Science Daily
Earth-size, habitable-zone planet found hidden in early NASA Kepler data
A team of transatlantic scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting in its star's habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky planet could support liquid water.
Scientists discovered this planet, called Kepler-1649c, when looking through old observations from Kepler, which the agency retired in 2018. While previous searches with a computer algorithm misidentified it, researchers reviewing Kepler data took a second look at the signature and recognized it as a planet. Out of all the exoplanets found by Kepler, this distant world -- located 300 light-years from Earth -- is most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature.
This newly revealed world is only 1.06 times larger than our own planet. Also, the amount of starlight it receives from its host star is 75% of the amount of light Earth receives from our Sun -- meaning the exoplanet's temperature may be similar to our planet's as well. But unlike Earth, it orbits a red dwarf. Though none have been observed in this system, this type of star is known for stellar flare-ups that may make a planet's environment challenging for any potential life.
Extinction of threatened marine megafauna would lead to huge loss in functional diversity
In a paper published in Science Advances, an international team of researchers have examined traits of marine megafauna species to better understand the potential ecological consequences of their extinction under different future scenarios.
Defined as the largest animals in the oceans, with a body mass that exceeds 45kg, examples include sharks, whales, seals and sea turtles.
These species serve key roles in ecosystems, including the consumption of large amounts of biomass, transporting nutrients across habitats, connecting ocean ecosystems, and physically modifying habitats.
Scientific American
Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found
The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA.
Genetic material is not supposed to last over such time periods—not by a long shot. DNA begins to decay at death. Findings from a 2012 study on moa bones show an organism’s genetic material deteriorates at such a rate that it halves itself every 521 years. This speed would mean paleontologists can only hope to recover recognizable DNA sequences from creatures that lived and died within the past 6.8 million years—far short of even the last nonavian dinosaurs.
But then there is the Hypacrosaurus cartilage. In a study published earlier this year, Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Alida Bailleul and her colleagues proposed that in that fossil, they had found not only evidence of original proteins and cartilage-creating cells but a chemical signature consistent with DNA.
COVID-19 Could Help Solve Climate Riddles
As the world scrambles to contain the spread of COVID-19, many economic activities have ground to a halt, leading to marked reductions in air pollution. And with the skies clearing, researchers are getting an unprecedented chance to help answer one of climate science’s thorniest open questions: the impact of atmospheric aerosols. What they learn could improve predictions of the earth’s climatic future. “We hope that this situation—as tragic as it is—can have a positive side for our field,” says aerosol researcher Nicolas Bellouin of the University of Reading in England.
Aerosols are tiny particles and droplets that are emitted into the air by myriad sources—from fossil-fuel burning to fertilizer spraying and even natural phenomena such as sea spray. They alter cloud properties and intercept sunlight, with some scattering solar radiation and others absorbing it. All of these factors influence global temperature—sometimes in competing ways. Overall aerosols have a cooling effect on the climate, offsetting some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases—but just how much they have done so to date, or will do so in the future, remains unclear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could increase temperatures by anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the wide range linked, in part, to scientist’s incomplete understanding of the influence of aerosols. “The fact that the aerosol effect on climate, so far, is so uncertain has held us back,” says atmospheric scientist Trude Storelvmo of the University of Oslo.
Part of the problem in parsing out the role of aerosols has been that their sources could not simply be turned off to compare what happens with and without them. But now the response to the pandemic has effectively done so.
Nature
Antibody tests suggest that coronavirus infections vastly exceed official counts
Widespread antibody testing in a Californian county has revealed a much higher prevalence of coronavirus infection than official figures suggested. The findings also indicate that the virus is less deadly than current estimates of global case and death counts suggest. But some scientists have raised concerns about the accuracy of kits used in such studies because most have not been rigorously assessed to confirm they are reliable.
An analysis of the blood of some 3,300 people living in Santa Clara county in early April found that one in every 66 people had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. On the basis of that finding, the researchers estimate that between 48,000 and 82,000 of the county’s roughly 2 million inhabitants were infected with the virus at that time — numbers that contrast sharply with the official case count of some 1,000 people reported in early April, according to the analysis posted today on medRxiv. The work has not yet been peer reviewed.
Revealed: How a spacecraft will bring Mars rocks to Earth
The plan to steal rocks from the surface of Mars is taking shape.
