Every day, the Earth rotates. The Sun appears on the horizon in the morning, and then some time later, it sets. We’ve built our lives and societies around this periodicity, with days that are divided into hours, minutes, and seconds, all kept track of by clocks. But in some places on Earth, the Sun rises only once per year, and sets once per year. With their concept of a day already so estranged from the rest of the world’s, one Arctic population started thinking: What if we ditched the concept of time altogether?
That’s the idea of Norwegian Kjell Ove Hveding, who lives north of the Arctic Circle in a town called Sommarøy. The idea has since taken off, and has been featured by Norway’s state news agency and at least one of the country’s large national newspapers. Yesterday, Hveding met with his local member of parliament to hand over a petition to get rid of time in the town. The driving motivator, it seems, is to make Sommarøy a place where people can do whatever they want, whenever they want.
NOAA Investigates Surge in Dead Dolphins Along the Gulf Coast
Since the beginning of February, over 260 bottlenose dolphin strandings have been documented along the northern Gulf Coast, prompting the declaration of an “unusual mortality event.” The reason for the strandings isn’t entirely clear, but indications point to excessive freshwater from rain—and even the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which has comprised dolphin health.
The unusual mortality event, or UME, was declared earlier today by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since February 1, 2019, a total of 261 strandings of the common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) have been detected in a Gulf Coast region stretching from the Florida Panhandle through to Louisiana. The strandings were particularly high in April and May.
At a news conference held earlier today, NOAA Fisheries Southeast Region Marine Mammal Stranding Program Administrator Erin Fougères said 121 strandings were documented in Mississippi, 89 in Louisiana, 32 in Alabama, and 37 in Florida, as reported in NOLA.
The Sun Can Spawn Dangerous ‘Superflares,’ New Research Suggests
High-energy superflares are typically associated with young, quickly rotating stars, but new evidence suggests mature, plodding stars like our own can still churn out the odd superflare.
Stars located hundreds of light-years away sometimes belch out bursts of energy powerful enough to be detected by astronomers here on Earth. Known as superflares, they’re like normal-strength solar flares but on a much grander scale. Conventional thinking suggests superflares are produced by young stars and that our middle-aged Sun, at 4.6-billion years old, is largely immune to such spasmodic bursts of energy.
New
research published in the Astrophysical Journal suggests superflares can indeed be generated by mature, slowly rotating stars like the Sun, though on a relatively infrequent basis.
Wired
The Top Secret Cold War Project That Pulled Climate Science From the Ice
In 1961—the year before he became the anchorman for CBS News—Walter Cronkite visited Camp Century, an unusual military compound on the Greenland ice sheet. Carved under the snow and ice, Camp Century had a main street and prefab housing for 250 soldiers and scientists—all powered by a pint-sized nuclear reactor. To get there, Cronkite endured a multiday haul from the edge of the ice sheet by “wanigan”—a heated, insulated trailer hitched to a massive Caterpillar tractor traveling at the speed of a slow-walking human.
Cronkite’s televised report was wide-eyed at the base’s scale and audacity—there were mess halls, a church, and even the hair-cutting services of a barber named Jordon. When Cronkite asked Camp Century’s commanding officer, Tom Evans, about his objectives, Evans rattled off three: “The first one is to test out the number of promising new concepts of polar construction. And the second one is to provide a really practical field test of this new nuclear plant. And, finally, we’re building Camp Century to provide a good base, here, in the interior of Greenland, where the scientists can carry on their R&D activities.”
A New Fuel for Satellites Is So Safe It Won’t Blow Up Humans
Later this month, a small satellite will hitch a ride on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for the world’s first demonstration of “green” satellite propellant in space. The satellite is fueled by AFM-315, which the Air Force first developed more than 20 years ago as an alternative to the typical satellite juice of choice, hydrazine. If successful, AFM-315 could make satellites vastly more efficient, shrink satellite deployment time from weeks to days, and drastically reduce the safety requirements for storing and handling satellite fuel, a boon to humans and the environment. Looking to the future, scientists working on the fuel say it will play a large role in helping get extraterrestrial satellite operations off the ground.
