Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman, jck, and Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) 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.
Undark: Amid a Global Pandemic, Designers Aim To Reimagine PPE by Hannah Tomaasy
IN MARCH, as Covid-19 cases spiked and supplies of N95 protective masks dwindled at the Bay Area hospital where her brother-in-law works, Megan Duong launched a local search for N95s. Along with her sister-in-law, Sabrina Paseman, Duong enlisted volunteers and tracked down 7,000 masks — barely enough to cover the needs of two hospitals for one day. “We just knew that it was not a scalable solution,” Duong said.
So, Duong and Paseman, both former Apple employees, set out to invent a new tool that, they hoped, would make available mask technologies more effective and accessible.
They weren’t the only inventors attempting to meet sudden, massive demand for personal protective equipment, or PPE. Experts say that PPE like masks is critical for slowing the spread of Covid-19. But for much of the pandemic, high-quality PPE has been in short supply for medical workers. Meanwhile, PPE available to the public has been of variable quality, with users complaining that cheap cloth masks, although widely available and recommended by public health agencies, are uncomfortable, hamper social interactions, and have limited effectiveness.
WIRED: How Does a Sturgis-Sized Crowd Affect Covid? It's Complicated by Megan Molteni
THE CORONAVIRUS LOVES a crowd. Put enough warm, susceptible bodies together and it's sure to spread. Scientists have known that since nearly the start of the pandemic, from studying Covid-19 outbreaks aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, inside a megachurch in South Korea, at a Champions League soccer match in Italy. Countless other clusters have since been recorded, often seeded by a single contagious individual.
It’s the danger of crowds that led the governments of other countries to enact national lockdowns. In the United States, it was more of a patchwork of state and local stay-at-home orders, school closures, and bans on mass gatherings. As scientists have learned more about the specific conditions that can lead to such superspreading events—unmasked people talking, singing, or exercising inside poorly ventilated indoor spaces—that’s made it possible, in theory, to fine-tune these disease containment strategies, and to ease up on the most dramatic restrictions and focus on the policies that do the most to stem the spread of the virus.
But people also love a crowd. And over the late spring and summer, a number of mass gatherings—often anxiously watched by the media, health care professionals, and worried neighbors—became real-life experiments in what happens when you put people together in the Covid-19 era. The events ranged from the apolitical (
spring break,
summer camp,
back-to-school) to the politically supercharged (President Trump’s Tulsa rally,
“reopen” protests,
anti-police brutality protests, and
ongoing demonstrations in Portland against the use of federal agents). Each one tested different variables—masks versus no masks, indoors versus outdoors—but all elicited an opportunity to study the same questions: How many people would get sick as a result, how many would die, and who would bear the cost of the health care bill?
LIveScience: Earth barreling toward 'Hothouse' state not seen in 50 million years, epic new climate record shows by Brandon Specktor
Sixty-six million years ago, after a massive asteroid hit Earth with the explosive energy of roughly 1 billion nuclear bombs, a shroud of ash, dust and vaporized rock covered the sky and slowly rained down on the planet. As plant and animal species died en masse, tiny undersea amoebas called forams continued to reproduce, building sturdy shells out of calcium and other deep-sea minerals, just as they had for hundreds of millions of years. When each foram inevitably died — pulverized into seabed sediment — they kept a little piece of Earth's ancient history alive in their fossilized shells.
For decades, scientists have studied those shells, finding clues about the ancient Earth's ocean temperatures, its carbon budget and the composition of minerals spilling through the air and seas. Now, in a new study published today (Sept. 10) in the journal Science, researchers have analyzed the chemical elements in thousands of foram samples to build the most detailed climate record of Earth ever — and it reveals just how dire our current climate situation is.
The new paper, which comprises decades of deep-ocean drilling missions into a single record, details Earth's climate swings across the entire Cenozoic era — the 66 million-year period that began with the death of the dinosaurs and extends to the present epoch of human-induced climate change. The results show how Earth transitioned through four distinct climate states — dubbed the Warmhouse, Hothouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse states — in response to changes in the planet's orbit, greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets.
Nature: The Arctic is burning like never before — and that’s bad news for climate change by Alexandra Witze
Wildfires blazed along the Arctic Circle this summer, incinerating tundra, blanketing Siberian cities in smoke and capping the second extraordinary fire season in a row. By the time the fire season waned at the end of last month, the blazes had emitted a record 244 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — that’s 35% more than last year, which also set records. One culprit, scientists say, could be peatlands that are burning as the top of the world melts.
Peatlands are carbon-rich soils that accumulate as waterlogged plants slowly decay, sometimes over thousands of years. They are the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth; a typical northern peatland packs in roughly ten times as much carbon as a boreal forest. When peat burns, it releases its ancient carbon to the atmosphere, adding to the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change.
Quanta: How Two Became One: Origins of a Mysterious Symbiosis Found by Viviane Callier
Symbiotic relationships between bacteria and multicellular organisms are everywhere in nature, but some are more intricately intertwined than others. Both cows and carpenter ants, for example, rely on bacterial partners in their digestive systems to help them get the most out of their food. Yet while the cows’ bacteria merely inhabit the animals’ stomach, the bacteria in the ants live inside their gut cells as endosymbionts.
