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.
MedicalXpress: A cup of Joe and you're good to go (Under six a day and you're A-OK)
Latte, cappuccino or short black, a morning coffee is an essential for many people looking to kick start their day. But while the humble coffee may be a vital feature of the daily grind, how much is too much?
While the pros and cons of drinking coffee have been debated for decades, new research from the University of South Australia reveals that drinking six or more coffees a day can be detrimental to your health, increasing your risk of heart disease by up to 22 per cent.
In Australia, one in six people are affected by cardiovascular disease. It is a major cause of death with one person dying from the disease every 12 minutes. According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, yet one of the most preventable.
Investigating the association of long-term coffee consumption and cardiovascular disease, UniSA researchers Dr. Ang Zhou and Professor Elina Hyppönen of the Australian Centre for Precision Health say their research confirms the point at which excess caffeine can cause high blood pressure, a precursor to heart disease.
LiveScience: Is It Safe to Drink Moonshine? By Mindy Weisberger
A glass of clear moonshine may look identical to water, but this illicit alcoholic beverage is infamous for its potency — and for the peril associated with drinking it.
What is moonshine? Broadly, moonshine is any type of distilled liquor that's manufactured without government oversight, though some argue that moonshine can be labeled as such only when it is made with certain ingredients or comes from specific geographic regions, experts told Live Science.
People all over the world make and drink moonshine, particularly in places where alcohol is illegal or where legal alcohol is prohibitively expensive or hard to get. But producing moonshine is a tricky chemical process. When it's unregulated, manufacturers' mistakes, ignorance or shortcuts can yield a highly toxic product.
Science: Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts. But is anyone brave enough to study them? By David Grimm
CORVALLIS, OREGON—Carl the cat was born to beat the odds. Abandoned on the side of the road in a Rubbermaid container, the scrawny black kitten—with white paws, white chest, and a white, skunklike stripe down his nose—was rescued by Kristyn Vitale, a postdoc at Oregon State University here who just happens to study the feline mind. Now, Vitale hopes Carl will pull off another coup, by performing a feat of social smarts researchers once thought was impossible.
In a stark white laboratory room, Vitale sits against the back wall, flanked by two overturned cardboard bowls. An undergraduate research assistant kneels a couple of meters away, holding Carl firmly.
"Carl!" Vitale calls, and then points to one of the bowls. The assistant lets go.
Toddlers pass this test easily. They know that when we point at something, we're telling them to look at it—an insight into the intentions of others that will become essential as children learn to interact with people around them. Most other animals, including our closest living relative, chimpanzees, fail the experiment. But about 20 years ago, researchers discovered something surprising: Dogs pass the test with flying colors. The finding shook the scientific community and led to an explosion of studies into the canine mind.
ScienceNews: Deep-sea fishes’ eye chemistry might let them see colors in near darkness by Susan Milius
Some fishes in the deep, dark sea may see their world in more than just shades of gray.
A survey of 101 fish species reveals that four from the deep sea had a surprising number of genes for light-sensitive eye proteins called rod opsins, researchers report in the May 10 Science. Depending on how the animals use those light catchers, the discovery might challenge the widespread idea that deep-sea fishes don’t see color, says coauthor Zuzana Musilová, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague.
To see, many fishes, humans and most other vertebrates rely on two types of light-detecting cells in the eye known as rods and cones. Cone cells use two or more kinds of opsins and need decent amounts of light to work. Rods generally use only one opsin called RH1, which works in dim light. That variety in opsins in cones, but not in rods, lets vertebrates see a range of colors in well-lit conditions but be color-blind in the near dark.
In the new study, Musilová and Fabio Cortesi of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia sailed on research ships equipped to reach into the ocean depths for fish. The deep-sea specimens came from the “twilight” zone 200 to 1,000 meters below the surface, where sunlight becomes only a subtle lessening of darkness. The most colorful things to look at would be bioluminescent spots on animals’ bodies.
