk that it could come into contact with the water table and produce steam. As rocks increasingly fell into the crater, it created a cap that forced steam to build up under pressure and eventually explode, scattering rocks and ash. Kilauea hasn't had a large-scale explosive eruption since 1924, when it sent ballistic rocks the size of refrigerators careening into the air.
With good reason, scientists and residents are concerned. Already, more than 2,000 residents on Hawaii's Big Island have been evacuated to protect them from serious dangers from the recent activity, including encroaching lava and noxious gases.
How People Make Only a Jar of Trash a Year
Imagine 15 grocery bags filled with plastic trash piled up on every single yard of shoreline in the world. That’s how much land-based plastic trash ended up in the world’s oceans in just one year. The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of plastic and other solid waste a day, 10 times the amount a century ago, according to World Bank researchers. The U.S. is the king of trash, producing a world-leading 250 million tons a year—roughly 4.4 pounds of trash per person per day.
And yet there are a growing number of people—often young millennial women—who are part of a zero-waste movement. Their yearly trash output can be small enough to fit inside an eight-ounce mason jar. These are not wannabe hippies, but people embracing a modern minimalist lifestyle. They say it saves them money and time and enriches their lives.
Kathryn Kellogg is one of those young millennials who has downsized her trash pile—anything that hasn’t been composted or recycled—so two years' worth literally fits inside one 16-ounce jar. Meanwhile, the average American produces 1,500 pounds of trash a year.
Science
Excess hippo dung may be harming aquatic species across Africa
Beady eyes and tiny ears may be all you see of a hippopotamus wading through the water, but there’s a lot more going on under the surface—and a lot of it is poop. The giant African mammals generate 52,800 metric tons of dung each year, enough—according to two new studies—to pollute ecosystems and kill fish by the hundreds.
Until now, the daily migration of Africa’s 70,000 hippos between wading pools during the day and grasslands where they feed at night was thought to beneficial. With their poop, the animals transfer nutrients to African aquatic ecosystems. But in the dry season of Kenya’s Mara River, when 4000 hippos crowd together in the 100 or so few pools deep enough for them, hippo dung accumulates at the bottom, feeding microbes that rob the water of oxygen needed by other underwater creatures. When this water is flushed downriver by periodic floods, it can kill fish downstream.
Over 5 years, one team documented 13 such incidents on the Mara River, and the resulting loss of oxygen killed large numbers of fish during nine of them, the researchers report today in Nature Communications. They used robotic boats to survey the pools and built small dams to construct and flush an artificial hippo pool to verify this role of hippo dung.
Warming seas may scramble North America’s fishing industry
Get ready, seafood lovers: Climate change may complicate efforts to net your catch of the day. That’s because warming seas will force many of North America’s most valuable fish and shellfish stocks north in coming decades, a major new modeling study finds, potentially creating headaches for the fishing industry and government regulators. Some species could see their ranges shrink by half, whereas others are poised to expand into vast new territories more than 1000 kilometers north of their current homes.
“Basically, climate change is forcing species to move, jumbling up ecosystems,” says ecologist Malin Pinsky of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher James Morley, now at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “That’s not necessarily bad news. But we’ve already seen that even much smaller shifts in the distribution of marine species can cause real economic disruption, political friction, and challenges to fisheries managers. And here we are talking about potentially big shifts.”
Researchers have already shown that on land and in the sea, plants and animals are shifting their ranges in response to rising global temperatures. Trees that thrive in warmer climates, for example, are spreading into areas where frigid winters once made survival impossible. And species that need cooler weather are retreating from areas that have become too warm.
Something killed a lot of sperm whales in the past—and it wasn’t whalers
Sperm whales are a genetic puzzle. The deep-diving, squid-eating giants that inspired Moby Dickare found in every ocean, where they can mate with partners from around the world; as such, they should be quite genetically diverse. Yet, their genetic diversity is actually very low, hinting that something killed a lot of them off in the past. And that something wasn’t whalers.
