Gizmodo
Punctured Skulls Suggest Saber-Toothed Cats Fought Amongst Themselves
An analysis of two punctured saber-toothed cat skulls suggests these extinct creatures engaged in intra-species combat. It’s further evidence that the exaggerated fangs of saber-toothed cats were strong enough to penetrate bone.
Saber-toothed cats disappeared around 11,000 years ago, but these fearsome predators dominated Pleistocene landscapes for millions of years. The purpose of their iconic fangs, however, is the subject of a longstanding debate, with some scientists arguing that the fangs—which grew as long as 28 centimeters (11 inches) in length—were too fragile, and the saber-tooth bite too weak, to be used for attacking prey. According to this theory, the fangs were only put to use once a saber-toothed cat brought its prey down to the ground with its huge forelimbs, at which point the elongated upper canines were used to pierce through the soft, vulnerable neck.
More Than Half a Million Corals Died to Bring Bigger Ships Into Miami Port
Off the coast of Miami, corals are dying. Why? Because of a 16-month-long project to expand the harbor channel. A new study shows how the project killed over half a million corals between 2013 and 2015.
Published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin Thursday, the study involved on-the-ground observations of the corals coupled with satellite images to see how much sedimentation the project’s dredging threw into the water—and how all that sediment ultimately affected coral health. The authors found that nearly 2,000 pounds of sediment were suffocating the reefs for every 10 square feet about a mile and a half out from where the dredging was occurring.
Bias Against Female Lab Animals Is Messing Up Scientific Research
Gender discrimination in science doesn’t just affect women scientists. It also skews the results of animal research, as a new paper out this week describes. Animals used in experiments are still overwhelmingly male, thanks to outdated stereotypes that hormones like estrogen can distort an experiment’s findings.
The argument comes courtesy of Rebecca Shansky, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston. In her paper, published Thursday in Science, she outlines the long history of relying on male lab animals, particularly mice, for studies looking into the latest experimental drug or better understanding neurological illness. She also handily explains why this gender preference is completely unnecessary and could actually lead to serious harms.
Science Daily
Transgenic fungus rapidly killed malaria mosquitoes in West African study
According to the World Health Organization, malaria affects hundreds of millions of people around the world, killing more than 400,000 annually. Decades of insecticide use has failed to control mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite and has led to insecticide-resistance among many mosquito strains. In response, scientists began genetically modifying mosquitoes and other organisms that can help eradicate mosquitoes. Until now, none of these transgenic approaches made it beyond laboratory testing.
In a research paper published in the May 31, 2019, issue of the journal Science, a team of scientists from the University of Maryland and Burkina Faso described the first trial outside the laboratory of a transgenic approach to combating malaria. The study showed that a naturally occurring fungus engineered to deliver a toxin to mosquitoes safely reduced mosquito populations by more than 99% in a screen-enclosed, simulated village setting in Burkina Faso, West Africa.
Declining fertility rates may explain Neanderthal extinction
A new hypothesis for Neanderthal extinction supported by population modelling is put forward in a new study by Anna Degioanni from Aix Marseille Université, France and colleagues, published May 29, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
The lack of empirical data allowing testing of hypotheses is one of the biggest challenges for researchers studying Neanderthal extinction. Many hypotheses involve catastrophic events such as disease or climate change. In order to test alternative hypothetical extinction scenarios, Degioanni and colleagues created a Neanderthal population model allowing them to explore demographic factors which might have resulted in declining populations and population extinction over a period of 4,000-10,000 years (a time frame compatible with known Neanderthal history). The researchers created baseline demographic parameters for their Neanderthal extinction model (e.g. survival, migration, and fertility rates) based on observational data on modern hunter-gatherer groups and extant large apes, as well as available Neanderthal paleo-genetic and empirical data from earlier studies. The authors defined populations as extinct when they fell below 5,000 individuals.
Popular Science
This distant Neptune-like planet really shouldn't exist
It’s time for us to get acquainted with the “Forbidden Planet.” No, not the 1956 sci-fi classic—I’m talking about a new Neptune-like exoplanet found 920 light-years away, given the moniker thanks to its inexplicably ability to exist too close to its host star.
