Since I was late this morning in finishing my science reading (I got caught up fuming over things like freedom of speech and the culture of cruelty, because I haven’t learned to keep my head down on Saturday morning), I’m munging together popular articles, mostly from secondary sources, and peer-reviewed research this afternoon. Though hopefully not in a way that makes it impossible to tell which is which.
With that in mind, here is clearly the most important science news of the week: Women’s pockets are too small. As reported with admirable completeness (and keen diagrams) at the site pudding.cool, science has confirmed something that every woman has been aware of since … ever. That being that you can’t fit a decent phablet into any pocket on any piece of clothing owned by anyone sporting a double-X set of chromosomes.
There are few things more frustrating than collecting your belongings only to realize that the pockets in your pants are too small to hold them. Or worse, the fabric designed to look like a pocket is merely for decoration and doesn’t open at all.
This extensive review looked at one of America’s most vital bits of technology—blue jeans. In a survey of 80 different pairs for men and women, the average pair of men’s jeans had a front pocket 6.4” wide and 9.1” deep. Women’s jeans had front pockets just 6” wide. That 7 percent decline in pocket width might be attributable to a general tendency of women, on average, to be smaller than men. After all the height difference between men and women in the US is also 7 percent. So problem solved! No sexually prejudicial pockets here.
Except … women’s pockets only average 5.6” deep. A depth also known as less than that of an iPhone X or a Samsung S9 — and forget about the big phablet versions. These are pockets that are clearly designed to put women at a technological disadvantage. And move purses. And increase the national sale of blood pressure medicine through sheer frustration.
On average, the pockets in women’s jeans are 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower than men’s pockets.
Which might be fine, if the average woman was 2’ 5” tall. But since these clothes are mostly sold by locations like the Gap rather than Keebler, it’s just possible they might want to think about putting in a pocket that’s actually workable.
And now … on to science.
Agriculture
“Bee-Safe” pesticide turns out to not be safe for bees.
Pesticides based around sulfoxaflor have been touted as being less ecologically harmful as those around neonicotinoids. The “neonics” are the mostly commonly used pesticide worldwide, but they’ve proven to be harmful to many useful species, not just bees, so many countries, and pesticide companies, have been transitioning away. And sulfoximine-based pesticides have been the go-to replacement. These pesticides don’t seem to have the immediate impact on bees, but this study out of Royal Holloway University in the UK indicates that they are far from bee-friendly.
Here we show that chronic exposure to the sulfoximine-based insecticide sulfoxaflor, at dosages consistent with potential post-spray field exposure, has severe sub-lethal effects on bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies. Field-based colonies that were exposed to sulfoxaflor during the early growth phase produced significantly fewer workers than unexposed controls, and ultimately produced fewer reproductive offspring.
Colonies that get exposed to sulfoxaflor don’t die outright. They just fail to thrive, with slow declines in both workers and drones.
GMO crops swap old pests for new ones.
Pest resistance is one of the big promises of genetically modified crops. However, that doesn’t always work out perfectly. A researcher from Imperial College London looks specifically at cotton, and particularly at China. But the story he discovers may be unsettlingly universal.
Pesticides used to knock out a single local pest also eliminated predators. Which invited in another set of pests. And heavier pesticides to knock out the new crew ripped through the local environment even worse. And eventually farmers were using far more pesticide … and still having more losses than before they started. And then came GMO crops that were designed to stop that set of pests and offer some relief to the rounds of spraying and spraying and … guess what.
Protagonists of the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for pest control argued that crops incorporating the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins, such as Cry1Ac, would be a panacea, as they would obviate the need for pesticide sprays.
Bzzzzt.
Non-crop borders around crops are complex to manage.
Maintaining areas of non-crop plants around planted fields has often been held up as a successful method of reducing the need for pesticides by encouraging biologic controls, as well as encouraging biodiversity. But an extensive international study shows that these systems are, not surprisingly, highly variable in their effectiveness.
Decades of research have fostered the now-prevalent assumption that noncrop habitat facilitates better pest suppression by providing shelter and food resources to the predators and parasitoids of crop pests. Based on our analysis of the largest pest-control database of its kind, noncrop habitat surrounding farm fields does affect multiple dimensions of pest control, but the actual responses of pests and enemies are highly variable across geographies and cropping systems.
Which is … pretty much what you would expect.
Genetics
Wheat gene finally, finally gets transcribed.
Human beings have about 19,000 genes. It takes a similar number of genes to build a chimpanzee, a dog, or a puffer fish. So people are sometimes surprised to find that the corn plant is packing 33,000 genes. But at least when it comes to the total number of base pairs, people still out-total something that we’re used to consuming in flake form.
And then there’s wheat. Wheat is not only packing around 95,000 genes, it’s doing it in a confusing heap of DNA that’s roughly seven times are large as that needed to build the people who came up with that number. Which has made the recently announced complete transcription of the wheat genome (by a cast of hundreds) an accomplishment. It also offers some early insights into the planet’s most widely planted plant.
An annotated reference sequence representing the hexaploid bread wheat genome in 21 pseudomolecules has been analyzed to identify the distribution and genomic context of coding and noncoding elements across the A, B, and D subgenomes. … This community resource establishes the foundation for accelerating wheat research and application through improved understanding of wheat biology and genomics-assisted breeding.
