Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck and Rise above the swamp. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Since 2007 the OND has been a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news 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.
Some stories for tonight:
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Engineers enlist AI to help scale up advanced solar cell manufacturing
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LED lights developed from rice husks
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Ultra-rare black hole ancestor detected at the dawn of the universe
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What is the coldest place in the solar system?
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On the hunt for new viruses
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Diverse Microbial Life Forms Existed At Least 3.75 Billion Years Ago, Study Confirms
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Fungi Use Electrical ‘Language’ to Communicate with Each Other: Study
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Peptides on Stardust May Have Provided a Shortcut to Life
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James Webb telescope's MIRI instrument goes super-cold
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If we can farm metal from plants, what else can we learn from life on Earth?
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Artificial whale poop could save the planet — here's how
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Entirely New Immune System Discovered in Bacteria
Science Daily
Engineers enlist AI to help scale up advanced solar cell manufacturing
Perovskite materials could potentially replace silicon to make solar cells that are far thinner, lighter, and cheaper. But turning these materials into a product that can be manufactured competitively has been a long struggle. A new system using machine learning could speed the development of optimized production methods, and help make this next generation of solar power a reality. Perovskites are a group of layered crystalline compounds defined by the configuration of the atoms in their crystal lattice. There are thousands of such possible compounds and many different ways of making them. While most lab-scale development of perovskite materials uses a spin-coating technique, that's not practical for larger-scale manufacturing, so companies and labs around the world have been searching for ways of translating these lab materials into a practical, manufacturable product.
Science Daily
LED lights developed from rice husks
Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year. Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle rice husks to create the first silicon quantum dot (QD) LED light. Their new method transforms agricultural waste into state-of-the-art light-emitting diodes in a low-cost, environmentally friendly way.
Aware of the environmental concerns surrounding the current quantum dots, the researchers set out to find a new method for fabricating quantum dots that has a positive environmental impact. Waste rice husks, it turns out, are an excellent source of high-purity silica (SiO2) and value-added Si powder.
The team used a combination of milling, heat treatments, and chemical etching to process the rice husk silica.
Live Science
Ultra-rare black hole ancestor detected at the dawn of the universe
Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole.
The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn," the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.
Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now. Quasars (short for "quasi-stellar objects") are extremely bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. With masses millions to tens of billions of times greater than that of Earth's sun, these monster black holes suck in everything around them at blinding speed. Gas spiraling into these black holes heats up due to friction, creating a bright glow that's comparable to starlight.
Live Science
What is the coldest place in the solar system?
Space is very, very cold. The baseline temperature of outer space is 2.7 kelvins — minus 454.81 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 270.45 degrees Celsius — meaning it is barely above absolute zero, the point at which molecular motion stops.
But this temperature is not constant throughout the solar system. So-called "empty" space — though it is not actually empty — is far colder than planets, moons or asteroids, for example, because there is (practically) nothing to absorb the energy coming from the sun.
So, not including regular "empty" space, what is the coldest place in the solar system?
[snip]
In 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA robotic spacecraft designed to help scientists better understand conditions on the moon, presented data suggesting that "shadowed craters" at the lunar south pole could be the coldest place in the solar system.
(or Putin’s heart)
Science.org
On the hunt for new viruses.
Supaporn is one of the world’s most accomplished virus hunters. She is known for her work tracking Nipah virus, a batborne pathogen that is less contagious than SARS-CoV-2 but more deadly to humans. She has found bat coronaviruses related to both SARS-CoV, which triggered the epidemic of sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) nearly 2 decades ago, and the virus behind Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). And her quest has gained new importance during the COVID-19 pandemic, which likely originated when a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 and crossed over into humans, perhaps through an intermediate host animal.
She was the first researcher to sequence SARS-CoV-2 outside China—not in an animal, but in an airline passenger—and she is on the trail of its wild relatives. From her base at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Supaporn has made many forays like the one delayed by the elephant. Those outings added precious data points in the hunt for SARS-CoV-2’s origin as she identified bat coronaviruses on the virus’ family tree—some of which may be its closest relatives yet found.
Sci-News
Diverse Microbial Life Forms Existed At Least 3.75 Billion Years Ago, Study Confirms
In 2017, paleontologists found 3.75- to 4.28-billion-year-old microscopic filaments and tubes, which appeared to have been made by iron-loving bacteria, in rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt in Québec, Canada. However, not all scientists agreed that these structures — dating about 300 million years earlier than what is more commonly accepted as the first sign of ancient life — were of biological origin. Now, after extensive further analysis of the Nuvvuagittuq rocks, the paleontologists have discovered a much larger and more complex structure — a stem with parallel branches on one side that is nearly 1 cm long — as well as hundreds of distorted spheres, or ellipsoids, alongside the tubes and filaments. While some of these structures could conceivably have been created through chance chemical reactions, the tree-like stem with parallel branches was most likely biological in origin, as no structure created via chemistry alone has been found like it. The new findings suggest that a variety of microbial life may have existed on primordial Earth, potentially as little as 300 million years after the planet formed. “This discovery implies that only a few hundred million years are needed for life to evolve to an organized level on a primordial habitable planet.”