In the world of space science, Neptune is far from a unique gem. Similar exoplanets (gas giants far bigger than Earth but exceptionally smaller than something like Jupiter) are perhaps the most common planets out there in space. But if they get too close to their host star, in an orbital zone we ominously call the “Neptunian desert,” they’re inundated with bouts of stellar radiation that evaporates their gaseous atmospheres and leaves behind a barren, shriveled up rocky core.
That’s not the case with the Forbidden Planet—formally known as NGTS-4b. It’s in the Neptunian desert, frightfully close to its host star, boasting an orbit of just 1.34 days. Yet, as researchers report in a new paper published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, it retains its Neptune-like atmosphere. It’s the first-ever detection of a Neptunian exoplanet defying the odds and residing cozily (relatively speaking) amongst its host star.
The king behind Machu Picchu built his legacy in stonehttps://www.popsci.com/pachacuti-wrote-story-inca-empire-in-stone
Glance at an Incan brick, and you’ll notice there’s very little that’s conventionally bricklike about it. There are no right angles, no proper corners. And it’s not a rectangle at all, but a trapezoid: one side wider and squatter than the other. Look at another. Then another. Then another. No two are exactly the same, each a polygonal version of the unique rock it started as.
Carefully stacked together like a 15th-century game of Tetris, these seemingly haphazard blocks have withstood 500 years of disasters, both natural and human. The signature style of the pre-Columbian empire, these stones marked the Inca expansion some 2,500 miles down the backbone of South America. The sprawl took just a few decades, propelled by the strength of a man named Pachacuti, the ninth Sapa Inca (the indigenous Quechua term for “king”). His most impressive building project was Machu Picchu, a 200-building, mountain-hugging summer resort for the ruler and his extended family. But this wonder of the world is just one place where Pachacuti carefully recorded his legacy—and building concepts that continue to help us create more-resilient cities—stone by stone.
Nature
Genomics institute to close world-leading animal facility
One of the world’s top genomics centres — the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK — has decided to close a 13-year-old laboratory dedicated to animal research that supplies mouse strains to thousands of genetic researchers worldwide. But some scientists worry that it’s too soon for Sanger to scale back animal research — and that the move will curtail the centre’s ability to do cutting-edge science.
Set up in 2006, the animal facility, which was built at a cost of £30 million (US$38 million), hosts mice, zebrafish, rats and frogs used in research, and employs about 70 people.
The institute says that the closure, announced to staff on 16 May, is a consequence of a move towards using alternative technologies, such as cell lines and organoids — 3D biological structures that can be grown in a dish — in genetics research, instead of animals.
Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch
A panel of scientists voted this week to designate a new geologic epoch — the Anthropocene — to mark the profound ways in which humans have altered the planet. That decision, by the 34-member Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), marks an important step towards formally defining a new slice of the geologic record — an idea that has generated intense debate within the scientific community over the past few years.
The panel plans to submit a formal proposal for the new epoch by 2021 to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the official geologic time chart.
The Guardian
Scientists pursue universal snakebite cure using HIV antibody techniques
Scientists in five countries, including the UK, hope to find a universal cure for snakebite using the same technology that discovered HIV antibodies.
A new consortium of venom specialists in India, Kenya, Nigeria, Britain and the US will locate and develop antibodies to treat critical illness from snakebites, which harm nearly 3 million people worldwide each year.
The consortium will seek an antidote comprised of “humanised antibodies” rather than conventional animal-based therapies, which can sometimes cause adverse effects in snakebite victims, said Prof Robert Harrison, who heads the centre for snakebite research and interventions at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
'Phenomenal' 2,300-year-old bark shield found in Leicestershire
An “astonishing and unparalleled” 2,300-year-old shield made of tree bark has been discovered in Leicestershire, the only example of its kind ever found in Europe.
Archaeologists say the discovery of the shield, made between 395 and 250BC, has completely overturned assumptions about the weapons used in the ironage, sparking breathless reactions among experts of the period.
“This is an absolutely phenomenal object, one of the most marvellous, internationally important finds that I have encountered in my career,” said Julia Farley, curator of British and European iron age collections at the British Museum.
“So often it is gold which grabs the headlines, but this bark shield is much rarer.”