Understanding endosymbiosis is a prize puzzle for biologists because it is so central to life as we know it: Mitochondria, the organelles that power all complex cells, are the remnants of a very ancient endosymbiotic event. Yet explaining how such intense interdependencies between species evolve is always a challenge. Even the mechanisms that reliably guarantee the endosymbionts will get into the right cells of their hosts and be passed from one generation to the next can be mysterious.
Last week in Nature, however, a trio of scientists working at McGill University announced their discovery of how the essential endosymbiosis in carpenter ants evolved and helped them become some of the most successful creatures on the planet. What the researchers pieced together is that this seemingly harmonious partnership evolved through a duel at the cellular and genetic levels, one that left the ant eggs largely unviable on their own. The bacteria have seized genetic control over crucial stages of the ant’s early development and literally reshaped the embryo into a vessel for their own survival.
Science: The more they eat, the more tentacles these sea anemones sprout by Rasha Aridi
Almost every school child knows that cats have four legs, humans two, and spiders, a terrifying eight. Their number of limbs is immutable, set by their genetic code. But a new study suggests starlet sea anemones—part of a famously adaptable group of aquatic creatures known as cnidarians—have a leg up on them. They are the first species shown to grow entirely new limbs in response to food.
Starlet sea anemones (Nematostella vectensis) are tiny, flowerlike invertebrates that live in shallow, salty lagoons along the coasts of North America and in parts of the United Kingdom. They start their lives as mobile larvae, before burrowing themselves in fine mud, where they develop their adult form and remain for the rest of their short lives. To feed, they capture small mollusks and crustaceans with venom-filled tentacles and pull them down to their mouths. But scientists never knew why some anemones had as few as four tentacles—and others as many as 24.
To find out, developmental biologist Aissam Ikmi of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and colleagues raised more than 1000 of the fingernail-size creatures in their lab. While working on another project, Ikmi noticed that the more the anemones were fed, the faster their tentacles appeared—some could sprout new pairs within just a few days. But when feeding slowed, tentacle growth did, too. “From there, we started with the most straightforward hypothesis: Does food matter for them? And then the answer was yes,” he says.
In any ordinary year, it might be a little fun to contemplate an animal that grew legs as a response to eating. However, 2020 is...no ordinary year.
Phys.org: Computational modelling explains why blues and greens are brightest colors in nature by Sarah Collins
Researchers have shown why intense, pure red colors in nature are mainly produced by pigments, instead of the structural color that produces bright blue and green hues.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used a numerical experiment to determine the limits of matt structural color—a phenomenon which is responsible for some of the most intense colors in nature—and found that it extends only as far as blue and green in the visible spectrum. The results, published in PNAS, could be useful in the development of non-toxic paints or coatings with intense color that never fades.
Structural color, which is seen in some bird feathers, butterfly wings or insects, is not caused by pigments or dyes, but internal structure alone. The appearance of the color, whether matt or iridescent, will depending on how the structures are arranged at the nanoscale.
ScienceDaily: Volcanic ash may have a bigger impact on the climate than we thought
When volcanoes erupt, these geologic monsters produce tremendous clouds of ash and dust -- plumes that can blacken the sky, shut down air traffic and reach heights of roughly 25 miles above Earth's surface.
A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that such volcanic ash may also have a larger influence on the planet's climate than scientists previously suspected.
The new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, examines the eruption of Mount Kelut (or Kelud) on the Indonesian island of Java in 2014. Drawing on real-world observations of this event and advanced computer simulations, the team discovered that volcanic ash seems to be prone to loitering -- remaining in the air for months or even longer after a major eruption.
"What we found for this eruption is that the volcanic ash can persist for a long time," said Yunqian Zhu, lead author of the new study and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder.
Arts Technica: New gravitational-lensing study hints at problems for dark matter models by John Timmer
While the idea of dark matter was originally proposed to explain the structure of galaxies, one of its great successes was explaining the nature of the Universe itself. Features of the Cosmic Microwave Background can be explained by the presence of dark matter. And models of the early Universe produce galaxies and galaxy clusters by building on structures formed by dark matter. The fact that these models get the big picture so right has been a strong argument in their favor.
But a new study suggests that the same models get the details wrong—by an entire order of magnitude. The people behind the study suggest that either there's something wrong with the models, or our understanding of dark matter may need an adjustment.
The new study, performed by an international team of researchers, took advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Gravity warps space itself, and it can do so in a way that bends light, analogous to a lens. If a massive object—say, a galaxy—sits between us and a distant object, it can create a gravitational lens that magnifies or distorts the distant object. Depending on the precise details of how the objects are arranged, the results can be anything from a simple magnification to circular rings or having the object appear multiple times.
Because dark matter's effects are detectable via gravity, we can "see" the presence of dark matter via its gravitational-lensing effects. In a few cases, we've even detected lensing where little matter is present. That's one of the many pieces of evidence in favor of dark matter.
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting a Saturday Night Owls thread tonight.
Everyone have a good evening!