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...a short but sweet edition (I hope) of this OND!
Science: Glowing genitalia reveal the identity of mysterious millipedes by Helen Santoro
Some insects are easy to tell apart. Others, not so much. Some flat-backed millipedes in the genus Pseudopolydesmus look almost identical regardless of their species, making it difficult for scientists to figure out who’s who. Now, researchers have discovered a special way to identify these insects: Shine an ultraviolet (UV) light on their genitals.
Under normal light, these millipedes look unremarkable—they’re less than 2 centimeters long with brown exoskeletons. To see whether they looked different in altered lighting, a group of scientists photographed the millipedes under UV light using a special camera that produces highly detailed images. When the mug shots were done, they found that some species’s genitals glowed different colors—a dazzling variety of greens and blues, they report today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Others simply stood out more under the UV lighting.
Phys.org: Study: Infamous 'death roll' almost universal among crocodile species
The iconic "death roll" of alligators and crocodiles may be more common among species than previously believed, according to a new study published in Ethology, Ecology & Evolution and coauthored by a researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contrary to popular belief, crocodiles can't chew, so they use a powerful bite coupled with a full-bodied twisting motion—a death roll—to disable, kill, and dismember prey into smaller pieces. The lethal movement is characteristic of both alligators and crocodiles and has been featured in numerous movies and nature documentaries.
Until now, the death roll had only been documented in a few of the 25 living crocodilian species, but how many actually do it?
"We conducted tests in all 25 species, and 24 of them exhibited the behavior," said lead author Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a paleontologist and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT.
Science Daily: Young children judge others based on facial features as much as adults do
Just like adults, children by the age of 5 make rapid and consistent character judgements of others based on facial features, such as the tilt of the mouth or the distance between the eyes. Those facial features also shape how children behave toward others, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
"For centuries, philosophers, scientists and people in general have recognized that facial features fundamentally shape how we judge and behave toward others, yet most of that has been based on intuitions of how adults behave and perceive," said Tessa E.S. Charlesworth, MA, of Harvard University and lead author of the study in the journal Developmental Psychology. "What is surprising is that children, from such a young age, are also swayed by relatively arbitrary facial features in their consequential judgments and behaviors."
Previous research has found that children as young as 3 make decisions about a person's character traits, such as trustworthiness, dominance and competence, by looking at their facial features, according to Charlesworth.
Although these snap judgments based on a person's facial features may not be accurate or fair, research has shown they can have real-world consequences in elections, hiring and the harshness of criminal sentencings, said Charlesworth. These consequences, however, have so far only been shown among adults looking at others' faces. Whether these consequences also appeared in the behavior of children was, until the present study, unknown.
LiveScience: Tiny Earthquakes Shake Southern California Every 3 Minutes by Stephanie Pappas
Southern California is a lot shakier than ever before realized. According to a new study, a tiny earthquake rumbles through the southern portion of the Golden State every 3 minutes.
These temblors won't knock down walls or send palm trees swaying. In fact, they're too small for even typical seismic instruments to regularly detect. But their discovery reveals seismic activity that scientists couldn't previously detect. Understanding the full pattern of activity should help seismologists understand how larger earthquakes get started and how quakes can trigger one another.
"The Earth is failing all the time," said study author Zachary Ross, a postdoctoral researcher in geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. "What really starts to come out is that these events, they're really communicating with each other in space and time."
Science News: The first type of molecule to form in the universe has been seen in space by Maria Temming
Helium hydride ions, thought to be the first type of molecule to form in the universe, have finally been spotted in space.
These charged molecules, each made of a neutral helium atom and a positively charged hydrogen atom, first emerged within about 100,000 years after the Big Bang. Back then, the universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, and helium hydride was the only molecule that these two elements could create when they collided.
Although researchers have seen helium hydride ions in the lab, these molecules have never been definitively detected in space. The discovery of helium hydride in a nearby planetary nebula ends a decades-long search for these seminal molecules and helps confirm our understanding of chemistry in the infant universe, researchers report online April 17 in Nature.
During three flights in May 2016, the airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy observed a planetary nebula about 3,000 light-years away called NGC 7027. This shell of stellar material was blown off a sunlike star when its core collapsed into a white dwarf about 600 years ago. In the light emitted by the hot, dense cloud of gas, researchers detected helium hydride’s signature wavelength of infrared radiation.
Science News: Statisticians want to abandon science’s standard measure of ‘significance’ by Bethany Brookshire
In science, the success of an experiment is often determined by a measure called “statistical significance.” A result is considered to be “significant” if the difference observed in the experiment between groups (of people, plants, animals and so on) would be very unlikely if no difference actually exists. The common cutoff for “very unlikely” is that you’d see a difference as big or bigger only 5 percent of the time if it wasn’t really there — a cutoff that might seem, at first blush, very strict.
It sounds esoteric, but statistical significance has been used to draw a bright line between experimental success and failure. Achieving an experimental result with statistical significance often determines if a scientist’s paper gets published or if further research gets funded. That makes the measure far too important in deciding research priorities, statisticians say, and so it’s time to throw it in the trash.
More than 800 statisticians and scientists are calling for an end to judging studies by statistical significance in a March 20 comment published in Nature. An accompanying March 20 special issue of theAmerican Statistician makes the manifesto crystal clear in its introduction: “‘statistically significant’ — don’t say it and don’t use it.”
ScienceDaily: A history of the Crusades, as told by crusaders' DNA
History can tell us a lot about the Crusades, the series of religious wars fought between 1095 and 1291, in which Christian invaders tried to claim the Near East. But the DNA of nine 13th century Crusaders buried in a pit in Lebanon shows that there's more to learn about who the Crusaders were and their interactions with the populations they encountered. The work appears April 18 in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
The remains suggest that the soldiers making up the Crusader armies were genetically diverse and intermixed with the local population in the Near East, although they didn't have a lasting effect on the genetics of Lebanese people living today. They also highlight the important role ancient DNA can play in helping us understand historical events that are less well documented.
"We know that Richard the Lionheart went to fight in the Crusades, but we don't know much about the ordinary soldiers who lived and died there, and these ancient samples give us insights into that," says senior author Chris Tyler-Smith, a genetics researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Phys.org: How superstitions spread
Ancient Roman leaders once made decisions about important events, such as when to hold elections or where to build new cities, based on the presence or flight patterns of birds. Builders often omit the thirteenth floor from their floor plans, and many pedestrians go well out of their way to avoid walking under a ladder.
While it's widely recognized that superstitions like these are not rational, many persist, guiding the behavior of large groups of people even today.
In a new analysis driven by game theory, two theoretical biologists devised a model that shows how superstitious beliefs can become established in a society's social norms. Their work, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates how groups of individuals, each starting with distinct belief systems, can evolve a coordinated set of behaviors that are enforced by a set of consistent social norms.
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting a night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!