By analyzing fairy tales as an evolutionary process, researchers discovered that Holocene era humans created some of the fairy tales still heard today. Which stories we tell now will be around 6,000 years in the future and how much of our truths will they reveal? A creation myth for the Great Pacific Plastic Patch? Our discovery of the photosynthesis secret sauce? The good old days when atmospheric carbon dioxide was less than 400 ppm? This week’s science news includes all of these topics plus a new mathematical model of nature to inform robot design, the filth found in boozy mouths, a story told by ichnology, how birds sense earth’s magnetic field, and a 3D map of the Milky Way.
Sometimes the stories we tell are fictions bouncing off true facts. Last week’s report that California detectives identified the Golden State killer by comparing crime scene DNA with ancestry data “like that held by 23 and Me and Ancestry.com” triggered a tsunami of speculation. Here are the critical words: like that. Despite all the wailing about losing our genetic privacy, the ancestry data used was not from private sources like 23 and Me. It originated with the open source genealogy website GEDmatch. Their privacy policy clearly states that the genetic information users share is publicly available — that’s the whole point. GEDmatch allows people to voluntarily upload their ancestry genetic data to find other relatives.
GEDmatch exists to provide DNA and genealogy tools for comparison and research purposes . . . by its very nature, requires the sharing of information. Because of that, users participating in this site should expect that their information will be shared with other users [...]
We take steps to prevent your genealogy information from being available to the casual web surfer or to the search engines (e.g. Google). However, we cannot guarantee that your information will never be accessed by unintended means. If you require absolute security, please do not upload your data to GEDmatch.
Science daily — Why a robot can't yet outjump a flea
When it comes to things that are ultrafast and lightweight, robots can't hold a candle to the fastest-jumping insects and other small-but-powerful creatures.
New research could help explain why nature still beats robots, and describes how machines might take the lead.
Take the smashing mantis shrimp, a small crustacean not much bigger than a thumb. Its hammer-like mouthparts can repeatedly deliver 69-mile-per-hour wallops more than 100 times faster than the blink of an eye to break open hard snail shells.
Or the unassuming trap-jaw ant: In a zero-to-60 matchup, even the fastest dragster would have little chance against its snapping mandibles, which reach speeds of more than 140 miles per hour in less than a millisecond to nab their prey.
In a study to appear April 27 in the journal Science, researchers describe a new mathematical model that could help explain how these and other tiny organisms generate their powerful strikes, chomps, jumps and punches. The model could also suggest ways to design small, nature-inspired robots that come closer to their biological counterparts in terms of power or speed.
science news — Footprints prove humans hunted giant sloths during the Ice Age
Genome Web — The Mouths of Heavy Drinkers Are Disgusting
Do you drink a lot? Chances are that you have an undesirable mix of bacteria infesting your mouth.
In a study published this week in Microbiome, researchers assess the impact of alcohol use on the oral microbiome. Looking at more than 1,000 US adults, they amplified, and sequenced bacterial 16S rRNA genes from oral wash samples. Testing the association of the level of alcohol drinking and the type of alcohol with overall microbial composition and individual taxon abundance, they find that the diversity of oral microbiota and overall bacterial profiles were different between heavy drinkers and teetotalers.
The concentration of some good bacteria was less abundant in heavy drinkers, they say, while some nasty bacteria were more prevalent in the mouths of high consumers of alcohol. It is unclear why alcohol would have these effects.
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 and Bésame.
OND is a regular series on Daily Kos, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
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UCF Today — Professor Invents Way to Trigger Artificial Photosynthesis to Clean Air, Produce Energy
“This work is a breakthrough,” said UCF Assistant Professor Fernando Uribe-Romo. “Tailoring materials that will absorb a specific color of light is very difficult from the scientific point of view, but from the societal point of view we are contributing to the development of a technology that can help reduce greenhouse gases.”
The findings of his research are published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A .
Uribe-Romo and his team of students created a way to trigger a chemical reaction in a synthetic material called metal–organic frameworks (MOF) that breaks down carbon dioxide into harmless organic materials. Think of it as an artificial photosynthesis process similar to the way plants convert carbon dioxide (CO2) and sunlight into food. But instead of producing food, Uribe-Romo’s method produces solar fuel.
independent — World's first ocean plastic-cleaning machine set to tackle Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Scientists are preparing to launch the world's first machine to clean up the planet's largest mass of ocean plastic.
