Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, Besame, and annetteboardman. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke, Man Oh Man, and jlms qkw.
OND is 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 (or sometimes slightly later).
I’m Chitown Kev and welcome to the Saturday Science Edition of the Overnight News Digest. And we sart of tonight’s science edition with...March Madness and the upcoming NCAA Basketball Tournament.
Phys.org: Want to predict March Madness? New method identifies key statistics, outperforms others in accuracy by American Statistical Association
University of Illinois researchers have developed a method using causal inference for predicting upsets in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament that outperforms many other techniques. In addition to improved accuracy, the method stands out because it relies on publicly available data, making it reproducible and more accessible for others to use.
The paper reporting the method is published in the American Statistical Association (ASA) Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports (JQAS) by Sheldon H. Jacobson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jason J. Sauppe (University of Wisconsin La Crosse) and Shouvik Dutta (former University of Illinois graduate student). In short, the technique identifies potential upsets using only a small number of publicly available statistics by identifying match-ups in the current year that exhibit characteristics similar to those exhibited by historical round-of-64 upsets.
Using decision trees, machine learning, and causal inference, Jacobson and his collaborators analyzed 115 publicly available statistics to detect the 15 most important for identifying upsets in the first-round matchups between the teams seeded 2 and 15, 3 and 14, and 4 and 13. Among the most influential of the 15 were the effective possession ratio—the number of possessions and offensive rebounds minus the number of turnovers all divided by the number of possessions—the number of games played in the regular season and a measure of scoring chances per game.
The differences in those 15 statistics between the two teams in each historical upset are then used to build a profile of past upsets. Finally, the upset profiles can be compared to round-of-64 games in the current year to find match-ups that are most like historical upsets.
Science: This ancestor of today’s insects, spiders, and crustaceans had a simple brain, but complex eyes by Elizabeth Pennini
Although it’s hard to believe that delicate nervous tissues could persist for hundreds of millions of years, that’s exactly what happened to the brains and eyes of some 15 ancestors of modern-day spiders and lobsters, called Kerygmachela kierkegaardi (after the famous philosopher Søren Kierkegaard). Found along the coast of north Greenland, the 518-million-year-old fossils contained enough preserved brains and eyes to help researchers write a brand-new history of the arthropod nervous system.
Until now, many biologists had argued that ancient arthropods—which gave rise to today’s insects, spiders, and crustaceans—had a three-part brain and very simple eyes. Compound eyes, in which the “eye” is really a cluster of many smaller eyes, supposedly evolved later from a pair of legs that moved into the head and was modified to sense light.
Undark.org: Ticks Creep Into Canada, Bringing Lyme Disease (and Confusion) With Them by Viviane Collier
JOANNE SEIFF, a resident of Manitoba, contracted Lyme disease a couple of years ago but didn’t remember pulling off the tick that bit her; nor did she have the telltale bullseye rash of a tick bite. Her husband Jeff Marcus, who grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, about an hour and a half from the eponymous town of Lyme, Connecticut, recognized her symptoms immediately because Lyme disease was common there.
Canadian doctors, however, were not convinced.
“Even though we had been telling people for months that she had Lyme disease and that all she needed was about four weeks of antibiotics, we were seeing specialist after specialist, and getting the same run-around,” Marcus says. “She was getting sicker and sicker.” At their wits’ end, they paid thousands of dollars for testing at a certified lab in the United States, which finally convinced a Canadian doctor to treat her.
Ticks carried by migratory birds have been raining down on Canada for years. But it’s only in the last 10 to 15 years, amid a changing climate and the creation of new habitats in the north, that populations of deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) have been able to establish a permanent beachhead in Canada. They have brought with them a variety of tick-borne diseases, the most common of which is Lyme.
Nature: Neuron creation in brain’s memory centre stops after childhood by Giorgia Guglielmi
Every day, the human hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory, creates hundreds of new nerve cells — or so scientists thought. Now, results from a study could upend this long-standing idea. A team of researchers has found that the birth of neurons in this region seems to stop once we become adults.
A few years ago, the group looked at a well-preserved adult brain sample and spotted a few young neurons in several regions, but none in the hippocampus. So they decided to analyse hippocampus samples from dozens of donors, ranging from fetuses to people in their 60s and 70s. They concluded that the number of new hippocampal neurons starts to dwindle after birth and drops to near zero in adulthood. The results1, published in Nature on 7 March, are already raising controversy.
