The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
Science Daily
Climate of North American cities will shift hundreds of miles in one generation
In one generation, the climate experienced in many North American cities is projected to change to that of locations hundreds of miles away -- or to a new climate unlike any found in North America today. A new study and interactive web application aim to help the public understand how climate change will impact the lives of people who live in urban areas of the United States and Canada. These new climate analyses match the expected future climate in each city with the current climate of another location, providing a relatable picture of what is likely in store.
"Within the lifetime of children living today, the climate of many regions is projected to change from the familiar to conditions unlike those experienced in the same place by their parents, grandparents, or perhaps any generation in millennia," said study author Matt Fitzpatrick of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "Many cities could experience climates with no modern equivalent in North America."
Possibility of recent underground volcanism on Mars
A study published last year in the journal Science suggested liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap.
The new research does not take sides as to whether the liquid water exists. Instead, the authors suggest recent magmatic activity -- the formation of a magma chamber within the past few hundred thousand years -- must have occurred underneath the surface of Mars for there to be enough heat to produce liquid water underneath the kilometer-and-a-half thick ice cap. On the flip side, the study's authors argue that if there was not recent magmatic activity underneath the surface of Mars, then there is not likely liquid water underneath the ice cap.
"Different people may go different ways with this, and we're really interested to see how the community reacts to it," said Michael Sori, an associate staff scientist in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and a co-lead author of the new paper.
Ecosystem changes following loss of great white sharks
A new study has documented unexpected consequences following the decline of great white sharks from an area off South Africa. The study found that the disappearance of great whites has led to the emergence of sevengill sharks, a top predator from a different habitat. A living fossil, sevengill sharks closely resemble relatives from the Jurassic period, unique for having seven gills instead of the typical five in most other sharks.
These findings are part of a long-term collaborative study between shark researcher Neil Hammerschlag from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and wildlife naturalist Chris Fallows from Apex Shark Expeditions.
The research focused on the waters surrounding Seal Island in False Bay, South Africa, a site well known for its "flying" great white sharks that breach out of the water when attacking Cape fur seals. Since the year 2000, the research team has spent over 8,000 hours observing great whites from boats, during which they recorded 6,333 shark sightings, and 8,076 attacks on seals. These data revealed that for more than a decade, great white numbers were relatively stable, but in 2015 sightings began to drop off steeply.
Ars Technica
Aluminum may be key to making exosolar systems with water worlds
Mini-Neptunes. Super-Earths. There's a huge diversity of exoplanets out there, many of them unlike anything we have in our Solar System. So how does a single physical process—the aggregation of bodies within a disk of gas and dust—produce so many different outcomes?
That's a question tackled by a paper in this week's Nature Astronomy. An international team of researchers has modeled the formation of planets early in the history of exosolar systems. And they find it's possible to radically change the water content of planets based on the amount of a radioactive element present in the material forming the exosolar system. The difference, they suggest, can determine whether a system is filled with ocean worlds or whether it winds up looking more like our own Solar System.
Opportunity did not answer NASA’s final call, and it’s now lost to us
Late Tuesday night, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent their final data uplink to the Opportunity rover on Mars. Over this connection, via the Deep Space Network, the American jazz singer Billie Holiday crooned "I'll Be Seeing You," a song that closes with the lines:
I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you
The scientists waited to hear some response from their long-silent rover, which had been engulfed in a global dust storm last June, likely coating its solar panels in a fatal layer of dust. Since then, the team of scientists and engineers has sent more than 835 commands, hoping the rover will wake up from its long slumber—that perhaps winds on Mars might have blown off some of the dust that covered the panels.
So on Tuesday night, they listened. They reminisced. But in the end, no response came. Opportunity would finally be declared dead on Sol 5352, as in five thousand, three hundred, and fifty-two days on Mars. NASA is expected to make it official at 2pm ET Wednesday, when NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and the chief of the agency's science division, Thomas Zurbuchen, convene a news conference.
