Popular Science
The most important science policy issue in every state
Wildfires burning around the West. Rising seas lapping at the East. Animal feces, coal ash, and fertilizer fouling waterways from the Carolinas to the Midwest. Bridges, roads, and pipelines crumbling across the country. With the midterm elections less than a month away, communities across the United States face some of the most formidable scientific, environmental, and technological challenges in decades. On November 6, voters from Alaska to Florida will choose not just their next governor, state representative, or member of Congress, but to some degree how we live for decades to come. “This is the most important election of our lifetime,” says Bill Holland, State Policy Director for the League of Conservation Voters. […]
These are the top science, technology, or environment issues facing each state—plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. Even if it never surfaces on the campaign trail, science is always on the ballot.
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Birds: They’re just like us. Except their lungs are small in comparison to their body size (much smaller than ours, by this metric) and they have a set of air sacs, nine in total, that run down the sides of their bodies.
A newly described fossil found in China shows that birds evolved one of these notable features very, very early–while they were still dinosaurs, in fact. A team of researchers from China and South Africa just published a study detailing the presence of what they believe to be lung tissue in the fossil. This is the first time evidence of lungs has been found in an avian dinosaur fossil, and it may help explain why one group of avian dinosaurs—the Ornithumorpha, of which this fossil was a member—was able to survive the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs and continue to evolve into modern birds.
When and how did dinosaurs go extinct?
For 165 million years, dinosaurs dominated land, sea, and sky. Long-necked Brachiosauruses lumbered along like mobile four-story buildings. Tyrannosaurus rex chased down prey with 50 to 60 teeth as big as bananas. Mosasaurs stretching 55 feet from snout to tail terrorized the seas, consuming everything they could catch.
But 66 million years ago, the world’s climate drastically changed. Dinosaurs had thrived in the warm temperatures and mild weather of the Mesozoic era. All of a sudden, the Earth became much colder and darker. Plants died and food became scarce. All the dinosaurs—except for the ancestors of modern birds—and three quarters of the creatures living on Earth went extinct.
To this day, scientists debate what caused this sudden change. The leading theories involve an asteroid strike and a giant volcano.
Science Magazine
Chemists find a recipe that may have jump-started life on Earth
In the molecular dance that gave birth to life on Earth, RNA appears to be a central player. But the origins of the molecule, which can store genetic information as DNA does and speed chemical reactions as proteins do, remain a mystery. Now, a team of researchers has shown for the first time that a set of simple starting materials, which were likely present on early Earth, can produce all four of RNA’s chemical building blocks.
Those building blocks—cytosine, uracil, adenine, and guanine—have previously been re-created in the lab from other starting materials. In 2009, chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom devised a set of five compounds likely present on early Earth that could give rise to cytosine and uracil, collectively known as pyrimidines. Then, 2 years ago, researchers led by Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, reported that his team had an equally easy way to form adenine and guanine, the building blocks known as purines. But the two sets of chemical reactions were different. No one knew how the conditions for making both pairs of building blocks could have occurred in the same place at the same time.
Now, Carell says he may have the answer. On Tuesday, at the Origins of Life Workshop here, he reported that he and his colleagues have come up with a simple set of reactions that could have given rise to all four RNA bases
Climate change prompts a rethink of Everglades management
Efforts to restore the rich ecology of the Florida Everglades have so far focused on fighting damage from pollutant runoff and reestablishing the natural flow of water. But now, an expert panel is calling for federal and state agencies to reassess their plans in light of threats from climate change and sea-level rise. A congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, released on 16 October, asks the managers of the 18-year-old Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) to conduct a “midcourse assessment.” The new evaluation should account for likely conditions in the wetlands in “2050 and beyond” and model how existing restoration projects would fare under various sea-level rise scenarios. […]
The Everglades watershed once included more than 1 million hectares of wetlands, sawgrass plains, and tree islands across southern Florida, but agriculture and human settlement have shrunk that habitat by half.
One of the world’s largest organisms is shrinking
The Pando aspen grove, located in central Utah, is the largest organism on the planet by weight. From the surface, it may look like a forest that spans more than 100 U.S. football fields, but each tree shares the exact same DNA and is connected to its clonal brethren through an elaborate underground root system. Although not quite as large in terms of area as the massive Armillaria gallica fungus in Michigan, Pando is much heavier, weighing in at more than 6 million kilograms. Now, researchers say, the grove is in danger, being slowly eaten away by mule deer and other herbivores—and putting the fate of its ecosystem in jeopardy.
