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.
PhysicsWorld: Seeing the unseeable: the impact and legacy of the first black-hole images by Matin Durrani
For the last two decades, we’ve been living through a “golden age” in astronomy. We’ve mapped fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, spotted thousands of extra-solar planets and measured the accelerating expansion of the universe. And then, in 2016, gravitational waves were detected for the first time, opening an entire new window on the cosmos, including the sight of colliding black holes and neutron stars.
But those breakthroughs have been matched – and possibly even eclipsed – by the first-ever image of a black hole, which were released earlier this week.
Likened by some to the eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, this instantly iconic image – which will grace the cover of the May 2019 issue of Physics World magazine – shows the glowing disc of hot matter surrounding the event horizon of the supermassive black hole M87* at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy. The dark region at the centre is the “shadow” of the black hole, roughly three times larger than the (invisible) event horizon. Predicted by general relativity, the shadow is significant as it’s a feature of the horizon, while its size and shape gives clues to the mass and spin of the black hole.
Phys.org: Earliest life may have arisen in ponds, not oceans by Jennifer Chu
Primitive ponds may have provided a suitable environment for brewing up Earth's first life forms, more so than oceans, a new MIT study finds.
Researchers report that shallow bodies of water, on the order of 10 centimeters deep, could have held high concentrations of what many scientists believe to be a key ingredient for jump-starting life on Earth: nitrogen.
In shallow ponds, nitrogen, in the form of nitrogenous oxides, would have had a good chance of accumulating enough to react with other compounds and give rise to the first living organisms. In much deeper oceans, nitrogen would have had a harder time establishing a significant, life-catalyzing presence, the researchers say.
"Our overall message is, if you think the origin of life required fixed nitrogen, as many people do, then it's tough to have the origin of life happen in the ocean," says lead author Sukrit Ranjan, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). "It's much easier to have that happen in a pond."
Popular Science: Watch 'giant pill bugs' burrow inside this alligator carcass for legitimate scientific reasons by Sara Chodosh
The bottom of the ocean seems incredibly desolate. Apart from sand and darkness, few things are in abundance. And that elevates ordinary animal carcasses to the level of the most sumptuous buffet you can imagine. But food falls, the alliterative name for when a dead animal’s body drifts down to the sea floor, are some of the wildest feasts in all of nature, bringing together all kinds of deep sea critters.
For scientists, though, these falls pose something of a problem. You can’t exactly predict when and where a whale or a sea lion will die, and you can’t spend all your time searching the world’s oceans for a freshly dead critter. So if you want to study the various worms, arthropods, and bacteria that opportunistically chow on a food fall, you have to drop the carcass yourself. Biologists have done this with whales to monitor which deep sea creatures show up as the body turns from fully-blubbered behemoth to skeletal monster. And this week, for the first time ever, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) did the same for an alligator—and they recorded the whole process.
The gator in the video is currently about a mile deep at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and was euthanized as part of a conservation effort. Those giant pill bugs crawling on top of and inside that alligator are actually related to the terrestrial, tiny pill bugs you may have played with as a child, though they’re more accurately called giant isopods. In the video, the biologists conducting the study explain that part of the reason these crustaceans may have been able to grow so large in comparison to their land-lubbing cousins is food falls like this. Having unpredictable, infrequent food sources makes possessing a large body beneficial. It means you can literally eat yourself into a stupor, then survive on the stored lipids for months or even years.
LiveScience: Glaciers in European Alps Could Disappear by 2100 by Megan Gannon
The glaciers that cover the European Alps could disappear by 2100 if human-caused global warming greatly increases over the next several decades, according to new climate models.
"In a bad case, everything will almost be gone," Harry Zekollari, a climate scientist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, told reporters Tuesday (April 9) at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna.
Even if humans manage to prevent further global warming, the glaciers will still lose half their volume by 2050, Zekollari and his colleagues found. The researchers simulated the evolution of nearly 4,000 individual glaciers in the European Alps with a new computer model. Scientists used 2017 as their baseline year, with the glaciers starting out at a volume of about 24 cubic miles (100 cubic kilometers), or the equivalent of 40 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
Nature: Nepali scientists record country’s first tornado by Smriti Mallapaty
A deadly storm that tore through Nepal almost two weeks ago was the country’s first ever recorded tornado, say researchers there. A team identified the extremely rare event in southeast Nepal without the aid of typical tornado-detecting instruments, instead relying on satellite images, analysis of social-media posts and a visit to the affected area.
The government says 28 people died and more than 1,100 were injured in the storm on 31 March, which also damaged about 2,600 buildings and a national park that is listed as a World Heritage Site.
The storm shifted slabs of concrete 50 metres, which requires a massive amount of power not typical of storms observed in Nepal, says Dhiraj Pradhananga, a meteorologist and president of The Small Earth Nepal, a non-governmental organization in Kathmandu. “We don’t even have a Nepali word for tornado,” he says.
Reports of the storm’s damage took many meteorologists by surprise. A team of researchers at The Small Earth Nepal and the country’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) initiated an investigation into the nature of the storm the morning after it struck.