The first step in this interplanetary heist will come in July, when NASA launches its Perseverance rover to roll around on the Martian surface and collect tubes of dust and rock. Now, officials have laid out exactly how those tubes might find their way back to Earth. It’s a soaringly ambitious, sure-to-be-expensive, international endeavour that involves sending multiple spacecraft to Mars to fetch the precious samples.
If it works, scientists will finally get their hands on rocks retrieved from the red planet in just over 10 years. “What we can learn about Mars in our own laboratories is going to be fantastic,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars exploration programme at NASA headquarters in Washington DC, who outlined the plans at a virtual meeting on 15 April.
The Guardian
Fruity and irresistible: male lemurs' wrist scent seduces females
An irresistible floral scent dabbed on the body may sound like a cliche from a perfume advert, but it appears to play a role in how male ring-tailed lemurs attract a mate.
Researchers in Japan say they have identified the odours males waft at females, and shown the latter’s attention is indeed captured by the pong.
They say these substances could be sex pheromones, chemical signals produced by all members of one sex within a species to affect the behaviour of the opposite sex, helping bag a partner.
If so, it would be the first time sex pheromones have been found in primates.
Scientists confirm dramatic melting of Greenland ice sheet
There was a dramatic melting of Greenland’s ice sheet in the summer of 2019, researchers have confirmed, in a study that reveals the loss was largely down to a persistent zone of high pressure over the region.
The ice sheet melted at a near record rate in 2019, and much faster than the average of previous decades. Figures have suggested that in July alone surface ice declined by 197 gigatonnes – equivalent to about 80 million Olympic swimming pools.
Now experts have examined the level of melting in more detail, revealing what drove it. Crucially, the team note, the high pressure conditions lasted for 63 of the 92 summer days in 2019, compared with an average of just 28 days between 1981 and 2010. A similar situation was seen in 2012, a record bad year for melting of the ice sheet.
Science
How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes
On rounds in a 20-bed intensive care unit (ICU) one recent day, physician Joshua Denson assessed two patients with seizures, many with respiratory failure and others whose kidneys were on a dangerous downhill slide. Days earlier, his rounds had been interrupted as his team tried, and failed, to resuscitate a young woman whose heart had stopped. All shared one thing, says Denson, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Tulane University School of Medicine. “They are all COVID positive.”
As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.
“[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, who is leading multiple efforts to gather clinical data on COVID-19. “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”
Gravitational waves reveal unprecedented collision of heavy and light black holes
Researchers with the world’s gravitational wave detectors said today they had picked up vibrations from a cosmic collision that harmonized with the opening notes of an Elvis Presley hit. The source was the most exotic merger of two black holes detected yet—a pair in which one weighed more than three times as much as the other. Because of the stark mass imbalance, the collision generated gravitational waves at multiple frequencies, in a harmony Elvis fans would recognize. The chord also confirms a prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity, or general relativity.
Such mismatched mass events could help theorists figure out how pairs of black holes form in the first place. “Anything that seems to be at the edge of our predictions is most interesting,” says Chris Belczynski, a gravitational theorist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who was not involved in the observation. But the one event is “not quite in the regime where you can tell the different formation [routes] apart.”
Physicists first detected gravitational waves in 2015, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of detectors in Washington and Louisiana, spotted two black holes spiraling into each other, generating infinitesimal ripples in spacetime. Two years later, the Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, joined the hunt, and by August 2017, the detectors had bagged a total of 10 black hole mergers
The New York Times
This Might Be the Longest Creature Ever Seen in the Ocean
Nerida Wilson couldn’t take her eyes off the computer screen. Some 2,000 feet beneath the research boat she was aboard, a creature drifted past in the shape of a vast, galactic swirl. By her team’s estimates, it was 150 feet long.
“It looked like an incredible U.F.O.,” said Dr. Wilson, a senior research scientist at the Western Australian Museum.
She and her colleagues documented this organism with the help of SuBastian, a remotely piloted deep-sea robot, during a March expedition on the Falkor, a research vessel operated by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Their mission was to understand what lives in the deep waters off Australia’s western edge. And the coiling stringy mass they had just found was a siphonophore, the first spotted off Western Australia and potentially the longest organism in the sea.
Popular Science
A new ’Oumuamua theory could mean many more interstellar visitors are headed our way
'Oumuamua shattered astronomers’ expectations when it streaked past the sun in 2017. It was skinny, not round. It looked rather dry with ruddy hue—nothing like the ice ball it should have resembled. To make matters worse, it jetted away as if it were moving under its own power. The first interstellar object to be spotted in our solar system exploded researchers’ assumptions about what sorts of bodies are most likely to escape their host star, and how. Three years later, they’re still trying to figure out where they went wrong.