To reach this conclusion, researchers analyzed mitochondrial genomes (DNA inherited only through the maternal line) from 175 sperm whale samples collected from biopsies of live and dead stranded whales across the globe. Their analysis showed that the current global distribution of sperm whales resulted from a population expansion starting about 100,000 years ago. Sperm whales at that time had apparently been reduced to a small population of about 10,000, when a freezing world caused extensive ice to exclude them from all oceans except the Pacific.
Today’s sperm whales (about 360,000 animals) are all descended from this single population, the team reports online today in Molecular Ecology. They subsequently colonized the Atlantic Ocean multiple times. Whaling has taken another toll, although the full extent is not yet known; it likely depleted some sperm whale populations more than others, the scientists say, noting that collecting information on the population’s overall recovery has proved difficult.
The Guardian
Moon of Jupiter prime candidate for alien life after water blast found
A Nasa probe that explored Jupiter’s moon Europa flew through a giant plume of water vapour that erupted from the icy surface and reached a hundred miles high, according to a fresh analysis of the spacecraft’s data.
The discovery has cemented the view among some scientists that the Jovian moon, one of four first spotted by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610, is the most promising place in the solar system to hunt for alien life.
If such geysers are common on Europa, Nasa and European Space Agency (Esa) missions that are already in the pipeline could fly through and look for signs of life in the brine, which comes from a vast subsurface ocean containing twice as much water as all the oceans on Earth.
Climate change on track to cause major insect wipeout, scientists warn
Global warming is on track to cause a major wipeout of insects, compounding already severe losses, according to a new analysis.
Insects are vital to most ecosystems and a widespread collapse would cause extremely far-reaching disruption to life on Earth, the scientists warn. Their research shows that, even with all the carbon cuts already pledged by nations so far, climate change would make almost half of insect habitat unsuitable by the end of the century, with pollinators like bees particularly affected.
However, if climate change could be limited to a temperature rise of 1.5C - the very ambitious goal included in the global Paris agreement - the losses of insects are far lower.
Exercise is good for you – unless it's part of your job
Men who work as labourers or in other physically demanding roles have a greater risk of dying early than those with more sedentary jobs, researchers say.
The finding, from scientists in the Netherlands, reveals an apparent “physical activity paradox” where exercise can be harmful at work but beneficial to health when performed in leisure time.
Pieter Coenen, a public health researcher at VU University medical centre in Amsterdam, said the reason for the disparity is unclear, but he believes it may reflect the different types of exercise people get at work compared with those in their free time.
“While we know leisure-time physical activity is good for you, we found that occupational physical activity has an 18% increased risk of early mortality for men,” Coenen said. “These men are dying earlier than those who are not physically active in their occupation.”
Ars Technica
An 800-year-old label may rewrite the history of a Java Sea shipwreck
In the 1980s, fishermen working off the coast of Indonesia made a surprising haul: a cargo of ceramic vessels, elephant tusks, sweet-smelling resin, and other artifacts from a ship that had lain on the bottom of the Java Sea for centuries. Most of the ship's hull was long since gone; wood decays quickly in warm waters, leaving behind only its former contents.
Now, a closer look at its cargo reveals that the ship may have gone to the bottom a century earlier than archaeologists first suspected, which puts it in the middle of a very interesting period in Chinese history.
The Song dynasty (1127-1279) was the height of ceramic export production in China, when the imperial court encouraged overseas trade. Ships crossing the seas were beginning to form a more direct link between far-flung trading partners than the ancient Silk Road could allow. The Srivijaya empire, a formidable maritime power based on Sumatra, was in decline, and other coastal powers in the region were vying for its former supremacy.
NASA asks for Europa lander science experiments—and that’s a big deal
NASA is in various stages of planning two multi-billion dollar missions to Jupiter's intriguing, ice-covered moon of Europa. One, a flyby mission known as the Europa Clipper, will make dozens of passes of the moon down to an altitude of about 25km as it assesses the nature of the ice and the ocean below and looks for clues of habitability. A second even more ambitious mission would seek to actually land on Europa, sample its ice, and look for signs of life.
