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, doomandgloom and FarWestGirl.
Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, JeremyBloom, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, 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. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Archeology/Anthropology
Ancient DNA uncovers unknown Argentina lineage that has persisted for last 8,500 years.
An area called the central Southern Cone in South America, which consists of a large part of Argentina, is known to be one of the last global regions to become inhabited by humans.
Despite research indicating migration into the area over 12,000 years ago, there is currently little DNA research that describes the lineages associated with the area. To remedy this problem, a group of DNA researchers conducted a genome-wide study on ancient individuals from the region. The new research is published in Nature.
Analyzing 10,000 years of DNA
"The peopling of South America likely followed both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Genetic differentiation is detectable in ancient genomic data after 9,000 bp in at least three main clusters: central Andes, tropical/subtropical forest or lowlands (including Amazonia), and central Chile, Patagonia and Pampas. However, current sampling has major gaps. We focus on the poorly sampled central Southern Cone (CSC)—the territory of central and northern Argentina comprising the Andean mountains in the west to the eastern fluvial plains and southern grassland plains," the study authors write.
Stone Age Pacific fishing practices revealed through chemical fingerprints hidden in collagen.
A new collagen fingerprinting tool can help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. Pacific islanders of the late Stone Age, also known as the Neolithic period, were master fishers. Archaeological evidence indicates that these groups caught fish both inshore as well as in open waters.
Now, researchers have found a way to shed light on the types of fish they feasted on and the advanced fishing techniques used to capture them. The new Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) tool can detect the unique chemical fingerprint hidden within collagen, a structural protein that makes up most of bone mass.
The researchers tested 131 archaeological bones and accurately identified three tuna and five shark varieties. The findings are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Humans have remote touch 'seventh sense' like sandpipers, research shows.
A study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London has found that humans have a form of remote touch, or the ability to sense objects without direct contact, a sense that some animals have.
Human touch is typically understood as a proximal sense, limited to what we physically touch. However, recent findings in animal sensory systems have challenged this view. Certain shorebirds, such as sandpipers and plovers, use a form of "remote touch" to detect prey hidden beneath the sand. Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.
The study in IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) investigated whether humans share a similar capability. Participants moved their fingers gently through sand to locate a hidden cube before physically touching it. Remarkably, the results revealed a comparable ability to that seen in shorebirds, despite humans lacking the specialized beak structures that enable this sense in birds.
The long, deep dig: Collaboration unearths ancient city of Sardis.
From the Greeks and the Romans to the Ottoman empire, the history of Sardis, Turkey, is one of persistent turnover. But its archaeological investigation has been remarkably consistent. Since 1958, the ancient city has been continuously excavated by one of the longest-running institutional projects, the Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis.
"It's really important that it has institutional continuity," said Benjamin Anderson, associate professor of history of art and visual studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. "Many of us know and have been mentored by colleagues of the previous generation of excavators. As a result, it's one of the few long-term archaeological projects in the region that has generated a critical mass of data."
For the last several years, Anderson has been documenting the walls and structures of the city's acropolis, which was a major part of the settlement in the Byzantine period, following Roman times.
"This is a city that shows up in lots of ancient historical sources," he said. "But now, just in the last 75 years or so, we have the possibility of telling that story, also, through what the project has found archaeologically."
Air-filled anomalies in Menkaure Pyramid could indicate a new entrance.
Researchers from Cairo University and TUM, as part of the ScanPyramids research project, have identified two hidden air-filled anomalies in the third-largest pyramid of Giza. The hypothesis of a possible entrance at this point on the eastern side of the Menkaure Pyramid had existed for some time.
The investigations using radar, ultrasound and ERT prove the existence of two air-filled voids underneath the eastern facade, providing initial evidence to support the hypothesis. The work is published in the journal NDT & E International.
For some time now, the structure of the granite blocks on the eastern side of the more than 60-meter-high Menkaure Pyramid has puzzled researchers. The stones are remarkably polished over an area around four meters high and six meters wide. Such smooth stones are otherwise only found at what is currently the only entrance to the pyramid, on the north side. Researcher Stijn van den Hoven hypothesized a possible additional entrance for the first time in 2019.
Landscape clues suggest Indigenous Peoples have thrived in southwestern Amazon for more than 1,000 years.
In September 2021, a multidisciplinary expedition explored one of the least-known regions of the Bolivian Amazon: the Great Tectonic Lakes of Exaltación in the department of Beni.
