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The Overnight News Digest (OND) Tech Edition for Thursday, August 27, 2009.
OND is a regular feature on Daily Kos consisting of current stories each night around 11:00pm Central Time. Each editor of OND imparts their own presentation and style and content choices.
We would like to extend our appreciation and gratitude to Magnifico who started OND and to our current editor-in-chief Neon Vincent.
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Crazy Ants Dominate Fire Ants By Neutralizing Their Venom
AUSTIN, Texas — Invasive “crazy ants” are rapidly displacing fire ants in areas across the southeastern U.S. by secreting a compound that neutralizes fire ant venom, according to a University of Texas at Austin study published this week in the journal Science Express. It’s the first known example of an insect with the ability to detoxify another insect’s venom.
The crazy ant invasion is the latest in a series of ant invasions from the southern hemisphere and, like its predecessors, will likely have dramatic effects on the region’s ecosystems.
Crazy and attacks fire ant
A crazy ant (left) attacks a larger fire ant (right). Scientists just discovered that invasive crazy ants can neutralize the venom of the red imported fire ant. Credit: Lawrence Gilbert. Copyright: Science.
Known for their painful stings on humans and other animals, fire ants dominate most ant species by dabbing them with powerful, usually fatal venom. A topical insecticide, the venom is two to three times as toxic as DDT on a per weight basis.
Oil composition boost makes hemp a cooking contender
Scientists at the University of York today report the development of hemp plants with a dramatically increased content of oleic acid.
The new oil profile results in an attractive cooking oil that is similar to olive oil in terms of fatty acid content having a much longer shelf life as well as greater heat tolerance and potentially more industrial applications.
The new line represents a major improvement in hemp as an oil crop
Professor Ian Graham
Researchers in the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) in the Department of Biology at York say that high oleic acid varieties are a major step towards developing hemp as a commercially attractive break crop for cereal farmers. The research is published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Fossils Reveal Oldest Known Vertebrate Live Birth
A 248 million-year-old fossil Ichthyosaur shows a stunningly preserved female with three embryos inside. This pushes the timeline for vertebrate live births back 10 million years. The discovery comes a team led by Ryosuke Motani of UC Davis and was published in PLOS One.
The development of offspring inside the mother is known as viviparity, which is used by most mammals along with certain examples of arthropods, sharks, and snakes. This method is opposed to oviparity, which is when a mother does not facilitate development aside from laying eggs, which is seen in birds and most reptiles, insects, and fish. Many animals utilize a variation that combines certain aspects of these two techniques. While nearly all modern reptiles are oviparous, this has not been not always been the case. The discovery of a fossil in China from the ancient species ichthyosaur has now shown that the earliest known instance of viviparity actually came from a reptile.
The preservation of the fossil was so clear, scientists were able to gather quite a bit of information about the birthing process and found several surprising features. The fossil dates back to the Mesozoic era, 248 million years ago. This is about 10 million years older than the previous record holder for the oldest known evidence of vertebrate live birth.
Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 9:49 PM PT: Winter in the Antarctic Shows What It Will Take to Live on Mars
This week 13 people will begin a nine-month mission inside a small, remote station largely cut off from the world. Outside their habitat there is little air, extremely cold temperatures and no sunlight. The crew must eat only what they've stockpiled and recycle their precious water for reuse. Despite appearances, however, these people are not going to space, but to the next best thing: Antarctica.
The European Concordia Research Station is set to begin its 10th winter season on the southernmost continent, where the sun will not rise for more than three months starting around May. In addition to conducting astronomical, atmospheric and glacier research, among other projects, the crew will serve as test subjects on a mock mission to Mars. After all, their experiences are the closest we can come to learning how astronauts will fare on a real long-distance space voyage without actually sending them off Earth. "We’ll never be able to be 100 percent prepared for everything," says Oliver Angerer, project manager for Concordia at the European Space Agency (ESA). "We can only do the best we can by learning as much as we can from similar situations."