The system, originally dreamed up by a teenager, will be shipped out this summer to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California, and which contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.
It will be the first ever attempt to tackle the patch since it was discovered in 1997.
The experts believe the machine should be able to collect half of the detritus in the patch – about 40,000 metric tons – within five years.
nature — Billion-star map of Milky Way set to transform astronomy
...the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission published its first fully 3D map of the Milky Way.
The data haul includes the positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars, and the distance, colours, velocities and directions of motion of about 1.3 billion of them. Together they form an unprecedented live movie of the sky, covering a volume of space 1,000 larger than previous surveys have (see ‘Gaia’s gold’). “In my professional opinion, this is crazy awesome,” says Megan Bedell of the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, one of the many astronomers who will conduct studies based on the data set. “I think the whole community is eager to dive in.”
Within hours of the catalogue going online, 3,000 users from around the world had already started downloading the data, ESA said in a tweet.
“We’re very curious to see what the community will do with it,” says Anthony Brown, an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands….
protein in bird eyes detects earth magnetic field
Two new studies have shown that sunlight transforms oil on the ocean surface more significantly and quickly than previously thought. The phenomenon considerably limits the effectiveness of chemical dispersants, which are during oil spills to break up floating oil and reduce the amount of oil that reaches coastlines.
A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) found that sunlight chemically alters crude oil floating on the sea surface within hours or days. In a follow-up study the team reported that sunlight changes oil into different compounds that dispersants cannot easily break up. The results of these two studies could affect how responders decide when, where, and how to use dispersants.
thinking big — earth biogenome project
science daily — City fish evolve different body forms than country fish
A new study examining the effects of urbanization on the evolution of fish body shape produced both expected and surprising results: One fish species became more sleek in response to urbanization, while another species became deeper bodied in urban areas. [...]
Generally, urbanization produces conditions that make water in streams flow more variably and more quickly during rain storms. So NC State biologists hypothesized that fish would quickly evolve a body shape that improves swimming efficiency in response to changes in stream water velocity caused by urbanization.
"We wanted to test rapid body shape evolution in western and central North Carolina stream fish in response to urbanization," said Brian Langerhans, associate professor of biology at NC State and senior author of a paper describing the research. "While some species cannot handle the altered conditions and have disappeared or reduced in abundance, some remaining species may rapidly evolve adaptive trait changes to contend with the human-induced changes in their environment."
Scientific American — We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2
On Tuesday, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded its first-ever carbon dioxide reading in excess of 410 parts per million (it was 410.28 ppm in case you want the full deal). Carbon dioxide hasn’t reached that height in millions of years. It’s a new atmosphere that humanity will have to contend with, one that’s trapping more heat and causing the climate to change at a quickening rate.
In what’s become a spring tradition like Passover and Easter, carbon dioxide has set a record high each year since measurements began. It stood at 280 ppm when record keeping began at Mauna Loa in 1958. In 2013, it passed 400 ppm. Just four years later, the 400 ppm mark is no longer a novelty. It’s the norm.
nature’s hidden design feature
science mag — Some fairy tales may be 6000 years old
A new study, which treats [Western fairy tales] like an evolving species, finds that some may have originated as long as 6000 years ago.
The basis for the new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, is a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from different Indo-European cultures known as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which was compiled in 2004 . They limited their analysis to tales that contained magic and supernatural elements because this category contained nearly all the famous tales people are familiar with. This narrowed the sample size to 275 stories, including classics such as Hansel and Gretel and Beauty and the Beast. [...]
Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.
This approach allowed the researchers to trace certain tales, such as The Smith and the Devil, which tells the story of a blacksmith who makes a deal with the devil in exchange for unmatched smithing prowess, back thousands of years—all the way to the Proto-Indo-European people. If the analysis is correct, it would mean the oldest fairy tales still in circulation today are between 2500 and 6000 years old. Other stories seem to be much younger, appearing for the first time in more modern branches of the language tree.
icymi — baby tapirs have googly eyes