Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, Besame, and annetteboardman. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke, Man Oh Man, and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time (or sometimes slightly later).
I’m Chitown Kev and welcome to this Saturday Science Edition of the Overnight News Digest.
Popular Science: All the ways daylight saving time screws with you by Sara Chodosh
Only a narrow band of people are really that affected by daylight saving. But gosh darn it, we will complain about it loudly every year.
The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn’t understand why more people weren’t appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order to fit their own daily routines.
DST eventually gained widespread appeal (if you can really call it that) in 1916, when it was a useful way to conserve wartime coal—having more daylight hours in the evening meant people used less energy heating their houses. In the next couple of years, many other countries followed suit.
Phys.org: Study confirms horseshoe crabs are really relatives of spiders, scorpions by Kelly April Tyrell
Blue-blooded and armored with 10 spindly legs, horseshoe crabs have perhaps always seemed a bit out of place.
First thought to be closely related to crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans, in 1881 evolutionary biologist E. Ray Lankester placed them solidly in a group more similar to spiders and scorpions. Horseshoe crabs have since been thought to be ancestors of the arachnids, but molecular sequence data have always been sparse enough to cast doubt.
University of Wisconsin-Madison evolutionary biologists Jesús Ballesteros and Prashant Sharma hope, then, that their recent study published in the journal Systematic Biology helps firmly plant ancient horseshoe crabs within the arachnid family tree.
By analyzing troves of genetic data and considering a vast number of possible ways to examine it, the scientists now have a high degree of confidence that horseshoe crabs do indeed belong within the arachnids.
"By showing that horseshoe crabs are part of the arachnid radiation, instead of a lineage closely related to but independent of arachnids, all previous hypotheses on the evolution of arachnids need to be revised," says Ballesteros, a postdoctoral researcher in Sharma's lab. "It's a major shift in our understanding of arthropod evolution."
Science: Humans are wiping out chimpanzee cultures by Gretchen Vogel
When chimpanzees encounter humans, it’s usually bad news for the chimps. Logging, hunting, and epidemics have helped push chimpanzee populations to the brink across their range in West and Central Africa. Now, a new study suggests human activity may also rob chimp populations of their cultures.
Chimpanzees perform distinct behaviors, such as using tools to crack nuts or collect termites, that are passed on from one generation to the next, like human culture. These behaviors include adaptations that can be crucial for the animals’ survival—but chimp groups living near people have fewer such behaviors, according to the study. The authors say “chimpanzee cultural heritage sites” may be needed to protect key behaviors. “A lot of conservation effort is focused on species diversity and genetic diversity, but we need to look at cultural diversity as well,” says Hjalmar Kühl, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped lead the study.
Nearly 2 decades ago, primatologist Carel van Schaik, an emeritus professor at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, proposed that human impacts like habitat destruction and poaching could wipe out key behaviors in great apes. (Van Schaik studied cultural behaviors in orangutans.) For example, a population may lose important traditions when a key resource it involved—like kola nuts—becomes scarce, or when fewer experienced group members are alive to pass on the behavior. But it has been hard to collect enough data to test the hypothesis.
Nature: Second patient free of HIV after stem-cell therapy by Matthew Warren
A person with HIV seems to be free of the virus after receiving a stem-cell transplant that replaced their white blood cells with HIV-resistant versions. The patient is only the second person ever reported to have been cleared of the virus using this method. But researchers warn that it is too early to say that they have been cured.
The patient — whose identity hasn’t been disclosed — was able to stop taking antiretroviral drugs, with no sign of the virus returning 18 months later. The stem-cell technique was first used a decade ago for Timothy Ray Brown, known as the ‘Berlin patient’, who is still free of the virus.
So far, the latest patient to receive the treatment is showing a response similar to Brown’s, says Andrew Freedman, a clinical infectious-disease physician at Cardiff University in the UK who was not involved in the study. “There’s good reason to hope that it will have the same result,” he says.
Like Brown, the latest patient also had a form of blood cancer that wasn’t responding to chemotherapy. They required a bone-marrow transplant, in which their blood cells would be destroyed and replenished with stem cells transplanted from a healthy donor.
