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 this Saturday Science Edition of the Overnight News Digest.
Had to work a lot of hours this week...including today...so this will be an uncharacteristically short Science OND for me tonight.
Space.com: Something Is Not Quite Right In the Universe, Ultraprecise New Measurement Reveals by Mara Johnson-Groh
Something isn't quite right in the universe. At least based on everything physicists know so far. Stars, galaxies, black holes and all the other celestial objects are hurtling away from each other ever faster over time. Past measurements in our local neighborhood of the universe find that the universe is exploding outward faster than it was in the beginning. That shouldn't be the case, based on scientists' best descriptor of the universe.
If their measurements of a value known as the Hubble Constant are correct, it means that the current model is missing crucial new physics, such as unaccounted-for fundamental particles, or something strange going on with the mysterious substance known as dark energy.[5 Elusive Particles Beyond the Higgs | Quantum Physics]
Now, in a new study, published Jan. 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists have measured the Hubble Constant in an entirely new way, confirming that, indeed, the universe is expanding faster now than it was in its early days.
Phys.org: Butterflies are genetically wired to choose a mate that looks just like them
A team of academics from the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, observed the courtship rituals and sequenced the DNA from nearly 300 butterflies to find out how much of the genome was responsible for their mating behaviour.
The research, published today in PLOS Biology, is one of the first ever genome studies to look at butterfly behaviour and it unlocks the secrets of evolution to help explain how new species are formed.
Scientists sequenced the DNA from two different species of Heliconius butterflies which live either side of the Andes mountains in Colombia. Heliconians have evolved to produce their own cyanide which makes them highly poisonous and they have distinct and brightly coloured wings which act as a warning to would-be predators.
Professor Chris Jiggins, one of the lead authors on the paper and a Fellow of St John's College, said: "There has previously been lots of research done on finding genes for things like colour patterns on the butterfly wing, but it's been more difficult to locate the genes that underlie changes in behaviour.
"What we found was surprisingly simple—three regions of the genome explain a lot of their behaviours. There's a small region of the genome that has some very big effects."
Science: Numerical cognition in honeybees enables addition and subtraction by Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree and Adrian G. Dyer
Honeybees are a model for insect cognition and vision (19, 20). Bees have demonstrated the ability to learn a number of rules and concepts to solve problems such as “left/right” (21), “above/below” (22), “same/different” (23), and “larger/smaller” (24–26). Honeybees have also shown some capacity for counting and number discrimination when trained using an appetitive (reward- only) differential conditioning framework (27–30). Recent advances in training protocols reveal that bees perform significantly better on perceptually difficult tasks when trained with an appetitive-aversive (reward-punishment) differential conditioning framework (31). This improved learning capacity is linked to attention in bees (31), and attention is a key aspect of advanced numerosity and spatial processing abilities in the human brain (32, 33). Using this conditioning protocol, honeybees were recently shown to acquire the numerical rules of “greater than” and “less than” and subsequently apply these rules to demonstrate an understanding that an empty set, zero, lies at the lower end of the numerical continuum (34). Thus, to inform the current debate on number skills in animals, research on insects with miniature brains enables valuable comparisons of what brains of different sizes and architectures can achieve.
The capacity of honeybees to learn complex rules and concepts (20) alongside evidence of their number sense (29, 34) suggests that they are a good model for testing numerical cognition. We trained bees to identify a salient color (blue or yellow) as a symbolic representation of whether to follow a rule based on addition (blue) or subtraction (yellow) and thus choose the correct result of an arithmetic operation.
Smithsonian: Artificial Intelligence Study of Human Genome Finds Unknown Human Ancestor by Brian Handwerk
Can the minds of machines teach us something new about what it means to be human? When it comes to the intricate story of our species’ complex origins and evolution, it appears that they can.
A recent study used machine learning technology to analyze eight leading models of human origins and evolution, and the program identified evidence in the human genome of a “ghost population” of human ancestors. The analysis suggests that a previously unknown and long-extinct group of hominins interbred with Homo sapiens in Asia and Oceania somewhere along the long, winding road of human evolutionary history, leaving behind only fragmented traces in modern human DNA.
The study, published in Nature Communications, is one of the first examples of how machine learning can help reveal clues to our own origins. By poring through vast amounts of genomic data left behind in fossilized bones and comparing it with DNA in modern humans, scientists can begin to fill in some of the gaps of our species’ evolutionary history.
LiveScience: Earth Once Swallowed Its Own Superocean. Could It Happen Again? by Stephanie Pappas
The ancient supercontinent of Rodinia turned inside out as the Earth swallowed its own ocean some 700 million years ago, new research suggests.
Rodinia was a supercontinent that preceded the more famous Pangea, which existed between 320 million and 170 million years ago. In a new study, scientists led by Zheng-Xiang Li of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, argue that supercontinents and their superoceans form and break up in alternating cycles that sometimes preserve the ocean crust and sometimes recycle it back into Earth's interior.
"We suggest that the Earth's mantle structure only gets completely reorganised every second supercontinent [or every other cycle] through the regeneration of a new superocean and a new ring of fire," Li wrote in an email to Live Science. The "Ring of Fire" is a chain of subduction zones around the Pacific, where the crust of the ocean grinds underneath the continents. Volcanoes and earthquakes are frequent around the Ring of Fire, lending it its name.. [In Photos: Ocean Hidden Beneath Earth's Surface]
Everyone have a great evening!