Shipwreck reveals ancient market for knock-off consumer goods
Sometime in the late 12th century CE, a merchant ship laden with trade goods sank off the coast of Java. The 100,000 ceramic vessels, 200 tons of iron, and smaller amounts of ivory, resin, and tin ingots offer a narrow window onto a much broader world of global trade and political change. The merchant vessel that sank in the Java Sea was the pointy tip of a very long spear, and a new study sheds some light on the trade networks and manufacturing industry hidden behind its cargo—all thanks to a little help from a cool X-ray gun.
There was a network of trade routes that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean and South China Sea by the late 12th century, linking Song Dynasty China to far-flung ports in Japan and Southeast Asia to the east, Indonesia to the south, and the Middle East and eastern Africa to the west. Merchant ships carried crops, raw materials like metals and resin, and manufactured goods like ceramics along these routes. Today, ceramics are a common sight in shipwrecks in these waters, partly because the material outlasts most other things on the seafloor, and partly because of the sheer volumes that could be packed into the holds of merchant ships from around 800 CE to 1300 CE.
Archaeologists have found Chinese ceramics at sites stretching from Japan to the east coast of Africa.
Nature
Maya bones bring a lost civilization to life
The Autonomous University of the Yucatán, in the Mexican city of Mérida, holds one of the most comprehensive libraries on Earth. But few books line the shelves on the bottom floor of the anthropological sciences building. Instead, boxes are stacked from floor to ceiling in almost every corner of the laboratory, with labels naming Calakmul, Pomuch or Xcambo and other ancient Maya ruins. Inside every box is a set of human bones.
Bodies from some 2,000 burials are stored here, with another 10,000 records of others in a database. The remains of some of the most famous Maya kings have passed through this room at the university. Ancient paupers, warriors, priests, scribes, lords, ladies and artisans — the lab has seen them all.
Science
Here’s how your city’s climate will change by 2080, if you’re in Canada or the United States
Climate change is a hard thing to imagine, especially 60 years into the future. With that in mind, environmental scientists have developed a web-based app that can tell people living in one of 540 cities in Canada or the continental United States how their homes will transform by the year 2080—and which modern-day city it is most likely to resemble.
Using 27 different climate models, researchers looked at 12 different aspects of climate—including maximum and minimum temperatures, precipitation, and how those factors vary with the seasons—for each location under two scenarios: one in which atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) rise from 410 parts per million (ppm) today to about 650 ppm in the year 2100, and another in which CO2 levels rise to about 1370 ppm. Then, they compared projected data points from each city to the climates those locales experience now. […]
If you want to figure out what the climate in your city will be like in the 2080s, the [web] app is available here.
Stonehenge, other ancient rock structures may trace their origins to monuments like this
Stonehenge may be the most famous example, but tens of thousands of other ancient sites featuring massive, curiously arranged rocks dot Europe. A new study suggests these megaliths weren’t created independently but instead can be traced back to a single hunter-gatherer culture that started nearly 7000 years ago in what is today the Brittany region of northwestern France. The findings also indicate societies at the time were better boaters than typically believed, spreading their culture by sea.
“This demonstrates absolutely that Brittany is the origin of the European megalithic phenomenon,” says Michael Parker Pearson, an archaeologist and Stonehenge specialist at University College London.
The origins of the megalith builders have haunted Bettina Schulz Paulsson since she excavated her first megalithic monument in Portugal nearly 20 years ago. Early on, most anthropologists thought megaliths originated in the Near East or the Mediterranean, whereas many modern thinkers back the idea they were invented independently in five or six different regions around Europe. The major hurdle, she says, has been sorting through the mountains of archaeological data to find reliable dates for the 35,000 sites, including carved standing stones, tombs, and temples.
No proof that shooting predators saves livestock
On 5 August, biologists from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife ascended in a helicopter to shoot two members of the Profanity Peak wolf pack, which had been preying on cattle in the state’s northeast corner. After the cull failed to end predation, the state removed four more members of the 11-wolf pack. Some conservationists were outraged, but the logic behind such lethal control seems airtight: Remove livestock-killing wolves, coyotes, bears, and other predators, and you’ll protect farmers and ranchers from future losses.