ScienceNews: How droplets of oil or water can glow vibrant colors by Maria Temming
Oil and water may not mix, but the two have now revealed a new example of structural color, in which an object’s hue arises from its shape.
Studying droplets made of two layers of clear oil, researchers discovered that, depending on a viewer’s perspective, the tiny blobs glowed a variety of vibrant colors under white light. In a petri dish, same-sized droplets changed color as the dish was rotated (see video below). The same phenomenon, described in the Feb. 28 Nature, occurred with tiny water droplets that collected on the underside of a petri dish’s lid.
Materials chemist Lauren Zarzar of Penn State and colleagues found that the iridescent hues appear when light strikes a bowl-shaped boundary between two substances — in this case, the water-air barrier on the underside of the water droplets hanging off a flat surface, or a basin-shaped divide between the two layers of oil. Light that enters near a droplet’s edge bounces along this this concave surface multiple times before being reflected and exiting near the opposite edge.
LiveScience: Antarctica's Bizarre Green Icebergs Are More Than a Quirk of the Southern Ocean by Stephanie Pappas
Just in time for Saint Patrick's Day, scientists think they might know why some Antarctic icebergs are green.
The reason could be iron oxide dust ground down by glaciers on the Antarctic mainland. If the theory holds, it means that the green 'bergs are more than just a quirk of the Southern Ocean. In fact, they might be crucial to the movement of ocean nutrients.
"It's like taking a package to the post office," study leader Stephen Warren, a glaciologist at the University of Washington, said in a statement. "The iceberg can deliver this iron out into the ocean far away, and then melt and deliver it to the phytoplankton that can use it as a nutrient."
The mystery of the green icebergs
Warren has been on the case of the green icebergs for more than 30 years. He first took samples from one of these green hunks of ice in 1988, near the Amery Ice Shelf of East Antarctica.
"When we climbed up on that iceberg, the most amazing thing was actually not the color but rather the clarity," Warren said. "This ice had no bubbles. It was obvious that it was not ordinary glacier ice."
Undark: For Health and Habitat: Rescuing the Great Lakes by Peter Essick
RESTORATION OF the Great Lakes began unofficially in 1969, after the notoriously polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland, near where it empties into Lake Erie. Nearly two decades later, in 1987, the U.S. and Canada signed an agreement creating the Great Lakes Areas of Concern program, which identified 43 Great Lakes watersheds that were most in need of environmental restoration. It also created a process whereby an area can be delisted once its environmental quality has improved.
In 2010, the Obama administration launched the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), which, among other things, provides funds for the Areas of Concern program so that all of the areas left in the U.S. can eventually be delisted. Last year, President Trump called for massive cuts to the GLRI, but Congress fully funded it at $300 million, in a bipartisan effort.
This bipartisan support stems from the economic benefits of environmental restoration. A study by a team of economists released last fall found that every dollar invested in the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative brings more than $3 in additional economic benefits across the region. “It is no longer the economy versus the environment,” said Jill Jedlicka, executive director of Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, a Western New York nonprofit focused on protecting and restoring the Niagara River watershed. “You cannot have a healthy economy without a healthy environment.”
Astronomy: It’s even harder to destroy asteroids than we thought by Alison Klesman
You’ve likely heard by now that the movie Armageddon got it all wrong — it’s just not feasible to blow up an asteroid heading toward Earth with a bomb or few. But how unfeasible is it, really? New research set for publication March 15 in the planetary science journal Icarus is sending any hope humanity might have had to nuke an incoming asteroid threat even further into the realm of impossibility. Breaking up asteroids, it turns out, is really, really hard to do.
The new study, led by recent Ph.D. graduate Charles El Mir from the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, makes use of both recent advancements in understanding about the way rock fractures, as well as improved computer code to model what happens when you smack an asteroid with something big. “Our question was, how much energy does it take to actually destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces?” El Mir said in a press release.
The answer to that question, it turns out, is “that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered,” he said.
