Disaster research and inadvertent capture of human images by wildlife camera head the Ethics Needed category although tech projects also pose ethical challenges like “Is it better to have 50,000 satellites in low earth orbit transmitting high speed internet to remote areas or be able to use telescopes to spot Earth-bound asteroids?” (I might vote for the internet access. It’s slow and expensive in my not-really-remote area.)
Other news this week includes a “new and strange” El Niño climate pattern, monarch butterfly hearing check, planting out captive-bred abalones, personal and environmental value of vegetarian/vegan diets supported by data, and climate crisis consequences of landslides.
Also, Ohio Man reports finding Life on Mars and French-Spanish researchers discover where there’s no life on Earth. (I added bold to key points.)
| WELCOME TO THE OVERNIGHT NEWS DIGEST WITH A CREW CONSISTING OF FOUNDER MAGNIFICO AND REGULAR EDITORS SIDE POCKET, MAGGIEJEAN, CHITOWN KEV, INTERCEPTOR7, MAGNIFICO, ANNETTEBOARDMAN, JCK, AND BÉSAME. |
Between 2016 and 2018, Harris led the first published camera trap survey ever conducted in Burkina Faso and Niger, originally conceived to focus on the critically endangered West African lion. But Harris ended up capturing so much human activity that she expanded the focus of her study to include how humans were using the area. Research on human activity in the wildlife preserve had typically relied on humans reporting their own actions, but with the cameras, Harris could see what they were actually doing. “The data emerged to be a really interesting story that I felt compelled to tell,” Harris says. [...]
When camera traps inadvertently capture human activity, it’s called “human bycatch.” And according to a 2018 University of Cambridge study, Harris is far from the only researcher to have ended up with humans in the data. The study included a survey of 235 scientists across 65 countries about their experiences with human bycatch, and 90% of them reported capturing some images of people in their most recent projects. Even in studies conducted in remote nature reserves, meant to capture wildlife at its wildest, people showed up.
As in Harris’s study, this human data doesn’t always stay “bycatch.” Nearly half of respondents to the Cambridge survey said they had used images of people apparently involved in illegal activity to inform wildlife management efforts. Many of them had reported images to law enforcement, others to conservation staff, and some to the media. All this, despite only 8% of projects having set out to capture images of people.
El Ninos have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Nino years. A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Ninos are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.
It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.
"What we're seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age," said Kim Cobb, the study's principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "There were three extremely strong El Nino-La Nina events in the 50-year period, but it wasn't just these events. The entire pattern stuck out."
nature —
The Environmental Protection Agency must desist from a course that could harm both human and planetary health.
This editorial opposes a rule being discussed by the EPA “that would require scientists to supply it with the raw data for studies if the findings are to be taken into consideration in the drafting of environmental regulations. The EPA says that it will not recognize studies unless scientists agree to supply such data.” Raw data can include confidential information that people have not given permission to disclose, e.g., “where they live; their travel habits; their age and gender identity; and the state of their health”
The EPA has denied that the rule would be applied retrospectively, or to existing environmental standards. That might be true up to a point. But what would happen when existing standards needed to be reviewed — as most periodically are? Would the rule be applied because the reviewed version would be a future standard? And, if so, would any science — new or old — become inadmissible unless the underlying data and models were supplied? The EPA has yet to clarify what would happen in such a scenario, but last week’s revelations had the result of once again uniting the United States’ scientific, medical and health communities, and culminated in a crescendo of opposition.
Here’s a practical explanation from a PhD environmental engineer who is Research Director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
...disaster research needs a culture shift. As in other branches of study involving human participants, ethical concerns should have the same primacy as research questions … Researchers working in disaster zones, with people whose culture might be different from their own, need to know how to interact with survivors as well as local officials and scholars, without adding to those people’s problems.
There is no universal definition of ethical behaviour, and only a handful of countries have ethically informed guidelines for post-disaster research. [...]
The needs of local people should be central7. Too often, research is driven by media coverage and politics. Disasters in heavily populated areas receive the most attention, but the cumulative impacts of smaller events can be just as devastating. For example, after the massive Nepal earthquake in April 2015, the impacts on infrastructure and the quality of shelters were widely studied, and aid donors gave millions of dollars to rebuild parts of Kathmandu. Yet in rural western Nepal, hundreds of villages cope with floods and landslides each year, unnoticed by the outside world.
A researcher code can help to redress the balance.
During the week of Nov. 18, thousands of white abalone hatched in a marine lab will be planted in the ocean near Los Angeles and San Diego. It will be the first time that scientists attempt to introduce captive-bred white abalone into the wild. [...]