Hydrazine is a volatile fuel that will ruin your day—and perhaps your life—if you’re exposed to it. To fuel a satellite you need a lot of safety infrastructure, including pressurized full-body “SCAPE suits” just to handle the stuff. AFM-315, on the other hand, is less toxic than caffeine, so all you need is a lab coat and a pump. “We literally sat in a room next to a plastic jug of it when we were fueling the satellite,” says Chris McLean, an engineer at Ball Aerospace and the project lead on NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission.
Unlike hydrazine, which has a consistency similar to water, AFM-315 is viscous. But its fuel density would increase the “miles per gallon” delivered to a satellite by 50 percent, compared with the same volume of hydrazine.
Space.com
NASA Spacecraft Spots 'Star Trek' Logo on Mars
It looks like Starfleet is literally embedded on the planet next door: A dune in the shape of the famous logo from "Star Trek" appears prominently in a new picture from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Even Captain Kirk himself (actor William Shatner) has weighed in.
Don't expect to find Spock, Jean-Luc Picard or Michael Burnham squatting nearby, however. Just like the famous "face on Mars," this Starfleet logo was produced by random chance, as wind, lava and other forces sculpted the Martian landscape.
"Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo," the University of Arizona, which manages the MRO HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, said in a statement. "You'd be right, but it's only a coincidence."
'Cold Quasars' May Be at the End of Their Lives, But They Can Still Birth Stars
Building a quasar, the brightest type of object in the universe, usually signifies an end of star-formation in a galaxy. Now, new research suggests that some galaxies may continue to birth new stars longer than expected after a quasar cuts off their supply of gas.
Using observations gathered with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Telescope, astronomers in ongoing research revealed the additional blip in the life story of these galaxies. They suspect that the unexpectedly late star formation could be possible in all types of galaxies.
"We already knew quasars go through a dust-obscured phase … a heavily shrouded phase where dust is surrounding the supermassive black hole," lead researcher Allison Kirkpatrick, an astrophysicist at the University of Kansas, said in a statement. Kirkpatrick and her colleagues studied several intriguing quasars in the X-ray and far-infrared spectra to find quasars that hadn't lost all of their dust. "Now we've found this unique transition regime that we didn't know [about] before," she said.
Phys.org
Revealing 'hidden' phases of matter through the power of light
Most people think of water as existing in only one of three phases: Solid ice, liquid water, or gas vapor. But matter can exist in many different phases—ice, for example, has more than ten known phases, or ways that its atoms can be spatially arranged. The widespread use of piezoelectric materials, such as microphones and ultrasound, is possible thanks to a fundamental understanding of how an external force, like pressure, temperature, or electricity, can lead to phase transitions that imbue materials with new properties.
A new study finds that a metal oxide has a "hidden" phase, one that gives the material new, ferroelectric properties, the ability to separate positive and negative charges, when it is activated by extremely fast pulses of light. The research was led by MIT researchers Keith A. Nelson, Xian Li, and Edoardo Baldini, in collaboration with Andrew M. Rappe and Penn graduate students Tian Qiu and Jiahao Zhang. The findings were published in Science.
No direct link between north Atlantic currents, sea level along New England coast
A new study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) clarifies what influence major currents in the North Atlantic have on sea level along the northeastern United States. The study, published June 13 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined both the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—a conveyor belt of currents that move warmer waters north and cooler waters south in the Atlantic—and historical records of sea level in coastal New England.
"Scientists had previously noticed that if the AMOC is stronger in a given season or year, sea levels in the northeast U.S. go down. If the AMOC weakens, average sea levels rise considerably," says Chris Piecuch, a physical oceanographer at WHOI and lead author on the paper. "During the winter of 2009-2010, for example, we saw the AMOC weaken by 30 percent. At the same time, sea level in our region rose by six inches. That doesn't sound like a lot, but a half-foot of sea level rise, held for months, can have serious coastal impacts."
Nature
Small, furry and powerful: are mouse lemurs the next big thing in genetics?
Onja is struggling tonight — her hands keep slipping off a miniature grip bar used to measure her strength. “Come on, you can do better,” coos Zeph Pendleton, who is gently supporting the mouse lemur as she tries to get a firm hold. Finally, the animal gets her fingers around the bar and gives it a tug. It records a force of 1 kilogram, impressive for a creature weighing only 41 grams. “Good,” says Pendleton, a research assistant who is working here in the rainforest at Centre ValBio, a research station at Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar.
