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: These half-billion-year-old creatures were animals—but unlike any known today by Colin Barras
So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange life forms dominated Earth’s seas half a billion years ago, and scientists have long struggled to figure out whether they’re algae, fungi, or even an entirely different kingdom of life that failed to survive. Now, two paleontologists think they have finally established the identity of the mysterious creatures: They were animals, some of which could move around, but they were unlike any living on Earth today.
Scientists first discovered the Ediacaran organisms in 1946 in South Australia’s Ediacara Hills. To date, researchers have identified about 200 different types in ancient rocks across the world. Almost all appear to have died out by 541 million years ago, just before fossils of familiar animals like sponges and the ancestors of crabs and lobsters appeared in an event dubbed the Cambrian explosion. One reason these creatures have proved so tricky to place in the tree of life is that some of them had an anatomy unique in nature. Their bodies were made up of branched fronds with a strange fractal architecture, in which the frond subunits resembled small versions of the whole frond.
Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Jian Han at Northwest University in Xi’an, China, have now found key evidence that the Ediacaran organisms were animals. They analyzed more than 200 fossils of a 518-million-year-old marine species named Stromatoveris psygmoglena. Paleontologists had previously concluded that the 10-centimeter-tall species was some sort of animal—in part, says Hoyal Cuthill, because it was found alongside other known animals, and all of the fossils are preserved in a similar way. Hoyal Cuthill and Han argue S. psygmoglena was also an Ediacaran organism, a rare “survivor” that somehow clung on through the Cambrian explosion.
ScienceDaily: Mojave Desert birds crashed over the last century due to climate change
Bird communities in the Mojave Desert straddling the California/Nevada border have collapsed over the past 100 years, most likely because of lower rainfall due to climate change, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.
A three-year survey of the area, which is larger than the state of New York, concludes that 30 percent, or 39 of the 135 bird species that were there 100 years ago, are less common and less widespread today. The 61 sites surveyed lost, on average, 43 percent of the species that were there a century ago.
"Deserts are harsh environments, and while some species might have adaptations that allow them to persist in a desert spot, they are also at their physiological limits," said Kelly Iknayan, who conducted the survey for her doctoral thesis at UC Berkeley. "California deserts have already experienced quite a bit of drying and warming because of climate change, and this might be enough to push birds over the edge. It seems like we are losing part of the desert ecosystem."
The collapse could have an impact on desert plants that rely upon birds to spread their seeds and for pollination, she said, as well as on a host of creatures that prey on the birds.
Phys.org: Study finds flaw in emergent gravity by Lisa Zyga
In recent years, some physicists have been investigating the possibility that gravity is not actually a fundamental force, but rather an emergent phenomenon that arises from the collective motion of small bits of information encoded on spacetime surfaces called holographic screens. The theory, called emergent gravity, hinges on the existence of a close connection between gravity and thermodynamics.
Emergent gravity has received its share of criticism, however, and a new paper adds to this by showing that the holographic screen surfaces described by the theory do not actually behave thermodynamically, undermining a key assumption of the theory.
Zhi-Wei Wang, a physicist at Jilin University in Changchun, China, and Samuel L. Braunstein, a professor of quantum computational science at the University of York in the UK, have published their paper on non-thermodynamic surfaces in a recent issue of Nature Communications.
"Emergent gravity has very strong claims: that it can explain things like dark matter and dark energy, but also reproduce the decades of work coming out of regular general relativity," Wang told Phys.org. "That last claim is now knocked on its head by our work, so emergent gravity proponents will have their work cut out for themselves in showing consistency with the huge canon of observational results. We've set them back, not necessarily knocked them out."
Chemical and Engineering News: What’s baijiu, and where does its unique flavor come from? By Cici Zhang
When covering U.S. President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, American journalist Dan Rather referred to a popular liquor there, called baijiu, as “liquid razor blades.” Few outside of China have heard of baijiu (pronounced bye-joe), and clearly, not everyone’s a fan, but the potent beverage is the most-consumed spirit in the world, with people drinking more than 4 billion L per year.
Despite its fame (or infamy) among visitors to China, baijiu, typically enjoyed during special occasions or as a show of hospitality, has remained a mystery to most spirit lovers in the West. Still, there are those, like Jim Boyce, a Canadian blogger and consultant based in Beijing, who are determined to expand the liquor’s popularity across the globe. He dreamed up World Baijiu Day, celebrated on Aug. 9. Now in its fourth year, the festival features baijiu-inspired drinks and foods in 30 cities from New York to Melbourne.
More favorable reviews of baijiu by Westerners have called it funky, with a rotting, sweet fruit flavor and a touch of nuttiness. Some types have an aroma similar to soy sauce. The complex flavor arises from a production process that has been passed down from generation to generation over thousands of years.
