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.
Undark.org: In California’s Fertile Valley, Industry and Agriculture Hang Heavy in the Air by Brendan Borrell
THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY is the land of Big Agriculture. Stretching 250 miles from Bakersfield in the south to Stockton in the north, the San Joaquin comprises the southern two-thirds of the storied Central Valley, a plowed-over promised land covering seven million acres of irrigated fields that generate more than $17 billion a year in crops — with the vast majority coming from three San Joaquin Valley counties. In sum, the region supplies a quarter of the food on American plates.
It is also awash in air pollution. Millions of beef and dairy cattle, millions of acres of dusty crops, and the truck traffic to support these mega-operations generate fine airborne particles that linger and swirl in what is, in effect, a gigantic, pollution-trapping bowl bounded by mountains. Add in prolific use of wood stoves and barbecue pits, the second-hand smog blowing into the valley from cities to the west and the north, and emissions from some of the densest oil fields in the lower 48 states, and the result is
some of the worst air pollution in the nation.
California’s recent record-breaking forest fires only worsen the mix.
Scientific American: Freshwater Is Getting Saltier, Threatening People and Wildlife by Tim Vernimmen
Salts that de-ice roads, parking lots and sidewalks keep people safe in winter. But new research shows they are contributing to a sharp and widely rising problem across the U.S. At least a third of the rivers and streams in the country have gotten saltier in the past 25 years. And by 2100, more than half of them may contain at least 50 percent more salt than they used to. Increasing salinity will not just affect freshwater plants and animals but human lives as well—notably, by affecting drinking water.
Sujay Kaushal, a biogeochemist at the University of Maryland, College Park, recounts an experience he had when visiting relatives in New Jersey. When getting a drink from the tap, “I saw a white film on the glass.” After trying to scrub it off, he found, “it turned out to be a thin layer of salt crusting the glass.”
When Kaushal, who studies how salt invades freshwater sources, sampled the local water supply he found not just an elevated level of the sodium chloride, widely used in winter to de-ice outdoor surfaces, but plenty of other salts such as sodium bicarbonate and magnesium chloride. He also found similar concentrations of these chemicals in most rivers along the east coast, including the Potomac, which provides drinking water for Washington, D.C. Where did all of it come from?
Scientists at the University of Oxford may have solved one of the biggest questions in modern physics, with a new paper unifying dark matter and dark energy into a single phenomenon: a fluid which possesses 'negative mass." If you were to push a negative mass, it would accelerate towards you. This astonishing new theory may also prove right a prediction that Einstein made 100 years ago.
Our current, widely recognised model of the Universe, called LambdaCDM, tells us nothing about what dark matter and dark energy are like physically. We only know about them because of the gravitational effects they have on other, observable matter.
This new model, published today in Astronomy and Astrophysics, by Dr. Jamie Farnes from the Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science, offers a new explanation. Dr. Farnes says: "We now think that both dark matter and dark energy can be unified into a fluid which possesses a type of 'negative gravity," repelling all other material around them. Although this matter is peculiar to us, it suggests that our cosmos is symmetrical in both positive and negative qualities."
The existence of negative matter had previously been ruled out as it was thought this material would become less dense as the Universe expands, which runs contrary to our observations that show dark energy does not thin out over time. However, Dr. Farnes' research applies a 'creation tensor," which allows for negative masses to be continuously created. It demonstrates that when more and more negative masses are continually bursting into existence, this negative mass fluid does not dilute during the expansion of the cosmos. In fact, the fluid appears to be identical to dark energy.
Quanta: Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever by Natalie Wolchover
Leonard Susskind, a pioneer of string theory, the holographic principle and other big physics ideas spanning the past half-century, has proposed a solution to an important puzzle about black holes. The problem is that even though these mysterious, invisible spheres appear to stay a constant size as viewed from the outside, their interiors keep growing in volume essentially forever. How is this possible?
In a series of recent papers and talks, the 78-year-old Stanford University professor and his collaborators conjecture that black holes grow in volume because they are steadily increasing in complexity — an idea that, while unproven, is fueling new thinking about the quantum nature of gravity inside black holes.
