U.S. beekeepers lost over 40 percent of colonies last year, highest winter losses ever recorded
Beekeepers across the United States lost 40.7% of their honey bee colonies from April 2018 to April 2019, according to preliminary results of the latest annual nationwide survey conducted by the University of Maryland-led nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of food crops in the United States each year.
The survey results show, the annual loss of 40.7% this last year represents a slight increase over the annual average of 38.7%. However winter losses of 37.7%, were the highest winter loss reported since the survey began 13 years ago and 8.9 percentage points higher than the survey average.
"These results are very concerning, as high winter losses hit an industry already suffering from a decade of high winter losses," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and president for the Bee Informed Partnership.
Melting of Himalayan glaciers has doubled in recent years
A newly comprehensive study shows that melting of Himalayan glaciers caused by rising temperatures has accelerated dramatically since the start of the 21st century. The analysis, spanning 40 years of satellite observations across India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, indicates that glaciers have been losing the equivalent of more than a vertical foot and half of ice each year since 2000 -- double the amount of melting that took place from 1975 to 2000. The study is the latest and perhaps most convincing indication that climate change is eating the Himalayas' glaciers, potentially threatening water supplies for hundreds of millions of people downstream across much of Asia.
"This is the clearest picture yet of how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting over this time interval, and why," said lead author Joshua Maurer, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. While not specifically calculated in the study, the glaciers may have lost as much as a quarter of their enormous mass over the last four decades, said Maurer. The study appears this week in the journal Science Advances.
New research shows an iceless Greenland may be in our future
New research shows an iceless Greenland may be in the future. If worldwide greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, Greenland may be ice-free by the year 3000. Even by the end of the century, the island could lose 4.5% of its ice, contributing up to 13 inches of sea level rise.
"How Greenland will look in the future -- in a couple of hundred years or in 1,000 years -- whether there will be Greenland, or at least a Greenland similar to today, it's up to us," said Andy Aschwanden, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
Aschwanden is lead author on a new study published in the June issue of Science Advances. UAF Geophysical Institute researchers Mark Fahnestock, Martin Truffer, Regine Hock and Constantine Khrulev are co-authors, as is Doug Brinkerhoff, a former UAF graduate student.
The New York Times
NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life
Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today.
In a measurement taken on Wednesday, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on Thursday, and by Friday, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA.
“Given this surprising result, we’ve reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment,” Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email that was obtained by The Times.
Who Liked Hurricane Sandy? These Tiny, Endangered Birds
The wrath of Hurricane Sandy’s powerful winds and violent storm surge left considerable damage across New York and New Jersey in October 2012. But for one tiny bird, the cataclysmic storm has been a big help.
“Hurricane Sandy was really good for piping plovers,” said Katie Walker, a graduate student in wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech.
The piping plover is a small, migratory shorebird that nests along North America’s Great Lakes and Atlantic Coast. The species, which is listed as endangered in New York State and threatened federally, has been the focus of intensive conservation efforts for decades. But on one island that was heavily damaged by the big storm, the piping plover population has increased by 93 percent, Ms. Walker and colleagues reported in the journal Ecosphere this month.
The Guardian
Trump's EPA is 'dangerously off the rails' on toxic chemical regulation, say senators
Senate Democrats are charging that the Trump administration has gone “dangerously off the rails”, in failing to implement landmark legislation meant to protect people from toxic chemicals.
In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency, five senators say Trump officials are ignoring new authorities made available to them, favoring the chemical industry over the health of Americans. The senators are presidential candidate Cory Booker, Tom Udall, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley and Sheldon Whitehouse.
In 2016, Congress amended the Toxic Substances Control Act, aiming to fix structural problems with the 1976 law and give the EPA more powers to ensure chemicals used in everyday products and materials are safe for humans and the environment. Research has shown health risks in products ranging from nail polish to plastic food packaging.
Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows
A sign on an upside-down dumpster spelled the end of Pearl Pai’s long romance with plastics recycling…
A Guardian investigation reveals that cities around the country are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins. Instead, they are being landfilled, burned or stockpiled. From Los Angeles to Florida to the Arizona desert, officials say, vast quantities of plastic are now no better than garbage.
