fish says “screw your human rules imma livin’ in the earth”
Artificial light at night can alter patterns of genetic drift, natural selection, and gene flow — so it may be driving evolutionary change in urban populations of plants and animals.
Light is fundamental to biological systems, affecting the daily rhythms of bacteria, plants, and animals. Artificial light at night (ALAN), a ubiquitous feature of urbanization, interferes with these rhythms and has the potential to exert strong selection pressures on organisms living in urban environments. ALAN also fragments landscapes, altering the movement of animals into and out of artificially lit habitats.
Although research has documented phenotypic and genetic differentiation between urban and rural organisms, ALAN has rarely been considered as a driver of evolution. We argue that the fundamental importance of light to biological systems, and the capacity for ALAN to influence multiple processes contributing to evolution, makes this an important driver of evolutionary change, one with the potential to explain broad patterns of population differentiation across urban–rural landscapes. Integrating ALAN's evolutionary potential into urban ecology is a targeted and powerful approach to understanding the capacity for life to adapt to an increasingly urbanized world.
there’s a word for this: lachryphagy
A joint study from the Universities of York, Newcastle and Hull suggests moths have an important but overlooked ecological role -- dispensing pollen over large distances under the cover of darkness. [...]
"Over half of the plant species we detected were not previously known to be visited by moths. It was particularly interesting that moths were carrying pollen from many of the same plant species that are visited by bees, hoverflies and butterflies."
Pollen grains from crops such as peas, soybean and oil-seed rape were detected on multiple moths, despite a lack of previous evidence to suggest that moths are beneficial to farmers.
Dr Macgregor added: "Our study highlights the fact that we need to think seriously about the benefits of moths to plants and agricultural systems. While bees are excellent pollinators, they will only travel within the local environment of the nest.
"Moths appear to complement the work of bees and can carry pollen over greater distances as they don't have the same ties to a particular part of the landscape.
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Besame, interceptor7, Magnifico and annetteboardman. |
The nose is the obvious place to look for the olfactory receptors that detect odours, but researchers now know that similar receptors are found in many parts of the body. This includes the skin around hair follicles, where cells produce an olfactory receptor called OR2AT4 that plays a role in various physiological responses, such as fixing a cut.
Ralf Paus at the University of Manchester, UK, and his colleagues say there is already good evidence that forming a new hair uses a similar set of molecular tools as forming a patch of new skin after a wound. This made them wonder whether activating OR2AT4 could promote hair growth.
To test the idea, the team used samples of human scalp donated by volunteers who had undergone facelift procedures, and immersed them in synthetic sandalwood odorant for six days. They chose the synthetic sandalwood scent because it is an odour molecule particularly likely to bind to the OR2AT4 receptor.
The researchers found a 25 to 30 per cent increase in the secretion of a growth hormone in the scalp. In other words, the hormone plays a key role in promoting hair growth.
...for the first time, scientists have found that microplastics can move just as easily through one animal’s different life stages – even if those are spent in different habitats.
In a paper published in Biology Letters, UK researchers show the tiny fragments of plastic can be eaten by mosquito larvae and transferred to into a non-feeding (pupa) life stage and subsequently into the adult terrestrial life stage.
This provides another way for microplastics to travel through the environment – effectively dispersed through the air – putting even more animals and insects at risk of contamination.
“Our results have important implications because any aquatic life stage that is able to consume MPs and transfer them to their terrestrial life stage is a potential vector of MPs onto novel aerial and terrestrial habitats,” the authors write.
“Adults are predated on emergence by many animals including dipteran flies … while resting predominantly by spiders and in flight they are the prey of dragonflies, damselflies, birds, such as swallows and swifts, and bats.”
Certain brain and personality characteristics may help predict whether a sugar pill can provide relief to someone suffering from chronic pain.
In a small study, patients with persistent back pain who responded to a placebo treatment benefitted from up to a 33 percent reduction in their pain intensity. These people had distinctive features in their brains and certain personality traits, researchers report online September 12 in Nature Communications.
“We need to seriously think about placebo as a treatment option, especially in chronic pain patients,”….
Rediscovering species once thought to be extinct or on the edge of extinction is rare. Red wolves have been extinct along the Gulf Coast region since 1980, with their last populations found in coastal Louisiana and Texas. We report the rediscovery of red wolf ghost alleles in a canid population on Galveston Island, Texas. We analyzed over 7,000 SNPs in 60 canid representatives from all legally recognized North American Canis species and two phenotypically ambiguous canids from Galveston Island. We found notably high Bayesian cluster assignments of the Galveston canids to captive red wolves with extensive sharing of red wolf private alleles. Today, the only known extant wild red wolves persist in a reintroduced population in North Carolina, which is dwindling amongst political and taxonomic controversy. Our rediscovery of red wolf ancestry after almost 40 years introduces both positive opportunities for additional conservation action and difficult policy challenges.
“I think this is a whole new level of weirdness,” says Matthew Leifer, a theoretical physicist at Chapman University in Orange, California.
In the world’s most famous thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrödinger described how a cat in a box could be in an uncertain predicament. The peculiar rules of quantum theory meant that it could be both dead and alive, until the box was opened and the cat’s state measured. Now, two physicists have devised a modern version of the paradox by replacing the cat with a physicist doing experiments — with shocking implications . . .
...the latest version, which involves multiple players, is unusual: it shows that if the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then different experimenters can reach opposite conclusions about what the physicist in the box has measured. This means that quantum theory contradicts itself….
Physicists are still coming to terms with the implications of the result. It has triggered heated responses from experts in the foundations of quantum theory, many of whom tend to be protective of their pet interpretation. “Some get emotional,” Renner says. And different researchers tend to draw different conclusions. “Most people claim that the experiment shows that their interpretation is the only one that is correct.”
ending with out of this world music