The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
Gizmodo
As Soon as 2025, Climate Change Could Cause More Birth Defects in the US
Looks like climate change may be breaking hearts in the near future. Literally.
A new study out in the Journal of the American Heart Association Wednesday reveals the ways more intense heat and longer heat events as a result of our warming world will impact pregnant mothers and their unborn babies. In short: The U.S. will see more newborns with congenital heart defects by 2025, especially in the South, Northeast, and Midwest.
The preliminary paper pulled data from the National Birth Defects Prevention Study, the largest of its kind, which looked at about 482,000 births a year between 1997 through 2007 from California to Arkansas. The authors then coupled this data with climate models to project how the number of congenital heart defects would change in a warmer world.
Chinese Scientists Launch Weather Rocket From Semi-Submersible Vehicle for Typhoon Measurements
In an apparent first, Chinese scientists have launched a weather-observing rocket from an uncrewed semi-submersible vehicle (USSV). I guess anything can be a “first” if no one has done it before and it’s specific enough.
Researchers at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Scientists developed the vehicle specifically for the purpose of making atmospheric measurements, including launching rockets. But there’s a reason behind the launch: to study the interaction between the air and the sea and the weather it produces, like fog and powerful tropical cyclones/
Though important, these measurements can be difficult or limiting due to the types of equipment available: buoys, ships, or aircraft. China has relatively few islands or platforms to perform these measurements from in the expanse of ocean bordering the country, according to the paper published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
How Scientists Used a 1906 Photo to Find the Center of San Francisco's Most Infamous Earthquake
Researchers used a grainy photograph of a toppled train combined with an eyewitness account to analyze the deadly earthquake that struck San Francisco over 110 years ago.
In 1906, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck San Francisco, destroying much of the city and killing as many as 3,000 people, making it one of the deadliest earthquakes in history. But it also gave birth to modern American earthquake science. Now, researchers are trying to understand the quake using cutting-edge techniques—and some old documents.
“It’s important to understand how these larger quakes occurred so we can build safer buildings,” explained Swetha Veeraraghavan, postdoctoral research associate in structural computational science at Idaho National Laboratory. “I think these types of eyewitness accounts really help with this. That’s why I found the problem really cool.”
Astronomers Accidentally Discover a Hidden Galaxy Right Next Door
While inspecting a known globular cluster, a team of astronomers began to notice that some of its stars didn’t seem to belong. Investigating further, they realized the anomalous stars were part of a nearby galaxy—one previously unknown to us.
Science works in mysterious ways.
One moment you’re investigating a globular cluster, and the next you’re unexpectedly writing a research paper about something else entirely, namely the discovery of previously unknown dwarf spheroidal galaxy. But that’s how it goes sometimes, and the authors of the new study, published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, couldn’t be happier.
“It was definitely a surprise!” exclaimed Luigi Bedin, an astronomer at INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova in Italy and the lead author of the new study. “We knew it was something atypical.”
Science
Bug bombs don’t get rid of bugs, study suggests
In the United States alone, we spend more than $2.5 billion a year trying to rid our homes of cockroaches and other pests—but a new study says some of us may be doing it all wrong. The peer-reviewed study tested the effectiveness of baits, gels laden with insecticide, and bug bombs, devices that “fog” a room with an insect-killing aerosol. For at least one pest, the common German cockroach (Blattella germanica), bombs don’t work, says the study, but baits do.
Scientists set off four kinds of bombs and placed two kinds of baits in 30 infested homes in Raleigh. Twenty homes got one of the four bombs and 10 got one of the two baits. The scientists counted the number of cockroaches before treatment and after, once at 2 weeks and once 1 month later. In every home that had been bombed, cockroach numbers stayed the same, the researchers report this week in BMC Public Health. With one bait, populations dropped by more than half after 2 weeks; with the other, they plummeted by more than 75%. Numbers went down even more after the full month.
Alligators gobble rocks to stay underwater longer
Alligators dine on many strange delicacies: sharks, kumquats, and stones. Scientists have long thought that, like birds, gators swallow stones to help them digest their tough-to-process meals, or accidentally ingest them in the chaos of consuming a live, thrashing dinner. But a new study supports another use for a belly full of rocks—as a way to boost bottom time on dives.
Crocodylians—which include alligators, crocodiles, and caimans—spend most of their time in the water, stalking prey and escaping from predators. Anything they can do to maximize their time below the surface is an advantage, and some experts wondered whether rocks might also serve this purpose.