The “market conditions” on the sign Pai saw referred to the situation caused by China. Once the largest buyer of US plastic waste, the country shut its doors to all but highest-quality plastics in 2017. The move sent shockwaves through the American industry as recyclers scrambled, and often failed, to find new buyers. Now the turmoil besetting a global trade network, which is normally hidden from view, is hitting home.
“All these years I have been feeling like I’m doing something responsible,” said Pai, clearly dumbstruck as she walked away with a full bag. “The truth hurts.”
Reversible superglue proves strong enough to hold average man
A reversible superglue that mimics the under-appreciated properties of dried snail mucus has proved strong enough to bear the weight of an average man.
Scientists who tested the slime-inspired product found that two sticky squares the size of postage stamps were sufficient to hold an 87kg (192lb) weight in the form of a volunteer engineering student.
The unusual substance overcomes a problem with which researchers in the field have wrestled for decades, namely that glues can be weak and reversible, or strong and irreversible, but never, it seemed, both strong and reversible.
Gizmodo
Behold: Scientists Get Great View of Uranus' Glowing Rings
Astronomers captured a first look at radiation emitted directly by Uranus’ rings.
Scientists have known for a few decades that the planet has faint rings, but there’s a whole lot that remains mysterious about them—the rings’ composition and mass, and the sizes of their individual pieces. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom used two telescopes in Chile to measure radiation from the pieces that comprise Uranus’ rings, the first observations of the rings in radio and mid-infrared wavelengths.
Prior to these observations, scientists have observed Uranus’ rings block the starlight behind them as seen from Earth and from the Voyager 2 probe, and have imaged them from the Hubble Space Telescope and using near-infrared telescopes on the ground. These measurements demonstrated that the planet has 10 skinny rings, three fatter rings, and at least 13 small moons that orbit within the rings.
City Dwellers Could Be Key to Saving Monarch Butterflies From Extinction
Since 2014, conservationists have been trying to secure protections for the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act. The butterfly—whose signature black-and-white speckled orange wings are impossible to miss—has seen its numbers drop by 80 percent in North America over the last 20 years.
New research, however, paints a promising future for the species in a surprising place: our cities.
A pair of studies from the Field Museum in Chicago published Friday look at the role urban centers can play in saving the monarch butterfly, as well as other pollinators, from extinction. What these insects need is milkweed, the only plant the butterflies can lay their eggs on. Unfortunately, habitat loss has made it difficult for these bugs to find enough milkweed to breed. But more than 100 species of milkweed exist, so the team of researchers got to work figuring out how much already exists in U.S. cities, and how much room cities have for even more milkweed.
Nature
CRISPR babies: when will the world be ready?
Jeff Carroll had been married for six months when he and his wife decided not to have children. Carroll, 25 years old and a former corporal in the US Army, had just found out that he had the mutation that causes Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that ravages the brain and nervous system and invariably ends in an early death. He had learnt that his mother had the disease about four years earlier, and now he knew that he was all but certain to develop it, too.
Faced with a 50% chance of passing on the same grim fate to their children, the couple decided that kids were out of the question. “We just kind of shut that down,” says Carroll.
But he had begun studying biology in the army in the hope of learning more about the disease. He found out about a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD. By conceiving through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening the embryos, Carroll and his wife could all but eliminate the chance of passing on the mutation. They decided to give it a shot, and had twins free of the Huntington’s mutation in 2006.
Robo-fish powered by battery ‘blood’
Researchers have created a robotic fish powered by a battery fluid that its developers dub ‘robot blood’.
The roughly 40-centimetre soft robot doesn’t have solid batteries — instead it is propelled by a dual-function fluid that stores energy and moves the fish’s fins. The approach allows the machine to store more energy in a smaller space and operate for longer periods without the need for heavy and cumbersome battery packs.
The innovation is a step towards creating autonomous robots — those that can perform tasks without human intervention or guidance, says Robert Shepherd, a roboticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was part of the team that built the robot. The researchers describe their machine in a Nature paper published on 19 June1.