New results based on computer simulations, which appeared Monday in Nature Astronomy, aim to tie up all 'Oumuamua’s mysteries into one explanatory package: once upon a time, a distant star shredded a comet or planetary fragment, spraying thin comet-asteroid hybrids out into the void. If the theory proves accurate, then 'Oumuamua represents just one of a countless number of such objects, ejected by similar stars across the galaxy.
“We are confident that this scenario we proposed is common,” says Yun Zhang, a researcher at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France and co-author of the work. “We expect we will see more things like 'Oumuamua in the future.”
Live Science
Wuhan lab says there's no way coronavirus originated there. Here's the science.
An unprecedented amount of research has been focused solely on understanding the novel coronavirus that has taken nearly 150,000 lives across the globe. And while scientists have gotten to know some of the most intimate details of the virus called SARS-CoV-2, one question has evaded any definitive answers — Where did the virus come from?
Live Science contacted several experts, and the reality, they said, is that we may never know where this deadly coronavirus originated. Among the theories circulating: That SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally, after passing from bats to a secondary animal and then to humans; that it was deliberately engineered and then accidentally released by humans; or that researchers were studying a naturally-occurring virus that subsequently escaped from a high-security biolab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. The head of the lab at WIV, for her part, has emphatically denied any link to the institute.
Just today (April 18), the vice director of WIV Zhiming Yuan CGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster, said "there is no way this virus came from us," NBC News reported. "We have a strict regulatory regime and code of conduct of research, so we are confident."
Was the 'Nazareth Inscription' a Roman response to Jesus' empty tomb? New evidence says it wasn't.
A stern warning carved in Greek on an ancient marble slab declared that a Roman emperor would pass harsh judgement on grave robbers, promising a severe punishment for their crimes. This artifact, known as the Nazareth Inscription, was long suspected to be an official Roman response to the disappearance of Jesus' body from its tomb.
However, new evidence suggests otherwise.
Scientists conducted the first isotope analysis of marble sampled from the slab, describing the results in a new study. Their findings offer fresh clues about where the carved edict came from and call into question its relationship to early Christianity.
Gizmodo
Kneeling, Decapitated Skeleton Offers Evidence of Ancient Chinese Sacrificial Custom
Archaeologists in central China have unearthed a decapitated skeleton still resting in its final kneeling position. Such practices were hinted at in ancient Chinese scripts, but this discovery is further proof of this particular sacrificial rite.
The discovery was made at the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, located in China’s Henan province, reports Xinhua, the country’s largest state-run news agency. Archaeologists from the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Jiyuan Municipal Cultural Relics Team have been digging through the site since 2019. To date, they’ve managed to comb through 6,000 square meters (64,600 square feet) at Chaizhuang.
The site dates back to the Shang Dynasty, which ruled from around 1600 BCE to 1046 BCE. The site has yielded evidence of houses, water wells, stoves, roads, and a surprising number of tombs.
The West Is Facing Its Worst Megadrought in at Least 1,200 Years
Nearly 1,000 years ago, a megadrought ravaged the southwestern U.S., swiftly wiping out a thriving indigenous culture and rendering once-arid land unusable. Scientists have long warned that the climate crisis may trigger another megadrought. And according to a new study, that megadrought isn’t just on its way—it’s likely already under way, and it could be worse than anything the region has ever seen.
The research, published in the journal of Science on Tuesday, is based on modern weather observations, 1,200 years of tree-ring data, and dozens of climate models. It is the most up-to-date and comprehensive long-term climate analysis of the region.
The study found that the extreme dry spell could hit a huge region of the West from Oregon and Montana, down through California and New Mexico, and part of northern Mexico. A leading cause of the increasingly dry conditions is the climate crisis. A warmer world creates the conditions for more severe, longer, and more widespread drought.
Mongabay
Ocean deoxygenation could be silently killing coral reefs, scientists say
In March, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef suffered its most widespread bleaching event to date. Sixty percent of the reef underwent moderate to severe bleaching, and some corals may never recover.
