CBC News
Scientists are paying close attention to the blanket of clouds that insulate the Arctic and play a major role in warming up the North.
Researchers from the University of Utah published a new study Wednesday that suggests Arctic clouds are between two and eight times more sensitive to pollution than clouds in other parts of the world.
Pollutants in the air from Europe and China modify the physical structure of water droplets in Arctic clouds. The effect of that is to warm the earth in a similar way to a down jacket, or adding an extra blanket on a cold night.
Warmer oceans damaging coral 5 times more often than in 1980s: research
High ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals almost five times more often than in the 1980s, undermining reefs' ability to survive marine heat waves caused by man-made climate change, scientists said on Thursday.
The average time between severe "bleachings," when heat makes the stony-bodied creatures that make up coral reefs expel colourful algae, shortened to six years in 2016 from 25–30 years in the early 1980s, the Australian-led team wrote.
Corals die if bleachings are long-lasting, wrecking reefs that are nurseries for fish, a source of food to millions of people and a destination for scuba-diving tourists.
2017 was 2nd hottest year on record, European data shows
Last year was the second hottest worldwide on record, just behind a sweltering 2016 with signs of climate change ranging from wildfires to a thaw of Arctic ice, a European Union monitoring centre said on Thursday.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service, the first major international weather agency to report global 2017 temperatures, said they averaged 14.7 C or 1.2 C above pre-industrial times.
Last year was slightly "cooler than the warmest year on record, 2016, and warmer than the previous second warmest year, 2015," the report said. Temperature records date back to the late 19th century.
The Globe and Mail
Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?
[…] They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.
Consider this: In the first five years of the smartphone era, the proportion of Americans who said internet use interfered with their family time nearly tripled, from 11 per cent to 28 per cent. And this: Smartphone use takes about the same cognitive toll as losing a full night's sleep. In other words, they are making us worse at being alone and worse at being together.
Ten years into the smartphone experiment, we may be reaching a tipping point. Buoyed by mounting evidence and a growing chorus of tech-world jeremiahs, smartphone users are beginning to recognize the downside of the convenient little mini-computer we keep pressed against our thigh or cradled in our palm, not to mention buzzing on our bedside table while we sleep.
The Guardian
Largest prime number discovered – with more than 23m digits
At more than 23m digits long, the number is something of a beast. But for mathematicians, the latest discovery from a global gang of enthusiasts is a thing of beauty: the largest prime number ever found.
Known simply as M77232917, the figure is arrived at by calculating two to the power of 77,232,917 and subtracting one, leaving a gargantuan string of 23,249,425 digits. The result is nearly one million digits longer than the previous record holder discovered in January 2016. […]
“I’m very surprised it was found this quickly; we expected it to take longer,” said Chris Caldwell, a professor of mathematics who runs a website on the largest prime numbers at the University of Tennessee at Martin. “It’s like finding dead cats on the road. You don’t expect to find two so close to one another.”
Surprise as DNA reveals new group of Native Americans: the ancient Beringians
A baby girl who lived and died in what is now Alaska at the end of the last ice age belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient Native Americans, according to DNA recovered from her bones.
The child, a mere six weeks old when she died, was found in a burial pit next to the remains of a stillborn baby, perhaps a first cousin, during excavations of an 11,500-year-old residential camp in Tanana River Valley in Central Alaska. The remains were discovered in 2013, but a full genetic analysis has not been possible until now.
Researchers tried to recover ancient DNA from both of the infants but succeeded only in the case of the larger individual. They had expected her genetic material to resemble modern northern or southern lineages of Native Americans, but found instead that she had a distinct genetic makeup that made her a member of a separate population.
The newly-discovered group, named “ancient Beringians”, appears to have split off from the founding population of Native Americans about 20,000 years ago. While the ancestors of other Native Americans pushed south into the continent as the ice caps thawed, the ancient Beringians remained in the north until they eventually died out.
Oceans suffocating as huge dead zones quadruple since 1950, scientists warn
Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, scientists have warned, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the sea.
Climate change caused by fossil fuel burning is the cause of the large-scale deoxygenation, as warmer waters hold less oxygen. The coastal dead zones result from fertiliser and sewage running off the land and into the seas.
The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the first comprehensive analysis of the areas and states: “Major extinction events in Earth’s history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans.” Denise Breitburg, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US and who led the analysis, said: “Under the current trajectory that is where we would be headed. But the consequences to humans of staying on that trajectory are so dire that it is hard to imagine we would go quite that far down that path.”