Phys.org
Climbing droplets driven by mechanowetting on transverse waves
Modern applications use self-cleaning strategies and digital microfluids to control individual droplets of fluids on flat surfaces but existing techniques are limited by the side-effects of high electric fields and high temperatures. In a new study, Edwin De Jong and co-workers at the interdisciplinary departments of Advanced Materials, Mechanical Engineering and Complex Molecular Systems developed an innovative "mechanowetting" technique to control droplet motion on changing surfaces based on the interfacial surface tension.
To demonstrate the method, they transported droplets using transverse waves on horizontal and vertically inclined surfaces at velocities equal to the speed of the wave. The scientists captured the fundamental mechanism of the mechanowetting force in theory and quantitatively to establish the phenomenon's dependence on the properties of the fluid, surface energy and wave parameters. Jong et al. demonstrated "mechanowetting" as a technique that can lead to a range of new applications featuring droplet control through surface deformations. The research is now published on Science Advances.
Scientists map huge undersea fresh-water aquifer off US Northeast
In a new survey of the sub-seafloor off the U.S. Northeast coast, scientists have made a surprising discovery: a gigantic aquifer of relatively fresh water trapped in porous sediments lying below the salty ocean. It appears to be the largest such formation yet found in the world. The aquifer stretches from the shore at least from Massachusetts to New Jersey, extending more or less continuously out about 50 miles to the edge of the continental shelf. If found on the surface, it would create a lake covering some 15,000 square miles. The study suggests that such aquifers probably lie off many other coasts worldwide, and could provide desperately needed water for arid areas that are now in danger of running out.
The researchers employed innovative measurements of electromagnetic waves to map the water, which remained invisible to other technologies. "We knew there was fresh water down there in isolated places, but we did not know the extent or geometry," said lead author Chloe Gustafson, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It could turn out to be an important resource in other parts of the world." The study appears this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Popular Science
Male ants are pretty much just flying sperm (and other amazing ant facts)
Have you have seen ants this year? In Britain, they were probably black garden ants, known as Lasius niger—Europe's most common ant. One of somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 species, they are the scourge of gardeners—but also fascinating. […]
Unlike humans, with X and Y chromosomes, an ant's sex is determined by the number of genome copies it possesses. Male ants develop from unfertilized eggs, so receive no genome from a father. This means that male ants don't have a father and cannot have sons, but they do have grandfathers and can have grandsons. Female ants, in comparison, develop from fertilized eggs and have two genome copies—one from their father and one from their mother.
Male ants function like flying sperm. Only having one genome copy means every one of their sperm carries DNA genetically identical to themselves. And their job is over quickly, dying soon after mating (although their sperm sometimes lives for years). Essentially their only job is to reproduce.
These flesh-eating bacteria are finding new beaches to call home
Luckily for some of them—specifically the flesh-eating varieties—we humans have warmed the climate enough that their habitats are expanding. Vibrio vulnificus, one of roughly a dozen species that cause vibriosis in humans, only lives in high-salinity surface waters above 13°C (that's 55.4°F). In the U.S., that means it's historically been confined to the southeastern coast. But a case report published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that our flesh-eating friends are already moving up the shoreline.
Ars Technica
Debunked: The absurd story about smartphones causing kids to sprout horns
The Washington Post on Thursday published a story suggesting that the use of mobile devices is causing young people to sprout horns from their skulls. But a look at the scientific data behind the story finds that such a splashy takeaway is tenuous at best—and atrocious reporting at worst.
The Post’s story was primarily based on a study published back in February 2018 by two Australian researchers. It earned fresh attention last week after being mentioned in a BBC feature on how modern life is supposedly transforming the human skeleton. The study was published in Nature’s open source journal Scientific Reports, which is supposedly peer-reviewed. But the study has significant limitations and flaws, and the Post breezed over them for a sensationalized story.
Perhaps the most striking problems are that the study makes no mention of horns and does not include any data whatsoever on mobile device usage by its participants who, according to the Post, are growing alleged horns. Also troubling is that the study authors don't report much of the data, and some of the results blatantly conflict with each other.