Science
Researchers strapped video cameras on 16 cats and let them do their thing. Here’s what they found
Ever since video cameras became ultraportable, scientists have strapped them onto animals from sheep to sharks to see how they view and interact with the world around them. But relatively little has been done with cats, perhaps because they’re so hard to work with. Maren Huck is trying to change that. In a study published this month in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, the behavioral ecologist at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom placed small cameras on 16 cats and followed them for up to 4 years as they prowled their neighborhoods. Though the study—co-authored by Samantha Watson, an animal behaviorist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom—was mostly done to gauge the accuracy of the technology, the duo has already made some surprising findings.
Gut bacteria may contribute to autism symptoms, mouse study finds
Genes are a powerful driver of risk for autism, but some researchers suspect another factor is also at play: the set of bacteria that inhabits the gut. That idea has been controversial, but a new study offers support for this gut-brain link. It reveals that mice develop autismlike behaviors when they are colonized by microbes from the feces of people with autism. The result doesn’t prove that gut bacteria can cause autism. But it suggests that, at least in mice, the makeup of the gut can contribute to some hallmark features of the disorder.
“It’s quite an encouraging paper,” says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who was not involved in the research. The idea that metabolites—the molecules produced by bacterial digestion—can influence brain activity “is plausible, it makes sense, and it will help push the field forward.”
Phys.org
Three ways to travel at (nearly) the speed of light
One hundred years ago today, on May 29, 1919, measurements of a solar eclipse offered verification for Einstein's theory of general relativity. Even before that, Einstein had developed the theory of special relativity, which revolutionized the way we understand light. To this day, it provides guidance on understanding how particles move through space—a key area of research to keep spacecraft and astronauts safe from radiation.
The theory of special relativity showed that particles of light, photons, travel through a vacuum at a constant pace of 670,616,629 miles per hour—a speed that's immensely difficult to achieve and impossible to surpass in that environment. Yet all across space, from black holes to our near-Earth environment, particles are, in fact, being accelerated to incredible speeds, some even reaching 99.9% the speed of light.
Conservationists find protected areas worldwide are shrinking
A large international team of researchers reports that the amount of land designated as protected around the globe is shrinking. In their paper published in the journal Science, the researchers describe their study of protected lands over the past 200 years, and what they found. Lisa Naughton-Treves and Margaret Buck Holland with the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland, respectively, have published a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue. They also note that not all downgrades are a threat to biodiversity.
For much of modern history, governments and national leaders have set aside land under their jurisdiction to prevent it from destruction by human activities. But as the researchers note, governments are also free to remove such restrictions if they so desire. In this new effort, the researchers studied the history of land protection and protected area downgrading, downsizing and degazettement, or PADDD, over the past two centuries.
Space
These Are the Private Lunar Landers Taking NASA Science to the Moon
NASA on Friday (May 31) announced that private lunar landers built by the American companies Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond will carry agency science gear to the moon in 2020 and 2021.
These robotic vanguard missions are key early steps in NASA's ambitious Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon in 2024 and establish a sustainable, long-term presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by 2028.
”Next year, our initial science and technology research will be on the lunar surface, which will help support sending the first woman and the next man to the moon in five years," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement yesterday. "Investing in these commercial landing services also is another strong step to build a commercial space economy beyond low-Earth orbit."
Weird 'Fettucine' Rocks May Help Us Spot Life on Mars
Let's be very clear: No one is suggesting that Martians feast on pasta during a Red Planet all-you-can-eat buffet.
But if scientists find a type of rock on Mars that looks a bit like fettuccine, it could be a key sign that a certain type of bacteria once lived on Earth's next-door neighbor, researchers said in a new study. That hypothesis is based exclusively on observations made here on Earth; scientists have found neither this type of rock on the Red Planet nor any definitive proof of life on Mars. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing feature that scientists can look for as they seek to better understand the Red Planet.
"If we see the deposition of this kind of extensive filamentous rock on other planets, we would know it's a fingerprint of life," lead author Bruce Fouke, a geologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. "It's big and it's unique. No other rocks look like this. It would be definitive evidence of the presence of alien microbes."
BBC News
Britain in two-week coal-free record
Britain has not used coal to generate electricity for two weeks - the longest period since the 1880s. The body which manages the way electricity is generated said coal was last used at 15:12 on 17 May.