ArsTechnica: Physicists are decoding math-y secrets of knitting to make bespoke materials by Jennifer Ouellette
Knitted fabrics like a scarf or socks are highly elastic, capable of stretching as much as twice their length, but individual strands of yarn hardly stretch at all. It's the way those strands form an interlocking network of stitches that give knitted fabrics their stretchiness. Physicists are trying to unlock the knitting "code"—the underlying mathematical rules that govern how different stitch combinations give rise to different properties like stretchiness—in hopes of creating new "tunable" materials whose properties can be tailored for specific purposes.
"Knitting is this incredibly complex way of converting one-dimensional yarn into complex fabric," said Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "So basically this is a type of coding." Figuring out how different stitch types determine shape and mechanical strength could help create designer materials for future technologies—everything from better materials for the aerospace industry to stretchable materials to replace torn ligaments. The models her team is developing may also be useful in improving the realistic animation of clothing and hair in video game graphics. Matsumoto described her research during the American Physical Society's 2019 March meeting taking place this week in Boston.
Knitted fabrics can technically be considered a type of metamaterial (engineered materials that get their properties not from the base materials but from their designed structures), according to Matsumoto, who points to the medieval embroidery technique known as "smocking" as an early example. From a physics standpoint, smocking uses knots to essentially convert local bending energy into bulk stretching energy.
Phys.org: Einstein 'puzzle' solved as missing page emerges in new trove
An Albert Einstein "puzzle" has been solved thanks to a missing manuscript page emerging in a trove of his writings newly acquired by Jerusalem's Hebrew University, officials announced Wednesday.
The handwritten page, part of an appendix to a 1930 paper on the Nobel winner's efforts towards a unified field theory, was discovered among the 110-page trove the university's Albert Einstein archives received some two weeks ago.
Hebrew University unveiled the collection to coincide what would have been Einstein's 140th birthday on March 14.
Most of the documents constitute handwritten mathematical calculations behind Einstein's scientific writings in the late 1940s.
There are also letters that Einstein, born in Germany in 1879, wrote to collaborators that deal with a range of scientific and personal issues, including one to his son, Hans Albert.
The 1935 letter to his son expresses concern about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.
Nearly all the documents had been known to researchers and available in the form of copies—"sometimes better copies, sometimes very poor copies", said Hanoch Gutfreund, scientific advisor to the university's Einstein archives.
Guardian: Scientists discover what the Milky Way weighs by Ian Sample
Astronomers have hauled the Milky Way on to a cosmic scale of sorts, and found that our galaxy has as much mass as 1.5tn suns, give or take a few.
The measurement, the most accurate yet, covers all the stars and planets, dust and gas, and the supermassive black hole that sits at the centre. It alone comes in at 4m times more massive than the sun.
“This is absolutely everything there is in the Milky Way,” said Laura Watkins, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory headquarters at Garching in Germany. “Knowing its total mass will help us understand the galaxy better.”
Scientists have sought to weigh the Milky Way for decades. Previous estimates have ranged wildly from 500bn to 3tn suns. The latest estimate is in the middle of that range, and translates into about 3,000 trillion trillion trillion tonnes.
Science: The Black Death may have transformed medieval societies in sub-Saharan Africa by Lizzie Wade
In the 14th century, the Black Death swept across Europe, Asia, and North Africa, killing up to 50% of the population in some cities. But archaeologists and historians have assumed that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas infesting rodents, didn't make it across the Sahara Desert. Medieval sub-Saharan Africa's few written records make no mention of plague, and the region lacks mass graves resembling the "plague pits" of Europe. Nor did European explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries record any sign of the disease, even though outbreaks continued to beset Europe.
Now, some researchers point to new evidence from archaeology, history, and genetics to argue that the Black Death likely did sow devastation in medieval sub-Saharan Africa. "It's entirely possible that [plague] would have headed south," says Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist who studies ancient pathogens at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. If proved, the presence of plague would put renewed attention on the medieval trade routes that linked sub-Saharan Africa to other continents. But Stone and others caution that the evidence so far is circumstantial; researchers need ancient DNA from Africa to clinch their case. The new finds, to be presented this week at a conference at the University of Paris, may spur more scientists to search for it.
Everyone have a great evening!
For more science, don’t forget to read Mark Sumner’s Science Round-Up...for more news and commentary, don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!