LiveScience
There Are Thousands of Tardigrades on the Moon. Now What?
Tardigrades, which live on every continent on Earth, are also (maybe) living on the moon, following the crash of a lunar lander carrying thousands of the microscopic water bears.
Did any of them survive the impact? If they did, what happens to them now?
When the tardigrades were placed on the Israeli moon mission Beresheet, they were in a tun state — dehydrated, with their chubby limbs and heads retracted and all metabolic activity temporarily suspended. Their arrival on the moon was unexpectedly explosive; Beresheet's crash landing on April 11 may have scattered the microorganisms onto the lunar surface.
Scientists Figure Out Why There Are Black Squirrels All Over the United States
Biologists from the United Kingdom think they've decoded the mystery of all the gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) running around the United States with black fur.
The bit of genetic code that causes the gray squirrel species to turn black, they showed, is an allele, or a variant form of a specific gene, called MC1R∆24. But that allele doesn't seem to come from gray squirrels. Instead, they showed, the gray squirrel MC1R∆24 allele is "identical" to the MC1R∆24 allele found in another species, fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) — one of two mutations that occasionally cause big, usually reddish fox squirrels to turn black. In a paper published online July 11 in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, the researchers showed that the color-changing allele likely originated in fox squirrels and moved over to gray squirrels through interbreeding.
To reach that conclusion, the researchers examined all three possible ways the gene variant could have turned up in both species.
Nature
Chemists make first-ever ring of pure carbon
Long after most chemists had given up trying, a team of researchers has synthesized the first ring-shaped molecule of pure carbon — a circle of 18 atoms.
The chemists started with a triangular molecule of carbon and oxygen, which they manipulated with electric currents to create the carbon-18 ring. Initial studies of the properties of the molecule, called a cyclocarbon, suggest that it acts as a semiconductor, which could make similar straight carbon chains useful as molecular-scale electronic components.
It is an “absolutely stunning work” that opens up a new field of investigation, says Yoshito Tobe, a chemist at Osaka University in Japan.
The quest to unlock the secrets of the baby Universe
To get an idea of what the Universe looks like from Earth’s perspective, picture a big watermelon. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of the seeds, at the centre of the fruit. The space around it, the pink flesh, is sprinkled with countless other seeds. Those are also galaxies that we — living inside that central seed — can observe through our telescopes.
Because light travels at a finite speed, we see other galaxies as they were in the past. The seeds farthest from the centre of the watermelon are the earliest galaxies seen so far, dating back to a time when the Universe was just one-thirtieth of its current age of 13.8 billion years. Beyond those, at the thin, green outer layer of the watermelon skin, lies something primeval from before the time of stars. This layer represents the Universe when it was a mere 380,000 years old, and still a warm, glowing soup of subatomic particles. We know about that period because its light still ripples through space — although it has stretched so much over the eons that it now exists as a faint glow of microwave radiation.
The most mysterious part of the observable Universe is another layer of the watermelon, the section between the green shell and the pink flesh. This represents the first billion years of the Universe’s history. Astronomers have seen very little of this period, except for a few, exceedingly bright galaxies and other objects.
The Guardian
‘Perhaps the most important isotope’: how carbon-14 revolutionised science
artin Kamen had worked for three days and three nights without sleep. The US chemist was finishing off a project in which he and a colleague, Sam Ruben, had bombarded a piece of graphite with subatomic particles. The aim of their work was to create new forms of carbon, ones that might have practical uses.
Exhausted, Kamen staggered out of his laboratory at Berkeley in California, having finished off the project in the early hours of 27 February 1940. He desperately needed a break. Rumpled, red eyed and with a three-day growth of beard, he looked a mess.
And that was unfortunate. Berkeley police were then searching for an escaped convict who had just committed several murders. So when they saw the unkempt Kamen they promptly picked him up, bundled him into the back of their patrol car and interrogated him as a suspected killer.
Thus one of most revolutionary pieces of research undertaken in the past century was nearly terminated at birth when one of its lead scientists was accused of murder. It was only when witnesses made it clear that Kamen was not the man the police were after that he was released and allowed to go back to the University of California Radiation Laboratory to look at the lump of graphite that he and Ruben had been irradiating.
Bronze age meals in the marshes – seasoned with parasitic worms
The clutch of homes that stood on stilts in the wetland fens of East Anglia were the envy of the local peasantry 3,000 years ago. But amid the remains of the grand wooden huts and the belongings of the well-to-do residents lurked evidence that all was not well at Must Farm, Britain’s premier bronze age settlement.
Firm, sausage-shaped lumps found skulking in the mud that swallowed the settlement after a catastrophic fire have been identified as pieces of faeces. Inside these deposits researchers found a grim array of tiny eggs – the calling card for parasitic worm infestations.