Scientists will closely monitor how the Concordia crew members fare physically, mentally and emotionally. "You have limited space for a bunch of people, no contact with the outside world in a normal way, no sunlight or normal circadian triggers," says Peter Gräf, life sciences program manager at the German Aerospace Center, who has worked on numerous Mars analogue missions. "You have a bunch of people you have to get along with, and you have no alternatives and no escapes." Studies will track how their diet and metabolism correlate with mood changes, whether their sleep is disturbed by the lack of sunlight and pressure changes, and how the isolation and stress of the situation affect crew dynamics. All of these data will eventually be used to help plan the first official missions to Mars and other deep-space destinations.
Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 9:55 PM PT: Scientists Sequence Genome of 12,600-Year-Old Clovis Boy
While not the earliest inhabitants of the Americas, Clovis people represent the first humans with a wide expansion on the North American continent – until the culture mysteriously disappeared only a few hundred years after its origin.
They lived about 13,000 years ago and hunted mammoth, mastodons and giant bison with big spears.
Clovis culture originated south of the large Ice Sheets that covered Canada at that time and are the direct descendants of the earliest people who arrived in the New World around 15,000 years ago.
Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 9:57 PM PT: Inspired by Termites, Bots Build Complex Structures With Simple Rules
Robots inspired by the collective construction sites of termites can build complex block structures using just a few simple rules, researchers reported at the AAAS Annual Meeting.
Unlike humans, who require a high-level blueprint to build something complicated, termites can build complex mounds hundreds of times their size without a detailed plan. They take simple cues from each other and their environment to know where to lay the next clump of dirt, and ultimately, to build a structure that suits their surroundings.
Justin Werfel of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and colleagues demonstrated at a press briefing how the robots can be programmed to follow the same kinds of cues to build a structure requested by human. A paper published in the 14 February issue of Science also described this study.
Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 10:04 PM PT: Green space can make people happier for years
Longitudinal Effects on Mental Health of Moving to Greener and Less Green Urban Areas"
Environmental Science & Technology
Nearly 10 years after the term “nature deficit disorder” entered the nation’s vocabulary, research is showing for the first time that green space does appear to improve mental health in a sustained way. The report, which appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, gives urban park advocates another argument in support of their cause.
Mathew P. White and colleagues note that mental well-being is a major public health issue, with unipolar depressive disorder the leading cause of disability in middle- to high-income countries. Some research suggests that part of the blame for this unhappiness lies in increased urbanization — nearly 80 percent of the world’s population in more developed regions live in city environments, which tend to have little room for nature. Other studies suggest a link between happiness and green space, but no research had convincingly established cause and effect of nature on well-being over time. To help fill that gap, White’s team decided to examine the issue.
To figure out if nature makes people feel better in the long run, they compared the mental health of hundreds of people in the U.K. who went from a grey urban setting to a greener one with those who moved in the opposite direction. Mental health data showed that the people who moved to greener areas were happier during all three years that their health was tracked after relocating. “Moving to greener urban areas was associated with sustained mental health improvements, suggesting that environmental policies to increase urban green space may have sustainable public health benefits,” the researchers conclude.
Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 10:07 PM PT: Atlas of Human Genetic History Shows Mongol Warriors’ Reach
Scientists have mapped the genetic legacy of events of the past 4,000 years that have shaped populations, such as Genghis Khan’s expansion of the Mongol Empire, creating an atlas that extends our understanding of human health and history.
The atlas uses genetic data on 95 different populations to confirm known historical interactions between peoples and shows the impact of European colonialism, the Arab slave trade, the Mongol Empire, and trade near the Silk Road. The study, led by scientists at University College London and Oxford University, is published today in the journal Science.
When comparing a sample of DNA from one of the groups against other populations’ DNA, matching sequences indicate shared ancestry. The longer the uninterrupted matched DNA sequence, the more recent the occurrence of intermingling, said Garrett Hellenthal, lead author and research fellow at the UCL Genetics Institute. Shorter matches indicate that the mixing occurred in earlier periods, allowing the team to estimate when the interaction occurred, he said.