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.
Science: How blood-red ants became slave snatchers by Erica Tennenhouse
Every summer, blood-red ants of the species Formica sanguinea go on a mission to capture slaves. They infiltrate the nest of another ant species, like the peaceful F. fusca, assassinate the queen, and kidnap the pupae to raise as the next generation of slaves. Once the slaves hatch in their new nest, they appear none the wiser to their abduction, dutifully gathering food and defending the colony as if it were their own.
Scientists have long wondered how such slavemaking behavior evolved. Now, new evidence suggests that today’s slave snatchers started out as temporary parasites—ants that laid their eggs in the nests of other species and then used those workers as part-time caregivers for their own offspring.
The evolution of enslavement in Formica ants has long eluded scientists, largely because they didn’t know how species in the genus were related. So Jonathan Romiguier, a molecular biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and colleagues sequenced and meticulously mapped the genetic relationships of 15 Formica species to create the most robust family tree to date. The tree includes major branches for slavemakers, species without slaves, and parasitic species that exploit foreign workers on a temporary basis.
Astrobiology Magazine: Are viruses the new frontier for astrobiology? By Sarah Wild
They are the most abundant form of life on Earth, but viruses – or their seed-like dormant state, known as virions – are outliers in our search for life on other planets. Now, one group of scientists are pushing for astrobiologists to consider searching for viruses beyond Earth more seriously.
In NASA’s current astrobiology strategy, viruses are mentioned six times in its 250 pages, write the authors of a recent paper Astrovirology: Viruses at large in the Universe. They call for the study of viruses to be incorporated into extraterrestrial science missions and astrobiological research at home, and have a checklist for the actions needed to put viruses on the interplanetary map.
“Viruses are an integral part of life on Earth as we know it,” saysKen Stedman, a virologist at Portland State University’s Center for Life in Extreme Environments and a co-author on the paper. If we are going to be thinking about life on early Earth or ancient or current life on other planets, we need to be thinking about viruses, he says.
It has been more than a century since scientists discovered the first virus, and for decades it was known simply as a “very small disease-causing agent”. Late Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar even referred to them as “a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein”, Stedman and colleagues write.
Their current definition is more complicated, and less defamatory: viruses are entities whose genome replicates inside living cells, and are able to transfer that viral genome to other cells. As this definition implies, viruses comprise the whole reproduction cycle – and they need other living cells to reproduce. Virions, on the other hand, are the viral seedsthat could become viruses if they happen upon compatible living cells in which to replicate. On Earth, virions and viruses go hand-in-hand with life, and if we find the former on other planets they could point to cellular life once having existed on them.
Chemical & Engineering News: Trace proteins on texts and clothes offer insight into the past by Bethany Halford
When historians study texts, whether they’re ancient records or more recent manuscripts, they look to the words on the page to tell them about the life and times of the authors. But words aren’t all that writers leave behind. Metabolites from the medications they were taking, bacterial proteins from microorganisms that may have been in their surroundings, and even traces of their meals accumulate on the pages of these old documents—and can sometimes tell a different story.
An international team of scientists has been using a novel, nondestructive analytical technique to suss out such proteins and small molecules and uncover their biochemical secrets. The researchers’ most recent molecular sleuthing has given them insight into the outbreak of plague that struck Milan in 1630 and brought them to the deathbed of Russian writer Anton Chekhov.
The analytical technique uses small, thin plastic diskettes, known as an EVA films because they’re made from ethyl-vinyl acetate. The scientists moisten a diskette with distilled water and place it on the surface of an object for study, such as a painting, manuscript, or article of clothing. Beads of anion and cation exchange resin embedded within the EVA film pick up proteins and other charged molecules from the object’s surface. Similarly, hydrophobic C8 resins in the EVA films gather oily molecules from the surface. The researchers then remove the film from the object, wash the collected compounds from its surface, and analyze them with liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (Anal. Chem. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.6b03722).
The Conversation: The invisible power of ‘flutter’ – from plane crashes to snoring to free energy by Justin Webster
With the car windows down on the first warm day of spring, the urge is unshakable. You extend your arm into the wind, tracing the city skyline in a natural motion somewhere between swimming and waving. As you move your hand, you alter the flow of the air. The redirected air in turn exerts a force on your hand.
Interactions like this – between a fluid flow, like water or air, and a flexible structure – are ubiquitous in nature. You can see them in a flapping flag, a garden hose spraying wildly or even the mild annoyance of a snoring significant other.
Such interactions are carefully considered in the design of buildings, bridges and aircraft. The principal reason? A structure can become fundamentally unstable when immersed in a fluid flow, like that of air or water.