The cause of this bleaching event was climate change, which brought unusually warm waters to the Great Barrier Reef in February, and disrupted the delicate, symbiotic relationship between the corals and their life-sustaining algae. In general, when sea temperatures rise, corals become stressed and expel algae from their tissues. Without this algae, the corals turn ghostly white and slowly starve.
But there’s another big threat to coral reef systems, one that could be more serious than sea temperature rise and acidification. According to David Hughes, lead author of a new study published in Nature Climate Change, corals and other organisms living on the Great Barrier Reef could also be suffering from deoxygenation, and this could greatly impede the reef’s recovery.
Rescuing orangutans ‘doesn’t work’ for apes or forests, studies find
Dramatic images of orangutans being rescued from clear-cut forests are ubiquitous on the web and in nature magazines, but new research suggests that rather than being a crucial tool for the conservation of the species, removing these great apes from patches of forest in agricultural landscapes can be harmful to both the animals themselves and the habitats they are taken from.
Researchers found that over a 10-year period, between 2007 and 2017, at least 621 orangutans — and possibly more than 1,800, given known inconsistencies in reporting data — were “rescued” from forest fragments and human-impacted landscapes in Borneo and moved to new locations.
But the data obtained by the team, and reported in the Journal of Biological Diversity, showed that 90% of the 621 individuals were healthy, and 20% were females with infants. This suggests, the authors say, that there were sufficient resources within even these degraded areas for the orangutans to thrive.
Phys.org
On the origin of feces: CoproID reliably predicts sources of ancient poop
The archaeological record is littered with feces, a potential goldmine for insights into ancient health and diet, parasite evolution, and the ecology and evolution of the microbiome. The main problem for researchers is determining whose feces is under examination. A recent study published in the journal PeerJ, led by Maxime Borry and Christina Warinner of Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), presents CoproID: a reliable method of inferring sources of paleofeces.
After thousands of years, the source of a particular piece of feces can be difficult to determine. Distinguishing human and dog feces is particularly difficult: they are similar in size and shape, occur at the same archaeological sites, and have similar compositions. In addition, dogs were on the menu for many ancient societies, and our canine friends have a tendency to scavenge on human feces, thus making simple genetic tests problematic, as such analyses can return DNA from both species.
In order to access the insights contained within paleofeces, the researchers developed coproID (coprolite identification).
10 years after BP spill: Oil drilled deeper; rules relaxed
Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters, where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever.
Industry leaders and government officials say they're determined to prevent a repeat of BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster. It spilled 134 million gallons of oil that fouled beaches from Louisiana to Florida, killed hundreds of thousands of marine animals and devastated the region's tourist economy.
Yet safety rules adopted in the spill's aftermath have been eased as part of … Donald Trump's drive to boost U.S. oil production. And government data reviewed by The Associated Press shows the number of safety inspection visits has declined in recent years, although officials say checks of electronic records, safety systems and individual oil rig components have increased.
Ars Technica
How turtles use temperature to figure out their sex
There's a global pandemic happening on a scale that hasn't been seen in roughly a century. So we decided it would be the perfect time to talk about turtle sex. Not turtles having sex, which is undoubtedly an interesting geometry problem, but rather the process by which turtles develop as male or female.
That process is interesting because it seems, at least from our XY chromosomal perspective, to be a bit haphazard: turtles and many other reptiles determine their sex based on ambient temperature. In elevated temperatures, most of the eggs will develop as female; at lower temperatures, most of the eggs will develop as males. We don't really know how they register the temperature and somehow translate it to a complex program of anatomical development. But a new paper in Science fills in some of our gaps.
Second African locust swarm of the year 20 times bigger than the first
As the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world earlier this year, another even more conspicuous plague was tearing through East Africa: locusts. The voracious little beasts are particularly fond of carbohydrates like grains, a staple of subsistence farmers across the continent. Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted the worst was still to come, and that by June, the size of the swarms could grow by a factor of 500.
And now, at the worst time, a second wave of locusts 20 times bigger than the first has descended on the region, thanks to heavy rains late last month, according to the FAO. The swarms have infiltrated Yemen and firmly established themselves across the Persian Gulf, having laid eggs along 560 miles of Iran's coastline. New swarms are particularly severe in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.
"The timing is really horrendous, because the farmers are just planting, and the seedlings are just coming up now since it's the beginning of the rainy season," says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO. "And it's right at the same time when you have an increasing number of swarms in Kenya and in Ethiopia. There's already pictures and reports of the seedlings getting hammered by the swarms. So basically that's it for the farmers' crops."