Nature: Thousands of exotic ‘topological’ materials discovered through sweeping search by Elizabeth Gibney
The already buzzing field of topological physics could be about to explode. For the first time, researchers have systematically scoured through entire databases of materials in search of ones that harbour topological states — exotic phases of matter that have fascinated physicists for a decade. The results show that thousands of known materials probably have topological properties — and perhaps up to 24% of materials in all. Previously, researchers knew of just a few hundred topological materials, and only around a dozen have been studied in detail.
“I’m shocked by the number,” says Reyes Calvo, an experimental physicist at the nanoGUNE Cooperative Research Center in San Sebastián, Spain.
In late July, several teams posted preprints1,2,3 detailing their scans of tens of thousands of materials and their predicted topological classifications, which are based on algorithms that use a material’s chemistry and symmetry to calculate their properties. Two teams have already integrated their algorithms into searchable databases. “You can put in a compound name and, with one click, get whether there is topology or not. For me, this is wonderful,” says Chandra Shekhar, a condensed-matter physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany.
LiveScience: This Meteor 'Exploded' Over Greenland, But Nobody Saw It. Here's Why It Matters. By Jeanna Breyer
A fireball that streaked across the sky above the Thule Air Base in Greenland on July 25 was notable for not only the 2.1 kilotons of energy it released — the second-most-energetic "explosion" of its kind recorded this year — but also the stir it caused on social media and the frenzied calls it prompted to the U.S. Air Force.
And the blazing rock — which was traveling at about 54,000 mph (87,000 km/h), about 74 times the speed of sound, according to The Aviationist — may have sent meteorites to the ground for passersby (the few people who happened to be this far north of the Arctic Circle) to discover.
The first reports of the meteor above Greenland came from two tweets from scientists. On July 31, Ron Baalke, of the Solar System Dynamics group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (or "Rocket Ron" on Twitter), wrote, "A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US Government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km. The energy from the explosion is estimated to be 2.1 kilotons." His tweet was followed by a similar one on Aug. 1 by Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists: "Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base." [Top 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]
Guardian: Rocket fault delays the launch of Nasa’s solar probe by James Tapper
As the first rays of dawn reached Cape Canaveral on Saturday, the rocket that Nasa hopes will reveal the sun’s secrets remained very much earthbound.
A last-minute technical hitch forced controllers at the Florida space centre to cancel the night-time launch of the Parker Solar Probe, announcing that they would try again on Sunday.
With one minute and 55 seconds left on the countdown timer, a launch controller ordered “Hold, hold, hold” when a pressure alarm sounded, showing that there was a fault with the Delta IV Heavy rocket’s helium system. Engineers tried to identifiy the problem, but the launch window – when a spacecraft can take off in the right direction due to the Earth’s rotation – closed before they could make progress.
United Launch Alliance, which made the rocket, will make a second attempt to launch the probe at 8.31am UK time on Sunday, although Nasa said that there was only a 60% chance of favourable weather conditions.
ScienceDaily: Alexa, be my friend: Children talk to technology, but how does it respond?
You ask Alexa to play a song, Siri for the weather or the Google Assistant to make a call. But what happens when your toddler asks a voice-activated device a question?
Your daughter pauses, stammers, mispronounces a few words. She's a beginner, after all.
In return: Silence. Or the familiar, default robot apology.
For such popular household technology, that's a missed opportunity to reach every member of the family, a new University of Washington study finds. Children communicate with technology differently than adults do, and a more responsive device -- one that repeats or prompts the user, for example -- could be more useful to more people.
"There has to be more than 'I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that,'" said co-author Alexis Hiniker, an assistant professor at the UW Information School. "Voice interfaces now are designed in a cut-and-dried way that needs more nuance. Adults don't talk to children and assume there will be perfect communication. That's relevant here."
I already know the answer to this question, lol.
LiveScience: Ancient Octagon-Shaped Tomb Reveals Morbid Tales from Mongol-Ruled China by Owen Janus
Archaeologists in Yangquan, China, have discovered an octagon-shaped tomb with walls covered in murals that dates back some 700 years, when the descendants of Genghis Khan ruled China.
The pyramid-shaped roof of the tomb is decorated with images of the sun, moon and stars, archaeologists said. And one of the murals depicts the story of parents attempting to bury their young son alive.
Seven of the walls are covered in murals, while the eighth holds the entranceway. No skeletal remains were found inside, though a mural on the north wall shows the tomb's husband and wife occupants, a team of archaeologists wrote in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics. [See Photos of the Octagon-Shaped Tomb and Excavation]
Some of the murals show scenes of life in Mongol-ruled China. These include a band of musicians playing songs, tea being prepared, and horses and camels transporting people and goods, according to the paper.
Everyone have a great evening!