The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
Phys.org
Scientists create bee vaccine to fight off 'insect apocalypse'
Scientists in Finland have developed what they believe is the world's first vaccine to protect bees against disease, raising hopes for tackling the drastic decline in insect numbers which could cause a global food crisis.
Bees are vital for growing the world's food as they help fertilise three out of four crops around the globe, by transferring pollen from male to female flowers.
But in recent years bee populations around the world have been dying off from "colony collapse disorder", a mysterious scourge blamed on mites, pesticides, virus, fungus, or some combination of these factors.
UN-led research in 2016 found that more than 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators, particularly bees and butterflies, are facing extinction. The study also found that 16.5 percent of vertebrate pollinators, such as birds and bats, are under threat. Scientists warn that the die-off will result in higher food prices and the risk of shortages.
A damming trend
Hundreds of dams are being proposed for Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia. The negative social and environmental consequences—affecting everything from food security to the environment—greatly outweigh the positive changes of this grand-scale flood control, according to new research by Michigan State University.
The results, published in the current issue of Scientific Reports, are the first to tackle the potential environmental changes that the overall basin could experience from harnessing the region's hydropower.
"The Mekong River is one of the few large and complex river systems that remains mostly undammed," said Yadu Pokhrel, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and the study's lead author. "However, the rapid socio-economic growth, increasing energy demands and geopolitical opportunities have led to basin-wide construction of large hydropower dams."
For these critically endangered marine turtles, climate change could be a knockout blow
Hawksbill turtles aren't the only marine turtles threatened by the destabilizing effects of climate change, but a new study from researchers at Florida State University shows that this critically endangered species could be at particular risk.
In a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from FSU's Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science suggest that projected increases in air temperatures, rainfall inundation and blistering solar radiation could significantly reduce hawksbill hatching success at a selection of major nesting beaches.
Earth's history abounds with examples of climate shifts, but researchers say today's transforming climate, paired with unabated human development, imperils hawksbills and other marine turtles in new and alarming ways.
The Guardian
First Dutch bananas could help tackle worldwide fungal threat
A Dutch university has grown the Netherlands’ first crop of bananas as part of a research programme that could help protect the fruit from a deadly fungus that threatens production worldwide.
Wageningen University grew 60 banana plants in its greenhouses on coco peat and rock wool, avoiding the threat of a soil-borne fungal disease that could destroy hundreds of thousands of hectares of banana plants around the world, local media reported. The crop will be offered to local hospitals and restaurants.
Gert Kema, a professor of tropical plant pathology, said the success would lead to further research into combating Fusarium wilt. “It threatens banana production throughout the world,” Kema said. “So we took the banana out of the soil. The plants grow very well, with only the application of a nutrient.”
Genetic study of people with acne raises prospect of new treatment
The world’s first genetic study of people with acne has raised the prospect of new treatments for those with severe cases of the skin condition.
The study of almost 27,000 people, including 5,602 with severe acne, identified genetic differences that were more common in people with the skin condition. Scientists found that many of the genetic variants influenced the formation of hair follicles, which was previously an unknown risk factor for the condition. The researchers think that differences in the shape of hair follicles may make some people’s skin more prone to harbour bacteria, creating the conditions for acne.
The team at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical research centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital hopes that the findings could pave the way for more effective drugs.
UN climate change talks avoid contentious issues in draft agreement
The UN met on Saturday in Poland to discuss a draft agreement on climate change, which sources said was likely to pass, as exhausted delegates made compromises on some key issues but left other contentious problems to be resolved next year.
The result will not be the breakthrough campaigners and some countries were hoping for, but will keep discussions alive on formulating key aspects of the implementation rules for the 2015 Paris accord.
Delegates have been thrashing out a text on the complex mechanisms required to put the Paris goals into effect for the past two weeks, and appeared partly successful as the talks overran their Friday deadline and looked likely to continue into late afternoon on Saturday at least.
Popular Science
These beautiful images preserve plant species that might otherwise disappear forever
In 1859, Charles Darwin finally published his long-gestating theory of natural selection in On the Origin of Species. Famous for his descriptions of Galapagos turtles and birds' ever-changing beaks, the English scientist concluded, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Fast forward almost 160 years, and that quote is serving as the inspiration for a new project to digitize intriguing and, in many cases, endangered plants. Called "Endless Forms," the initiative brings together 17 research institutions in an effort to scan and share two million plant specimens over the next three years.