Bathed in dim red light, Pendleton, who has come here from Stanford University in California, puts Onja through her paces. He gets her to place her hands on an iPhone modified to measure her heart’s electrical activity. He checks her length and weight — she has gained 2 grams in less than a week — then he snaps a mugshot, eventually logging the information into an ever-expanding database of one of the planet’s smallest and most abundant primates.
Finally, Pendleton nudges Onja back into a cage and covers it with a black bag to protect the nocturnal creature’s eyes while he carries her out into the bright hallway and back to the rainforest.
Superconducting magnet breaks strength world record
Scientists have created the world’s most powerful superconducting magnet, capable of generating a record magnetic field intensity of 45.5 tesla. Only pulsed magnets, which sustain fields for a fraction of a second at a time, have achieved higher intensities.
Materials scientist David Larbalestier and his collaborators at the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida, ran intense electric currents through coils made of a cuprate superconductor to generate magnetic fields with low energy consumption. The resulting field strength exceeded that of energy-hungry resistive magnets — which don’t use superconductors — used by state-of-the-art magnet labs. It also surpassed conventional superconductor magnets, and ‘hybrid’ superconducting–resistive magnets (see ‘Record-breaking magnets’). The results were published 12 June in Nature.
Science
Russian geneticist answers challenges to his plan to make gene-edited babies
In a bold rejection of the widespread sentiment—and regulations in many countries—that no one should alter the genome of a human embryo and transfer it to a woman, Russian geneticist Denis Rebrikov last week went public with his plans to become the second researcher to cross this red line. “We can’t stop progress with words on paper,” Rebrikov told ScienceInsider yesterday, when asked about international efforts to ban such research.
Rebrikov, who is at the Kulakov National Medical Research Center of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology in Moscow, does not yet have Russian approval to do the experiment. But, as Naturefirst reported on 10 June, he would like to use the genome editor CRISPR to modify the CCR5 gene in embryos so they would be highly resistant to infection with HIV.
Half a billion hoverflies migrate to the United Kingdom each year. The benefits to farmers are huge
Each year, hundreds of millions of hoverflies cross the English Channel from continental Europe, according to a new radar-based study. Most migratory insects around the world are pests, such as locusts, but luckily for U.K. farmers, the hoverflies are friends.
“The potential benefit is quite large,” says Ben Woodcock, an entomologist with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, in Wallingford, U.K., who was not involved in the study. Many hoverfly species pollinate crops, he notes, and their larvae consume aphids, which are pests of wheat and other crops.
Most insect migrations are invisible to the naked eye. But researchers can track and identify them with narrow radar beams. In 2016, a group using the technology and led by ecologist Jason Chapman at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom reported that trillions of insects migrate in and out of the country each year
This psychologist explains why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit
At 16, Huwe Burton confessed to killing his mother. He was still in shock from discovering her body when New York City police began to interrogate him. After hours of being threatened and cajoled, he told the police what they wanted to hear. He soon recanted, knowing he was innocent and hoping the justice system would clear him.
Burton was convicted of second-degree murder in 1991 and received a sentence of 15 years to life.
After 20 years in prison, he was released on parole, but he never could shake the stigma of the conviction. Attorneys from several organizations worked for more than a decade to clear him. They produced facts that contradicted the confession and showed evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. But for the Bronx District Attorney's Office, Burton's confession outweighed all other evidence; after all, who would admit to a crime they did not commit? Finally, last summer Burton's attorneys brought in Saul Kassin, a psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City who is one of the world's leading experts on interrogation
Science Daily
How much does climate change affects the risk of armed conflict
Intensifying climate change will increase the future risk of violent armed conflict within countries, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. Synthesizing views across experts, the study estimates climate has influenced between 3% and 20% of armed conflict risk over the last century and that the influence will likely increase dramatically.