Robotic Sociology
Kids feel peer pressure from robotic peers.
I created a new category just for this research from Germany.
People are known to change their behavior and decisions to conform to others, even for obviously incorrect facts. Because of recent developments in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots are increasingly found in human environments, and there, they form a novel social presence. It is as yet unclear whether and to what extent these social robots are able to exert pressure similar to human peers. This study used the Asch paradigm, which shows how participants conform to others while performing a visual judgment task. We first replicated the finding that adults are influenced by their peers but showed that they resist social pressure from a group of small humanoid robots. Next, we repeated the study with 7- to 9-year-old children and showed that children conform to the robots. This raises opportunities as well as concerns for the use of social robots with young and vulnerable cross-sections of society; although conforming can be beneficial, the potential for misuse and the potential impact of erroneous performance cannot be ignored.
“Opportunities” in this description are … kind of concerning. But this does bode well for those who are looking forward to our bot-dominated future.
Astronomy
This is what they mean by “hot” Jupiter
Despite what the results of surveys like Kepler and K2 have turned up, the universe is not dominated by giant Jupiter-sized planets zipping around their sun at sub-Mercury distances. It’s just that these kind of planets — big one that cross their star a lot — are by far the easier to detect. That detection bias has made so-called “Hot Jupiters” look as if they’re a dime a star system.
But just how hot is a hot Jupiter? Hot enough for these results turned up by Swiss scientists.
Here we report observations of neutral and singly ionized atomic iron (Fe and Fe+) and singly ionized atomic titanium (Ti+) in the atmosphere of KELT-9b.
Hot enough to have an atmosphere with significant amounts of ionized iron. That hot. About 4.000 degrees hot. Just as hot Jupiters are the easiest type of planet to find, their atmospheres are the easiest to study, but this result is a nice step toward getting numbers from smaller, hopefully cooler, worlds to come.
Medicine
Transfer of a zebra fish gene may allow mammals to regrow damaged retinas.
Zebra fish are one of those species that often comes in for study because of, among other things, their ability to regenerate parts of their optical system that can’t be matched by most organisms. But a team from Mount Sinai University showed that tranfer of a single gene allowed mice to preform an important trick.
Here we report that following gene transfer of β-catenin, cell-cycle-reactivated MG can be reprogrammed to generate rod photoreceptors by subsequent gene transfer of transcription factors essential for rod cell fate specification and determination. MG-derived rods restored visual responses in double mutant mice, a model of congenital blindness, throughout the visual pathway from the retina to the primary visual cortex. Together, our results provide evidence of vision restoration after de novo MG-derived genesis of rod photoreceptors in mammalian retinas.
As someone who lost an eye to retina damage as a teenager, this is … cool. It seems unlikely I’ll ever manage the double-mutant stage required to start making those repairs. But in our hopefully-less-nightmarish-Gattaca future, someone will.
Climate Change
How climate change relates to extreme weather events.
Is it climate change?
For decades, climate researchers using computer models have predicted that the warming ocean and atmosphere would likely increase the intensity of such natural disasters. More recently, though, high-resolution datasets and more sophisticated models have allowed researchers to find the fingerprint of climate change in individual weather events. Such analyses are exceedingly tricky, and not all experts the field agree on the best approach. But in recent years, a growing subfield of “attribution” research has produced results that are increasingly compelling—and increasingly concerning. Such work not only investigates the causes of past events but could potentially help improve forecasting for future ones.
One study published in Harvey's aftermath suggests climate change likely boosted the hurricane's rainfall by 20 to 40%. ... In May, a National Science Foundation-funded study estimated that recent named storms would be slower-moving, have faster winds, and be much wetter, on average, if they’d formed in a climate warmed by 5 °C (9 °F)—the change predicted in average temperature over the next century. In other words, the models suggest that even devastating hurricanes such as Harvey will be worse in the future.
Yes. Yes it is.
Heat waves at sea.
Just as heat waves can persist over land, the same thing can happen — and is happening with increasing frequency — above the sea. These heat waves can drive or contribute to severe weather events.Between 1982 and 2016, we detect a doubling in the number of Marine Heat Wave] days, and this number is projected to further increase on average by a factor of 16 for global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels and by a factor of 23 for global warming of 2.0 degrees Celsius. However, current national policies for the reduction of global carbon emissions are predicted to result in global warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the twenty-first century, for which models project an average increase in the probability of MHWs by a factor of 41.
That’s a third of each year spent in heat wave conditions.
Archeology
Trade networks show that early Native American culture in the Southeast US was more advanced than previous suggestions.
A multi-university team identified copper artifacts at sites in Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana created from metal that originated in the Great Lakes region. These extensive trade networks indicate that the America of 6000 years ago was more advanced, and more populated, than previously suggested. Rather than living in small, isolated communities, Americans at the time seem to have been invovled in organizations that didn’t just trade goods, but culture. Just as with the copper artifacts, burial practices could be traced over a similar range.
Put it all together, and it makes it seem as if the entire region might have been involved in a kind of loose, or not so loose, larger cultural and political structure. There may have been a more extensive, more interconnected society than researchers have been willing to recognize.
Image
This week’s image comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit Andy’s site for a larger, easier to read version of the image as well as related text.