Organized by the Grupo de Trabajo para los Llanos de Moxos (GTLM), the mission brought together researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the National Museum of Natural History, the Institute of Ecology, the Biodiversity and Environment Research Center, the Aquatic Resources Research Center, and the Department of Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn.
Landscapes as living archives
In southwestern Amazonia, the great tectonic Lakes Rogaguado and Ginebra in Bolivia reveal a profoundly human landscape, a living archive of adaptation and creativity. Beneath the grasslands and shallow waters lie monumental earthworks, raised fields, and complex canal systems that attest to millennia of human–environment interaction.
Digital map increases Roman Empire road network by 100,000 kilometers.
A new high resolution digital dataset and map—named Itiner-e—of roads throughout the Roman Empire around the year 150 CE is presented in research published in Scientific Data. The findings increase the known length of the Empire's road system by over 100,000 kilometers.
At its height in the second century CE, the Roman Empire included over 55 million people and stretched from modern day Britain to Egypt and Syria. Although a network of roads throughout the Empire facilitated its development and maintenance, it remains incompletely mapped and existing digitizations are low resolution.
Tom Brughmans, Pau de Soto and Adam Pažout and colleagues created Itiner-e using archaeological and historical records, topographic maps, and satellite imagery. The dataset includes 299,171 kilometers of roads—an increase from a previous estimate of 188,555 kilometers—covering almost four million square kilometers.
Space
Saturn's icy moon may host a stable ocean fit for life.
A new study led by researchers from Oxford University, Southwest Research Institute and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona has provided the first evidence of significant heat flow at Enceladus's north pole, overturning previous assumptions that heat loss was confined to its active south pole.
This finding confirms that the icy moon is emitting far more heat than would be expected if it were simply a passive body, strengthening the case that it could support life.
The research is published in the journal Science Advances.
Enceladus is a highly active world, with a global, salty subsurface ocean, believed to be the source of its heat. The presence of liquid water, heat and the right chemicals (such as phosphorus and complex hydrocarbons) means that its subsurface ocean is believed to be one of the best places in our solar system for life to have evolved outside Earth.
General
James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of DNA, has died at age 97
James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died. He was 97.
The breakthrough—made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24—turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people.
Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that coil around each other to create what resembles a long, gently twisting ladder.
That realization was a breakthrough. It instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when they divide. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper.
Rare footage shows sucker fish as they whale-surf in the ocean's wildest joyride
There are easier ways to cross an ocean, but few are as slick or stylish as the remora's whale-surfing joyride.
Scientists tracking humpbacks off the coast of Australia have captured rare footage that shows clutches of the freeloading fish peeling away from their host in what looks like a high-speed game of chicken, just moments before the whale breaches.
As the humpback plunges back below the surface the remoras, also known as sucker fish, return to the whale, sticking their landings with the timing and precision of Olympic gymnasts. It's elegant work for a hitchhiking fish that lives upside-down and survives on dead skin flakes.
Remora australis spend their lives aboard whales or other large marine mammals, which they ride like giant cruise ships, breeding and feeding their way across stretches of ocean. The species has an adhesive plate on its head that helps to create a kind of vacuum seal, allowing the fish to grab a whale and hang on for the ride.
Bacteria use sugar-fueled currents and molecular gearboxes to move without flagella
New studies from Arizona State University reveal surprising ways bacteria can move without their flagella—the slender, whip-like propellers that usually drive them forward.
Movement lets bacteria form communities, spread to new places or escape from danger. Understanding how they do it can help us develop new tools to fight against infections.
In the first study, Navish Wadhwa and colleagues show that salmonella and E. coli can move across moist surfaces even when their flagella are disabled. As part of their metabolism, the bacteria ferment sugars and set up tiny outward currents on the moist surface. These currents carry the colony forward, like leaves drifting on a thin stream of water.
The researchers call this new form of movement "swashing." It may help explain how harmful microbes successfully colonize medical devices, wounds or food-processing surfaces.
Nanoparticles that enhance mRNA delivery could reduce vaccine dosage and costs.
A new delivery particle developed at MIT could make mRNA vaccines more effective and potentially lower the cost per vaccine dose.
In studies in mice, the researchers showed that an mRNA influenza vaccine delivered with their new lipid nanoparticle could generate the same immune response as mRNA delivered by nanoparticles made with FDA-approved materials, but at around 1/100 the dose.
