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.
LiveScience: Rogue 'Immune Cell X' Is a Completely New Type of Cell. It Could Trigger Type 1 Diabetes. By Tia Ghose
Scientists have discovered a mysterious population of previously unknown cellslurking in the human body, according to a new study.
The enigmatic new cell type, called immune cell X, is a changeling that can act as two other cell types. And this rogue hybrid cell may trigger type 1 diabetes.
Scientists have long believed that hybrid cells like these could not exist. The population of these cells is likely tiny; perhaps less than 7 out of every 10,000 white blood cells, said study co-author Abdel-Rahim A. Hamad, associate professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
But they may play an outsize role in the development of autoimmunity.
"They are very rare, but we think they are very powerful," Hamad told Live Science.
Undark: Can a New Diagnosis Help Prevent Suicide? By Temma Ehrenfeld
Banks, then 25, was a disciplined graduate student with a job and close friends and had no psychiatric history. “I had never considered suicide an option,” she says. But for the next three days, she couldn’t sleep while the voice and disturbing images persisted. After seeing a therapist, she decided to teach herself techniques from dialectical behavior therapy, one of the few treatments shown to reduce suicidality. The voices and images came back over the next few months, but eventually faded. Eight years later, Banks now evaluates suicide prevention programs across Tennessee as a manager at the large mental health provider Centerstone’s research institute, and she and the same boyfriend just celebrated their 10th anniversary.
In the public imagination, suicide is often understood as the end of a torturous decline caused by depression or another mental illness. But clinicians and researchers know that suicidal crises frequently come on rapidly, escalating from impulse to action within a day, hours, or just minutes. Many also point to the fact that they may strike people like Banks, who are otherwise in good mental health.
That understanding is one reason a movement is building to define suicidality as a condition in its own right. Most recently, researchers from Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Florida State University have agreed to collaborate on a joint proposal for a new diagnosis in the next Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a handbook published by the American Psychiatric Association. The criteria include familiar symptoms of depression, but these symptoms occur in an acute state that is not currently obvious to clinicians. Proponents say it could spur more research and make it easier for suicidal patients to get the care they need.
Quanta: New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively by Jonathan Lambert
To biologists eager to understand how one species can split into two, the apple maggot fly seemed primed to spill the genetic secrets.
Sometime within the past 170 years, populations of Rhagoletis pomonella jumped from infecting the fruits of native hawthorn trees in North America to infecting apple trees introduced by European colonists, a move that formed an incipient species. The new apple-specialist insects even altered their developmental schedule by maturing earlier, when apple trees are fruiting. Finding the new genetic differences that distinguished and isolated the two types of flies should have been easy.
The researchers did find one — but the timing seemed all wrong. It wasn’t a new mutation at all; instead, the genetic variant had originated in an isolated Mexican population over 1 million years ago and then spread north after some ancient hybridization event. How could a speciation gene be orders of magnitude older than the actual speciation?
The Scientist: Newly Described Electric Eel Has Strongest Voltage Yet Measured by Kerry Grens
For hundreds of years, scientists had thought there was just one species of Electrophorus, the electric eel, swimming through Amazonian waterways. Turns out, there’s three. And one of the newly described taxa delivers an electric discharge of 860 volts, “making it the strongest living bioelectricity generator,” the authors write in their report, published in Nature Communications today (September 10).
“That’s bonkers,” Kory Evans, an evolutionary biologist who studies electric fish at Brown University and was not involved in the study, tells Nova Next. “The fact that there’s a living organism that has the ability to generate this kind of violent electricity is really shocking, no pun intended.”
Carl Linnaeus described Electrophorus electricus 250 years ago, and since then it’s been the lone species in the genus. Then along comes Carlos David de Santana. As a kid, he watched electric eels swim in the Amazon River, and now as an ichthyologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, he studies its—or rather, their—natural history.