“This is a really unusual habitat type,” says Luke Painter, an ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who was not involved with the research. “A lot of animals depend on it.”
Ars Technica
New material could up efficiency of concentrated solar power
With the price of photovoltaics having plunged dramatically, solar is likely to become a major contributor to the electrical generating mix in many countries. But the intermittent nature of photovoltaics could put a limit on how much they contribute to future grids or force us to develop massive storage capabilities.
But photovoltaics aren't the only solar technology out there. Concentrated solar power uses mirrors to focus the Sun's light, providing heat that can be used to drive turbines. Advances in heat storage mean that the technology can now generate power around the clock, essentially integrating storage into the process of producing energy. Unfortunately, the price of concentrated solar hasn't budged much, and photovoltaics have left it in the dust. But some materials scientists may have figured out a way to boost concentrated solar's efficiency considerably, clawing back some of photovoltaics' advantage.
Gorillas that are great with kids are also luckier in love
Cantsbee the gorilla was great with kids, which is why it struck gorilla researcher Stacy Rosenbaum as odd when he suddenly started grunting aggressively at his usual gaggle of baby gorilla sidekicks. Cantsbee seemed oddly annoyed by them tagging along behind.
“Cantsbee was always incredibly gentle,” says Rosenbaum. “He was never aggressive towards infants or humans. So the infants looked startled, not sure what to do.” Eventually they got the hint and moved off into the bushes to go around the grumpy Cantsbee, who then began displaying aggressively at Rosenbaum, too.
“I thought he was just having a really bad day,” she recalls. “But then I realized he was sitting next to a snare. It sent chills down my spine—I can’t say for sure, but it seems like he was protecting not just the infants, but me, too.”
Not all male gorillas are as gentle as Cantsbee, and not all of them are followed around by a swarm of adoring kids. But it seems that Cantsbee knew what he was doing: the better a male gorilla is with babies, the luckier he is with the ladies. Rosenbaum and her colleagues have drawn on decades of data to explore the relationship between gorilla babysitting and mating success. Their results, published this week in Nature Scientific Reports, also suggest that female mate choice plays an important role in gorilla society.
Collapse of ancient city’s water system may have led to its demise
The Cambodian city of Angkor was once the largest in the world... then the vast majority of its inhabitants suddenly decamped in the 15th century to a region near the modern city of Phnom Penh. Historians have put forth several theories about why this mass exodus occurred. A new paper in Science Advances argues that one major contributing factor was an overloaded water distribution system, exacerbated by extreme swings in the climate.
Angkor dates back to around 802 CE. Its vast network of canals, moats, embankments, and reservoirs developed over the next 600 years, helping distribute vital water resources for such uses as irrigation and to help control occasional flooding. By the end of the 11th century, the system bore all the features of a complex network, with thousands of interconnected individual components heavily dependent on each other.
Such a configuration, hovering at or near the so-called critical point, is ideal for the effective flow of resources, whether we're talking about water, electricity (power grids), traffic, the spread of disease, or information (the stock market and the Internet). The tradeoff is that it can become much more sensitive to even tiny perturbations—so much so that a small outage in one part of the network can trigger a sudden network-wide cascading failure.
Nature
Double the fun: Mars scientists push NASA to send rock-harvesting rover to two sites
NASA’s next Mars rover — the first to gather rock samples meant to come back to Earth — should dream big and visit as many places on the red planet as possible, scientists concluded on 18 October.
Its stops would probably include some combination of Jezero crater, once home to river deltas and a lake; Northeast Syrtis, which contains some of the most ancient rocks on Mars; and Midway, a compromise option located between those two. Project scientists have proposed visiting both Jezero, for the river and lake sediments that might retain signs of past life, and Midway, for the ancient rocks.
The two are approximately 28 kilometres apart — so visiting both would be an ambitious but achievable goal.
Dandelion seeds fly using ‘impossible’ method never before seen in nature
Dandelion seeds fly using a method that researchers thought couldn’t work in the real world, according to a study1 published on 17 October in Nature.
When some animals, aeroplanes or seeds fly, rings of circulating air called vortices form in contact with their wings or wing-like surfaces. These vortices can help to maintain the forces that lift the animal, machine or seed into the air.