The Washington Post
When two different types of birds mated, a new species, Big Bird, was born
It’s not every day that scientists observe a new species emerging in real time. Charles Darwin believed that speciation probably took place over hundreds if not thousands of generations, advancing far too gradually to be detected directly. The biologists who followed him have generally defaulted to a similar understanding and have relied on indirect clues, gleaned from genomes and fossils, to infer complex organisms’ evolutionary histories.
Some of those clues suggest that interbreeding plays a larger role in the formation of new species than previously thought. But the issue remains contentious: Hybridization has been definitively shown to cause widespread speciation only in plants. When it comes to animals, it has remained a hypothesis (albeit one that’s gaining increasing support) about events that typically occurred in the distant, unseen past.
Until now. In a paper published recently in Science, researchers reported that a new animal species had evolved by hybridization — and that it had occurred before their eyes in the span of merely two generations. The breakneck pace of that speciation event turned heads both in the scientific community and in the media. The mechanism by which it occurred is just as noteworthy, however, because of what it suggests about the undervalued role of hybrids in evolution.
Official who improperly helped Redskins owner cut down trees picked as National Park Service deputy director
A former National Park Service official who improperly helped Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder cut down more than 130 trees to improve a river view at his Potomac, Md., estate has been chosen by the Trump administration to be one of the agency’s highest-ranking leaders.
According to an internal email circulated at the Department of the Interior, P. Daniel Smith will assume the agency’s deputy director position on Monday. He is expected to replace acting director Mike Reynolds, whose 300-day term has expired.
The selection was first reported by National Parks Traveler. Interior and the Park Service did not respond Friday to multiple requests for a comment. “We have a new political appointee,” Lori K. Mashburn, Interior’s White House liaison, announced in the email obtained by The Washington Post. “Dan should be a familiar face at NPS. He most recently served as Superintendent of Colonial National Historical Park.”
Prehistoric snake was as long as a school bus
Scared of snakes? The thought of Titanoboa might make you shiver even if you’re not. Imagine a snake 48 feet long. Now imagine it slithering through the jungle and eating entire crocodiles.
Don’t worry — Titanoboa cerrejonensis isn’t on the loose today. But 60 million years ago, the snake reigned supreme.
Now you can get close to a re-creation of this huge snake in Utah. A full-scale model of Titanoboa — complete with a half-swallowed crocodile — is on display at the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum at Brigham Young University.
Titanoboa didn’t kill with fangs or venom. Instead, it crushed its prey to death — appropriate for a creature thought to have weighed 2,500 pounds.
Los Angeles Times
California offshore drilling could be expanded for the first time since 1984 under federal leasing proposal
The Trump administration, inviting a political backlash from coastal state leaders, on Thursday proposed to open for exploration the largest expanse of the nation's offshore oil and natural gas reserves ever offered to global energy companies, including waters off the coast of California.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said the draft five-year leasing plan would commit 90% of the nation's offshore reserves to leasing, including areas off all three regions of the California coast that have been off-limits to oil and gas exploration since the Reagan administration.
The draft plan, now subject to review and debate, would allow the first new federal lease sales off California since 1984. It sparked immediate fury from Democratic leaders up and down the West Coast.
Autism spectrum disorders appear to have stabilized among U.S. kids and teens
Researchers have a new reason to believe that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in the U.S. has reached a plateau.
The evidence comes from the National Health Interview Survey, which polls American households about a variety of conditions. When a participating family includes children, one of those kids is selected at random to be included in the interview.
A new question was added to the survey in 2014: "Has a doctor or health professional ever told you that [the child] had autism, Asperger's disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, or autism spectrum disorder?"
Between 2014 and 2016, this question was answered for 30,502 children ages 3 to 17. In 711 cases, the answer was "yes."
Humans may look for the helpers, but bonobos prefer the troublemakers
A new study of one of our closest living relatives finds that these docile apes prefer individuals who hinder over those who help. The findings, described in the journal Current Biology, could shed light on the origins of "prosocial" behavior in human beings.
"A preference for helpers over hinderers," the study authors wrote, may have "played a central role in the evolution of human development and cooperation."
Bonobos, together with chimpanzees, are two of humans' closest living relatives — and while they look fairly similar, there are many significant differences in their behaviors and social structure. Chimps have a tendency to engage in violent conflict; bonobos do not. Chimp social groups are male dominated, whereas bonobo groups are female dominated.
