Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, Besame, and annetteboardman. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke, Man Oh Man, and jlms qkw.
OND is 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 (or sometimes slightly later).
I’m Chitown Kev and welcome to the Saturday Science Edition of the Overnight News Digest and tonight we start out with a couple of stories about Olympic competition; specifically, figure skating.
Scientific American: Go Figure: Why Olympic Ice Skaters Don't Fall Flat on Their Faces by Yasemin Saplakoglu
Watching a fellow human jump into the air, spin three times and land on a thin piece of steel—all the while balancing on slippery ice—is an awe-inspiring experience.
Figure skaters execute their routines so elegantly, they make it look easy—an illusion that quickly dissolves with our own trepid first step in an ice rink. Clinging to the side walls for dear life, feet stinging from the awkward display of ice walking, first-time ice skaters can barely skate in a straight line, let alone balance on one foot. Although it may seem Olympic figure skaters have befriended the ice gods and coaxed the laws of physics to work in their favor, what they have really done is rewire their brains to suppress their reflexes.
If one tilts one’s head backward far enough, the body’s reflexes will kick in. Neurons that are responsible for firing when the brain senses the body is off-balance will set off a cascade of signals from the inner ear to the brain stem, then to the spinal cord and finally to the muscles that tell the body to lurch forward for the save. In sports like figure skating, the body is frequently in such unlikely positions. So how do skaters convince their brains that it’s totally okay the body is halfway to a face-plant?
Wired: Figure Skating's Quintuple Jump: Maybe Impossible, Definitely Bonkers by Robbie Gonzalez
WHEN AMERICAN FIGURE skater Nathan Chen performs at this year's Winter Olympics, he'll be looking to make history. The first and only skater in the world competing with five different types of quadruple jump—the salchow, loop, toe loop, flip, and lutz—he is poised to become the first athlete in the sport's history to execute these five variations in a single program. It would be another iconic first for Chen, who last year, at the age of 17, became the first person to land five quads in a single performance.
"He has defined the current limit of the sport," says retired figure skater Tim Goebel, an Olympic bronze medalist who, in 1998, became the first American figure skater to land a quadruple jump in competition. Once known as the "Quad King," Goebel has watched quads transform from a nigh-impossible feat into an essential element in the routine of any male figure skater hoping to compete at the elite level—a transformation that has culminated with Nathan Chen. "For the time being," Goebel says, "he's set the standard."
For the time being. As in: Greater aerial feats await. Even as recently as a few years ago, a quintuple jump seemed out of the question. But today, Goebel says, it seems more like a matter of when than if.
Exactly when is difficult to say. But even harder to say is how. "I really don't think a quint is possible," says James Richards, a kinesiologist at the University of Delaware and an expert in the dynamics of figure skating spins. Using high speed cameras and motion-capture equipment, Richards has worked with many of the best figure skaters on Earth to deconstruct triple and quadruple jumps into their anatomically dependent variables, and explore the physiological limits to factors like hang time and rotations per minute.
Phys.org: 'Sinking' Pacific nation is getting bigger: study
The Pacific nation of Tuvalu—long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels—is actually growing in size, new research shows.
A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.
It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.
Co-author Paul Kench said the research, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, challenged the assumption that low-lying island nations would be swamped as the sea rose.
"We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise, but there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing," he said.
Futurism: In 1918 We Faced the Flu Pandemic. Today, We’re Still Fighting the War. by Abby Norman
Over the century that followed, Americans would face three more pandemic flus, but none of them like the one in 1918. The 1957 pandemic flu killed roughly 1.1 million people worldwide; another in 1968 wiped out about another million globally. Most recently, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic flu killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people worldwide, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Today, a century after the 1918 pandemic, we know much more about the virus — how it spreads, how it kills. We now have influenza vaccines — unheard of in 1918 — that provide us with (albeit limited) protection. And sophisticated tracking mechanisms help us predict which flu viruses we might encounter in a given year.
We have not, however, completely vanquished the flu. In this particularly bad flu season in the U.S., we need little reminder that the virus is hardy and evolves rapidly. The flu that ravaged humanity in 1918 is not the same strain making headlines in 2018. Likewise, if another global pandemic flu is inevitable, we can’t assume the virus will be one we’ve seen before.
Today, our relationship with the flu has shifted from an adversarial, bellicose one, to one of competition; we are running a race, no longer fighting a war. To survive another century, or another season, public health experts will need stay one step ahead, armed with an artillery provided by science and a war plan drafted from the history of the battle we lost.