California’s abalone population has been decimated by a combination of commercial overfishing, ocean warming and poor kelp growth. White abalone, sought by divers because of its tender meat, was hit especially hard. The declines resulted in a 1997 ban on all recreational and commercial abalone fishing south of San Francisco, and in 2001 white abalone became the first marine invertebrate to be listed as an endangered species.
It’s been almost two decades since Dr. Rogers-Bennett and her team have found a live juvenile white abalone in the wild.
“Captive breeding might be the only way this population can recover,” she said.
Algorithm that allows underwater photos to show true colors
People who want to eat less livestock—but who can’t quite bring themselves to exchange burgers for beans—might take inspiration from two recent academic papers. A study published this week by scientists at Oxford University and the University of Minnesota estimates both the medical and environmental burdens of having an extra serving per day of various food types. The health findings were sobering. Compared with a typical Western adult of the same age who eats an average diet, a person who guzzles an additional 50g of processed red meat (about two rashers of bacon) per day has a 41% higher chance of dying in a given year.
Many species of caterpillars have been reported to respond to sound, but there has been limited formal study of what sounds they hear, how they hear them and how they respond to them. Here, we report on hearing in caterpillars of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Fourth and fifth instar caterpillars respond to sounds by freezing, contracting, and flicking their thorax in a vertical direction. Behavioural responses were evoked by sound frequencies between 50 and 900 Hz, with best sensitivity at 100–200 Hz. The lowest mean threshold was 79 dB SPL (particle velocity 605 μm s−1) at 150 Hz. When presented with a repeated 200 Hz sound tone, caterpillars habituate by no longer responding. A series of ablation experiments confirmed that the primary sensory receptors are a pair of long hairs, called trichoid sensilla, located on the upper prothorax. These sensilla are ∼450 µm long, rest in a socket and are innervated by a single bipolar sensory neuron. Removal of these setae reduced responses significantly compared with controls. Other setae contributed minimally to hearing in response to 200 Hz tones, and tubercles and prothoracic shields played no apparent role in sound reception. We propose that hearing functions to prevent attacks by aerial insect predators and parasitoids, which produce flight sounds in the frequency range to which the caterpillars are sensitive. This research lays the foundation for further investigations on the function and evolution of hearing in caterpillars, and has significance for the conservation of threatened monarch butterfly larvae living near noisy urban environments and roadways.
US air pollution rules could be hugely insufficient in preventing deaths, experts are concluding from a new study of the likely causes of death of 4.5 million veterans.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Jama, the research finds that 99% of deaths from illnesses linked to a certain type of air pollution occur in people who are exposed to lower levels than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently deems acceptable. [...]
They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia.
Three of those conditions were newly identified associations: chronic kidney disease, hypertension and dementia.
Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.
Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.
“We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change – is driving insect declines,” the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important – but often overlooked – bringer of the insect apocalypse.”
A flagship observatory that will map the heavens in spectacular detail and search the skies for asteroids on a collision course with Earth faces serious disruption from a new wave of satellites bound for space, the Guardian has learned.
Astronomers on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a state-of-the-art observatory due to open in Chile next year, have discovered that its views of the night sky will be marred by thousands of highly reflective communications satellites being launched by SpaceX, Amazon and other firms. [...]
They found that in some scenarios, almost every image the telescope takes will be spoiled by at least one bright streak produced by satellites passing overhead.
The scientists modelled the impact of companies launching 50,000 internet satellites into low Earth orbits over the next decade, in line with stated aims. The greatest disruption was to twilight observations, which are crucial for some areas of astronomy, and useful for spotting Earth-bound asteroids coming from the direction of the sun.
SCIENCE MAG —
With its steep slopes and rainy weather, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is no stranger to landslides. In February and April, landslides tore down a slope by the coast, leading to the collapse of a local cycling lane that runs along a major road. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center research scientist Dalia Kirschbaum hopes to lessen the toll of future events by forecasting them—and sounding the alarm through social media. She and her team in Greenbelt, Maryland, launched their forecast model for Rio, called the Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA), in October.
LHASA, which cost the city about $11,000 to install, creates what it calls “nowcasts.” Those are near–real-time forecasts of where landslides are most likely to happen in the next few minutes—based on past rainfall data and other variables, including hill slope angles, local rock and soil types, and whether an area has been deforested, as well as how close geologic structures such as faults are. Felipe Mandarino, a city information coordinator whose Rio-based data organization is helping customize LHASA for the city’s specific needs, hopes that with the model’s launch, landslides will become less and less of a surprise.