Black holes are spherical regions of such extreme gravity that not even light can escape. First discovered a century ago as shocking solutions to the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they’ve since been detected throughout the universe. (They typically form from the inward gravitational collapse of dead stars.) Einstein’s theory equates the force of gravity with curves in space-time, the four-dimensional fabric of the universe, but gravity becomes so strong in black holes that the space-time fabric bends toward its breaking
I haven’t followed theoretical physics much but….this story kinda makes me a Leonard Susskind fan.
I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16 he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.
When did physics come along?
I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics. When I told my father I wanted to be a physicist, he said, "Hell, no, you ain't going to work in a drugstore." I said, No, not a pharmacist. I said, "Like Einstein." He poked me in the chest with a piece of plumbing pipe. "You ain't going to be no engineer," he said. "You're going to be Einstein."
ScienceDaily: In death, Lonesome George reveals why giant tortoises live so long
Genetic analysis of DNA from Lonesome George and samples from other giant tortoises of the Galapagos -- which can live more than 100 years in captivity -- found they possessed a number of gene variants linked to DNA repair, immune response, and cancer suppression not possessed by shorter-lived vertebrates.
The findings were reported Dec. 3 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
"Lonesome George is still teaching us lessons," said Adalgisa "Gisella" Caccone, senior researcher in Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and co-senior author of the paper.
In 2010, Caccone began sequencing the whole genome of Lonesome George, the last of the species Chelonoidis abingdonii, to study evolution of the tortoise population on the Galapagos. Carlos Lopez-Otin at the University of Oviedo in Spain analyzed this data and other species of tortoises to look for gene variants associated with longevity.
Science: Assassin fly babies have ‘Swiss army knife’ mouths by Joshua Rapp Learn
Australia’s splendid assassin fly (Blepharotes splendidissimus) earns its fearsome moniker. About the size of a bottle cap and sporting a similar metallic luster, they ambush butterflies and dragonflies in midair, killing them with a venomous bite. Now, scientists have discovered that even the larvae of these flies are vicious.
The mouths of these maggots are “the insect equivalent of a Swiss army knife,” researchers report in Austral Entomology. Using scanning electron microscopy to produce photos like the one above, the team discovered blade-shaped mandible hooks with backward-pointing teeth—all the better to pierce into soft-bodied bugs in the soil where these larvae live. These hooks also have grooves that, when pushed together, form a tube the maggots use to inject venomous saliva into their prey. The venom injector tool doubles as a straw, allowing the larvae to suck out the body parts of their victims, the authors report.
The researchers also found that once the larvae pupate, usually underground or inside wood, the pupa adopts spurs and spines ultimately used by the emerging adult to drill through to the surface of soil or rotting timber so it can take to the skies.
ScienceNews: These new tweezers let scientists do biopsies on living cells by Maria Temming
It’s like the world’s smallest game of “Operation.” A new set of nanotweezers can extract DNA and other single molecules from a living cell without killing it.
Examining the molecular contents of a single cell has traditionally required killing the cell by bursting it open. But that process provides only a single snapshot of the cell’s molecular makeup at the time of its death. The new nanotweezers, reported online December 3 in Nature Nanotechnology, could enable long-term analysis of what’s going on inside individual cells to better understand how healthy cells work and where diseased cells go wrong.
The nanotweezers comprise a glass rod with a tip less than 100 nanometers across, capped with two carbon-based electrodes. Applying an electric voltage to the tweezers creates a powerful electric field in the immediate vicinity of the electrodes, which can attract and trap biomolecules within about 300 nanometers of the tweezer tip.
Nature: ‘Little Foot’ hominin emerges from stone after millions of years by Colin Barras
After a tortuous 20-year-long excavation, a mysterious ancient skeleton is starting to give up its secrets about human evolution.
The first of a raft of papers about ‘Little Foot’ suggests that the fossil is a female who showed some of the earliest signs of human-like bipedal walking around 3.67 million years ago. She may also belong to a distinct species that most researchers haven’t previously recognized.
“It’s almost a miracle it’s come out intact,” says Robin Crompton, a musculoskeletal biologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, who has collaborated with the research team that excavated the skeleton.
As well echoing the mythical ‘Bigfoot’, the nickname Little Foot comes from the small size of the foot bones that were among the first parts of the skeleton to be discovered.
If you would like to read more science, there’s Mark Sumner’s Abbreviated Science Round-Up.
And don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!