The Conversation: Chernobyl has become a refuge for wildlife 33 years after the nuclear accident by Germán Orizaola
...But today, 33 years after the accident, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which covers an area now in Ukraine and Belarus, is inhabited by brown bears, bisons, wolves, lynxes, Przewalski horses, and more than 200 bird species, among other animals.
In March 2019, most of the main research groups working with Chernobyl wildlife met in Portsmouth, England. About 30 researchers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Belgium, Norway, Spain and Ukraine presented the latest results of our work. These studies included work on big mammals, nesting birds, amphibians, fish, bumblebees, earthworms, bacteria and leaf litter decomposition.
These studies showed that at present the area hosts great biodiversity. In addition, they confirmed the general lack of big negative effects of current radiation levels on the animal and plant populations living in Chernobyl. All the studied groups maintain stable and viable populations inside the exclusion zone.
Chemical and Engineering News: No extra lead in Paris air after Notre-Dame fire by Laura Howes
Airparif, which monitors air quality in Paris, has released more data after the blaze at the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral last month. The readings were taken in the city’s 18th arrondissement, which was not directly under the fire’s smoke plume, and showed no elevated levels of the metals lead, cadmium, arsenic, or nickel in the air. Earlier analysis had already shown that the fire did not cause air pollution in the city to exceed normal levels.
After the fire on April 15, an environmental advocacy group raised concerns about the levels of lead released from the cathedral’s spire and roof. Tests later revealed that particulates containing the neurotoxic element had fallen in the local area around the cathedral, but data were not immediately available for the air levels in the city.
Lead levels were historically monitored in Paris because of the use of lead in vehicle fuels. Since the additive has been banned, lead levels have dropped significantly, and Airparif now maintains only three sites to measure lead levels in the air. Normally, these values are published as an annual average, but after the Notre-Dame fire, Airparif scientists did a more detailed analysis.
Space.com: Mysterious 'Sub-Neptunes' Are Probably Water Worlds by Charles Q. Choi
Water worlds that each possess thousands of times more water than Earth does may be more common than Earth-like rocky planets in the Milky Way galaxy, a new study finds.
Over the past 20 or so years, astronomers have confirmed the existence of thousands of exoplanets, or planets around other stars. NASA's recently deceased Kepler spacecraft discovered 2,702 confirmed exoplanets, and several thousand more "candidates" it found are awaiting confirmation.
Many exoplanets are quite unlike any planets in our solar system. For example, so-called super-Earths have diameters up to twice that of Earth, and "sub-Neptune" worlds are two to four times wider than Earth. (Neptune's diameter is about four times Earth's.)
Much remains hotly debated about sub-Neptunes, such as how they formed. Their compositions remain unknown, and understanding them could help shed light on these exoplanets' origins. Previous research suggested that sub-Neptunes were either gas dwarf planets with rocky cores surrounded by envelopes rich in hydrogen and helium, or water worlds with major amounts of liquid and frozen water in addition to rock and gas.
Astronomy: Antimatter acts like regular matter in classic double-slit experiment by Bailey Bedford
(Inside Science) — One of the strangest things about quantum mechanics is that a particle can act like a wave. In particular, in a double-slit experiment, individual particles that are shot through a pair of slits create a pattern as if they each went through both slits simultaneously and interfered with themselves. Researchers have now shown for the first time that antimatter behaves in the same unintuitive way.
Antimatter particles correspond to the regular particles that we are used to, such as protons and electrons, but with the opposite electrical charge and magnetic properties. But when antimatter and matter meet, they both disappear in a flash of energy, which makes antimatter rare and difficult to study.
A new experiment uses positrons — the antimatter counterpart of electrons — to create a situation similar to a traditional double-slit experiment. While scientists have been able to see the quantum interference of electrons for decades, this is the first time they have been able to observe it for antimatter. They present their results in an article published today in the journal Scientific Advances.