This type of instability is known as flutter, and it can cause catastrophic failure. A harrowing example, sadly involving loss of one canine life, is the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (“Galloping Gertie”) in 1940.
Quanta: Mathematicians Explore Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds by Kevin Hartnett
Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different kind of geometric world.
To physicists, the correspondence was interesting. To mathematicians, it was preposterous. They’d been studying these two geometric settings in isolation from each other for decades. To claim that they were intimately related seemed as unlikely as asserting that at the moment an astronaut jumps on the moon, some hidden connection causes his sister to jump back on earth.
“It looked totally outrageous,” said David Morrison, a mathematician at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the first mathematicians to investigate the matching numbers.
Nearly three decades later, incredulity has long since given way to revelation. The geometric relationship that the physicists first observed is the subject of one of the most flourishing fields in contemporary mathematics. The field is called mirror symmetry, in reference to the fact that these two seemingly distant mathematical universes appear somehow to reflect each other exactly. And since the observation of that first correspondence — a set of numbers on one side that matched a set of numbers on the other — mathematicians have found many more instances of an elaborate mirroring relationship: Not only do the astronaut and his sister jump together, they wave their hands and dream in unison, too.
Phys.org: Evidence mounts for Alzheimer's, suicide risks among youth in polluted cities
A University of Montana researcher and her collaborators have published a new study that reveals increased risks for Alzheimer's and suicide among children and young adults living in polluted megacities.
Dr. Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas said her group studied 203 autopsies of Mexico City residents ranging in age from 11 months to 40 years. Metropolitan Mexico City is home to 24 million people exposed daily to concentrations of fine particulate matterand ozone above U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. The researchers tracked two abnormal proteins that indicate development of Alzheimer's, and they detected the early stages of the disease in babies less than a year old.
"Alzheimer's disease hallmarks start in childhood in polluted environments, and we must implement effective preventative measures early," said Calderón-Garcidueñas, a physician and Ph.D. toxicologist in UM's Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences. "It is useless to take reactive actions decades later."
The research was published in the journal of Environmental Research.
The scientists found heightened levels of the two abnormal proteins - hyperphosphorylated tau and beta amyloid - in the brains of young urbanites with lifetime exposures to fine-particulate-matter pollution (PM2.5). They also tracked Apolipoprotein E (APOE 4), a well-known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's, as well as lifetime cumulative exposure to unhealthy levels of PM2.5 - particles which are at least 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair and frequently cause the haze over urban areas.
BBC: Nazi legacy found in Norwegian trees by Jonathan Amos
The relentless campaign to find and sink Germany's WWII battleship, the Tirpitz, left its mark on the landscape that is evident even today.
The largest vessel in Hitler's Kriegsmarine, it was stationed for much of the war along the Norwegian coast to deter an Allied invasion.
The German navy would hide the ship in fjords and screen it with chemical fog.
This "smoke" did enormous damage to the surrounding trees which is recorded in their growth rings.
Claudia Hartl, from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, stumbled across the impact while examining pines at Kåfjord near Alta.
The dendrochronologist was collecting wood cores to build up a picture of past climate in the area. Severe cold and even infestation from insects can severely stunt annual growth in a stand, but neither of these causes could explain the total absence of rings seen in some trees dated to 1945.
We end tonight’s Saturday Science Edition with the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins and her profile of Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.
Guardian: 'There is no such thing as past or future': physicist Carlo Rovelli on changing how we think about time
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who wants to make the uninitiated grasp the excitement of his field. His book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, with its concise, sparkling essays on subjects such as black holes and quanta, has sold 1.3m copies worldwide. Now comes The Order of Time, a dizzying, poetic work in which I found myself abandoning everything I thought I knew about time – certainly the idea that it “flows”, and even that it exists at all, in any profound sense.
We meet outside the church of San Petronio in Bologna, where Rovelli studied. (“I like to say that, just like Copernicus, I was an undergraduate at Bologna and a graduate at Padua,” he jokes.) A cheery, compact fellow in his early 60s, Rovelli is in nostalgic mood. He lives in Marseille, where, since 2010, he has run the quantum gravity group at the Centre de physique théorique. Before that, he was in the US, at the University of Pittsburgh, for a decade.
He rarely visits Bologna, and he has been catching up with old friends. We wander towards the university area. Piazza Verdi is flocked with a lively crowd of students. There are flags and graffiti and banners, too – anti-fascist slogans, something in support of the Kurds, a sign enjoining passers-by not to forget Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student killed in Egypt in 2016.
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight and if you would like to read more about science don’t forget about Mark Sumner’s Abbreviated Science Round-up.
Everyone have a great evening!