Researchers thought that an unattached vortex would be too unstable to persist in nature. Yet the light, puffy seeds of dandelions use vortices that materialize just above their surfaces and lift the seed into the air.
Gloomy 1970s predictions about Earth’s fate still hold true
On the eve of one the twentieth century’s most notable economic shocks — the 1973 oil crisis — an influential group of researchers released a now-iconic report entitled ‘The Limits to Growth’.
The work, which received wide attention and proved controversial, painted a bleak picture of humanity’s future. Left unchecked, it said, economic and population growth would deplete the planet’s resources and cause economic collapse before 2070.
More than four decades later, the report’s main conclusions are still valid, according to a group of independent researchers who have updated the work using more sophisticated analytical tools. Like the 1972 report, the latest work was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a group of liberal scientists, economists and politicians that this year celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its founding in 1968.
Phys.org
Elucidating cuttlefish camouflage
The unique ability of cuttlefish, squid and octopuses to hide by imitating the colors and texture of their environment has fascinated natural scientists since the time of Aristotle. Uniquely among all animals, these mollusks control their appearance by the direct action of neurons onto expandable pixels, numbered in millions, located in their skin. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies/Goethe University used this neuron-pixel correspondence to peer into the brain of cuttlefish, inferring the putative structure of control networks through analysis of skin pattern dynamics.
Cuttlefish, squid and octopus are a group of marine mollusks called coleoid cephalopods that once included ammonites, today only known as spiral fossils of the Cretaceous era. Modern coleoid cephalopods lost their external shells about 150 million years ago and took up an increasingly active predatory lifestyle. This development was accompanied by a massive increase in the size of their brains: modern cuttlefish and octopus have the largest brains (relative to body size) among invertebrates with a size comparable to that of reptiles and some mammals. They use these large brains to perform a range of intelligent behaviors, including the singular ability to change their skin pattern to camouflage, or hide, in their surroundings.
A single missing gene leads to miscarriage
A single gene from the mother plays such a crucial role in the development of the placenta that its dysfunction leads to miscarriages. Researchers from the Medical Faculty of Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have observed this in so-called knockout mice that were specifically modified for this purpose. These mice lack the gene for the transcription factor Math6. By conducting further analyses, the research team is now hoping to gain new insights into the role the gene plays in recurrent miscarriage in humans. The researchers headed by Professor Beate Brand-Saberi published their results in the journal Scientific Reports on 9 October 2018.
Transcription factors regulate the expression of downstream genes. Math6 plays a significant role in a number of organs during prenatal development as well as in the adult organism. The knockout mice generated at RUB lack the gene for the transcription factor Math6. "Considering the consequences caused by the lacking gene, conclusions can be drawn regarding its function," explains Beate Brand-Saberi, Head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology.
Researchers confirm Earth's inner core is solid
A new study by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) could help us understand how our planet was formed. Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalčić and PhD Scholar Than-Son Phạm are confident they now have direct proof the earth's inner core is solid.
They came up with a way to detect shear waves, or "J waves" in the inner core - a type of wave which can only travel through solid objects.
"We found the inner core is indeed solid, but we also found that it's softer than previously thought," Associate Professor Tkalčić said.
"It turns out - if our results are correct - the inner core shares some similar elastic properties with gold and platinum. The inner core is like a time capsule, if we understand it we'll understand how the planet was formed, and how it evolves."
Science Daily
Arctic greening thaws permafrost, boosts runoff
A new collaborative study has investigated Arctic shrub-snow interactions to obtain a better understanding of the far north's tundra and vast permafrost system. Incorporating extensive in situ observations, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists tested their theories with a novel 3D computer model and confirmed that shrubs can lead to significant degradation of the permafrost layer that has remained frozen for tens of thousands of years. These interactions are driving increases in discharges of fresh water into rivers, lakes and oceans.
"The Arctic is actively greening, and shrubs are flourishing across the tundra. As insulating snow accumulates atop tall shrubs, it boosts significant ground warming," said Cathy Wilson, Los Alamos scientist on the project. "If the trend of increasing vegetation across the Arctic continues, we're likely to see a strong increase in permafrost degradation."
The team investigated interactions among shrubs, permafrost, and subsurface areas called taliks. Taliks are unfrozen ground near permafrost caused by a thermal or hydrological anomaly. Some tunnel-like taliks called "through taliks" extend over thick permafrost layers.
