Welcome to Overnight News Digest — Saturday Science Edition. Here are the topics in today’s diary:
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Neuroscience and a Dose of Emotional Intelligence Reveal a Simple Trick to Learn More With Less Effort
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New Shazam for Birds Will Identify That Chirping for You
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Dinosaurs Nested in the High Arctic
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Comet strike may have sparked civilisation shift
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Napping at this time of day has shocking value
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A cave nestled in the Russian mountains could solve an ancient human mystery
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Stephen Hawking's black hole theory proved right
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The biggest problem with eating insects isn’t the “ew” factor
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Alzheimer’s Disease and Brain Injury Disrupt Microtubular Meshes to Trigger Nerve Cell Death
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Planting trees "doesn't make any sense" in the fight against climate change say experts
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A dry California creek bed looked like a wildfire risk. Then the beavers went to work
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Three projects for citizen scientists
Details and links to sources below the fold.
SACBEE.COM
by Isabella Bloom
A dry California creek bed looked like a wildfire risk. Then the beavers went to work
Seven years ago, ecologists looking to restore a dried-out Placer County floodplain faced a choice: Spend at least $1 million bringing in heavy machines to revive habitat or try a new approach.
They went for the second option, and turned to nature’s original flood manager to do the work — the beaver.
The creek bed, altered by decades of agricultural use, had looked like a wildfire risk. It came back to life far faster than anticipated after the beavers began building dams that retained water longer.
DEZEEN
by Marcus Fair
www.dezeen.com/...
Planting trees "doesn't make any sense" in the fight against climate change say experts
Afforestation is an unreliable way of sequestering atmospheric carbon, according to several key figures interviewed by Dezeen as part of our carbon revolution series.
While trees capture huge amounts of carbon, they need to remain growing for a long time to be effective carbon stores, experts say.
In addition, the timber they produce needs to be put to long-term use to prevent the carbon it contains from quickly going back into the atmosphere when it rots or is burned.
"Planting trees is probably the most difficult potential method from a measurement and verification perspective," said Paul Gambrill, CEO of carbon marketplace Nori in an interview with Dezeen.
GENE ENGINEERING AND BIOTECHNOLOGY NEWS
Alzheimer’s Disease and Brain Injury Disrupt Microtubular Meshes to Trigger Nerve Cell Death
Wounds heal by activating cell division in surrounding tissues that replace lost cells and allow the wound to close. Neural stem cells in mammals have a limited capacity for repair after an injury, and molecular triggers that reactivate their ability to divide are largely unknown.
When neurons attempt to divide, they tend to die. This occurs upon brain injury and in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, making it important to understand the molecular pathways that coax neurons to divide and eventually target these to prevent undesirable neuronal division.
New research led by scientists at the University of Plymouth, U.K., has uncovered a molecular pathway that sheds light on how cell division is triggered in neurons.
FuturePerfect
The biggest problem with eating insects isn’t the “ew” factor
by Dylan Matthews
Some cultures, encompassing some 2 billion people around the world, already eat bugs. Mopane worms and shea caterpillars are routinely farmed and eaten (the former in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the latter in Burkina Faso and Mali), as is the African edible bush-cricket, which is commonly consumed in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Madagascar. Wild insect gathering for food for either subsistence or sale is common throughout East Asia and the Pacific, from India to Indonesia to Japan to Australia. In the northwest Amazon region of South America, somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of total protein comes from insects.
But proponents of insect farming are looking to further industrialize the practice to raise more insects as feed for farmed animals as well as for human consumption — mostly in Europe and the US, where the practice is less common. In May, a European Union panel voted to approve the sale of an insect-based food for humans for the first time in the union’s history. The French company Agronutris had put in the application to sell dried yellow mealworm, a maggot-like organism “said to taste a lot like peanuts” when dried; with EU regulatory approval, the company hopes to sell the mealworm as a flour-like powder.