Matthew Pace, an orchid expert with the New York Botanical Garden, is one of the project coordinators. He says the digitization will focus on plants from 15 families, including succulents, carnivorous creatures, and epiphytes, which are organisms that grow on other plants. Though they differ remarkably from their living appearances, these botanical specimens find new ways to beguile the eye, even when packed tight and turned into 2D images.
How long can an event hold humanity's attention? There's an equation for that.
It’s not often you open a mathematical research paper and find a Pablo Neruda poem. But a new study in the journal Nature Human Behavior begins just like that: “Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido.” Translation? “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
The paper, titled “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” is an ambitious attempt to turn the slow slippage of cultural memory—the way a hit song lingers, or doesn’t—into a quantitative method for measuring the way our attention to various cultural products declines. It seeks, in other words, to turn the most abstract cognitive phenomenon into a cold, hard equation.
The first step was finding a viable proxy for memory. Lead study author Cristian Candia, an experimental physicist turned social complexity researcher, chose attention. In the 21st century, our eyeballs are so efficiently monitored, our online behaviors so carefully measured, all Candia had to do was turn Wikipedia searches or YouTube views into actionable data.
Ars Technica
What’s eating this 400-year-old painting? A whole ecosystem of microbes
A new study describes the complex ecosystems of bacteria and fungi that live and feast on a 17th-century painting—and how other species of bacteria may one day help art conservators fight back.
If you could zoom in for a microscopic look at an oil painting on canvas, you would see many thin, overlapping layers of pigments—powdered bits of insects, plants, or minerals—held together with oils or glue made from animal collagens. Many of those pigments and binding materials are surprisingly edible to bacteria and fungi. Each patch of color and each layer of paint and varnish in an oil painting offers a different microbial habitat. So when you look at a painting, you’re not just looking at a work of art; you’re looking at a whole ecosystem.
Ebola outbreak reaches city of 1 million residents
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to a city of nearly 1 million residents. There are now 30 confirmed cases and 15 deaths in the city of Butembo reported in the latest update provided by the World Health Organization (WHO). The number of cases in the city center is still low, according to Doctors Without Borders, but that number is rising quickly in more outlying districts and suburbs.
The outbreak, which has been going on since August, has so far resulted in 467 confirmed cases and a further 48 probable cases. More than half of the cases have resulted in death (including those of 17 health workers), while 177 patients have recovered, including a newborn baby.
The rate of transmission is beginning to slow down in Beni, a smaller city approximately 36 miles north of Butembo that has the highest number of reported cases so far. But “the outbreak is intensifying in Butembo and Katwa,” writes the WHO, “and new clusters are emerging elsewhere.”
Gizmodo
A Passing Comet Will Be Visible to the Naked Eye This Weekend
The year’s brightest comet will make its closest approach with Earth over the weekend—and, if you’re in the right spot, you should be able to see it without a telescope.
46P/Wirtanen is a fuzzy green blob that orbits Earth every 5.5 years. It hit its closest point to the Sun on Wednesday, and should be its brightest on Saturday or Sunday.
Comets are small, loosely bound agglomerations of ice, dust, and rock. They contain comas, the haze caused by particles from the Sun striking the comet’s nucleus. Scientists generally consider comets and asteroids to have different origins, but there are exceptions that look like asteroids and orbit like comets, called Manx objects.
Two Stalagmites Found in Chinese Cave Are a 'Holy Grail' for Accurate Radiocarbon Dating
Since its inception in the 1950s, radiocarbon dating has proven indispensable to archaeologists and climate scientists, who rely on the technique to accurately date organic compounds. But a good thing just got better, owing to the discovery of two stalagmites in a Chinese cave containing a seamless chronological atmospheric record dating back to the last Ice Age.
An unbroken, high-resolution record of atmospheric carbon-12 and carbon-14 was found in a pair of stalagmites located within Hulu Cave near Nanjing, China, according to new research published today in Science. Because this record extends back to the last glacial period, to around 54,000 years ago, scientists are now equipped with a more accurate standard for use in radiocarbon calibration.
This Could Be the Best Quantum Computer Yet
A startup based in Maryland has released and tested an impressive new quantum computer that demonstrates the power of an occasionally overlooked quantum computing architecture…
A company called IonQ, however, has now announced a state-of-the-art system that relies on the quantum nature of atoms themselves, and it’s one of the best-performing quantum computers yet.