"One of the challenges with mRNA vaccines is the cost," says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).
"When you think about the cost of making a vaccine that could be distributed widely, it can really add up. Our goal has been to try to make nanoparticles that can give you a safe and effective vaccine response but at a much lower dose."
Crop rotation delivers higher yields, better nutrition, and increased farm revenues across six continents, study shows.
An international study involving INRAE and coordinated by China Agriculture University has shown that the practice of crop rotation outperforms continuous monoculture in terms of yield, nutritional quality and farm revenues. The results, based on more than 3600 field observations from 738 experimental trials across six continents, have now been published in Nature Communications.
Although crop rotation is practiced widely in Europe, notably for the control of crop pests, diseases and invasive weeds, monocultures still dominate in Africa and Southern Asia. Elsewhere, continuous monocultures can still be popular, particularly soybean monocultures in regions such as South America where market demand for this agricultural staple is strong.
To support the transition of agricultural systems at a global scale, it is thus essential to quantify the costs, and benefits of crop rotations compared with monocultures, taking proper account of the particular characteristics of each of the world's major agricultural regions. Despite the availability of much experimental data, no comprehensive synthetic and multi-criteria study of the impact of crop rotation has been conducted until now.
Climate intervention may lower protein content in major global food crops.
A new study in Environmental Research Letters reports that cooling the planet by injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, a proposed climate intervention technique, could reduce the nutritional value of the world's crops.
Scientists at Rutgers University used global climate and crop models to estimate how stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI), one type of solar geoengineering, would impact the protein level of the world's four major food crops: maize, rice, wheat, and soybeans. The SAI approach, inspired by volcanic eruptions, would involve releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This gas would transform into sulfuric acid particles, forming a persistent cloud in the upper atmosphere that reflects a small part of the sun's radiation, thereby cooling Earth.
While these cereal crops are primarily sources of carbohydrates, they also provide a substantial share of dietary protein for large portions of the global population. Model simulations suggested that increased CO2 concentrations tended to reduce the protein content of all four crops, while increased temperatures tended to increase the protein content of crops. Because SAI would stop temperatures from increasing, the CO2 effect would not be countered by warming, and protein would decrease relative to a warmer world without SAI.
Rainfall's origin reveals a hidden driver behind drought risks for farmers.
A new University of California San Diego study uncovers a hidden driver of global crop vulnerability: the origin of rainfall itself. The paper, "Crop water origins and hydroclimate vulnerability of global croplands," was published in Nature Sustainability.
The research traces atmospheric moisture back to its source—whether it evaporated from the ocean or from land surfaces such as soil, lakes and forests. When the sun heats these surfaces, water turns into vapor, rises into the atmosphere, and later falls again as rain.
Ocean-sourced moisture travels long distances on global winds, often through large-scale weather systems such as atmospheric rivers, monsoons, and tropical storms.
In contrast, land-sourced moisture—often called recycled rainfall—comes from water that evaporates from nearby soils and vegetation, feeding local storms. The study finds that this balance between oceanic and terrestrial (land) sources strongly influences a region's drought risk and crop productivity.
"Our work reframes drought risk—it's not just about how much it rains, but where that rain comes from," said Yan Jiang, the study's lead author and postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego with a joint appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Uncovering the genetic mechanism that causes barley crops to sprout early.
Every year, billions of dollars' worth of crops worldwide perish due to pre-harvest sprouting (PHS), a phenomenon in which grain or seeds germinate on the plant before harvest. The process is triggered by a variety of factors, such as warm, moist weather, which can spoil the crop and threaten the global food supply. But this could be a thing of the past, as a team of researchers, primarily from the Carlsberg Research Laboratory in Denmark, has uncovered the genetic mechanism that controls when barley should sprout.
Self-inflicted problem
PHS is entirely a problem of our own making. When early farmers domesticated barley, they wanted a crop that would sprout soon after planting. So, they selected strains with less natural seed dormancy, a pause that stops seeds from sprouting until conditions are just right. While this allows farmers to plant quickly after harvest, sometimes yielding two crops, it comes with a considerable downside.
If perfect weather conditions hit before harvest, the entire crop starts to sprout early on the stalk. This is a problem because even if you could pick it early, the grain is often too wet for storage or has already started the biochemical changes that ruin its quality for food or brewing.
Energy Storage
New electrolyte helps all-solid-state batteries overcome long-standing 5 V stability barrier.