BigThink.com
Stephen Hawking's black hole theory proved right
by Paul Ratner
The late Stephen Hawking's black hole area theorem is correct, a new study shows. Scientists used gravitational waves to prove the famous British physicist's idea, which may lead to uncovering more underlying laws of the universe.
The theorem, elaborated by Hawking in 1971, uses Einstein's theory of general relativity as a springboard to conclude that it is not possible for the surface area of a black hole to become smaller over time. The theorem parallels the second law of thermodynamics that says the entropy (disorder) of a closed system can't decrease over time. Since the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, both must continue to increase.
Inverse
A cave nestled in the Russian mountains could solve an ancient human mystery
by Tara Yarlagadda
In a remote cave nestled in the Altai Mountains of southern Russia, scientists are uncovering the secrets of ancient human life. Here in this cave, ancient peoples like the Neanderthals found shelter from the bitter chill of the Ice Age.
According to new research, Neanderthals also shared this cave with another, little-known group of ancient humans: the Denisovans. Furthermore, the Denisovans were likely there first.
Ladders
Napping at this time of day has shocking value
by Kaitlyn McInnis
Scientific studies consistently hail napping as an undervalued resource. The problem: They don’t always leave us with step-by-step instructions on how and when to nap.
So we reached out to a number of sleep experts to get their insights on exactly how to foster peak mental performance — and it’s going to make you want to crawl back into bed immediately.
Older adults who engage in moderate naps after lunch report better cognition than those who forgo napping altogether, according to one study. And those who don’t recover their sleep debt by way of afternoon napping often experience repetitive negative thinking, according to research.
In fact, older adults who engage in moderate naps after lunch report better cognition than those who forgo napping altogether, according to a 2016 study in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.
Phys.org
Comet strike may have sparked civilisation shift
by University of Edinburgh
A cluster of comet fragments believed to have hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago may have shaped the origins of human civilisation, research suggests.
Possibly the most devastating cosmic impact since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it appears to coincide with major shifts in how human societies organized themselves, researchers say.
Their analysis backs up claims that an impact occurred prior to start of the Neolithic period in the so-called Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia.
During that time, humans in the region—which spans parts of modern-day countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon—switched from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to ones centered on agriculture and the creation of permanent settlements.
Smithsonian Magazine
Dinosaurs Nested in the High Arctic
by Riley Black
Even during the Cretaceous, roughly 70 million years ago, the High Arctic saw months of darkness. That’s offered paleontologists a longstanding puzzle. Various dinosaur species—from tyrannosaurs to armored dinosaurs—have been found in rocks from around this age along Alaska’s North Slope and certainly had to contend with the long winter nights. Did these dinosaurs migrate with the seasons, paleontologists have wondered, or did they stay in place through the harshest season?
The answer has come from a surprising source. During decades of explorations and excavations in Alaska’s Prince Creek Formation, paleontologists have slowly gathered a collection of bones from very young dinosaurs—and not just one species, but many. Described in Current Biology today, these tiny fossils speak volumes about the dinosaurs of the High Arctic. Instead of migrating to warmer regions to raise their young, polar dinosaurs stayed in ancient Alaska year-round and raised their offspring there.
Gizmodo
New Shazam for Birds Will Identify That Chirping for You
by Ryan F. Mandelbaum
I was recently creeping through a clearing of downed trees in a wooded Brooklyn park with my iPhone in hand. Birds were singing everywhere, but through the din, I was recording a peculiar song: It was almost certainly the slurred, metallic whistle of a Bicknell’s thrush. Though a plain-looking, brown-speckled bird, this rare thrush is a prime target of New York City’s birdwatchers—but its identification poses a challenge. Unless you’re holding it in your hand, you can’t reliably identify it based on its appearance alone, and its song differs only slightly from its doppelganger, the more common gray-cheeked thrush.
I left the copse with only a muddied recording of the experience, one littered with background noise and the chirping of other birds. But when I uploaded the file to the Merlin Bird ID app’s new Sound ID feature, it correctly named every bird in the recording, including cardinals and warblers, and it could discern between the faint whistle of the Bicknell’s and gray-cheeked thrushes that were both on the recording.