In the sanitising jargon of archaeology, the human coprolites were found to be brimming with eggs from fish tapeworms, giant kidney worms, whipworms and other undesirable creatures, pointing to a downside of the settlers’ fresh and convenient marsh diet.
Phys.org
Researchers build a heat shield just 10 atoms thick to protect electronic devices
Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode.
To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users.
Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically thin materials, stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can provide the same insulation as a sheet of glass 100 times thicker. In the near term, thinner heat shields will enable engineers to make electronic devices even more compact than those we have today, said Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering and senior author of a paper published Aug. 16 in Science Advances.
Arctic sea ice loaded with microplastics
At first glance, it looks like hard candy laced with flecks of fake fruit, or a third grader's art project confected from recycled debris.
In reality, it's a sliver of Arctic Ocean sea ice riddled with microplastics, extracted by scientists from deep inside an ice block that likely drifted southward past Greenland into Canada's increasingly navigable Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
"We didn't expect this amount of plastic, we were shocked," said University of Rhode Island ice expert Alessandra D'Angelo, one of a dozen scientists collecting and analysing data during an 18-day expedition aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden.
"There is so much of it, and of every kind—beads, filaments, nylons," she told AFP from Greenland, days after completing the voyage.
Science Daily
A simpler way to choose the sex of offspring by separating X and Y sperm
A simple, reversible chemical treatment can segregate X-bearing sperm from Y-bearing sperm, allowing dramatic alteration of the normal 50/50 male/female offspring ratio, according to a new study by Masayuki Shimada and colleagues at Hiroshima University, published on August 13 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The study was performed in mice, but the technique is likely to be widely applicable to other mammals as well.
Most cells from male mammals contain both an X and a Y chromosome, but during sperm development (spermatogenesis), the X and Y chromosomes are segregated into different cells so that an individual sperm will carry either one or the other, with an X chromosome giving rise to daughters and a Y chromosome to sons.
Unlike the Y chromosome, which carries very few genes, the X chromosome carries many, some of which remain active in the maturing sperm. This difference in gene expression between X- and Y-bearing sperm provides a theoretical basis for distinguishing the two.
Gut-brain connection helps explain how overeating leads to obesity
Eating extra servings typically shows up on the scale later, but how this happens has not been clear. A new study published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by a multi-institutional team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine reveals a previously unknown gut-brain connection that helps explain how those extra servings lead to weight gain.
Mice consuming a high-fat diet show increased levels of gastric inhibitory polypeptide (GIP), a hormone produced in the gut that is involved in managing the body's energy balance. The study reports that the excess GIP travels through the blood to the brain where it inhibits the action of leptin, the satiety hormone; consequently, the animals continue eating and gain weight. Blocking the interaction of GIP with the brain restores leptin's ability to inhibit appetite and results in weight loss in mice.
Popular Science
Ebola hasn't been cured yet, but two experimental drugs are showing significant progress
Two experimental treatments significantly improve survival rates from Ebola, according to preliminary data reported this week from a clinical trial testing the drug in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an Ebola outbreak is ongoing.
If patients received either of the two drugs early in their disease progression, risk of death dropped to around 10 percent. Overall, only around 30 percent of the patients taking the two drugs died. The fatality rate for the ongoing outbreak with the standard care is around 67 percent.
The findings represent a significant step forward, says Jason Kindrachuk, an Ebola researcher and assistant professor of viral pathogenesis in the department of medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba in Canada. “In the last outbreak, we didn’t really have anything in our arsenal we felt confident in. This is a major breakthrough.”
This newly discovered leech lurked in plain sight for decades
Recoil or rejoice: Scientists discovered a new medicinal leech in North America.
The about three-inch-long species, Macrobdella mimicus, had lurked in freshwater bodies and natural history collections for decades—until scientists gave it a closer examination. They described the species for the first time Thursday in the Journal of Parasitology.
“It’s been here this whole time,” says Anna Phillips, research zoologist and curator of parasitic worms at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Science
Here’s what Earth might look like to aliens
When Earthly astronomers train their telescopes on exoplanets beyond our solar system, they’re lucky to see even a single dot of light. How can they figure out whether it might have suitable conditions for life? To find out how they might know more, a team of scientists turned the problem on its head: They took images of a habitable planet—Earth—and transformed them into something alien astronomers light-years away would see. […]
To simulate an alien point of view, the researchers reduced the images into a single brightness reading for each wavelength—10 “dots” that, when plotted over time, produce 10 light curves that represent what a distant observer might see if they steadily watched exoplanet Earth over 2 years.