How many qubits, or quantum bits, does it have? Well, these days, qubit count is a misleading number for understanding how powerful a quantum computer is. It’s more about how good those qubits are.
“If you look at raw gate count or qubit numbers or fidelity, it doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Christopher Monroe, IonQ’s co-founder and chief executive and a physics professor at the University of Maryland. “What we’re trying to push is on is the idea that having standard metrics,” like algorithm performance, is more useful for comparing quantum computers.
Science Daily
Hair color gene study sheds new light on roots of redheads' locks
Scientists have discovered eight genes linked to red hair, helping to solve a mystery of how redheads inherit their flaming locks. The study -- which also sheds light on blondes and brunettes -- is the largest genetic study of hair colour to date.
It had been thought that red hair is controlled by a single gene, called MC1R. The new research sheds light on other genes that are involved. Previous studies had shown that redheads inherit two versions of the MC1R gene that leads to red hair -- one from their mum and one from their dad.
Although almost everyone with red hair has two copies of the red-haired version of MC1R, not everyone carrying two red-haired versions is a redhead. Scientists knew there must be other genes involved but these have mostly remained a mystery until now.
Scientists identify new minerals for carbon capture
Research confirms new minerals are capturing and storing carbon in a new paper by University of Alberta geologists and their collaborators. The minerals, members of the hydrotalcite group, are the first outside of the carbonate family to naturally capture atmospheric CO2 in mine waste, important as society continues to forge ways to lower our carbon emissions and combat climate change.
"This research confirmed that hydrotalcites are capable of sequestering atmospheric CO2 in mine waste," said Connor Turvey, who conducted this research during his PhD studies under the supervision of Sasha Wilson. "Hydrotalcites are trapping the CO2deeper into the tailings where carbonate minerals were unable to form."
Mine tailings are composed of the waste minerals removed from the ground in the mining process. As these minerals are exposed to the atmosphere and to rain water, they can react to form new minerals that trap CO2 from the atmosphere.
Scientists overhaul corn domestication story with multidisciplinary analysis
Smithsonian scientists and collaborators are revising the history of one of the world's most important crops. Drawing on genetic and archaeological evidence, researchers have found that a predecessor of today's corn plants still bearing many features of its wild ancestor was likely brought to South America from Mexico more than 6,500 years ago. Farmers in Mexico and the southwestern Amazon continued to improve the crop over thousands of years until it was fully domesticated in each region.
The findings, reported Dec. 13 in the journal Science, come from a multidisciplinary, international collaboration between scientists at 14 institutions. Their account deepens researchers' understanding of the long, shared history between humans and maize, which is critical for managing our fragile relationships with the plants that feed us, said Logan Kistler, curator of archaeogenomics and archaeobotany at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study. "It's the long-term evolutionary history of domesticated plants that makes them fit for the human environment today," he said. "Understanding that history gives us tools for assessing the future of corn as we continue to drastically reshape our global environment and increase our agricultural demands on land around the globe."
Nature
‘Transmissible’ Alzheimer’s theory gains traction
Neuroscientists have amassed more evidence for the hypothesis that sticky proteins that are a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases can be transferred between people under particular conditions — and cause new damage in a recipient’s brain.
They stress that their research does not suggest that disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease are contagious, but it does raise concern that certain medical and surgical procedures pose a risk of transmitting such proteins between humans, which might lead to brain disease decades later.
“The risk may turn out to be minor — but it needs to be investigated urgently,” says John Collinge, a neurologist at University College London who led the research, which is published in Nature on 13 December.
El Niño events will intensify under global warming
During El Niño events, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific Ocean increase. These rising temperatures cause considerable reorganization of atmospheric circulation, resulting in extreme weather events worldwide and strongly affecting ecosystems, human health and the global economy. The reorganization is greater for El Niño events that generate maximum warming in the eastern equatorial Pacific than for those producing maximum warming in the central equatorial Pacific — referred to as EP- and CP-El Niño events, respectively. Despite the huge impact of these phenomena, there has been no consensus on how the SST variability associated with El Niño events will change with global warming. But on page 201, Cai et al. report robust agreement among climate models that both EP-El Niño SST variability and the frequency of strong EP-El Niño events will increase.