The researchers used positrons that were emitted by a radioactive material and then accelerated and formed into a beam. Instead of traveling through just two slits, as in the classic experiment, the beam went through two sequential gratings with different spacing between the slits. This setup helped magnify the effects the researchers needed to measure. The positrons that survived the trip hit a detector, where they formed an interference pattern.
Phys.org: Smallest pixels ever created could light up color-changing buildings
The smallest pixels yet created—a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold—could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings.
The colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background, but making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers.
Quanta: Rapid Oxygen Changes Fueled an Explosion in Ancient Animal Diversity by Jonathan Lambert
For more than a billion years after animal life arose, it stagnated in simplicity; sponges represented the height of complexity. Then around 541 million years ago, the pace of life’s transformation abruptly accelerated. This period, known as the Cambrian explosion, roughly bracketed the appearance of nearly all major animal groups alive today.
Within a few tens of millions of years, a geologic blink, the living world expanded into a semblance of its current fullness. Although recent work suggests that important and sudden expansions in animal biodiversity also happened before and after the Cambrian explosion, there is no doubt that it was an extraordinary and baffling episode in evolutionary history.
Why animal life got more complicated in such a hurry remains a burning question for paleontologists and evolutionary theorists. Was it just a matter of evolving the right combination of genes? Or were environmental factors limiting life’s possible forms, forcing it to wait until sufficient oxygen or other essentials could support more complexity?
New Scientist: Traces of five drugs found on 1000-year-old South American ritual kit by Sam Wong
A 1000-year-old collection of drug paraphernalia found in a rock shelter in Bolivia features traces of five psychoactive chemicals, including cocaine and components of ayahuasca.
This is the largest number of psychoactive compounds detected in a single archaeological find in South America, the researchers say. The plants they come from aren’t native to the highland area where they were found, so they may have been brought there by trading networks or travelling shamans.
The artefacts were found among the rubble inside a structure that may have served as a funerary enclosure in the Lípez highlands of south-western Bolivia. They include a 28-centimetre-long leather bag, a pair of wooden snuffing tablets, a snuffing tube, a pair of llama-bone spatulas, a textile headband, fragments of dried plant stems and a pouch made from three fox snouts stitched together. The snuffing tube and tablets feature ornate carvings of human-like figures.
Atlas Obscura: How an Ancient Indian Art Utilizes Mathematics, Mythology, and Rice by Rohani Chakl
BEFORE THE FIRST RAYS OF sunlight stream across the rice fields and mud roads in the Nilgiri Mountains, before they force their way through the high-rises in the urban jungle of Chennai and Madurai, the women of Tamil Nadu are up for the day. In the dark, they clean the threshold to their home, and, following a centuries-long tradition, painstakingly draw beautiful, ritualistic designs called kōlam, using rice flour.
Taking a clump of rice flour in a bowl (or a coconut shell), the kōlam artist steps onto her freshly washed canvas: the ground at the entrance of her house, or any patch of floor marking an entrypoint. Working swiftly, she takes pinches of rice flour and draws geometric patterns: curved lines, labyrinthine loops around red or white dots, hexagonal fractals, or floral patterns resembling the lotus, a symbol of the goddess of prosperity, Lakshmi, for whom the kōlam is drawn as a prayer in illustration. The making of the kōlam itself is a performance of supplication. The artist folds her body in half, bending at the waist, stooping to the ground as she fills out her patterns. Many kōlam artists see the kōlam as an offering to the earth goddess, Bhūdevi, as well.
But the kōlam is not just a prayer; it is also a metaphor for coexistence with nature. In her 2018 book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India, an Exploration of the Kōlam, Vijaya Nagarajan, a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, refers to the belief in Hindu mythology that Hindus have a “karmic obligation” to “feed a thousand souls,” or offer food to those that live among us. By providing a meal of rice flour to bugs, ants, birds, and insects, she writes, the Hindu householder begins the day with “a ritual of generosity,” with a dual offering to divinity and to nature.
Everyone have a great evening!