BBC News
US wildlife refuges end ban on neonics and GM crops
The Trump administration has overturned bans on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in US national wildlife refuges.
The move, reversing a policy adopted in 2014, has attracted heavy criticism from environmentalists. It was announced in a memo by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Limited agricultural activity is allowed on some national wildlife refuges.
The Fish and Wildlife Service's deputy director, Greg Sheehan, said in the memo that the blanket ban on neonicotinoid pesticides and GM crops on refuges would end, with decisions about their use being made on a case-by-case basis.
He said genetically modified organisms helped "maximise production", and that neonics might be required "to fulfil needed farming practices".
Songbirds perceive colour like humans
Faced with a glorious spectrum of colour, songbirds, just like humans, look for the big picture. They can lump nearby hues in the colour spectrum into categories, such as shades that are generally red, or generally orange.
A study now shows that this affects their ability to distinguish between certain colours. The findings, by a team from Duke University in North Carolina, are published in the journal Nature. […]
The colours used in the study were picked because the male zebra finch's beak is coloured red or orange. The colour is based on carotenoids - the family of natural pigments found used by a variety of animals and plants.
Female zebra finches prefer a male mate with a red beak more than an orange beak.
Lemur extinction: Vast majority of species under threat
Almost every species of lemur, wide-eyed primates unique to Madagascar, is under threat of extinction. That is the conclusion of an international group of conservationists, who carried out an assessment of the animals' status.
This "Primate Specialist Group" reviewed and compared the latest research into lemur populations and the threats to their habitat and survival. Lemurs, they concluded, are the most endangered primates in the world.
In a statement, Russ Mittermeier, from the charity Global Wildlife Conservation, who is chair of the Primate Specialist Group which delivered the alarming conclusions, said that it highlighted the "very high extinction risk to Madagascar's unique lemurs" and was "indicative of the grave threats to Madagascar biodiversity as a whole".
Science Daily
New light shed on the people who built Stonehenge
Despite over a century of intense study, we still know very little about the people buried at Stonehenge or how they came to be there. Now, a new University of Oxford research collaboration, published in Scientific Reports suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument's construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales.
Conducted in partnership with colleagues at the UCL, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, France, the research combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis, pioneered by lead author Christophe Snoeck during his doctoral research in the School of Archaeology at Oxford.
While there has been much speculation as to how and why Stonehenge was built, the question of 'who' built it has received far less attention. Part of the reason for this neglect is that many of the human remains were cremated, and so it was difficult to extract much useful information from them. Snoeck demonstrated that that cremated bone faithfully retains its strontium isotope composition, opening the way to use this technique to investigate where these people had lived during the last decade or so of their lives.
New dinosaur found in the wrong place, at the wrong time
A new dinosaur called Lingwulong shenqi or 'amazing dragon from Lingwu' has been discovered by an Anglo-Chinese team involving UCL.
The announcement, published in Nature Communications, reports the surprising discovery of the new dinosaur which roamed the Ningxia Autonomous Region, northwest China, approximately 174 million years ago. This is in a place they were never thought to roam and 15 million years earlier than this type of dinosaur was thought to exist.
Lingwulong is the earliest known example of a type of advanced sauropod dinosaur called a 'neosauropod' -- one of the long-necked, gigantic herbivores that are the largest land animals known, including famous forms such as Brontosaurus and Diplodocus.
Heatwave and climate change having negative impact on our soil say experts
The recent heatwave and drought could be having a deeper, more negative effect on soil than we first realised say scientists. This could have widespread implications for plants and other vegetation which, in turn, may impact on the entire ecosystem.
That's because the organisms in soil are highly diverse and responsible not only for producing the soil we need to grow crops, but also other benefits such as cleaning water and regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
The new study, led by researchers at The University of Manchester and published today (02/08/2018) in Nature Communications, provides new insight into how a drought alters soil at microbial level. It shows that expected changes in climate will affect UK soil and that soil is not as tough as previously thought.
Due to climate change, disturbances such as drought are increasing in intensity and frequency. These extreme weather conditions change vegetation composition and soil moisture, which in turn impacts the soil's underlying organisms and microbial networks.