Science Magazine
Alzheimer’s protein may spread like an infection, human brain scans suggest
For the first time, scientists have produced evidence in living humans that the protein tau, which mars the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, spreads from neuron to neuron. Although such movement wasn’t directly observed, the finding may illuminate how neurodegeneration occurs in the devastating illness, and it could provide new ideas for stemming the brain damage that robs so many of memory and cognition.
Tau is one of two proteins—along with β-amyloid—that form unusual clumps in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists have long debated which is most important to the condition and, thus, the best target for intervention. Tau deposits are found inside neurons, where they are thought to inhibit or kill them, whereas β-amyloid forms plaques outside brain cells.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom combined two brain imaging techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, in 17 Alzheimer’s patients to map both the buildup of tau and their brains’ functional connectivity—that is, how spatially separated brain regions communicate with each other. Strikingly, they found the largest concentrations of the damaging tau protein in brain regions heavily wired to others, suggesting that tau may spread in a way analogous to influenza during an epidemic, when people with the most social contacts will be at greatest risk of catching the disease.
New robot ‘muscles’ are strong enough to lift a baseball—and nimble enough to pluck a raspberry
Robots are wielding a new kind of soft power. Researchers have outfitted them with a new class of muscles, which—like our own—offer both strength and sensitivity. By not overpowering and damaging the objects they’re manipulating, the muscles could one day help a new generation of soft robots perform delicate tasks—everything from picking fruit to assisting elderly people.
Robots, particularly those used in manufacturing, have long been good at repetitive tasks that require lots of power, such as welding pieces of a car chassis. But their motions tend to be rigid and ill-suited for tasks that require variable amounts of force. They’re also potentially dangerous to anyone who wanders too close. Robotics researchers are trying to create softer versions that can work alongside humans—or even as a part of them, like prostheses that can help paralyzed people walk.
Two soft muscle technologies have jumped to the fore: pneumatic actuators, which pump gases or liquids into soft pouches to create particular movements, and devices called dielectric elastomer actuators, which apply an electric field across an insulating flexible plastic to make it deform with a particular movement. Pneumatic actuators are both powerful and easy to make, but pumps can be bulky and moving gases and fluids around can be slow. Dielectric elastomer actuators are fast and energy efficient. But they often fail catastrophically when a bolt of electricity blasts through the plastic.
Nature
Long-awaited US report charts course for studies of Earth from space
Improving weather forecasts, predicting sea-level rise, and understanding ecosystem change top a new list of priorities for future US Earth-observing satellites.
The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released the much-anticipated report on 5 January. It is likely to shape the future of Earth-science missions at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Geological Survey for the next decade. More immediately, it provides scientists and agency leaders with ammunition to argue for Earth-observing research at a time when the White House and some members of Congress are looking to slash it.
“This is a very important process, having the community speak up and come up with a consensus set of priorities,” says Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. “Congress reads these, staffers read them, agencies pay attention in a very serious way.”
Tooth scratches reveal new clues to pterosaur diets
Microscopic scratches on fossil teeth are forcing palaeontologists to rethink some cherished ideas about the diets of pterosaurs — flying reptiles that ruled the skies while terrestrial dinosaurs flourished on the lands beneath them.
Since they first uncovered pterosaur fossils in the eighteenth century, researchers have made assumptions about their eating habits, mostly on the basis of indirect clues such as the shapes of their teeth and the environments they lived in. But Jordan Bestwick, a palaeontologist at the University of Leicester, UK, and his colleagues sought more direct evidence: t hey performed the first examination of fossilized pterosaur teeth for tiny abrasions caused by food. Microscopic scratches and chips create characteristic surface textures that vary according to an animal’s diet, says Bestwick. […]
One surprise in the analysis raised questions about the pterosaur Dimorphodon macronyx, which researchers assumed had hunted fish. The wear and tear on the reptile’s teeth now suggests it actually feasted on insects and land vertebrates.
Science Alert
Archaeologists Uncover an Ancient Model of The Universe in Mexico
The people of ancient Mexico may not have had the powerful telescopes that we have access to today, but that didn't stop them depicting the vastness of the Universe all the same, as a new archaeological discovery at the Nahualac site near Mexico City shows.
This particular miniature model of space doesn't feature planets or stars though – instead it's thought to show the monster Cipactli splitting heaven and Earth and bringing life into being, one of the traditional myths of the Aztec people.
In fact, experts from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) say the stone structure, discovered under a lagoon, was specially designed to give the impression that the map carving was floating on the surface of the water rather than lying on the pond bed – just as Cipactli would have done.