For the past 3 years, [Niels Hovius, a geomorphologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences] and his colleagues have scrambled and rappelled across the park, installing dozens of instruments in what will end up being Taiwan's most comprehensive landscape dynamics observatory. One goal is to monitor landslides and understand their triggers. A bigger aim is to investigate their hidden impact on the climate: As massive chemical reactors, landslides draw carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the sky and sometimes belch it out, too. Understanding their role as both carbon source and sink could help researchers better model the carbon cycle that ultimately controls our planet's climate and habitability.
Australia is on fire like never before—and this year’s “bushfire” season, which typically peaks in January and February, has barely begun. Driven in part by a severe drought, fires have burned 1.65 million hectares in the state of New South Wales, more than the state’s total in the previous 3 years combined. Six people have died and more than 500 homes have been destroyed. As Science went to press, some 70 uncontrolled fires were burning in adjacent Queensland, and South Australia was bracing for potentially “catastrophic” burns.
David Bowman, a fire ecologist and geographer and director of the Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, spoke with Science about the crisis. The flames have charred even moist ecosystems once thought safe, he says. And the fires have become “white-hot politically,” with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal government drawing criticism for refusing to acknowledge any link to climate change.
Companies and academic groups have begun to use the genome editor CRISPR to try to correct various diseases, but none has so far published, or even announced, evidence that patients have been helped—until this week. In an update for investors today, CRISPR Therapeutics of Zug, Switzerland, reported that one patient with sickle cell anemia and another with beta thalassemia appear to have benefited from the same CRISPR-based intervention for up to 9 months, STAT reports. [...]
When the edited cells were put back in each patient’s body through a stem cell transplant—which required a toxic chemotherapy to kill their own stem cells—both people produced high levels of fetal hemoglobin and no longer needed transfusions.
Dr. Romoser, who specializes in arbovirology and general/medical entomology, has spent several years studying photographs from the red planet that are available on the Internet. He found numerous examples of insect-like forms, structured similarly to bees, as well as reptile-like forms, both as fossils and living creatures. He presented his findings Tuesday, Nov. 19, at the national meeting of the Entomological Society of America in St. Louis, Missouri.
"There has been and still is life on Mars," Romoser said, noting that the images appear to show both fossilized and living creatures. "There is apparent diversity among the Martian insect-like fauna which display many features similar to Terran insects that are interpreted as advanced groups—for example, the presence of wings, wing flexion, agile gliding/flight, and variously structured leg elements."
Living beings, especially microorganisms, have a surprising ability to adapt to the most extreme environments on our planet, but there are still places where they cannot live. European researchers have confirmed the absence of microbial life in hot, saline, hyperacid ponds in the Dallol geothermal field in Ethiopia.
The infernal landscape of Dallol, located in the Ethiopian depression of Danakil, extends over a volcanic crater full of salt, where toxic gases emanate and water boils in the midst of intense hydrothermal activity. It is one of the most torrid environments on Earth. There, daily temperatures in winter can exceed 45° C and there are abundant hypersaline and hyperacid pools, with pH values that are even negative. [...]
...this work "helps to circumscribe the limits of habitability and demands caution when interpreting morphological bio-signatures on Earth and beyond," that is, one should not rely on the apparently cellular or 'biological' aspect of a structure, because it could have an abiotic origin.
"In addition, our study presents evidence that there are places on the Earth's surface, such as the Dallol pools, which are sterile even though they contain liquid water," stresses Lopez Garcia. This means that the presence of liquid water on a planet, which is often used as a habitability criterion, does not directly imply that it has life.
how to sci-comm about 90 MPH Ant jaws
Nine months ago, in my research laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, in Raleigh, I filmed myself being bitten by an ant. It wasn’t a bite from an ordinary, everyday ant. It was my main study organism, a trap-jaw ant of the genus Odontomachus, with jaws that snap shut faster than almost any other recorded animal movement. It’s so fast that visualizing it requires filming at a minimum of 60,000 frames per second. When I show high-speed videos of these ants, and talk about them, inevitably I’m met with the question: “Would it hurt if they snapped against you?” That’s a question that was answered almost immediately for me when I started working with them eight years ago: no. They’d snap their tiny jaws at my hands and bounce off, nearly unnoticed, while I scavenged through excavated nest soil in the field or cleaned their nest boxes in the lab.
But that question inspired me to expand my approach to communicating science. Until then, I had focused on imparting the ends of my scientific pursuits — the research results — but had overlooked opportunities to get across the fundamental, and often more exciting, aspects of my research: the initial experiences and observations. I realized that I had more research stories to tell, beyond just the final results. So, I switched on my high-speed camera and stuck my finger in front of a trap-jaw ant.