Plant hormone makes space farming a possibility
With scarce nutrients and weak gravity, growing potatoes on the Moon or on other planets seems unimaginable. But the plant hormone strigolactone could make it possible, plant biologists from the University of Zurich have shown. The hormone supports the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots, thus encouraging plants' growth -- even under the challenging conditions found in space.
The idea has been bounced around for a while now -- and not just by the likes of NASA, but also by private entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk: that of one day establishing colonies for people to live on the Moon or on other planets. Such visions, as well as the prospect of long-term human space expeditions in the future, raise the question of how to sustainably provide food for the people in space. One possible answer is to cultivate crops in situ. However, the soils on the Moon and on other planets are surely lower in nutrients compared to our agricultural land. The alternative -- transporting nutrient-rich soil and fertilizers up into space -- comes with a high economic and ecological cost.
Teenaged girls did not engage in riskier sexual behavior after HPV vaccination introduced in school
Despite fears to the contrary, sexual behaviours of adolescent girls stayed the same or became safer after publicly funded school-based HPV vaccinations were introduced in British Columbia (BC), according to new research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). […]
"The HPV vaccine has proved to be a remarkably effective and safe vaccine. However, parents have expressed concern that the use of the HPV vaccine might promote or condone risky sexual behavior in adolescents," explains lead author Dr. Gina Ogilvie, of the School of Population and Public Health, the University of British Columbia, and assistant director of the Women's Health Research Institute at BC Women's Hospital, Vancouver, BC.
BBC News
Trump to pull US from Russia missile treaty
The US will withdraw from a landmark nuclear weapons treaty with Russia, … Donald Trump has confirmed.
Speaking to reporters, Mr Trump said Russia had "violated" the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. The deal banned ground-launched medium-range missiles, with a range of between 500 and 5,500km (310-3,400 miles).
The US would not let Russia "go out and do weapons [while] we're not allowed to", Mr Trump said.
A long walk: New insight into history of dogs and humans
Dogs were part of a key moment in human history - when our ancestors began trying their hand at farming.
As the first farmers moved out of the Middle East, herding animals such as sheep and goats, dogs tagged along too, say scientists.
The DNA evidence fills in some of the gaps in the story of how wolves became the dogs of all shapes and sizes that we know today.
Blast-off for BepiColombo on mission to Mercury
Two satellites developed in Europe and Japan are on their way to Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun.
The joint endeavour, known as BepiColombo, left Earth on an Ariane rocket that launched out of South America.
It will take the probes seven years to reach their destination. But when they do finally arrive, it is hoped their parallel observations can finally resolve the many puzzles about the hot little world.
The Guardian
Viking ship burial discovered in Norway just 50cm underground
Archaeologists have discovered a Viking ship burial in Norway using ground-penetrating radar that suggests the 20-metre keel and many of its timbers remain well preserved just half a metre below the topsoil.
The ship lies in farmland in Østfold county in south-east Norway. Just three other intact ship burials have been recorded in the country; the survival of this one is remarkable because the imposing burial mound that once covered it has long since been ploughed out. Another mound, Jelle mound, still rises high in the field, and the research has also traced the outlines of at least eight other previously unknown burial mounds that once surrounded it, and five nearby longhouses.
Project leader Lars Gustavsen, an archaeologist from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (Niku), said: “The ship burial does not exist in isolation, but forms part of a cemetery which is clearly designed to display power and influence.”
Chinese city 'plans to launch artificial moon to replace streetlights'
In Chengdu, there is reportedly an ambitious plan afoot for replacing the city’s streetlights: boosting the glow of the real moon with that of a more powerful fake one.
The south-western Chinese city plans to launch an illumination satellite in 2020. According to an account in the People’s Daily, the artificial moon is “designed to complement the moon at night”, though it would be eight times as bright.
The “dusk-like glow” of the satellite would be able to light an area with a diameter of 10-80km, while the precise illumination range could be controlled within tens of metres – enabling it to replace streetlights.
Allergies: the scourge of modern life?
Our ancestors didn’t suffer from hay fever and food allergies were extremely rare even a few decades ago. What is causing the steep rise in their incidence now?
To anyone from Generation X or older, it often feels like food allergies are far more common today than in their youth. While they remember them being rare or nonexistent in their school days, their own children will have classmates with allergies or they may have one themselves. […]
Since 1906, when the word “allergy” was first used, the number of those affected has been climbing. Asthma has probably always been a problem but if ancient records of it are anything to go by, it was also exceptionally rare.