ScienceDaily: New state of matter: Elements can be solid and liquid at same time
Applying high pressures and temperatures to potassium -- a simple metal -- creates a state in which most of the element's atoms form a solid lattice structure, the findings show. However, the structure also contains a second set of potassium atoms that are in a fluid arrangement.
Under the right conditions, over half a dozen elements -- including sodium and bismuth -- are thought to be capable of existing in the newly discovered state, researchers say.
Until now, it was unclear if the unusual structures represented a distinct state of matter, or existed as transition stages between two distinct states.
A team led by scientists from the University of Edinburgh used powerful computer simulations to study the existence of the state -- known as the chain-melted state. Simulating how up to 20,000 potassium atoms behave under extreme conditions revealed that the structures formed represent the new, stable state of matter.
Applying pressure to the atoms leads to the formation of two interlinked solid lattice structures, the team says. Chemical interactions between atoms in one lattice are strong, meaning they stay in a solid form when the structure is heated, while the other atoms melt into a liquid state.
Space.com: Possible 2nd Planet Spotted Around Proxima Centauri by Mile Wall
BERKELEY, Calif. — The nearest exoplanet to Earth may have a neighbor.
Astronomers have detected a candidate planet circling the star Proxima Centauri, a dim red dwarf that lies just 4.2 light-years from our solar system. Proxima is already known to host one world, a roughly Earth-size planet called Proxima b.
So, the potential sibling world is Proxima c. But "potential" is the key word.
"It is only a candidate," Mario Damasso, of the University of Turin in Italy, said during a presentation today (April 12) at the Breakthrough Discuss conference here at the University of California, Berkeley, which was also webcast live. "This is very important to underline."
Damasso, fellow presenter Fabio Del Sordo of the University of Crete and their colleagues analyzed observations of Proxima Centauri made by the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher instrument. HARPS, which is installed on a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile, notices the tiny stellar movements induced by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. The instrument's data helped lead to the discovery of Proxima b (and many other alien worlds as well).
Quanta: Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply by Kevin Hartnett
Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians invented multiplication. Last month, mathematicians perfected it.
On March 18, two researchers described the fastest method ever discovered for multiplying two very large numbers. The paper marks the culmination of a long-running search to find the most efficient procedure for performing one of the most basic operations in math.
“Everybody thinks basically that the method you learn in school is the best one, but in fact it’s an active area of research,” said Joris van der Hoeven, a mathematician at the French National Center for Scientific Research and one of the co-authors.
The complexity of many computational problems, from calculating new digits of pi to finding large prime numbers, boils down to the speed of multiplication. Van der Hoeven describes their result as setting a kind of mathematical speed limit for how fast many other kinds of problems can be solved.
“In physics you have important constants like the speed of light which allow you to describe all kinds of phenomena,” van der Hoeven said. “If you want to know how fast computers can solve certain mathematical problems, then integer multiplication pops up as some kind of basic building brick with respect to which you can express those kinds of speeds.”
Phys.org: Researchers prove Leonardo Da Vinci was ambidextrous
Researchers at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence have proved what was suspected for a long time: that Renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci was able to write, draw and paint with both hands.
The museum's research and restoration institute confirmed Da Vinci's ambidexterity by analysing a drawing known simply as Landscape (8P), believed to be his earliest work, dated 1473, when the artist was 21.
The drawing of the Arno river which flows through Florence and the castle of Montelupo in the background also features two handwritten text inscriptions, one on the front written backwards and another on the back written left to right.
Researchers showed that both inscriptions were done by the artist who "used his left hand to write the inscription in 'mirror writing' on the front, while he used his right hand to pen the inscription on the back in ordinary writing," the Uffizi said in a statement.
Science: First Cherokee cave inscriptions commemorate sacred lacrosselike game by Catherine Matacic
There are places where the world of the living brushes up against the world of the spirits. For the Cherokee of the southeastern United States, those places are caves, where the heat of day gives way to the coolness of damp earth, and the light of the sun is exchanged for the darkness of deep, timeless spaces.
Now, researchers exploring several caves near the Alabama-Georgia border have discovered, for the first time, inscriptions describing sacred rituals and reaching out to ancestors, all in the Cherokee script invented by prominent Native American polymath Sequoyah before his people were forcibly moved to western reservations in the 1830s.
The Cherokee syllabary, which consists of 85 characters—one for each syllable in the Cherokee language—spread rapidly after its invention around 1821. It was used to communicate among tribes, commemorate events, and create the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States.
Now, it appears tribal members were also using this new script to record sacred events in the region’s caves, researchers report today in Antiquity. In 2006, archaeologists found a set of charcoal inscriptions in a chamber at the end of 1.67-kilometer-deep Manitou Cave near Fort Payne, Alabama, at the head of an underground stream.
I know enough about my family history to know that they have deep roots in the Alabama-Georgia region and that my great-great-great-grandmother was the descendant of a chieftain...but not whomever is associated with these cave paintings...at least I don’t think so.
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades has a Saturday night owls post tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!