All-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) are promising rechargeable batteries in which conventional liquid electrolytes are replaced with solid materials. These batteries could help to safely meet the growing demands of the electronics industry, as they can exhibit high energy densities, yet they should theoretically be safer and more stable than solutions based on flammable liquid electrolytes.
The energy density of most batteries, which is the amount of energy they can store in relation to their weight and volume, is known to depend on various factors, including the voltage of the electrolytes they rely on.
Although liquid electrolytes can operate up to around 4.5 V, their stability rapidly declines beyond this limit. By contrast, solid electrolytes could remain stable at higher voltages, thus allowing batteries to store more energy.
Zinc-air batteries show promise as tougher, safer alternatives to lithium-ion.
A research team in Mexico has created a battery that can still function after being punctured and submerged in water—conditions that would likely ignite the lithium-ion batteries currently used in cell phones and electric vehicles.
The ultra-durable prototype was developed by Noé Arjona and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Materials Research in Chihuahua, Mexico.
"We are not using lithium-ion batteries because of the many safety concerns regarding the flammability of the electrolytes that are used in that kind of technology," says Arjona. Instead, the team made a metal-air battery, combining metal and oxygen from the air in place of a flammable liquid.
"Many metals also create safety concerns when they are used in batteries. Many of the most active materials are in the list of critical materials. So, we wanted to use as little metal as possible," explains Arjona. Instead of bulk metal inside the battery, they set out to create a carbon sheet dotted with individual atoms of nickel.
The GIST Proposed all-climate battery design could unlock stability in extreme temps
Despite lithium-ion (Li) batteries' role as one of the most widely used forms of energy storage, they struggle to operate at full power in low temperatures and sometimes even explode at high temperatures. Researchers at Penn State, however, have proposed a design that could hold the key to effective and stable power storage in a variety of climates.
The research, published in Joule, investigated a state-of-the-art Li battery design known as an all-climate battery (ACB).
Previous design approaches have proven incapable of simultaneously improving efficiency at lower temperatures and increasing stability at higher temperatures—there has always been a trade-off.
Refining and building upon a decade of battery research, the team devised a novel development method that allows ACBs to offer stable and efficient performance over a wide range of temperatures.
AI
Magnetic materials discovered by AI could reduce rare earth dependence.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have harnessed artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new functional magnetic materials, creating a searchable database of 67,573 magnetic materials, including 25 previously unrecognized compounds that remain magnetic even at high temperatures.
"By accelerating the discovery of sustainable magnetic materials, we can reduce dependence on rare earth elements, lower the cost of electric vehicles and renewable-energy systems, and strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base," said Suman Itani, lead author and a doctoral student in physics.
The newly created database, named the Northeast Materials Database, helps to more easily explore all the magnetic materials which play a major role in the technology that powers our world: smartphones, medical devices, power generators, electric vehicles and more. But these magnets rely on expensive, imported, and increasingly difficult to obtain rare earth elements, and no new permanent magnet has been discovered from the many magnetic compounds we know exist.
AI tech can compress LLM chatbot conversation memory by 3–4 times.
Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Professor Hyun Oh Song from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has developed a new AI technology called KVzip that intelligently compresses the conversation memory of large language model (LLM)-based chatbots used in long-context tasks such as extended dialog and document summarization. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.
The term conversation memory refers to the temporary storage of sentences, questions, and responses that a chatbot maintains during interaction, which it uses to generate contextually coherent replies. Using KVzip, a chatbot can compress this memory by eliminating redundant or unnecessary information that is not essential for reconstructing context. The technique allows the chatbot to retain accuracy while reducing memory size and speeding up response generation—a major step forward in efficient, scalable AI dialog systems.
Modern LLM chatbots perform tasks such as dialog, coding, and question answering using enormous contexts that can span hundreds or even thousands of pages. As conversations grow longer, however, the accumulated conversation memory increases computational cost and slows down response time.
Paleontology
Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird.
The discovery of a tiny foot bone millions of years old reveals Aotearoa New Zealand was once home to a songbird species with potentially unique courtship behaviors, new research published in the journal Historical Biology shows.
These days, bowerbirds are only found in Australia and New Guinea, but an international collaboration by the University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the University of Cambridge, shows they may have resided in Aotearoa 14–19 million years ago.
The foot bone that was found in the St Bathans, Central Otago, fossil deposits bore a close similarity to bowerbirds, though belonged to a bird that was much smaller than living species.