A new study, however, claims that much of the research underpinning that common sense notion is flawed—and that the science of predator control needs a methodological overhaul. Adrian Treves, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues examined more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, searching for ones that randomized some by removing or deterring predators while leaving others untouched. Not a single experiment in which predators were killed has ever successfully applied this randomized controlled design, they reported 1 September in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “Lethal control methods need to be subjected to the same gold standard of science as anything else,” Treves says. He argues that policymakers should suspend predator management programs that aren’t backed by rigorous evidence.
Vox
Oxytocin, the so-called “hug hormone,” is way more sophisticated than we thought
In a memorable stunt to kick off his 2011 TEDGlobal talk, neuroeconomist Paul Zak stepped onstage wielding a syringe filled with what he nicknamed “the moral molecule.” […]
New research, published February 8 in Nature Communications, underscores how narrow this “hug hormone” theory of oxytocin is. The study maps where in the brain oxytocin receptors reside, and the resulting atlas suggests this hormone is involved in regions in the brain correlated with appetite, experiencing rewards, and anticipation, as well as social relationships.
“This result makes it clearer to me that oxytocin is more of a regulatory hormone [i.e. a hormone that helps the body maintain its homeostasis] that happens to influence social behavior,” Daniel Quintana, a biological psychiatry researcher at the University of Oslo and the lead author of that study, tells me. “It tries to maintain stability in a changing environment.”
The myth of oxytocin as the “hug hormone” isn’t dead.
Phys.org
Undersea gases could superheat the planet
The world's oceans could harbor an unpleasant surprise for global warming, based on new research that shows how naturally occurring carbon gases trapped in reservoirs atop the seafloor escaped to superheat the planet in prehistory.
Scientists say events that began on the ocean bottom thousands of years ago so disrupted the Earth's atmosphere that it melted away the ice age. Those new findings challenge a long-standing paradigm that ocean water alone regulated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during glacial cycles. Instead, the study shows geologic processes can dramatically upset the carbon cycle and cause global change.
For today's world, the findings could portend an ominous development. The undersea carbon reservoirs released greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as oceans warmed, the study shows, and today the ocean is heating up again due to manmade global warming.
In the squirrel world, prime real estate is determined by previous owner, study reveals
A young squirrel lucky enough to take over territory from an adult male squirrel is like a teenager falling into a big inheritance, according to a new University of Guelph study.
Researchers found male squirrels store more food than females, and if a young squirrel leaving the nest nabs a storage spot previously owned by a male squirrel, they will increase their lifetime pup production by 50 per cent.
"It's like buying a home and finding a big pile of money buried in the walls," said integrative biology professor Andrew McAdam, who worked on the study with lead author David Fisher, a former U of G post doc. "The previous owner of where you live can significantly impact how well off you are, at least in the squirrel world."
Does having a gun at home really make you safer?
Keeping a gun in your home is supposed to keep you safe. Matthew Miller's research suggests that the opposite is true.
"One-third of all households have guns, and I just don't think people are aware of the risks that they're assuming for themselves, or imposing on everyone else who lives in that home," says Miller, a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern. "I don't think people have the information. I don't think that they have internalized the risks."
As one of the nation's leading researchers of gun violence, Miller takes on the responsibility for piecing together that information. His work, which has revealed that people in households with guns face increased risk of injury, death, and suicide, is painstaking. He has co-authored recent studies that have found that Americans are generally unaware that access to guns increases the risk of suicide; and, further, that parents or caretakers tend to not recognize the need to make their guns inaccessible to children who are at risk of doing harm to themselves.
Gizmodo
Rare Spider Fossil Preserves 100-Million-Year-Old Glowing Eyes
A new spider fossil discovery included a surprising find: remnants of reflective eye tissue.
Though common today, spiders don’t appear much in the fossil record because their soft bodies don’t preserve well, according to the paper published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. This is the first time one family of spiders has been spotted outside of amber, and the first time that the reflective eye tissue of a spider has been found in a fossil.
“It’s opening up a whole new world about how these things lived and how they would have caught their prey,” Paul Selden, one of the paper’s authors and director of the Paleontological Institute at the University of Kansas, told Gizmodo.