If confirmed, the findings would be a “huge blow” not only to scientists in the field, but also to people with certain brain disorders, says Ludwig Aigner, a neuroscientist at Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg, Austria. This is because researchers had hoped to harness the brain’s ability to generate new neurons to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, he says.
Scientific American: Saliva Protein Might Inhibit Intestinal Anarchy by Christopher Intagliata
Every day, you produce one to two liters of spit. It kickstarts digestion and helps you swallow. And it helps prevent bacterial infection in your mouth.
"But that still seemed like a lot of energy put into something if it's only going to do that small task." Esther Bullitt, a biophysicist at the Boston University School of Medicine. "And we wondered whether there was something else it was doing as well, if maybe it had a farther reach than just preventing infections in the mouth."
So she and her team looked farther down the pipes—at whether certain proteins in spit might also disrupt the work of bad bugs in the gut. They grew cells taken from the small intestine of a 51-year-old woman. They also grew a batch of pathogenic E. coli bacteria, the kind that cause traveler's diarrhea. The E. coli have hair-like extensions, called pili, that grab onto the intestinal cells. But fewer of the E. coli were able to successfully attach to the intestinal cells when a particular saliva protein, called histatin-5, was hanging around.
ScienceNews: Massive stellar flare may have fried Earth’s nearest exoplanet by Lisa Grossman
Proxima Centauri has a temper. Earth’s nearest planet-hosting neighbor released a gigantic flare in March 2017, a new analysis of observations of the star shows. And that’s bad news for the potential for life on the star’s planet, Proxima b.
The star got 1,000 times brighter over 10 seconds before dimming again. That can best be explained by an enormous stellar flare, astronomer Meredith MacGregor of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and colleagues report February 26 in Astrophysical JournalLetters.
Because Proxima b is so much closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, the flare would have blasted Proxima b with 4,000 times more radiation than Earth typically gets from the sun’s flares. “If there are flares like this at all frequently, then [the exoplanet] is likely not in the best shape,” MacGregor says.
Proxima b was one of the most sought-after sites for finding life outside the solar system. Just four light-years away, it has a mass about the same as Earth’s and probably has temperatures suitable for liquid water (SN: 12/24/16, p. 20). But its star is an M dwarf, a class of small dim stars notoriously prone to flaresthat could rip away their planets’ atmospheres (SN: 6/24/17, p. 18).
Astronomy: Hubble captures new image of two colliding galaxies by Amber Jorgenson
Talk about getting up close and personal. The two spiral galaxies that make up the ARP 256 system have just begun a long and chaotic journey together, destined to spend millions of years colliding into each other before finally merging into a galaxy all their own.
The image, captured by NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope, shows the barred spiral galaxy duo slowly combining in Cetus the Sea Monster, about 350 million light-years from Earth. Their spiral shapes aren’t nearly as pronounced as they used to be, as the gravitational forces responsible for drawing the galaxies together cause them to become stretched and distorted.
Their nuclei are still far apart and won’t being converging any time soon, but the image shows distinct signs that an exciting galactic collision is underway. The galaxy on the upper left boasts prominent tidal tails, filled with dust, gas, and stars, being pulled toward its companion. The vibrantly blue specks scattered throughout the image are stellar nurseries from which hot new stars are consistently emerging. The uptick in star formation is caused by a surge in interstellar dust and gas motion triggered by the strong gravitational interactions.
Phys.org: Neanderthals' lack of drawing ability may relate to hunting techniques
Neanderthals had large brains and made complex tools but never demonstrated the ability to draw recognizable images, unlike early modern humans who created vivid renderings of animals and other figures on rocks and cave walls. That artistic gap may be due to differences in the way they hunted, suggests a University of California, Davis, expert on predator-prey relations and their impacts on the evolution of behavior.
Neanderthals used thrusting spears to bring down tamer prey in Eurasia, while Homo sapiens, or modern humans, spent hundreds of thousands of years spear-hunting wary and dangerous game on the open grasslands of Africa.
Richard Coss, a professor emeritus of psychology, says the hand-eye coordination involved in both hunting with throwing spears and drawing representational art could be one factor explaining why modern humans became smarter than Neanderthals.
In an article recently published in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Coss examines archaeological evidence, genomics, neuroscience studies, animal behavior and prehistoric cave art.
For more science news, you can check out Mark Sumner’s Abbreviated Science Round-up.
Everyone have a great evening!