Both missions, but especially the lander, would be among the most complex, daring, and costly planetary science missions that NASA has attempted. However, both the Clipper and lander are not equally likely to occur. The Clipper is more established. It has been progressing through NASA's multi-tiered review process and has a launch date of 2022. In the president's budget request for fiscal year 2019, it also received $265 million in funding.
The lander mission has always seemed more tenuous, partly because it represents such a breathtaking challenge to land on an icy moon so far away—a nightmare glacier that is irradiated by nearby Jupiter and where the creaky surface rises and falls. In terms of complexity, the Europa Clipper spacecraft has a mass of about 6 tons, and the lander spacecraft will probably end up with a mass of about 16 tons.
Clean air, water on voters’ agenda, but not Congress’
A poll came out this week indicating that huge majorities of the US public think that the federal government isn't doing enough to protect the environment. About 70 percent would like to see more action on clean water, and more than two-thirds would like to see additional steps taken on climate change. While there are some partisan divides regarding the right actions to take, most members of both parties would like to see expanded use of solar and wind power.
All of which provides a backdrop to the truly bizarre spectacle that took place in a hearing held by the House Science Committee this week. In a hearing meant to focus on technological solutions to climate change (like the hugely popular wind and solar), Republican members of the committee decided to once again raise questions about whether humans were influencing the warming climate, with one Congressman suggesting that the warming-driven rise in our oceans might instead be caused by rocks falling into the seas.
The poll comes courtesy of the Pew Research Center, which obtained the opinions of more than 2,500 US adults. Despite a steady stream of rhetoric about the government overstepping its bounds, fewer than 10 percent felt that the US is doing too much to protect air, water, animals, and wilderness. Only 13 percent felt this way about climate change. By contrast, substantial majorities (from 57 to 69 percent, depending on the issue) thought that the government wasn't doing enough.
Science Daily
New research shows how Indo-European languages spread across Asia
A new study has discovered that horses were first domesticated by descendants of hunter-gatherer groups in Kazakhstan who left little direct trace in the ancestry of modern populations. The research sheds new light on the long-standing "steppe theory" on the origin and movement of Indo-European languages made possible by the domestication of the horse.
The domestication of the horse was a milestone in human history that allowed people, their languages, and their ideas to move further and faster than before, leading both to widespread farming and to horse-powered warfare.
Scholars from around the world have collaborated on a new inter-disciplinary research project, which was published in the journal Science 9 May 2018. The researchers analysed ancient and modern DNA samples from humans and compared the results -- the 74 ancient whole-genome sequences studied by the group were up to 11,000 years old and were from inner Asia and Turkey.
500-year-old Leaning Tower of Pisa mystery unveiled by engineers
Why has the Leaning Tower of Pisa survived the strong earthquakes that have hit the region since the middle ages? This is a long-standing question a research group of 16 engineers has investigated, including a leading expert in earthquake engineering and soil-structure interaction from the University of Bristol.
Professor George Mylonakis, from Bristol's Department of Civil Engineering, was invited to join a 16-member research team, led by Professor Camillo Nuti at Roma Tre University, to explore this Leaning Tower of Pisa mystery that has puzzled engineers for many years.
Despite leaning precariously at a five-degree angle, leading to an offset at the top of over five metres, the 58-metre tall Tower has managed to survive, undamaged, at least four strong earthquakes that have hit the region since 1280.
Optimal age of puppy cuteness optimized
The popular meme proclaiming that all dogs are puppies assumes that humans' adoration of canines is not conditional on their age. But a new study led by Clive Wynne, professor of psychology and director of Arizona State University's Canine Science Collaboratory, suggests otherwise.
In a paper published this month in Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals, Wynne and colleagues describe the study, which found dogs' attractiveness to humans peaks at roughly eight weeks, the same point in time at which their mother weans them and leaves them to fend for themselves.
While spending time in the Bahamas, Wynne was able to observe the many street dogs there. According to him, there are around a billion dogs in the world, 80 percent of whom are feral. For those dogs, human intervention is crucial to their survival. Wynne wondered if there was a connection between pups' weaning age -- when they are at their most vulnerable -- and their level of attractiveness to humans. So he designed an experiment to test his query.