Climate Progress
Colorado officials headline pro-fossil fuels rally as wildfires devastate state
As Colorado grapples with unprecedented wildfires, some officials in the state are focusing their priorities elsewhere. During a rally in support of fossil fuels on Thursday, state officials argued that support for fracking should transcend party lines as they pushed for new oil and gas development.
Energy companies hosted an “Energy Proud” event in front of the state Capitol building in Denver, according to Western Wire, drawing a few thousand people to the gathering. Speakers included Gale Norton, a former Interior Department secretary and former Colorado attorney general, in addition to State Rep. James Coleman (D-Denver) and Colorado Treasurer Walker Stapleton, who is a Republican candidate for governor.
“There are over 200,000 people in Colorado that work in the energy industry, many of which are here today,” Coleman told the crowd, emphasizing bipartisan support for oil and gas. “And I’m proud to say that when I think about my grandfather, and when I see all of you, I don’t see blue, I don’t see red, I see hard-working Americans, hard-working Coloradans.”
Portland, Oregon’s efforts to crack down on fossil fuels just won big
Oregon’s Supreme Court has handed a major victory to Portland, upholding the city’s right to greatly restrict fossil fuel infrastructure. The measure has been a source of controversy and considerable back-and-forth over the past few years as business groups have sought to challenge the ordinance.
On Tuesday, the court declined to review a Oregon Court of Appeals decision issued in January that affirmed Portland’s constitutional right to prohibit new fossil fuel infrastructure, including storage and distribution terminals for oil and gas.
In 2016, the Portland City Council unanimously approved the ordinance limiting the construction of such terminals. This lead business groups to appeal the issue to Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA). The Columbia Pacific Building Trades Council, Portland Business Alliance and Western States Petroleum Association have led the opposition to the city’s efforts.
Ars Technica
Salt-infused graphene creates an infrared cloaking device
I love light and the various manners in which we can control it. It's a good time for me, as we are truly in a golden age of light control. We can manipulate it to see details that would otherwise be invisible. We can guide it around objects so that they are invisible. Light has been made to stand still and dance on the pointy end of pins.
All this control of light is indirect, coming via our control of materials that the light interacts with. Now, researchers have crafted a material that adapts its properties so that its infrared appearance is either hotter or colder than the object it encloses. In other words, hot objects appear cold, or cold objects can appear hot—it's infrared camouflage.
So, do you make yourself some infrared camo gear? The basic procedure is to control the efficiency with a material that can emit infrared radiation. Take gold as an example. Gold is a nearly perfect metal: it has high conductivity and does not absorb infrared radiation very easily. That means it will reflect incoming radiation; this is why emergency blankets have a thin gold coating: the gold reflects your own infrared radiation back to you to keep you warm.
The modern pygmies of Flores are not related to Homo floresiensis
On the Indonesian island of Flores, less than a mile from the cave where archaeologists discovered the fossil remains of the small-statured hominin Homo floresiensis, there's a village called Rampasasa that is home to a small population of pygmies. “Pygmy” is the scientific term for a group of people where adult males are less than about 4.7 feet tall but whose bodies have average human proportions. Most of the people living in Rampasasa fit that description.
It would be easy to assume they’re related to the other short-statured residents of Flores, and in fact some of the Rampasasans themselves have made that claim in the past. But a new genetic study says that’s not the case. These people show no signs of H. floresiensis in their ancestry, but their genomes do show evidence of a relatively recent adaptation toward shorter height. That means that people with short stature evolved twice on the same island, tens of thousands of years apart.
Evolutionary biologist Serena Tucci of Princeton University and her colleagues obtained DNA samples from 32 people in Rampasasa. They sequenced the full genomes of 10 of those people and looked for signs of an ancient encounter with H. floresiensis or some other unknown hominin relative.
Physicists’ simple spanks economists’ complex in economic growth forecasts
Physicists have a reputation for being a bunch of stickybeaks—they will jump into unrelated fields and tell everyone that they are doing it wrong. This reputation is so well deserved that there is even a relevant XKCD. Sometimes, though, it all works out—usually because the physicists stick to their area of expertise, which just happens to be relevant to the problem.