In a scenario with 4 degrees Celsius of warming (approximately the path we're on if societies do not substantially reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases), the influence of climate on conflicts would increase more than five times, leaping to a 26% chance of a substantial increase in conflict risk, according to the study. Even in a scenario of 2 degrees Celsius of warming beyond preindustrial levels -- the stated goal of the Paris Climate Agreement¬ -- the influence of climate on conflicts would more than double, rising to a 13% chance.
"Appreciating the role of climate change and its security impacts is important not only for understanding the social costs of our continuing heat-trapping emissions, but for prioritizing responses, which could include aid and cooperation," said Katharine Mach, director of the Stanford Environment Assessment Facility and the study's lead author.
Dolphins form friendships through shared interests just like us, study finds
When it comes to making friends, it appears dolphins are just like us and form close friendships with other dolphins that have a common interest. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Bby an international team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Zurich and Western Australia, provide further insight into the social habits of these remarkable animals.
Shark Bay, a World Heritage area in Western Australia, is home to an iconic population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, and the only place where dolphins have been observed using marine sponges as foraging tools. This learnt technique, passed down from generation to generation, helps certain dolphins, "spongers," find food in deeper water channels. While the tool-using technique is well-studied in female dolphins, this study looked specifically at male dolphins.
Using behavioural, genetic and photographic data collected from 124 male dolphins during the winter months in Shark Bay over nine years [2007 to 2015], the team analysed a subset of 37 male dolphins, comprising 13 spongers and 24 non-spongers.
What drives Yellowstone's massive elk migrations?
Every spring, tens of thousands of elk follow a wave of green growth up onto the high plateaus in and around Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, where they spend the summer calving and fattening on fresh grass. And every fall, the massive herds migrate back down into the surrounding valleys and plains, where lower elevations provide respite from harsh winters.
These migratory elk rely primarily on environmental cues, including a retreating snowline and the greening grasses of spring, to decide when to make these yearly journeys, shows a new study led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers. The study combined GPS tracking data from more than 400 animals in nine major Yellowstone elk populations with satellite imagery to create a comprehensive model of what drives these animals to move.
"We found that the immediate environment is a very effective predictor of when migration occurs," said Gregory Rickbeil, who conducted the analysis as a postdoctoral researcher in Arthur Middleton's lab at UC Berkeley. This is in contrast with some other species, such as migratory birds, which rely on changing day length to decide when to move, Rickbeil pointed out.
BBC News
Largest world stock of animal-killing virus destroyed by UK lab
Scientists have destroyed the UK's laboratory stocks of a virus that once caused devastating cattle losses.
These stocks accounted for most of the world's lab samples of rinderpest, which were held at The Pirbright Institute in Surrey.
Rinderpest and the deadly smallpox virus are the only diseases to have been eradicated from the face of the Earth…
Dr Carrie Batten, from The Pirbright Institute, described the moment as "the end of an era".
Bermuda land snail: An animal 'back from the dead'
Thousands of critically endangered snails have been released into the wild after being rescued from the edge of extinction, with a little help from a British zoo.
The greater Bermuda land snail was thought to have disappeared for many years until an empty shell turned up in the territory's capital city, Hamilton.
Live snails were then found among litter in a nearby alleyway. Some were flown to Chester Zoo for a unique breeding programme. More than 4,000 snails raised at the zoo have now been taken back to the island and released.
Many more captive snails will soon be returned to their homeland to help give the species a new lease of life.
Scotland's crannogs are older than Stonehenge
Archaeologists have discovered that some Scottish crannogs are thousands of years older than previously thought.
Crannogs were fortified settlements constructed on artificial islands in lochs. It was thought they were first built in the Iron Age, a period that began around 800 BC.
But four Western Isles sites have been radiocarbon dated to about 3640-3360 BC in the Neolithic period - before the erection of Stonehenge's stone circle.
Popular Science
Scientists are still straightening out the history of zebra stripes
The zebra’s striking black and white stripes have long mystified biologists. Over the past few decades, scientists have devised numerous theories to explain the pattern’s bizarre existence: Maybe the wildly printed coat is essential to keep the animal cool or to blend in; or it could also be essential for warding off pests or helping the animals make friends. The newest evidence—which comes from an unlikely investigator—states the stark coloring could provide relief from the often intense heat the animals live in.
