Welcome to Overnight News Digest- Saturday Science. Since 2007 the OND has been a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of science 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.
Topics included today:
- How to turn the tables on food waste (11 minutes) with strategies to avoid food waste
- Sustainable transportation
- Is your city a “Sundown Town”?
- Plutonium levels near Los Alamos similar to those detected at Chernobyl in Ukraine
- Toxic glass helps kill bone cancer cells without harming healthy tissue
- Puberty hasn’t changed since the ice age
- Finding your way out of the woods when you’re lost
- Electric batteries could last 20 years
- Discovering the cause of static electricity
- Math for English Majors
- Brain test by Johns Hopkins University
TED Talk
by Dana Gunders
How to turn the tables on food waste
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Get There Green! September 22-29, 2024 (in New York City)
Sustainable Transportation
Get There Green! is a week to promote and celebrate more sustainable modes of transportation. During this week everyone is encouraged to join in a week of climate-action by using a more sustainable mode of transportation for as many trips as they can. These include:
- walking;
- biking;
- taking public transit;
- carpooling;
- driving an electric vehicle; or
- anything else that isn't driving alone in a fossil fuel powered vehicle.
Black Enterprise Daily
by Mitti Hicks
Is your city a Sundown Town?
An interactive map from Tougaloo College gives insight into cities and communities in the United States and whether they’re considered sundown towns.
According to Britannica, sundown in U.S. history is a town that excluded nonwhite people, most frequently African Americans, when the sun set. How people enforced these “rules” ranged anywhere from collective violence, such as public lynchings, discriminatory laws, and open housing discrimination.
The Cooldown
by Kristen Lawrence
New study makes harrowing discovery in soil near birthplace of atomic bomb
A new study has made a troubling discovery about the health of ecosystems near Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was born.
Scientists measured plutonium levels in recreational areas near the nuclear site and found they were similar to those detected at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine.
What's happening?
According to the Guardian, a Northern Arizona University research team discovered "extreme concentrations" of plutonium in the soil, plants, and water near Los Alamos.
Michael Ketterer, a NAU scientist and the study's lead researcher, told the outlet that plutonium concentrations near New Mexico's Acid Canyon — a popular hiking and recreational spot — were some of the highest he'd ever encountered in public spaces in the U.S. throughout his career.
NEW ATLAS
by Michael Irving
Toxic glass kills 99% of bone cancer without harming healthy cells
Scientists have demonstrated a new potential treatment for bone cancer. A bioactive glass laced with a toxic metal was able to kill up to 99% of the cancer without harming healthy cells, and could even help regrow healthy bone after.
Osteosarcoma is the most common form of bone cancer, and treatment normally involves surgery to remove the tumor, followed by chemotherapy or radiation therapy to kill off any remaining cancer cells. Even so, it often recurs at the same site, and when it does the prognosis is usually grim.
NAUTILUS
by Katherine Gammon
Puberty Hasn’t Changed Since the Ice Age
Biological anthropologist April Nowell had been studying the skeletons of Ice Age children for two decades when she began to see her own kids in a new light. They had just hit puberty and her house was suddenly filled with gangly teenagers, who ate voraciously and had to be dragged out of bed most mornings. It made her want to know more about the fascinating changes we undergo between childhood and adulthood—only in her study subjects, most of whom lived thousands or even millions of years ago.
So Nowell conducted one of the first studies of puberty in a population from the Paleolithic period. Often referred to as the Ice Age, the Paleolithic period took place during the early phase of the Stone Age, when humans made tools and weapons of stone. Nowell analyzed the teeth and bones of 13 Paleolithic individuals who died in adolescence around 25,000 years ago, and estimated that for the majority, puberty had begun by 13.5 years of age—only slightly later than most humans today. There was some variability, however, with a few individuals taking several years longer than their peers. Nowell and her colleagues also examined details of the children’s burials and trace DNA. The research was published in the Journal of Human Evolution last week.
Outdoor Guide
by Laura Zbinden
The Genius Technique That'll Help You Find Your Way Out Of The Woods If You're Lost
If you spend time adventuring out in the backcountry, then you've probably thought about how scary it would be to lose your bearings in the woods and end up lost. In fact, getting lost is one of the most common causes of death in the wilderness alongside negative encounters with wildlife and altitude sickness. While getting lost in the woods is deeply frightening and it can be easy to panic, the most important thing to do in this situation is keep yourself calm and stop moving as soon as you realize you've lost your way. This is essential because continuing to walk without a plan can make you more lost and bring you further away from rescuers. Instead, first stop, calm down, and then use the find-me cross method.
Electrec
by Fred Lambert
Your electric car will fall apart before its battery pack does, study finds
A new study of 10,000 electric cars shows that their battery packs should outlast the vehicles themselves.
Geotab, an automotive telematics company, is using its in-depth access to EV data to track battery health.
We reported on its last study in 2019, which showed 2.3% EV battery degradation per year.
5 years later, the company now has a lot more data, and it just released a new study that shows the average degradation per year is actually 1.8%. The company believes that it could translate to EV batteries lasting 20 years:
IFL Science
by Laura Simmons
Thousands Of Years After Discovering Static Electricity We Finally Know How It Works
We have known about the phenomenon of static electricity since at least the time of Aristotle. Aristotle credits fellow philosopher Thales of Miletus, who lived between 640 and 546 BCE, with the discovery that amber picks up pieces of dried grass after it has been rubbed with a cloth.
For a very long time, no real progress was made in finding out what it is, or how it works. Benjamin Franklin made a little headway in the area by rubbing wax and wool together, defining positive charge as the charge acquired by the rubbing wool and negative charge the charge associated with the wax that got rubbed.
While the world certainly appreciates all of Franklin's rubbing, his understanding of the topic involved the exchange of fluids, which is not what's really going on to produce the positive and negative charge. But now, thanks to a team modeling static charge at the nano scale, we finally know what's going on, and why rubbing produces more static electricity than contact or rolling.
ArsTechnica
by Jennifer Ouellette
A handy guide to the universal language for the mathematically perplexed
Galileo once famously described the universe as a great book "written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures." Unfortunately, it's a language that many people outside of math and science simply do not speak, largely because they are flummoxed and/or intimidated by the sheer density of all that strange symbolic notation.
Math teacher extraordinaire Ben Orlin is here to help with his latest book: Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. And just like Orlin's previous outings, it's filled with the author's trademark bad drawings. Bonus: Orlin created a fun personality quiz, which you can take here to find out your mathematical style.
Daily Mail
by Maiya Focht
Brain test by John's Hopkins University challenges YOU to spot the 'T' within 10 seconds
Researchers from Johns Hopkins have come up with a way to test your ability to focus that should take less than 10 seconds.
It doesn't rely on how fast you can add sums in your head or recite history from memory.
Instead, asks you to call on skills you might've developed during Where's Waldo.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the science news of the day. Please share your articles and stories in the comments.