Proportion of Americans Alarmed About Climate Change Has Doubled in Just Five Years
After a few years of being buffeted by hurricanes, wildfires, record heat, torrential rain, and basically every other type of weather calamity, Americans are coming around to climate change being a real concern.
New polling results released by Yale and George Mason universities show that nearly 60 percent of Americans are alarmed or concerned about climate change, representing a new high water mark over the past six years of regular polling. At the same time, the number of climate deniers has plummeted as the impacts of climate change become harder to ignore.
The results are based on a suite of polling conducted in December 2018, the end of yet another terrible year of wildfires and hurricanes and the fourth hottest year ever recorded for the globe. Researchers at those universities have spent years developing what they call the Six Americas. By polling people on their “climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors,” they’re able to plunk them into one of six broad buckets that range from alarmed to dismissive.
2-Billion-Year-Old Squiggles Could Be the Earliest Evidence of a Mobile Life Form
The reported discovery of 2.1-billion-year-old fossilized track marks etched in sedimentary rock is pushing back the earliest evidence of self-propelled movement by an organism on Earth by a whopping 1.5 billion years.
New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests ancient life on Earth had acquired the capacity for self-propelled locomotion at least 2.1 billion years ago, and not 570 million years ago as previous research suggested. The evidence for this apparent locomotion, also known as motility, was presented in the form of tiny fossilized wriggle marks embedded within ancient sedimentary rocks.
The Long Now
The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures.
The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
I was particularly interested in this monument because this axial precession is also the slowest cycle that we track in Long Now’s 10,000 Year Clock. Strangely, little to no documentation of this installation seemed to be available, except for a few vacation pictures on Flickr. So the last time I was in Las Vegas, I made a special trip out to Hoover Dam to see if I could learn more about this obscure 26,000-year monument.
San Diego Zoo
Rare Black Leopards Appear on San Diego Zoo Global Remote Cameras
San Diego Zoo Global researchers have confirmed the presence of rare black leopards living in Laikipia County, Kenya. Sometimes called black panthers, the melanistic leopards were filmed in Lorok, Laikipia County, Kenya on remote cameras that were set up as part of a large-scale study aimed at understanding the population dynamics of leopards in Mpala and Loisaba Conservancies.
“Regionally we’ve heard reports of black leopards living here in Kenya, but high-quality footage or imagery to support these observations has always been missing,” said Nicholas Pilfold, Ph.D., San Diego Zoo Global scientist. “That’s what we’ve provided here with our cameras, and now we’re able to confirm what has been long suspected about black leopards living in Laikipia County.”
The Guardian
The best thing you can do for your health: sleep well
‘A consistent seven to nine-hour sleep each night is the most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health’
Do you think you got enough sleep this past week? Can you remember the last time you woke up without an alarm clock, feeling refreshed, not needing caffeine? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” you are not alone. Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep. […]
Insufficient sleep is now one of the most significant lifestyle factors influencing whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. During sleep, a remarkable sewage system in the brain, called the glymphatic system, kicks into high gear. As you enter deep sleep, this sanitisation system cleanses the brain of a sticky, toxic protein linked to Alzheimer’s, known as beta amyloid. Without sufficient sleep, you fail to get that power cleanse. With each passing night of insufficient sleep, that Alzheimer’s disease risk escalates, like compounding interest on a loan.
Female human body blocks weak sperm, scientists find
For millions of sperm it is the end of the road. Scientists have found evidence that the female reproductive tract is shaped in such a way that stops poor swimmers from reaching their goal.
Researchers used small-scale models and computer simulations to show that pinch points that behave like gates along the sperm’s arduous path from cervix to egg allow only the fastest ones through.
Tests with sperm from men and bulls revealed that the strongest swimmers were most likely to make it through the tight spots, known as “strictures”, while weaker ones were caught in oncoming currents that propelled them backwards when they got too close.
“The overall effect of these strictures is to prevent slow sperm from making it through and to select for sperm with highest motility,” said Alireza Abbaspourrad, a chemist and lead author on the study at Cornell University in New York.