To find out, researchers brought seven young American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) into their lab and measured how long they stayed submerged before and after they voluntarily swallowed a set of small stones. Each alligator took 42 dives—21 before and 21 after their flinty meal. The stones—which were only about 2.5% of the alligators’ body weight—seemed to make a significant difference, increasing dive time by an average of 88% and up to 35 minutes, the team reported last month in Integrative Organismal Biology.
Nature
Forget everything you know about 3D printing — the ‘replicator’ is here
They nicknamed it ‘the replicator’ — in homage to the machines in the Star Trek saga that can materialize virtually any inanimate object.
Researchers have unveiled a 3D printer that creates an entire object at once, rather than building it layer by layer as typical additive-manufacturing devices do — bringing science-fiction a step closer to reality.
“This is an exciting advancement to rapidly prototype fairly small and transparent parts,” says Joseph DeSimone, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ancient-human species mingled in Siberia’s hottest property for 300,000 years
Neanderthals and Denisovans might have lived side by side for tens of thousands of years, scientists report in two papers in Nature.
The long-awaited studies are based on the analysis of bones, artefacts and sediments from Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, which is dotted with ancient-human remains. They provide the first detailed history of the site’s 300,000-year occupation by different groups of ancient humans.
“We can now tell the whole story of the entire cave, not just bits and pieces,” says Zenobia Jacobs, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia, who co-led one of the studies.
Phys.org
Novel hypothesis goes underground to predict future of Greenland ice sheet
The Greenland ice sheet melted a little more easily in the past than it does today because of geological changes, and most of Greenland's ice can be saved from melting if warming is controlled, says a team of Penn State researchers.
"There is geologic data that suggests the ice sheet was more sensitive to warming and temperature variations in the past million years, and not so much in the more recent past," said David Pollard, research professor in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State.
Too much warming will cause Greenland to lose most or all of its ice over the coming centuries, but most research indicates that the threshold warmth for complete ice loss has not been reached yet.
Scientists 'hijack' open-access quantum computer to tease out quantum secrets
The rules of quantum mechanics describe how atoms and molecules act very differently from the world around us. Scientists have made progress toward teasing out these rules—essential for finding ways to make new molecules and better technology—but some are so complex that they evade experimental verification.
With the advent of open-access quantum computers, scientists at the University of Chicago saw an opportunity to do a very unusual experiment to test some of these quantum principles. Their study, which appeared Jan. 31 in Nature Communications Physics, essentially hijacks a quantum computer to discover fundamental truths about the quantum behavior of electrons in molecules.
"Quantum computing is a really exciting realm to explore fundamental questions. It allows us to observe aspects of quantum theory that are absolutely untouchable with classical computers," said Prof. David Mazziotti, professor of chemistry and author on the paper.
Mobile-phone microscope detects the 'silent killer' of honey bees
Bees are among the most important species responsible for pollinating about one-third of the world's food supply, with their contribution in the United States alone valued at $15-20 billion each year. Rapid declines in honey bee colonies globally, and in the United States specifically, have put increased strain on agricultural pollination and the future of food security. Parasites form one of the factors affecting bee population declines, with Nosema ceranea and Nosema apis being some of the most common. Nosema apis infection can have the symptoms of dysentery and defecation of honey bees at the entrance of the hive, but Nosema ceranae infection does not show any physical symptoms. This 'silent killer' of honey bees infects worker bees, drones and queen bees, and may even result in colony collapse.
Currently, the only approach to diagnose this disease accurately is through the detection of parasite spores using a light microscope. However, this traditional testing is performed in laboratory settings and requires expert operation. Therefore, a beekeeper must send local samples to a remote laboratory for accurate diagnosis, which is time-consuming and expensive.
Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Department of Biology at Barnard College, have developed a mobile-phone microscope that enables rapid and automated detection of Nosema spores in honey bees in field settings. This mobile and cost-effective platform, weighing only 0.8 pounds, is composed of a smartphone based fluorescence microscope, a custom-developed smartphone application and an easy to perform sample preparation protocol that enables fluorescence tagging of bee parasite spores even in the field.
Science Daily
Huge cavity in Antarctic glacier signals rapid decay
A gigantic cavity -- two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall -- growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier. The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.
Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites' bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.
"We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it," said Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Rignot is a co-author of the new study, which was published in Science Advances. "Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail," he said.