Allison Cobb, who co-published the latest findings this week in the Journal of Natural History, was in her 40s before she received any formal scientific training. Dissuaded from science—or any college degree—by her father, it wasn’t until later in life that she trained in biology and biochemistry. She became a technician at what is now Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. only leaving to join her husband in Africa where he was doing conservation research.
Now the 85-year-old amateur scientist has published her first scientific study, co-authored by her husband Steven Cobb, a zoologist and environmental consultant. The study used data from the couple's trip to Kenya in 2003. With the help of a local, the Cobbs gained access to two semi-tame zebras, one of which was an "extremely naughty" house pet allowed to drink coca-cola, she says.
Saving Greenland could save the world
Every year, about half of Greenland’s ice losses happen on the edges, through glaciers like Jakobshavn. But another half is lost through melting on its surface. This melting comprises turquoise lakes and rushing aquamarine rivers and thin lapis creeks. Unlike the island’s biggest glaciers, we already know a fair amount about how much the ice sheet’s surface is warming. For nearly thirty years, a Swiss scientist named Konrad “Koni” Steffen has been taking readings on temperature, wind, solar radiation, and melting at a station known as Swiss Camp, on the central ice sheet. Located about fifty miles east of Jakobshavn’s calving front, Steffen’s camp has weather towers that collect data on the surface environment several times a minute; the information is then transmitted to him in Europe and the United States (he has offices in both Zurich and Boulder) every hour. But the observations aren’t limited to one location. over the past few decades, he has set up a system of eighteen installations around Greenland that measure weather on the ice sheet. Every spring he checks on these towers by setting out from Swiss Camp, moving from one site to another either by snowmobile or by turboprop. “It is really by chance that I ended up studying the ice sheet,” he says.
The station over time had become a destination spot for visit- ing dignitaries seeking to find a kind of ground zero for global warming; Al Gore had been there, along with so many journalists, politicians, and European princesses and princes that Steffen could barely list them all. The true value of Swiss Camp was in the growing record of observations, however. Steffen calculated that between 1990 and 2018 average temperatures on the ice sheet had increased by about 2.8 degrees Celsius, or 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Over the same time period, the total area of the Greenland ice sheet that was vulnerable to surface melting had increased by around 65 percent. Carl Benson would barely have recognized the place.
Ars Technica
Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day
Since becoming fully operational in 1995, Global Positioning System technology has become widely adopted in the United States and abroad. The concept of satellite-based navigation has become so essential that other world powers, including China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Japan, have all started building their own regional or global systems.
Now, one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject has assessed the value of this GPS technology to the US economy and examined what effect a 30-day outage would have—whether it's due to a severe space weather event or "nefarious activity by a bad actor." The study was sponsored by the US government's National Institutes of Standards and Technology and performed by a North Carolina-based research organization named RTI International.
Ebola spreads in Uganda, but not an international emergency, WHO says
Local and international health officials are scrambling to smother a flare-up of Ebola in Uganda, which spread this week from a massive, months-long outbreak in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. The outbreak has sickened 2,084 and killed 1,405 since last August.
Uganda announced its first case stemming from the outbreak on Tuesday, June 11. The case was in a 5-year-old Congolese boy who traveled across the border with family a few days earlier. The Ugandan Health Ministry reported shortly after that the boy succumbed to his infection the morning of June 12. Two of his family members also tested positive by that time: the boy’s 50-year-old grandmother and his 3-year-old brother.
Scientists found these old photographs contain metallic nanoparticles
Daguerreotypes are one of the earliest forms of photography, producing images on silver plates that look subtly different, depending on viewing angle. For instance they can appear positive or negative, or the colors can shift from bluish to brownish-red tones. Now an interdisciplinary team of scientists has discovered that these unusual optical effects are due to the presence of metallic nanoparticles in the plates. They described their findings in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Co-author Alejandro Manjavacas—now at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque—was a postdoc at Rice University, which boasts one of the top nanophotonics research groups in the US. That's where he met his co-author, Andrea Schlather, who ended up in the scientific research department at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. The Met has a valuable collection of daguerreotypes, and her new colleagues were keen to find better methods for preserving these valuable artifacts.