In this case, we are talking about economics. It just so happens that the economy falls into the category of a complex system, which various physicists spend a lot of time playing with.
The paper in question seems to bring together a number of slowly developing concepts in economics. Taken together, and adding a touch of dynamical modeling, their merger leads to better forecasts for gross domestic product (GDP)—and I expect that other economic indicators can be attacked by a similar procedure.
The Guardian
Star spotted speeding near black hole at centre of Milky Way
Astronomers have observed a star speeding close to the massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way for the first time. The observations, made using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, tracked a star called S2 as it passed through the extreme gravitational field at the heart of our galaxy.
As the star approached its nearest point to the black hole on 19 May, it was accelerated to mind-boggling speeds, causing it to be subject to effects predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Astronomers had been tracking the star and preparing to make the observations for the past 16 years – the time taken for the star to complete a single elliptical orbit of the black hole.
Wildfire smoke: experts warn of 'serious health effects' across western US
As climate change helps push up the number of wildfires in the western US, communities face losing lives and properties to the flames. But another threat also looms large – dangerous exposure to wildfire smoke.
Huge wildfires in California have killed at least six people and razed hundreds of homes. A pall of smoke has shrouded much of California and has wafted eastwards, with Nasa satellites showing fingers of smoke billowing as far as Salt Lake City, Utah.
Much of the smoke from the two fires – near the city of Redding and another close to Yosemite national park - has remained close to ground level, prompting air quality warnings.
Dengue fever outbreak halted by release of special mosquitoes
The first large-scale deployment of mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria, which makes them unable to transmit viruses, has stopped all outbreaks of dengue fever in a city in northern Australia for the last four years.
The success of the project in Townsville, Queensland, will encourage hopes that Wolbachia can provide a knockout blow against the Zika virus in Brazil as well, where the mosquitoes have been introduced into the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Until now, the technology has looked promising but has only been tried in small pilot projects around the world of 1 to 1.5 square km.
Townsville, however, with 187,000 inhabitants, is on a much larger scale. Mosquitoes specially bred to carry Wolbachia, which occurs naturally in up to 60% of insects, were let loose over 66 square kilometres of the city in places where they could naturally breed.
The Washington Post
Skywatch: The best times to see 90 shooting stars an hour
Darting through the heavens on the night of Aug. 12-13, the Perseid meteors may capture your attention. This is one of the strongest showers of the year, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
The group predicts a zenithal hourly rate of about 90 shooting stars around the peak.
Skygazers stand a good chance, barring clouds, of catching these fiery pebbles zipping across the late-night sky because the shower’s peak occurs after the young, crescent new moon sets, which means the moon will not impede the meteoric show.
Lyme disease is now in 100 percent of the U.S.
If you thought you were safe from Lyme disease because you don’t live in New England, where the tick-borne illness first appeared, think again. Now, 100 percent of the country — all 50 states plus the District — has residents who have tested positive for Lyme, a bacterial infection that can cause a wide variety of symptoms, including joint aches, fatigue, facial palsy and neck stiffness.
This news comes from a report from the clinical laboratory Quest Diagnostics, which analyzed the results of 6 million blood tests doctors had ordered to diagnose Lyme disease in their patients. The report found that Pennsylvania had the most positive cases last year: 10,001. The Pennsylvania tally, along with that of the six New England states — Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont — accounted for about 60 percent of the country’s Lyme disease cases. Positive results grew by 50 percent in New England and by 78 percent in Pennsylvania from 2016 to 2017. However, the number of positive tests spiked in some areas not traditionally linked to Lyme disease. Florida, for instance, had 501 infections, up 77 percent since 2015. California had 483 people with positive test results — a 194.5 percent increase from 2015.
Environmental toxins are seen as posing risks during pregnancy
Leading up to and during pregnancy, women are told to avoid alcohol and cigarettes, to make sure they get enough folate and omega-3 fatty acids, and to get adequate sleep and exercise. Most are told little or nothing about reducing their exposure to chemicals despite evidence suggesting that ingredients in plastics, vehicle exhaust and cosmetics additives can have profound impacts on babies’ health.