Inc.com
Neuroscience and a Dose of Emotional Intelligence Reveal a Simple Trick to Learn More With Less Effort
by Jeff Haden
A producer for a television business show called and asked if I was available. He described the theme of the segment and asked if I had any ideas. I offered some possibilities.
"That sounds great," he said. "We're live in 30 minutes. And I need you to say exactly what you just said."
"Ugh," I thought. I'm not great at repeating exactly what I just said. So I started rehearsing.
Zooniverse
Citizen Science Projects
Imagine being in the room with the early nineteenth century’s ‘foremost man of science,’ Sir Humphry Davy. Around you are the remnants of experiments in the biological, geological, chemical, and electrical sciences – all fields coming into their own at this moment. On the table in front of you, a notebook contains developing theories that will come to define the ways we understand the physical world – but there are also private notes, fragments of poetry, and sketches that give you insights into the private workings of this exceptional mind.
We need your help bringing Sir Humphry Davy’s notebooks – some 75 of them – back to light. Many of the pages of Davy's notebooks have never been transcribed before. We know that they contain poetry, experiments, philosophical speculations, and more. Yet, to a large extent, we don't know what these notebooks contain, and what studying them might reveal. We need your help to explore the fascinating - and sometimes surprising - connections between poetry and science, and help us to better understand Davy's life, work, and ideas.
We’re looking for volunteers to work alongside researchers from Lancaster University, University College London, the University of Manchester, and the Royal Institution of Great Britain to digitally preserve these notebooks by producing transcriptions that, after editing, will be published online alongside images of the notebooks on a free-to-access website as part of Lancaster Digital Collections.
By contributing to this project, you will be helping us make these 200-year-old notebooks newly accessible for readers and researchers, driving forward understandings of how poetry and science could co-exist today.
Start transcribing today at www.zooniverse.org/projects/humphrydavy/davy-notebooks-project
Plastic Litter Project: Coastal Litter Mapping
In a relatively short period of time, the attributes of plastic initially perceived to be positive characteristics - convenience and longevity - have shifted to pose a widespread environmental problem. Within the marine context, millions of tonnes of plastic enter our oceans annually. The economic cost to marine natural capital alone is estimated to range from $3300–$33,000 per ton of plastic per year.
The Marine Remote Sensing Group (MRSG) is using drones to acquire images from a series of coastal zones with high-resolution optical sensors. Using the power of 'deep learning', the team trains AI algorithms that can map and quantify the marine litter washing onto beaches.
In their project, volunteers help identify images containing marine litter. You will help them create a dataset for their deep learning algorithms and help their team to map marine litter accumulation. The more images you classify, the better the machine learning algorithms get!
Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/moutzouris/plastic-litter-project-coastal-litter-mapping.
NOTE: This project is also available on the Zooniverse mobile app! You can download the Zooniverse app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. You'll find the Plastic Litter Project in the 'Climate' section.
HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service
Get your sea legs ready! Join us on an historical journey into the medical side of seafaring....
Beginning in 1826 on a worn out, leaking wooden warship, seafarers of all nations entering the busy port of London were treated at the Greenwich Dreadnought Seamen's Hospital for over a hundred and fifty years. What does their combined data tell us about the health of the seafaring community, the risks they faced and how medical theory applied at sea?
Royal Museums Greenwich is setting sail on a project to transcribe the hospital admission registers, to provide answers to these questions and many more. When completed, the project will provide statistical data on the health of the maritime world, the prevalence of all kinds of medical complaints and show which posed the greatest risks to health at sea. It will also provide an almost unlimited number of case studies on common injuries, their treatments and recovery times. If you enjoy deciphering old handwriting or have an interest in the history of medicine, this project is for you.
Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msalmon/hms-nhs-the-nautical-health-service.
Since 2007, the Overnight News Digest is a nightly, community series chronicling the day’s news and the American dystopia. This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, so please share articles, stories, and tweets with your comments.