Telescopes in Hawaii reopen after deal with protesters
Astronomers at the 12 observatories atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii returned to work on 10 August, after a deal was made with protesters blocking construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).
State authorities brokered the deal, which includes the construction of a temporary roadway built across hardened lava around the protesters’ camp on the summit access road. Law enforcement will give protesters an advance list of all vehicles going up and down—to show that they are not associated with the TMT.
Astronomers are grateful for an end to the 4-week shutdown of the existing observatories—the longest in the 5-decade history of the Mauna Kea observatories. “It was very far-reaching,” says Sarah Bosman of University College London, who lost 3 nights of time to observe distant galaxies with the twin W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes. “Every area of astronomy was affected by this.
Gizmodo
Scientists Say They've Found a New Organ in Skin That Processes Pain
It’s not common that researchers discover what could be an entirely new part of the human body. But a team in Sweden claims to have uncovered an intricate network of cells underneath skin that helps process certain kinds of pain. The find could broaden our conceptions of how we feel pain, as well as how to relieve it.
Typically, it’s thought that we perceive harmful sensations on our skin entirely through the very sensitive endings of certain nerve cells. These nerve cells aren’t coated by a protective layer of myelin, as other types are. Nerve cells are kept alive by and connected to other cells called glia; outside of the central nervous system, one of the two major types of glia are called Schwann cells.
The authors of the new study, published Thursday in Science, say they were studying these helper cells near the skin’s surface in the lab when they came across something strange—some of the Schwann cells seemed to form an extensive “mesh-like network” with their nerve cells, differently than how they interact with nerve cells elsewhere. When they ran further experiments with mice, they found evidence that these Schwann cells play a direct, added role in pain perception, or nociception.
A Dangerous Algae Is Killing Our Dogs—and Climate Change Is Going to Make It Worse
A pair of tragic stories reported this past weekend are raising awareness of a threat to both people and animals in the water: algae. At least four dogs in two states along the Southeast U.S. have reportedly died from swimming in freshwater lakes and ponds filled with toxic blue-green algae. And as the climate warms, these sad cases could become more common in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In a Facebook post published early last Friday, North Carolina resident Melissa Martin said she and her friend Denise Mintz had taken their three dogs—Abby, Izzy, and Harpo— for a Thursday night swim at a local pond. But within minutes of leaving, Abby began suffering a seizure. And though all three were quickly taken to a veterinary hospital, none survived. According to her veterinarian, Martin wrote, they had died from algae poisoning.
Mongabay
Europe-bred rhinos join South African cousins to repopulate Rwanda park
Five eastern black rhinos translocated from European zoos to Rwanda’s Akagera National Park have successfully completed an initial period of acclimatization and been moved into larger, 1-hectare (2.5-acre) enclosures. They will eventually be released into the wider park, joining a group brought over from South Africa in 2017, the first of these critically endangered species to roam in Rwanda since 2005.
Since the 1970s, rhino populations have been decimated by a poaching epidemic driven by demand for rhino horn, with a 96 percent decline in the number of black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) from 70,000 to just 2,410 between 1970 and 1995. The eastern black rhino (D. b. michaeli), originally ranging across East Africa, from southern Sudan to northern Tanzania, is the most endangered of the three black rhino subspecies. There are fewer than 1,000 wild individuals left in small isolated populations scattered across Tanzania and Kenya.
Science News
Fluid in superdeep diamonds may be from some of Earth's oldest unchanged material
A surprisingly hardy reservoir of rock left over from just after Earth’s formation still lurks deep inside the planet, according to a new analysis of superdeep diamonds.
Fluid trapped inside these diamonds, forged hundreds of kilometers underground in Earth’s mantle, bears the chemical signatures of rock that has remained relatively undisturbed for billions of years. This holdout of primordial rock may be nearly as ancient as Earth itself — making it some of the oldest preserved material on the planet today, researchers report in the Aug. 16 Science. Understanding the characteristics and preservation of such a pristine piece of early Earth may yield new insights into the formation and evolution of the planet.
The worst wildfires can send smoke high enough to affect the ozone layer
For the first time, scientists have seen exactly how towering clouds that rise from intense wildfires launch smoke high into the atmosphere, where it can linger for months and mess with the protective ozone layer.
Cooler air closer to Earth’s surface normally keeps smoke from rising too high. But as dozens of fires raged in western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2017, they created their own giant storm clouds called pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCb, clouds. Within two months, these clouds had lofted smoke 12 to 23 kilometers up into the stratosphere, researchers report in the Aug. 9 Science. Solar radiation heating soot in the smoke helped it reach those soaring heights.