Physics indicates some of Earth’s earliest animals helped each other feed
What drove the evolution of the earliest animal life? In modern animals, it's easy to infer a lot about an organism's lifestyle based on its anatomy. Even back in the Cambrian, with its large collection of bizarre looking creatures, these inferences are possible. Anomalocaris may have had a freakish, disk-shaped mouth, but it clearly was a mouth.
Go back to Earth's earliest animals in the Ediacaran, however, and things get much, much harder. There's only one species known so far that appears to have the right body plan to act as a predator of sorts. Beyond that, it's all a collection of soft-looking fronds and segments that are difficult to ascribe any obvious function to. Faced with a lot of questions without obvious answers, biologists turned to an unlikely source of help: physicists and engineers who understand fluid mechanics.
All of these creatures lived in an aquatic environment, so tracing how fluid flows across them can provide some hints as to how food might have arrived. Now, the same sort of research indicates that a strange cup-shaped species grew in communities because it improved the feeding of some of the community members.
BBC News
'Friendly' bacteria could help save frogs from disease
Bacteria living on the skin of frogs could protect them against a deadly virus, according to research.
The work by scientists at the University of Exeter and Zoological Society of London could help save species such as the European common frog from being wiped out by a disease.
Amphibians have been hit particularly hard by changes in the natural world. Up to 40% of species are close to dying out due to factors such as pathogens, habitat loss and climate change.
The British scientists looked at how common frogs are coping with ranavirus, which can kill a large number of frogs in a short time in UK ponds.
Clean electricity overtaking fossil fuels in Britain
For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Britain is obtaining more power from zero-carbon sources than fossil fuels.
The milestone has been passed for the first five months of 2019.
National Grid says clean energy has nudged ahead with 48% of generation, against 47% for coal and gas.
The rest is biomass burning. The transformation reflects the precipitous decline of coal energy, and a boom from wind and solar.
Live Science
No Signs of Aliens in the Closest 1,300 Stars, Hunt Funded by Russian Billionaire Reveals
While the truth might be out there, technological aliens don't seem to be — at least not yet. New results from the most comprehensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program ever undertaken — which surveyed 1,327 nearby stars for signals from intelligent beings — have turned up empty.
"There's certainly nothing out there glaringly obvious," Danny Price, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a paper about the results, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal, told Live Science. "There's no amazingly advanced civilizations trying to contact us with incredibly powerful transmitters."
While the team didn't find anything this time around, Price said that there could be many explanations for the lack of alien signals.
Quanta
A New Law to Describe Quantum Computing’s Rise?
In December 2018, scientists at Google AI ran a calculation on Google’s best quantum processor. They were able to reproduce the computation using a regular laptop. Then in January, they ran the same test on an improved version of the quantum chip. This time they had to use a powerful desktop computer to simulate the result. By February, there were no longer any classical computers in the building that could simulate their quantum counterparts. The researchers had to request time on Google’s enormous server network to do that.
“Somewhere in February I had to make calls to say, ‘Hey, we need more quota,’” said Hartmut Neven, the director of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab. “We were running jobs comprised of a million processors.”
That rapid improvement has led to what’s being called “Neven’s law,” a new kind of rule to describe how quickly quantum computers are gaining on classical ones. The rule began as an in-house observation before Neven mentioned it in May at the Google Quantum Spring Symposium. There, he said that quantum computers are gaining computational power relative to classical ones at a “doubly exponential” rate — a staggeringly fast clip.
With double exponential growth, “it looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you’re in a different world,” Neven said. “That’s what we’re experiencing here.”
CNN
Photo of sled dogs walking through water shows reality of Greenland's melting ice sheet
Steffen Olsen, a scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, was on a routine mission in northwest Greenland to retrieve oceanographic and weather monitoring tools placed by his colleagues on sea ice when he ran into a problem.
He couldn't see them -- the usually flat white sea ice was covered in water, the result of flooding from Greenland's ice sheet, the second largest on the planet.
The incredible photo he took, of sled dogs ankle deep in a wide expanse of light blue water, quickly went viral, destined to join pictures of starving polar bears, shrunken glaciers, stranded walruses and lakes turned bone dry in the pantheon of evidence of our ongoing climate catastrophe.