Nature: ‘Ecological grief’ grips scientists witnessing Great Barrier Reef’s decline by Gemma Conroy
When Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral-reef system, was hit by record-breaking marine heat waves that bleached two-thirds of it in 2016 and 2017, many researchers were left in a state of shock.
Social scientist Michele Barnes witnessed this disaster first hand. She works at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, which is adjacent to the reef. Barnes decided to interview scientists and others working on the reef to investigate their response to this climate-change-driven catastrophe.
Barnes, who is still analysing her results, was surprised that many of the scientists whom she interviewed felt intense grief and sadness about the reef’s deterioration. Nature has also spoken to several coral-reef scientists not involved in Barnes’s study who echo those sentiments.
“I now feel much more hopeless, and there’s a deeper anxiety breaking through,” says John Pandolfi, a marine ecologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Pandolfi has been studying ecosystem dynamics in the Great Barrier Reef for more than 30 years. The consecutive bleaching events that began in 2016 triggered mass death of the reef’s coral cover, which caused a dramatic shift in its species composition. Pandolfi is now investigating new configurations of species that have arisen because of human impacts.
ScienceNews: This device harnesses the cold night sky to generate electricity in the dark by Maria Temming
A new device is an anti-solar panel, harvesting energy from the cold night sky.
By harnessing the temperature difference between Earth and outer space, a prototype of the device produced enough electricity at night to power a small LED light. A bigger version of this nighttime generator could someday light rooms, charge phones or power other electronics in remote or low-resource areas that lack electricity at night when solar panels don’t work, researchers report online September 12 in Joule.
The core of the new night-light is a thermoelectric generator, which produces electricity when one side of the generator is cooler than the other (SN: 6/1/18). The sky-facing side of the generator is attached to an aluminum plate sealed beneath a transparent cover and surrounded with insulation to keep heat out. This plate stays cooler than the ambient air by shedding any heat it absorbs as infrared radiation (SN: 9/28/18). That radiation can zip up through the transparent cover and the atmosphere toward the cold sink of outer space.
Meanwhile, the bottom of the generator is attached to an exposed aluminum plate that is continually warmed by ambient air. At night, when not baking under the sun, the top plate can get a couple of degrees Celsius cooler than the bottom of the generator.
Phys.org: Engineers develop 'blackest black' material to date by Jennifer Chu
With apologies to "Spinal Tap," it appears that black can, indeed, get more black.
MIT engineers report today that they have cooked up a material that is 10 times blacker than anything that has previously been reported. The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, or CNTs—microscopic filaments of carbon, like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminum foil. The foil captures more than 99.96 percent of any incoming light, making it the blackest material on record.
The researchers have published their findings today in the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces. They are also showcasing the cloak-like material as part of a new exhibit today at the New York Stock Exchange, titled "The Redemption of Vanity."
Space: 2 Studies, 1 Planet! Inside a Race to Discover a Water Vapor World by Chelsea Gohd
Water vapor, and likely clouds that rain liquid water, have been discovered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet that lies in the habitable zone of its star. But there's an issue.
While the discovery broke late Tuesday night (Sept. 10) in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv.org, a second, peer-reviewed paper was published yesterday (Sept. 11) in the journal Nature Astronomy that also showed the detection of water vapor in this planet's atmosphere. Both of these studies used the observations made by the team who published first, on arXiv.org.
In short, researchers made a major discovery — water vapor and likely liquid water clouds in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b — based on data they collected using the Hubble Space Telescope. But another team took and used some of that data to reach similar conclusions.
Guardian: Black hole at centre of galaxy is getting hungrier, say scientists by Hannah Devlin
Unseeable and inescapable, black holes already rank among the more sinister phenomena out in the cosmos. So it may come as disconcerting news that the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way appears to be growing hungrier.
Astronomers monitoring the colossal object, called Sagittarius A*, found that in the past year it appears to have consumed nearby matter at an unprecedented rate.
“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.”
Everyone have a great evening!