Fintan Slye, director of the National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO), said the British record for solar power had also been broken this month. Britain broke the record for a week of no coal earlier this month, which Mr Slye said would be a "new normal".
The government plans to phase out the UK's last coal-fired plants by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions and Mr Slye said there was "still a lot of work to do".
NPR News
'It's Never Done This': Arkansas River Keeps Flooding, Testing Levees And Patience
The Arkansas River just keeps rising. The usually placid tributary of the Mississippi has become a bloated torrent carrying entire trees downstream, drowning riverfront property and halting commerce for hundreds of miles.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Thursday the high water is costing the state economy an estimated $23 million each day. The river is currently forecast to crest on Wednesday in Little Rock, and there is so much water moving downstream that it will likely be more than a week before floodwaters begin to recede from many areas.
His state joins others from the Dakotas down to Louisiana that have been dealing with weeks or even months of record-breaking flooding along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. Back-to-back rainstorms have swept across the region, sometimes dumping inches of rain in just hours.
And, while flooding is a part of life along the rivers, this spring's relentless, extreme rain makes the disaster unfolding at the center of the country emblematic of a larger trend: Climate change is causing more extreme rain in some parts of the U.S., and that can cause more extreme flooding.
Study Shows Freezing Office Temperatures Affect Women's Productivity
Maybe you know colleagues who keep a sweater or a blanket at their desks to stay warm as the air conditioning tries to ice them out. Alternatively, maybe you have a
-worker who always comments on how warm the space is.
Either way, it's evident that the battle for the thermostat is being waged in offices and homes across the United States.
It's the debate that Tom Chang and his wife have been having for more than a decade.
Wired
An Illicit Chemical Is Again Jeopardizing Ozone Layer
When the Montreal Protocol marked its 30th anniversary in 2017, it seemed like an unalloyed triumph for environmental common sense. By banding together to address a planetary emergency, the 197 signatory nations had officially ended production and use of chemicals responsible for depleting the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, an essential shield against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. It was a “milestone for all people and our planet,” according to António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations. “The Earth’s Ozone Hole is Shrinking,” one celebratory headline announced. “Without the Ozone Treaty,” another advised, “You’d Get Sunburned in 5 Minutes.”
But an unexpected recent spike in emissions of CFCs (or chlorofluorocarbons), the major ozone-depleting chemicals, now suggests it’s far too soon to close the file on ozone depletion. A new study published this week in Nature pins down the source of 7,000 metric tons a year of new CFC-11 (trichlorofluoromethane) emissions to the provinces of Shandong and Hebei on the northeastern coast of China. That’s an area half the size of Texas, with a population of about 170 million people, including the city of Beijing. The bulk of these emissions are believed to come from small factories that are using CFC-11, in violation of the Montreal Protocol, to manufacture foam insulation used in refrigerators and buildings.
Geothermal Energy Could Save the Climate—or Trigger Lots of Quakes
Imagine if there was a carbon-free form of energy hiding in the ground beneath you. One that we could turn to anytime, even on cloudy, windless days.
There’s no need for imagination—it exists. Research suggests that geothermal energy could be the key to running the country on purely renewable power. A recent memo from the conservative clean-energy think tank ClearPath estimates that geothermal energy could supply as much as 20 percent of the country’s electricity. That would put the United States nearly on par with Iceland, which gets roughly a quarter of its power from underground heat. But getting there depends on loosening regulations and borrowing drilling techniques from oil and gas companies.
“It’s a great resource, but one that doesn’t get a lot of love,” said Spencer Nelson, who directs the energy innovation program at ClearPath and wrote the memo.
Live Science
Did the Maya Really Sacrifice Their Ballgame Players?
Imagine a crowd roaring as royalty take to the ball court, rubber ball in hand in a sport so spectacular, it symbolized good versus evil. The ballgame played by the Maya, Aztec and neighboring cultures is famous for its ubiquity in Mesoamerica before interloping Europeans shut it down. But many mysteries and misconceptions continue to dog people's understanding of the game.
For instance, did the game's winners or losers get sacrificed at the end of the game? And were the hoops on the ball courts treated like modern-day basketball nets?