Climate change tipping point could be coming sooner than we think
Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018, rising by an estimated 3.4 percent in the U.S. alone. This trend is making scientists, government officials, and industry leaders more anxious than ever about the future of our planet. As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said at the opening of the 24th annual U.N. climate conference on December 3, "We are in deep trouble with climate change."
A Columbia Engineering study, published today in Nature, confirms the urgency to tackle climate change. While it's known that extreme weather events can affect the year-to-year variability in carbon uptake, and some researchers have suggested that there may be longer-term effects, this new study is the first to actually quantify the effects through the 21st century and demonstrates that wetter-than-normal years do not compensate for losses in carbon uptake during dryer-than-normal years, caused by events such as droughts or heatwaves. […]
"It is unclear, however, whether the land can continue to uptake anthropogenic emissions at the current rates," says Pierre Gentine, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering and affiliated with the Earth Institute, who led the study. "Should the land reach a maximum carbon uptake rate, global warming could accelerate, with important consequences for people and the environment. This means that we all really need to act now to avoid greater consequences of climate change."
Mars rover Curiosity makes first gravity-measuring traverse on the Red Planet
A clever use of non-science engineering data from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has let a team of researchers, including an Arizona State University graduate student, measure the density of rock layers in 96-mile-wide Gale Crater.
The findings, to be published February 1, 2019, in the journal Science, show that the layers are more porous than scientists had suspected. The discovery also gives scientists a novel technique to use in the future as the rover continues its trek across the crater and up Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain in its center.
"What we were able to do is measure the bulk density of the material in Gale Crater," says Travis Gabriel, a graduate student in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. He worked on computing what the grain density should be for the rocks and ancient lakebed sediments the rover has been driving over.
The Guardian
Star count of Orion begins in attempt to uncover light pollution
Thousands of people across England will be gazing hopefully up at the starsthis weekend – not in an attempt to forecast the next twist of Brexit, but to map out areas of light pollution and genuine darkness.
Clear skies are expected over much of the country for the start of the Star Count, which kicks off on Saturday and will run for three weeks, to 23 February. Participants are being asked to concentrate on the constellation of Orion, which graces the UK’s skies in winter and is easily identifiable.
They will record how many stars they can see within the constellation using only the naked eye. Collating the data they provide will allow the organisers, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the British Astronomical Association, to map out which areas are worst affected by light pollution.
European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth's climate
European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found.
Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.
This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.
Early pint: evidence of 'first British beer' found in Cambridgeshire
Evidence of the first beer believed to have been brewed in the UK, dating back more than 2,000 years, has been uncovered by road workers.
Signs of the iron age brew from about 400BC were identified in fragments of charred residues from the beer-making process found during the £1.5bn upgrade of the A14 in Cambridgeshire. […]
Lara González Carretero, an archaeobotanist with Mola, said the beer residues were found alongside those of bread and porridge.
Wired
China’s Moon Lander Wakes Up From Its Long, Ultra-Cold Night
We already know it’s chilly on the moon. A lunar night lasts 14 Earth days, and its temperatures can dip into a cold so punishing it makes the polar vortex look like a hot tub. But yesterday, China’s space agency announced that the frigidity of the lunar night is even more intense than we’d thought: The country’s Chang’e 4 spacecraft recorded an icy low of –310 degrees Fahrenheit (–190 degrees Celsius).
Consisting of a stationary lander and a six-wheeled rover named Yutu-2, Chang’e 4 landed on the far side of the moonearlier this month—a first for any spacecraft. During its first lunar night, Chang’e 4 went into hibernation, relying on internal heat sources to survive.
Its record-breaking temperature data hints at some of the differences yet to be discovered between the far and near sides of the moon. "According to the measurements of Chang'e 4, the temperature of the shallow layer of the lunar soil on the far side of the moon is lower than the data obtained by the US Apollo mission on the near side of the moon," Zhang He, executive director of the Chang'e 4 probe project, told Xinhua. “That's probably due to the difference in lunar soil composition between the two sides of the moon. We still need more careful analysis.”
Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of Jpegs
Every morning, Lena Forsen wakes up beneath a brass-trimmed wooden mantel clock dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet.”
It was presented
to her more than two decades ago by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, in recognition of the pivotal—and altogether unexpected—role she played in shaping the digital world as we know it.
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
Lena’s path to iconhood began in the pages of Playboy. In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa.
NPR
Exploring The Mysterious Origins Of Mars' 3-Mile-High Sand Pile
Scientists have evidence that a mountain 3 miles tall, in the middle of a crater on Mars, may be made largely from dust and sand.