In recent years, the field of maternal-fetal medicine has started to respond. In 2013, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a committee opinion, reaffirmed this year, “calling for timely action to identify and reduce exposure to toxic environmental agents while addressing the consequences of such exposure.” The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics voiced a similar opinion in 2015, and the following year nearly 50 prominent U.S. doctors and scientists created Project TENDR: Targeting Environmental Neuro-Developmental Risks to call for reducing chemical exposures that can interfere with fetal and children’s brain development.
Yet, a recent survey suggests that most doctors don’t discuss exposure to pollutants with their pregnant patients.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
New Study: The Arctic Carbon Cycle is Speeding Up
When people think of the Arctic, snow, ice and polar bears come to mind. Trees? Not so much. At least not yet.
A new NASA-led study using data from the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) shows that carbon in Alaska's North Slope tundra ecosystems spends about 13 percent less time locked in frozen soil than it did 40 years ago. In other words, the carbon cycle there is speeding up -- and is now at a pace more characteristic of a North American boreal forest than of the icy Arctic.
"Warming temperatures mean that essentially we have one ecosystem -- the tundra -- developing some of the characteristics of a different ecosystem -- a boreal forest," said study co-author Anthony Bloom of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "While various factors regulate how fast this transformation will continue to occur, studies using Landsat and MODIS satellite imagery with field measurements over the past decades have observed a northward migration of shrubs and trees."
Nature News
Wilderness is vanishingly rare in Earth’s oceans
Only 13% of Earth’s oceans can now be classed as wilderness, according to a 26 July study in Current Biology.
Researchers used global data on 15 human stressors of oceans, including fishing, pollution and commercial shipping. Areas were defined as wilderness if they showed little impact from these stressors (scoring in the bottom 10% of a measure of each), as well as a low aggregate score that combined these human activities and climate stresses such as ocean acidification.
Most wilderness areas are in the open ocean and around the poles, far from human populations. Coastal ecosystems — which include centres of biodiversity such as coral reefs — make up just 10% of the wilderness area. Of all marine wilderness, just 5% is covered by marine protected areas (See 'Wild Oceans').
Entire yeast genome squeezed into one lone chromosome
For millions of years, brewer’s yeast and its close relatives have packed their DNA into 16 distinct chromosomes. Now, two teams have used CRISPR gene-editing to stuff all of yeast’s genetic material — save a few non-essential pieces — into just one or two chromosomes. The feat represents the most dramatic restructuring yet of a complex genome and could help scientists understand why organisms split their DNA over chromosomes. And, to the researchers’ surprise, the changes had little effect on most functions of the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
“That was the biggest shocker — that you can just get away with this and yeast seem to shrug its shoulders,” says Jef Boeke, a geneticist at New York University whose team jammed the yeast genome onto a pair of chromosomes1. A China-based group used a different technique to make yeast with one ‘super-chromosome’2. Both teams report their findings in Nature on 1 August.
Inverse
Math Model Determines Who Wrote Beatles' "In My Life": Lennon or McCartney?
t might seem counterintuitive that we don’t know who wrote one of the Beatles’ most famous songs, but a never-ending debate attributing it to either John Lennon or Paul McCartney has left us with an enduring mystery. Who actually wrote the melody of “In My Life,” the 23rd-greatest song of all time? Although we’ve spent decades pulling apart Beatles songs, even using A.I. to recreate them, so far we’ve only been able to guess. Now, a statistician at Harvard thinks he finally has an answer.
“It just seemed like Lennon and McCartney had different recollections of who wrote the music,” Mark Glickman, Ph.D. tells Inverse. Glickman, also a classical pianist, is presenting his research at 2018 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver this week. Lennon and McCartney, he explains, never managed to figure out who wrote which melodies in the song.
Working with Jason Brown, Ph.D., professor of mathematics at Dalhousie University, Glickman found a way to add some mathematical rigor to this debate.
