The world’s oldest known asshole (no not the giant bubble ejected by Uranus), infinite visions held in black holes, healing ozone hole, and other, unholy science news reminds us that other stuff continues even during an attention-seizing pandemic, such as the world’s highest mouse.
Overnight News Digest Science saturday reports all the news tonight’s editor can handle reading without running into the forest to hide in a hollow redwood tree. |
Important caveat #NotAllIntroducedSpecies restore missing ecosystem functions.
Invasive herbivore mammals seem to restore functions missing in some food webs and ecosystems since the Pleistocene era. [...]
Conventional wisdom holds that these animals are causing new, and potentially damaging, impacts to beleaguered ecosystems. But a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that the lifestyles of these and other exotic fauna may be restoring the ecological functions of species lost to extinction during the last ice age.
“We found that, amazingly, the world is more similar to the pre-extinction past when introduced species are included,” said Erick Lundgren, an ecologist at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and the study’s lead author.
Back in 1986, the ice giant world got what remains its only visitor from Earth — Voyager 2, which is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth, but at that time flew a mere 50,600 miles above Uranus’s cloudy skies. As it passed, Voyager 2 heard an odd magnetic whisper, a signal so ephemeral that it went unnoticed.
More than three decades later, scientists were taking a deep dive into the venerable spacecraft’s data pool, hoping to find scientific mysteries that could help support a return mission to Uranus and its ice giant sibling, Neptune. They unearthed that magnetic hiccup, and realized it represented the detection of a mass of electrically excited gas with a width 10 times Earth’s circumference.
This ginormous bubble was a jettisoned part of Uranus’s atmosphere. Although only one was spotted, other gassy missiles may also be launched every 17 hours, the time it takes Uranus to complete one rotation.
This process is draining the planet’s atmosphere, but scientists aren’t anticipating a vanishing act.
“I don’t understand why there is not more due diligence from these companies before these technologies are released,” said Ravi Shroff, a professor of statistics at New York University who explores bias and discrimination in new technologies. “I don’t understand why we keep seeing these problems.”
With an iPhone, you can dictate a text message. Put Amazon’s Alexa on your coffee table, and you can request a song from across the room.
But these devices may understand some voices better than others. Speech recognition systems from five of the world’s biggest tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft — make far fewer errors with users who are white than with users who are black, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The systems misidentified words about 19 percent of the time with white people. With black people, mistakes jumped to 35 percent. About 2 percent of audio snippets from white people were considered unreadable by these systems, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at Stanford University. That rose to 20 percent with black people.
It's become an all-too-common tale: An introduced insect takes hold in a new home and then spreads, wreaking havoc with ecosystems and economies. Take, for instance, the emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle first spotted in North America in 2002; researchers estimate it has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees and caused more than $10 billion in damage.
Now, in a bid to prevent such catastrophes—and get an early warning of which exotic pests are likely to cause trouble—researchers from the United States, Europe, and China are trying a new approach: planting “sentinel trees” from their own regions in distant nations, and then observing which insects attack. The findings should help authorities more quickly recognize and snuff out threatening introduced insects if they show up in the trees' native countries. Sentinel trees are “the new frontier” in fighting forest pests, says entomologist Jiri Hulcr at the University of Florida.
An unfortunate coincidence fueled conspiracy theorists, says Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is “in very close proximity to” the seafood market, and has conducted research on viruses, including coronaviruses, found in bats that have potential to cause disease in people. “That led people to think that, oh, it escaped and went down the sewers, or somebody walked out of their lab and went over to the market or something,” Garry says.
Meeting via Slack and other virtual portals, the researchers analyzed the virus’s genetic makeup, or RNA sequence, for clues about its origin.
It was clear “almost overnight” that the virus wasn’t human-made, Andersen says. Anyone hoping to create a virus would need to work with already known viruses and engineer them to have desired properties.
But the SARS-CoV-2 virus has components that differ from those of previously known viruses, so they had to come from an unknown virus or viruses in nature. “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone,” Andersen and colleagues write in the study.
click ->play<- for tonight’s saturday science mood music
The hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica is continuing to recover and it is leading to changes in atmospheric circulation – the flow of air over Earth’s surface that causes winds.
Using data from satellite observations and climate simulations, Antara Banerjee at the University of Colorado Boulder and her colleagues modelled changing wind patterns related to the layer’s recovery. Its healing is largely thanks to the Montreal Protocol agreed internationally in 1987, which banned the production of ozone-depleting substances.
Before 2000, a belt of air currents called the mid-latitude jet stream in the southern hemisphere had been gradually shifting towards the South Pole. Another tropical jet stream called the Hadley cell, responsible for trade winds, tropical rain-belts, hurricanes and subtropical deserts, had been getting wider.
Banerjee and her team found that both of these trends stopped and began to reverse slightly in 2000. This change couldn’t be explained by random fluctuations in climate, and Banerjee says they are a direct effect of the recovering ozone layer.
👇🏼 oldest asshole 👇🏼
“One major difference with a grain of rice is that Ikaria had a large and small end,” says palaeobiologist Scott Evans. “This may seem trivial but that means it had a distinct front and back end, which is the kind of organisation that leads to the variety of things with heads and tails that are around today.”
It might not show much of a family resemblance but fossil hunters say a newly discovered creature, that looks like a teardrop-shaped jellybean and is about half the size of a grain of rice, is an early relative of humans and a vast array of other animals.
The team discovered the fossils in rocks in the outback of South Australia that are thought to be at least 555m years old.
The researchers say the diminutive creatures are one of the earliest examples of a bilateral organism – animals with features including a front and a back, a plane of symmetry that results in a left and a right side, and often a gut that opens at each end. Humans, pigs, spiders and butterflies are all bilaterians, but creatures such as jellyfish are not.
Nearly half of more than 2,000 deer ticks collected last year for a new study in Connecticut were infected with Lyme disease.
Of 2,068 deer ticks tested at the Center for Vector Biology and Zoonotic Diseases at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, Connecticut, 46 percent carry the Lyme disease pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi.
About 13 percent also carried the human disease-causing pathogen Babesia microti, which causes babesia, a life-threatening infection of the red blood cells in humans.
Squids communicate in the pitch-black depths of the ocean with displays of speckled light.
Benjamin Burford at Stanford University in Pacific Grove, California, and Bruce Robison at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, analysed hours of footage of roving groups of gregarious Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), captured by a camera mounted on a remotely operated vehicle navigating off California’s coast. In the ocean’s dark reaches, these squid 'flashed' or 'flickered' when in the presence of others of their kind. To do so, the animals turned on internal bioluminescent organs that made their entire bodies glow — except where the glow was covered by overlying patterns of pigmentation.
But when squids pursued prey, they dimmed themselves. Then, just before striking, they suddenly flashed a splotchy pattern by lighting up organs beneath intermittently pigmented parts of their body.
The authors suggest that the displays help individual squid to avoid bumping into one another while swimming together, and might allow them to cooperate rather than compete for prey.
Science Quote of the Week
“so many questions without answers. so many experts with differing views.
a brutal realisation that things don’t work the way we always thought.
seeing infinite shades of grey instead of that comforting black and white world.
sound familiar? welcome to the mind of a scientist.”
Science also has something to teach us about living with uncertainty, argues biochemist Darren Saunders. (The Conversation)
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listen to scientists*
* ...when they speak about their particular subjects. However, don’t listen to a libertarian technologist when he advises on epidemiology.
breathe