The answer to both questions is no; the players were most likely not sacrificed, and the ball wasn't meant to go through the hoop, although it likely happened from time to time, said Christophe Helmke, an associate professor at the Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Confirmed: Earth Is Crushing the Ocean into Salty Diamonds
It's been said that diamonds are forever — probably because "diamonds are billion-year-old mutant rocks exposed to many lifetimes of crushing pressures and scorching temperatures in Earth's deep mantle" doesn't have the same snappy ring to it.
Either way, it takes a long, long time for a chunk of carbon to crystallize into a sparkling diamond — so long, in fact, that scientists aren't positive how they're made. One popular theory maintains that many diamonds form when slabs of seabed (part of an oceanic plate) grind underneath continental plates at so-called tectonic subduction zones. During the process, the oceanic plate and all the minerals at the bottom of the sea plunge hundreds of miles into Earth's mantle, where they slowly crystallize under high temperatures and pressures tens of thousands of times greater than those on the surface. Eventually, these crystals mix in with volcanic magma called kimberlite and burst onto the planet's surface as diamonds.
This Animated Mona Lisa Was Created by AI, and It Is Terrifying
The enigmatic, painted smile of the "Mona Lisa" is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI).
In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as she moves her lips and turns her head. She was created by a convolutional neural network — a type of AI that processes information much as a human brain does, to analyze and process images.
Researchers trained the algorithm to understand facial features' general shapes and how they behave relative to each other, and then to apply that information to still images. The result was a realistic video sequence of new facial expressions from a single frame.
Ars Technica
The oceans absorbed extra CO₂ in the 2000s
Tracking climate change means (among other things) tracking annual changes in global greenhouse gas emissions and the corresponding increases in the atmospheric CO2 concentration. This can get confusing, though, because there isn’t a perfect year-to-year correlation between the two.
Our CO2 emissions are released into the atmosphere, but the atmosphere interacts with other parts of Earth’s carbon cycle, which pull some CO2 out. In the short term, the two sinks that matter most are the oceans and the ecosystems on land. CO2 dissolves into seawater to maintain an equilibrium with the air, and photosynthetic organisms on land and in the oceans take in CO2. Shifting ocean currents or weather on land that affects plant growth will alter the amount of CO2being taken out of the atmosphere.
Sonic black holes produce “Hawking radiation,” may confirm famous theory
Israeli physicists think they have confirmed one of the late Stephen Hawking's most famous predictions by creating the sonic equivalent of a black hole out of an exotic superfluid of ultra-cold atoms. Jeff Steinhauer and colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) described these intriguing experimental results in a new paper in Nature.
The standard description of a black hole is an object with such a strong gravitational force that light can't even escape once it moves behind a point of no return known as the event horizon. But in the 1970s, Hawking demonstrated that—theoretically, at least—black holes should emit tiny amounts of radiation and gradually evaporate over time.
Mongabay
Mass die-offs of puffins in Alaska may be linked to climate change
On the remote island of St. Paul, located in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, more than 350 severely emaciated carcasses of sea birds, primarily tufted puffins, washed ashore between October 2016 and January 2017. Now, new research suggests that climate change may have been to blame.
The Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, in collaboration with researchers of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a citizen science project housed at the University of Washington, have been regularly conducting monthly surveys to record dead birds that wash onto the island’s beaches. Beginning in October 2016, though, the residents observed something odd: where earlier they rarely came across carcasses of tufted puffins (Fratercula cirrhata), now there were nearly 300 of them in a span of just four months. During the previous decade, between June 2006 and September 2016, the teams had come across only six puffin carcasses.
Land grabbing, cattle ranching ravage Colombian Amazon after FARC demobilization
Rafael Orjuela, a community leader in Cartagena de Chairá, Colombia, moved to the Amazonian department of Caquetá in 1979 to escape severe economic hardship in the interior Andes region. At the time, Orjuela encountered Amazonian lands covered with dense, virgin rainforest where “exquisite, supremely abundant” wildlife roamed freely between the rivers, mountains and plains.
“There was no ‘deforestation’ problem at that time. In fact, the state told us that if we didn’t knock down 70 percent of the forest on a piece of property, it wasn’t ours,” Orjuela said. “Sadly, today we’re paying for the errors of that mind-set.”
For decades, the rebel FARC group exercised nearly complete political control in the Caquetá’s rural areas. But that all changed when Colombia’s largest rebel army reached a historic peace agreement with the government and laid down its weapons in 2016.