Scientists Discover a Giant Rogue Planet Bumbling Around Space
Not all who wander are lost, but that might be the case for a newly discovered rogue planet. Scientists have found evidence of a giant planetary mass outside our solar system that appears to be traveling without any sort of set orbit or parent star.
This bumbling fool of a planet was first discovered by astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). From the radio astronomy observatory, scientists were able to pick up its magnetic activity and study it, the findings of which were made public on Thursday. It’s the first time the observatory’s radio-telescope detection was able to pick up a planetary-mass object beyond our solar system.
While the discovery is a first for the observatory, the object, known as SIMP J01365663+0933473, was probably hard to miss given that it’s a “surprisingly strong magnetic powerhouse” roughly a dozen times larger than Jupiter. The planetary mass earned the “rogue” moniker for being untethered to any orbit or parent star or galactic authority. But just because it’s a celestial anarchist remaining outside a solar system of conformists doesn’t mean it can’t offer scientists important new insight on its magnetic properties.
Scientists Figured Out How to Use London's Huge Fatbergs for Good
London’s infamous fatbergs are rock-hard, stadium-length clots of congealed fat, wet wipes, and soiled diapers. They’re also a potential fuel bonanza. While London’s waste management teams have been hard at work hacking at the fatbergs with shovels, a team of scientists at the University of British Columbia has been trying to figure out how to turn the UK’s fat-clogged lemons into greasy, functional lemonade. In a new study, they report they’ve discovered the recipe.
The new Water, Air, & Soil Pollution paper shows how future Fatty McFatbergs (that’s what Brits named the biggest one) can be used to churn out methane — a “clean” fuel that, when burned, releases water and low amounts of carbon dioxide relative to fossil fuels. Among the many biofuels that can be made from organic waste like fatbergs, methane is a particularly practical option for large-scale production.
“Anaerobic digestion systems commonly exist in municipal sewage treatment plants,” study co-author and research associate Asha Srinivasan, Ph.D. tells Inverse. “So, it would be advantageous to make use of the existing infrastructure to produce methane.”
Gizmodo
The Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Also Jumbled Shark Evolution
More than 500 different shark species roam Earth’s oceans: from zippy little cookie-cutter sharks, to the iconic great white, to nightmarish goblin sharks, to 25-foot-long, filter-feeding basking sharks. And it seems that the current equilibrium of shark species we see today arose after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event 66 million years ago, according to new research.
In the Cretaceous Period (between 142 million and 66 million years ago), an order of sharks called Lamniformes commanded the seas. Also known as mackerel sharks, modern lamniform sharks include the great white, thresher, and mako.
But by studying the varying shapes of hundreds of ancient, fossilized shark teeth, researchers found that Carcharhiniformes shark diversity—the biggest shark order today that includes hammerheads, tiger sharks, and more—exploded after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, whereas many lamniform sharks went extinct.
Small Dogs Pee Higher to Lie About Their Size, New Study Concludes
You just can’t trust a little dog.
We all know dogs can communicate through scent. They urinate on new areas, their own home turf, and certainly things that other dogs have peed on. We also know that some male dogs lift their legs in order to pee higher. But new research found that smaller dogs lift their legs at an even higher angle than larger dogs, perhaps to make themselves appear larger.
“Our findings... provide additional evidence that scent marking can be dishonest,” the authors said in the study published recently in the Journal of Zoology.
Scientists Just Measured the Drought that May Have Brought Down the Ancient Maya
The ancient Maya were an innovative people. They constructed intricate cities throughout the tropical lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, communicated using one of the world’s first written languages, and created two calendar systems by studying the stars. But despite their achievements, the thriving Mayan civilization mysteriously collapsed sometime between the eighth and ninth centuries. We still don’t know exactly why.
The general consensus is that the Mayan collapse was caused by a number of things, including disease, war, and other sociopolitical conflicts. One natural factor may have contributed to all of these issues: drought. A particularly bad drought would have made it difficult for the Maya to collect enough drinking water and to irrigate their crops. It also could have encouraged the spread of disease and increased the strain between Mayan leaders and their people.
Now, a new study quantifies just how harsh the Mayan droughts were.