Science Daily: Alien honeybees could cause plant extinction
New research indicates that introduced 'alien' honeybees are competing for resources with native bees and threatening the survival of plants that rely on interactions with specific pollinators.
The study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, was led by Dr Olivia Norfolk of Anglia Ruskin University, who carried out the work alongside academics from the University of Nottingham.
The scientists monitored the interactions between plants and their pollinators in the mountainous region of St Katherine Protectorate in South Sinai, Egypt. The region supports many range-restricted endemic plants and pollinators whose future may be jeopardised by the recent introduction of alien honeybees.
The mountains are characterised by the presence of Bedouin orchard gardens which act as hotspots for biodiversity, providing valuable habitat for wild plants, pollinators and migratory birds. These gardens form the basis of traditional Bedouin livelihoods, but recently managed honeybee hives have been introduced to supplement their income.
Nature: Primitive fish's sea-floor shuffle illuminates the origins of walking by Giorgia Guglielmi
The genes and nerve cells that allow people and other mammals to walk around can also be found in a primitive fish known as a skate, according to a study. The findings suggest that the nerve cells essential for walking evolved millions of years earlier than previously thought.
By studying the little skate (Leucoraja erinacea), a close relative of sharks and rays that can walk on the sea floor, a team of neuroscientists found that the nerve networks that control this ability are the same as those in mammals. The results, published on 8 February in Cell1, support the argument that the nerves that control walking first appeared in fish at least 420 million years ago, more than 20 million years before the first four-legged animals crawled out of the ocean2.
The analysis provides some of the only direct evidence showing that the nerve cells for walking arose before vertebrates moved onto land. Bones, teeth and other tough body structures are well preserved in the fossil record, but softer tissues such as muscles and nerves decay quickly and are often lost to time, says Tetsuya Nakamura, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. So if researchers want to study the nerves that control locomotion in an ancient animal, they often turn to modern creatures that scientists believe are good approximations of their ancestors.
Space.com: On This Day In Space! Feb. 10, 1958: Scientists Bounce Radar Waves Off Venus by Hanneke Weitering
On Feb. 10, 1958, scientists at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory bounced radar waves off of Venus.
At the time, Venus was at a point in its orbit called inferior conjunction, where it is directly in between the Earth and the sun. Scientists beamed a radar signal toward Venus, which was about 28 million miles away at the time.
It took about 5 minutes for the signal to bounce off of Venus and return to Earth. This was slightly shorter than they anticipated, which means that Venus was actually closer to Earth than scientists believed at the time.
New Scientist: This record-breaking photo was taken from 6 billion km away by Leah Crane
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is now one of the most distant human-made objects, and it just took the most distant photograph ever. The image of an icy rock in the Kuiper belt has had colour added to increase the contrast.
After its visit to Pluto, the spacecraft headed out toward the Kuiper belt on its way to its next target, a Kuiper belt object (KBO) called 2014 MU69. It is now about 41 times as far from Earth as Earth is from the sun. There are only four spacecraft that have ever traveled that far from home: Voyager 1 and 2, and Pioneer 10 and 11.
But New Horizons is the first to send back a picture for so far afield. Its four predecessors did not send back images because their cameras were shut down before they got that far away.
New Horizons is still on an active mission to visit the Kuiper Belt. During its voyage to the outer reaches of the solar system, the spacecraft usually stays in hibernation mode to conserve energy. Every once in a while, its mission operators turn on its camera to take a few pictures and calibrations and beam them back to Earth.
LiveScience: Humans Cared for Sick Puppies Long Ago, Ancient Burial Shows by Laura Geggel
Ancient people likely cared for a sick, domesticated pup for weeks on end before it died about 14,000 years ago during the Paleolithic era, a new study finds.
After it died, the dog was buried with the remains of another dog and an adult man and woman — making it not only the oldest burial of a domestic dog on record, but also the oldest known grave to contain both dogs and people, the researchers said.
This discovery suggests that even though the dog was young, sick and likely untrained as a result, ancient people still had an emotional bond with it, the researchers wrote in the study. This may explain why the people buried the animal with two of their own, the researchers said.
The grave itself was found in 1914 in Oberkassel, a suburb of Bonn in western Germany. Until now, however, researchers thought the burial contained two humans and just one dog. But a new analysis of the canid bones and teeth revealed that two dogs were in fact buried there: an older dog and a younger dog, which likely had a serious case of morbillivirus, better known as canine distemper.
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a good evening!