To get the data for that surprising conclusion, the researchers MacGyvered a navigation instrument on the NASA rover Curiosity, and turned it into a scientific instrument.
The idea for repurposing the Rover Inertial Measurement Unit came from Kevin Lewis. "It kind of frustrated me that we didn't have a surface gravimeter on Mars," says Lewis, a member of the Curiosity science team, and an assistant professor in earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
Massive Starfish Die-Off Is Tied To Global Warming
The skin lesions are the first sign that something is wrong. Then limbs fall off and the body disintegrates, collapsing in on itself as it liquefies. In the end, what was once a sea star is only a puddle on the ocean floor.
Since 2013, sea star wasting disease has killed so many starfish along the Pacific Coast that scientists say it's the largest disease epidemic ever observed in wild marine animals. Where there used to be dozens of stars, scuba divers now report seeing none.
And while the epidemic itself is a naturally occurring (if particularly devastating) phenomenon, newly published research suggests that climate change may have exacerbated the disease's deadliness.
How California's Worst Oil Spill Turned Beaches Black and the Nation Green
On January 28, 1969, an oil well off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., experienced a blowout. The result was an oil spill that at the time ranked as the largest in U.S. waters.
The disaster, which made headlines across the nation, helped create the modern environmental movement. It also led to restrictions on offshore drilling — restrictions the Trump Administration is trying to loosen.
The events that led to the spill began one morning on Platform A, a rig located about six miles from the coast and operated at the time by Union Oil. Workers had already drilled four wells from the platform and were drilling a fifth when they ran into a problem.
Stuff
A dinosaur relative discovered in Antarctica sheds light on extinction
The Antarctica of 250 million years ago was a far cry from today's icy landscape. At the time, the continent boasted a warm environment, forests, rivers, and plenty of fauna. One of those ancient creatures, scientists just learned, was a carnivorous reptile now known as the "Antarctic king."
Roughly the size of an iguana, Antarctanax shackletoni –Antarctanax being Greek for "Antarctic king" – was an archosaur, an early relative of crocodiles and the dinosaurs.
Finding a new dinosaur relative is exciting on its own, but the discovery of the "Antarctic king" is also significant because it helps scientists understand how archosaurs and their crocodile descendants repopulated the world after a mass die-off.
Ars Technica
Black hole jets may reveal details of event horizon
The problem with black holes is that the most interesting bits are hidden. The gravity of a black hole is such that everything—including light—is trapped if it gets closer than a certain distance. As a result, everything we observe about black holes comes from their effect on the world beyond that distance. Any closer and you pass the event horizon—the distance at which nothing escapes the black hole.
Jets are a common feature of black holes. They're narrow streams of high-energy particles that stream away from outside the event horizon. Their energy is such that the jets glow brightly, revealing themselves to us.
These jets may be able to tell us something about the black holes themselves, but that requires two things. One is observations that require a globe-spanning telescope. The second, more difficult requirement is that we need models that help us understand the observations, as we haven't built detailed models of the physics near the event horizon yet.
Scientists solve the mystery of Rembrandt’s “impasto” paint recipe
The 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn is justly considered one of the greatest artists of all time. He's particularly praised for his masterful depiction of light and shadow in his oil paintings, an almost three-dimensional effect achieved with his signature "impasto" technique. The recipes he used to mix his paints were believed to be lost to history. But now a team of Dutch and French scientists has used high-energy X-rays to unlock Rembrandt's secret recipe, according to a new paper in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Impasto (translated as "dough" or "mixture") involves applying paint to the canvas in very thick layers. It's usually done with oil paint because of the thick consistency and slow drying time, although it's possible to add acrylic gels as a thickening agent to get a similar effect with acrylics. Rembrandt used it to represent folds in clothing or jewels, among other objects, in his paintings. As David Bressan notes at Forbes, "The layer causes light to reflect in certain ways, giving the painting interesting dark and light contrasts and a three-dimensional effect."
Like most artists of his era, Rembrandt mixed his own paints, experimenting with different recipes to get different desired effects. Common materials then included lead white pigment (produced via the corrosion of metallic lead) and organic substances like linseed oil. But nobody knew the precise recipe the master used to create the impasto effect.
Editor’s note to night owls and news hounds: I am out this evening, so it will be a delay before I can respond to comments. Thanks for dropping by and stay warm.