Scientific American
Old Dinosaur Turns into Something New
A fossil uncovered in the 1970s turns out to be a previously unknown species
There are plenty of underappreciated dinosaur families. I’ve never once heard someone get excited about the svelte little hypsilophodonts, for example, and snappy coelophysoids usually only get fame for their relevance to the evolution of later, larger, toothier carnivores. Sauropodomorphs have suffered a similar fate.
Encompassing the largest land animals of all time, sauropodomorphs are incredibly varied. You undoubtedly know some of the later forms in the pillar-legged, long-necked sauropod subdivision – Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, and the rest. But usually when we talk about sauropodomorphs proper, we mean the earlier relatives of these giants. The mostly-herbivorous dinosaurs with strange, boxy skulls, long necks, huge hand claws, and – most of the time – a bipedal posture that made them look incredibly gawky.
Sci-News
Avocado Genome Sequenced
A multinational team of researchers has sequenced the genomes of Mexican, Guatemalan and West Indian avocados, and the most commercially popular hybrid cultivar, Hass, shedding light on the ancient origins of this buttery fruit and laying the groundwork for future improvements to farming.
The avocado (Persea americana) is a commercially important tree fruit species in the Lauraceae family, otherwise known for the spices cinnamon, bay leaves, and sassafras. It is a vital crop for Mexico, from which almost 50% of all avocado exports originate, valued at about $2.5 billion US dollars.
Although the avocado has an ancient cultivation history in Mexico and Central to South America, its extreme worldwide popularity as an oily, nutty-flavored fruit with highly beneficial nutritional properties dates mainly from the early 20th century.
Dark Chocolate Consumption May Reduce Depression Symptoms
Chocolate is widely reported to have mood-enhancing properties and several mechanisms for a relationship between chocolate and mood have been proposed.
Principally, chocolate contains a number of psychoactive ingredients which produce a feeling of euphoria similar to that of cannabinoid, found in cannabis. It also contains phenylethylamine, a neuromodulator which is believed to be important for regulating people’s moods.
Experimental evidence suggests that mood improvements only take place if the chocolate is palatable and pleasant to eat, which suggests that the experience of enjoying chocolate is an important factor, not just the ingredients present.
BBC News
Nasa picks headquarters for Moon lander
A Nasa facility in Alabama that developed the giant rocket for the Apollo programme in the 1960s will play a key role in sending astronauts down to the Moon's surface in 2024.
The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville will lead the development of a vehicle that will land astronauts on the body for the first time since 1972.
The decision was announced by Nasa's administrator Jim Bridenstine. But it's a disappointment for Texas, which was in the running.
Ars Technica
Trump administration announces changes to Endangered Species Act rules
After two years of review and revision, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a set of changes to the regulations that spell out how it will implement parts of the Endangered Species Act. The changes focus on how officials should decide whether to list a species as endangered or threatened, what kind of protections threatened species should receive, and how officials will decide which areas of habitat to protect.
In practice, the changes may weaken the Endangered Species Act’s protections. Depending on how this and future administrations interpret the wording of the regulation, these changes could make it easier to remove species from the endangered and threatened species lists. The wording may also give officials tacit permission to dismiss climate change as an irrelevant threat to species’ survival and to consider economic factors when they’re deciding whether to protect a species.
Wind power prices now lower than the cost of natural gas
This week, the US Department of Energy released a report that looks back on the state of wind power in the US by running the numbers on 2018. The analysis shows that wind hardware prices are dropping, even as new turbine designs are increasing the typical power generated by each turbine. As a result, recent wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant.
Wind is even cheaper at the moment because of a tax credit given to renewable energy generation. But that credit is in the process of fading out, leading to long term uncertainty in a power market where demand is generally stable or dropping.
Kaspersky AV injected unique ID that allowed sites to track users, even in incognito mode
Antivirus software is something that can help people be safer and more private on the Internet. But its protections can cut both ways. A case in point: for almost four years, AV products from Kaspersky Lab injected a unique identifier into the HTML of every website a user visited, making it possible for sites to identify people even when using incognito mode or when they switched between Chrome, Firefox, or Edge.
The identifier, as reported Thursday by c't Magazine, was part of a blob of JavaScript Kaspersky products injected into every page a user visited. The JavaScript, presented below this paragraph, was designed to, among other things, present a green icon that corresponded to safe links returned in search results.
c't reporter Ronald Eikenberg found something unsettling about the JavaScript injected by the Kaspersky AV product installed on his test computer—the tag 9344FDA7-AFDF-4BA0-A915-4D7EEB9A6615 was unique to his machine, and it was injected into every single page he visited. It didn't matter if he used Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Opera or whether he turned on incognito browsing. The identifier acted as a unique serial number that website operators could use to track him.