Fossil of a baby sea snail inside a mother's shell discovered.
Research teams from the Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University have documented the first discovery of five freshwater mollusk species in the Early Pleistocene Tananwan Formation of northern Taiwan. This pivotal finding, which demonstrates that some present-day freshwater snail lineages were established in Taiwan more than a million years ago, immediately establishes biogeographical connections with East Asia.
The discovery includes only the second known global fossil evidence of a juvenile snail shell preserved within its mother's shell, a rare find that reveals ancient viviparous (live birth) and nurturing behavior in these prehistoric snails. The research is published in the journal Geodiversitas.
Taiwan's ancient vanished ecosystem: Today's forests were once warm savanna, elephant teeth show.
A study by research teams at the National Museum of Natural Science and National Taiwan University has, for the first time, unveiled Taiwan's vanished Pleistocene ecosystem: a warm, arid savanna environment dominated by grasslands and rivers. This paleontological finding is published in Royal Society Open Science.
Dr. Chun-Hsiang Chang, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural Science, reported that stable carbon isotope analysis of the Straight-tusked Elephant (Palaeoloxodon) enamel showed the animals subsisted on C4 plants—herbaceous plants using the C4 photosynthetic pathway—almost year-round. This diet is strikingly different from the C3-preferring Palaeoloxodon in Europe and Japan, which favor environments typically associated with forests or temperate zones.
Instead, their dietary profile closely resembles that of Palaeoloxodon species in India and Africa, which were adapted to tropical or subtropical grassland habitats. This confirms that the Taiwan Strait, when exposed as part of the landmass, was a dry, warm C4 savanna, distinct from the forest landscapes currently seen on Taiwan island.
Mating injuries may give us a new way of identifying dinosaur genders.
Paleontologists have long wrestled with the challenge of identifying the genders of dinosaurs from the fossils they leave behind. Once the soft tissues like reproductive organs have decayed away, distinguishing a male from a female is nearly impossible and has fueled many debates. But there may be a simple way to solve this mystery, at least for one group of dinosaurs.
A new study published in the journal iScience suggests that traumatic injuries sustained during mating could be the key to determining dinosaur sex.
Analyzing the evidence
Hadrosaurid dinosaurs, commonly known as duck-billed dinosaurs because of their wide, flat snouts, are a group of dinosaurs that lived in the Cretaceous Period. Many fossils of the long, bony spikes in the middle section of their tails show evidence of healed fractures. But what caused these breaks?
Fossil hand from human relative puzzles scientists with mix of human- and gorilla-like features.
Experts have been puzzled by recently discovered fossils from the hand of an extinct human relative, Paranthropus boisei. They have been surprised by a mix of human-like and gorilla-like traits in the fingers.
In the journal Nature, researchers describe the set of 1.5-million-year-old fossils from a site in Kenya that includes the first unambiguous Paranthropus hand bones identified in the fossil record. They are also a very rare example of a relatively complete set of hand bones from this time.
The first example of Paranthropus was discovered in South Africa by Dr. Robert Broom in 1938. Its name means "beside man" and reflects the fact that it shared a direct ancestor (known as Australopithecus) with our own genus, Homo, but existed alongside the early human lineage. Broom's fossils belonged to the species Paranthropus robustus.
Giant ground sloths' fossilized teeth reveal their unique role in the prehistoric ecosystem.
Imagine a sloth. You probably picture a medium-sized, tree-dwelling creature hanging from a branch. Today's sloths—commonly featured on children's backpacks, stationery and lunch boxes—are slow-moving creatures, living inconspicuously in Central American and South American rainforests.
But their gigantic Pleistocene ancestors that inhabited the Americas as far back as 35 million years ago were nothing like the sleepy tree huggers we know today. Giant ground sloths—some weighing thousands of pounds and standing taller than a single-story building—played vital and diverse roles in shaping ecosystems across the Americas, roles that vanished with their loss at the end of the Pleistocene.
In our new study, published in the journal Biology Letters, we aimed to reconstruct the diets of two species of giant ground sloths that lived side by side in what's now Southern California. We analyzed remains recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits of what are colloquially termed the Shasta ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) and Harlan's ground sloth (Paramylodon harlani).
Our work sheds light on the lives of these fascinating creatures and the consequences their extinction in Southern California 13,700 years ago has had on ecosystems.
A few formatting issues tonight, ::sigh::
All articles from Phys.org
Hope everyone has a great weekend.