Conventionally, the response of El Niño SST variability to global warming has been investigated in climate models using SSTs at a fixed location. In the case of EP-El Niño events, this location is typically in the eastern equatorial Pacific (the ‘Niño3’ region: 5° S–5° N, 150°–90° W). Such an approach assumes that all models simulate an EP-El Niño centre — corresponding to the location of peak SST variability — that is the same as the observed centre. Cai and colleagues’ breakthrough comes from the realization that this fundamental assumption is invalid. The authors find that the longitude of the simulated centres differs greatly between models, and they examine the response of EP-El Niño SST variability to global warming at the centre of each model.
Science
Ancient bird fossils have ‘the weirdest feathers I have ever seen’
One hundred million years ago, the sky was filled with birds unlike those seen today, many with long, streamerlike tail feathers. Now, paleontologists have found examples of these paired feathers preserved in exquisite detail in 31 pieces of Cretaceous amber from Myanmar. The rare 3D preservation reveals the feathers’ structure is completely different from that of modern feathers—and hints that they may have been defensive decoys to foil predators.
Such tail streamers—in some cases longer than the bodies—have been observed in early bird fossils from China for several decades, in particular, the 125-million-year-old Confuciusornis sanctus. They may also be present in some feathered dinosaurs. Scientists have long thought the feathers were ornamental, similar to the tail feathers in some modern hummingbirds and birds of paradise—and that they may have been unique to either males or females, as only a subset of fossils of some species possess them.
But most of those fossils are squished almost flat, making the structure of the feathers near impossible to study. “These new discoveries change the game—the fossils are astoundingly beautiful,” says Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the work.
Surprise! Tornadoes form from the ground up
Call Dorothy—the formation of tornadoes has been knocked on its head. New measurements from tornadoes in Oklahoma and Kansas suggest these storms’ swirling winds first develop near the ground. That’s contrary to the long-accepted theory that tornado winds are born several kilometers up in clouds and only later touch down on Earth’s surface.
Researchers analyzed four tornadoes, including a monster known as El Reno (shown above), which holds the record as the widest tornado ever measured, at 4.2 kilometers. They noticed something odd when they compared radar measurements that tracked wind speed with hundreds of photographs and videos of El Reno taken by storm chasers: The storm’s funnel was already on the ground several minutes before the radar data—taken roughly 250 meters off the ground—recorded any rotation.
Out of curiosity, the scientists reanalyzed radar measurements taken near the ground. (A hilltop vantage point during the storm serendipitously allowed the team to scan close to the ground without the interfering effects of trees and telephone poles.) They found rapid rotation near the ground before it appeared higher up, a pattern that was confirmed in three other tornadoes, as they will report tomorrow at the semiannual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C.
BBC News
What chance has Nasa of finding life on Mars?
It could be easier to detect the signs of ancient life on Mars than it is on Earth, say scientists connected with Nasa's next rover mission.
The six-wheeled robot is due to touch down on the Red Planet in 2021 with the specific aim of trying to identify evidence of past biology. It will be searching for clues in rocks that are perhaps 3.9 billion years old. Confirming life on Earth at that age is tough enough, but Mars may have better preservation, say the researchers.
It comes down to the dynamic processes on our home world that constantly churn and recycle rocks - processes that can erase life's traces but which shut down on the Red Planet early in its history.
"We don't believe, for example, that Mars had plate tectonics in the way Earth has had for most of its history," said Ken Williford from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
Climate change: Failure to tackle warming 'suicidal'
The UN secretary-general has warned negotiators at a major meeting that failing to increase efforts on climate change would be "not only immoral but suicidal" for the planet.
Antonio Guterres has flown back to Poland to try and push COP24 to a successful conclusion. At the UN talks, a group of countries have said they will enhance their climate plans before 2020. The EU and others say they are responding to the urgency of science. […]
"To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change," Mr Guterres said. "It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.
Parker Solar Probe: Sun-skimming mission starts calling home
Just weeks after making the closest ever flyby of the Sun, Nasa's Parker Solar Probe is sending back its data.
Included in the observations is this remarkable image of the energetic gas, or plasma, flowing out from the star.
The bright dot is actually Mercury. The black dots are repeats of the little world that occur simply because of the way the picture is constructed.
Parker's WISPR instrument acquired the vista just 27.2 million km from the surface of the Sun on 8 November.