Sci-News
Fungi Use Electrical ‘Language’ to Communicate with Each Other: Study
Almost all communication within and between multicellular animals involves highly specialized cells called neurons.
These transmit messages from one part of an organism to another via a connected network called a nervous system.
The ‘language’ of the nervous system comprises distinctive patterns of spikes of electrical potential (otherwise known as impulses), which help creatures detect and respond rapidly to what’s going on in their environment.
Despite lacking a nervous system, fungi seem to transmit information using electrical impulses across thread-like filaments called hyphae.
The filaments form a thin web called a mycelium that links fungal colonies within the soil. These networks are remarkably similar to animal nervous systems.
By measuring the frequency and intensity of the impulses, it may be possible to unpick and understand the languages used to communicate within and between organisms across the kingdoms of life.
Using tiny electrodes, Dr. Adamatzky recorded the rhythmic electrical impulses transmitted across the mycelium of four different species of fungi.
Wired
Peptides on Stardust May Have Provided a Shortcut to Life
BILLIONS OF YEARS ago, some unknown location on the sterile, primordial Earth became a cauldron of complex organic molecules from which the first cells emerged. Origin-of-life researchers have proposed countless imaginative ideas about how that occurred and where the necessary raw ingredients came from. Some of the most difficult to account for are proteins, the critical backbones of cellular chemistry, because in nature today they are made exclusively by living cells. How did the first protein form without life to make it?
Scientists have mostly looked for clues on Earth. Yet a new discovery suggests that the answer could be found beyond the sky, inside dark interstellar clouds.
Last month in Nature Astronomy, a group of astrobiologists showed that peptides, the molecular subunits of proteins, can spontaneously form on the solid, frozen particles of cosmic dust drifting through the universe. Those peptides could in theory have traveled inside comets and meteorites to the young Earth—and to other worlds—to become some of the starting materials for life.
BBC
James Webb telescope's MIRI instrument goes super-cold
It is perhaps the very definition of cool. The Mid-Infrared Instrument on the James Webb Space telescope is now at its super-low operating temperature.
The UK-assembled instrument has reached a decidedly chilly -267C, or just six degrees above "absolute zero".
This unimaginably low temperature is not far short of the point where all atoms are supposed to stop jiggling.
MIRI's frigid status will allow the Webb observatory to see the distant Universe in unprecedented detail.
The temperature milestone, confirmed by the US space agency Nasa on Wednesday, was hailed by the instrument's British co-principal investigator, Prof Gillian Wright.
"The cooldown process has been a validation of our thermal design," she told BBC News.
The Guardian
If we can farm metal from plants, what else can we learn from life on Earth?
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with researchers in northern Greece who are farming metal. In a remote, beautiful field, high in the Pindus mountains in Epirus, they are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as “hyperaccumulators”: plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life. They do this by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems, where it can be harvested like any other crop. As well as providing a source for rare metals – in this case nickel, although hyperaccumulators have been found for zinc, aluminium, cadmium and many other metals, including gold – these plants actively benefit the earth by remediating the soil, making it suitable for growing other crops, and by sequestering carbon in their roots. One day, they might supplant more destructive and polluting forms of mining.
Deutsche Welle (older story)
Artificial whale poop could save the planet — here's how
We've known that whale feces is good for marine life for more than a decade. In 2010, German whale scientist Victor Smetacek discovered that whale poop is like agricultural dung, a fertilizer. Whale poop is loaded with iron, a nutrient that is vital for plant growth.
Before Smetacek's discovery, scientists had thought that whales were mere predators — that they ate between 10 and 20 tons of fish per day and then just pooped.
But something didn't add up. Tens of thousands of whales have been wiped out by commercial whalingover the centuries and yet fewer whales have not necessarily meant more fish — in fact, researchers say the opposite is true.
Smetacek's research showed that while whales eat tons of fish, their iron-filled feces supports other ocean organisms. It is a circle of life.
Whales feed on fish, krill or squid. And when they excrete, they release nutrients that act as a fertilizer. The nutrients encourage growth and provide food for other organisms at the surface of the seabed.
Those organisms include some of the smallest living creatures, known as phytoplankton.
SciTechDaily
Entirely New Immune System Discovered in Bacteria
Deep inside our body a continuous arms race is taking place. On the one hand, viruses keep searching for new ways to penetrate our cells, and on the other hand, our body keeps coming up with better defense mechanisms to eliminate these viruses. This is how sickness and health are usually kept in balance. The same arms race is waged between bacteria and their pathogenic ‘invaders’: viruses and plasmids.
In an article published in the scientific journal Cell, PhD candidate Bel Koopal from Daan Swarts’ research group describes a new defense mechanism in this arms race. The scientists demonstrate that a novel type of bacterial ‘Argonaute proteins’, after detecting the invading DNA, deliberately break down all molecules with the eloquent name nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+).
The NAD+ molecule has a crucial function in the metabolism of cells and keeps the proverbial engine running allowing for the continued existence of a cell. “Without NAD+, the cell will eventually die,” Swarts explains. “This might sound contradictory, but it is exactly what is meant to happen. By letting the infected cell die, the invader cannot propagate or spread to neighboring bacteria. The bacterium cell is ‘sacrificed’ in order to save other, healthy cells.”