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.
Nature: ‘Deathly silent’: Ecologist describes Australian wildfires’ devastating aftermath by Dyani Lewis
Australia is in the grip of its worst wildfire season on record. The human death toll stands at 27, and some 2,000 homes have been destroyed across more than 10 million hectares of land — an area larger than Portugal. An estimated 1 billion wild mammals, birds and reptiles have perished.
Michael Clarke, an ecologist at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Melbourne, has been studying the effect of fires on native ecosystems — and how they recover — ever since a fire tore through his field site 15 years ago. Clarke spoke to Nature about how animals fare in the wake of wildfires, and why this season’s fires could prove particularly devastating.
What happens in the aftermath of a wildfire?
It is deathly silent when you go into a forest after a fire. Apart from the ‘undertakers’ — the carrion eaters like currawongs, ravens and shrike-thrushes — picking off the dead bodies, there’s nothing much left in the forest. It’s a chilling experience.
For survivors, it’s a perilous existence in the months that follow. Any animal that manages to make it through the fire uninjured faces three major challenges. One is finding shelter from climatic extremes — places they can hide from bad weather, like a hollow tree or a hole in the ground. The second is the risk of starvation. And third, they’ve got to avoid predators like feral cats and foxes. They’re exposed; there’s nowhere to hide in a barren landscape.
Science News: Healthy babies exposed to Zika in the womb may suffer developmental delays by Aimee Cunningham
Babies from Colombia who were born healthy after being exposed to the Zika virus in the womb showed signs of neurodevelopmental delays by 18 months of age, a small study finds. The work supports long-term follow-up of babies whose mothers had the viral infection during pregnancy, the researchers say.
As a group, the 70 babies exposed to Zika didn’t hit certain developmental milestones for movement and social interaction around the times expected for healthy, nonexposed babies of the same age, researchers report January 6 in JAMA Pediatrics.
Overall, the children lagged in mobility skills such as rolling over or sitting up, and in play skills like peekaboo and searching for an object that has dropped out of sight, says Sarah Mulkey, a fetal neonatal neurologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. Within the group, some children developed as expected, some showed obvious development delays, and some showed more subtle delays that caregivers might not have noticed.
Science: These parrots are the first birds observed showing kindness to others by Virginia Morell
Helping others is such an essential part of being human that we’ve developed elaborate rituals—and biblical edicts—for protecting kin and sheltering strangers. Yet aside from humans, only a few other species, including orangutans and bonobos, seem to willingly help others. Now, scientists say they’ve found the first nonmammals that are also altruists: African gray parrots.
Past studies suggest some birds are prickly creatures. For example, crows—known for their intelligence—would not help other crows earn a nut reward, as parrots do for each other in the new study. The parrot study is “striking,” says Karl Berg, an avian ecologist and wild parrot expert at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, despite the small numbers of birds in the study. Berg was not involved in the research.
To find out whether African gray parrots or blue-headed macaws—two exceptionally brainy species—would assist their fellows, animal cognition scientists with the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology’s Comparative Cognition research station, tested four and three pairs, respectively. They first taught the captive birds to exchange a token with a researcher for a nut reward.
Phys.org: How technology designed for outer space can help detect disease on planet Earth
Sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which the body is fighting a severe infection that has spread via the bloodstream leading to poor circulation and lack of blood perfusion of vital tissues and organs, is one of the most significant causes of premature death in the world. In the UK alone there are 120,000 hospital admissions and 44,000 deaths due to the disease every year. 14,000 of these deaths are thought to be preventable through improved diagnosis and reduced treatment delays.
Researchers at King's are now trialling the use of a simple breath test device developed by RAL Space to study gases in the Martian atmosphere. The device known as a Laser Isotope Ratiometer (LIR) can provide instant results helping doctors start treatment earlier which could reduce the number of sepsis linked deaths.
Patients just breathe into a bag where the LIR uses laser beams to examine the gas samples. Now this is where gets a bit technical: the LIR then measures the concentration of two isotopes (or atoms) of carbon found in the sample. Carbon-13 and carbon-12 are exhaled as molecules or so called isotopologues 13CO2 and 12CO2.
Quanta: Continents of the Underworld Come Into Focus by Joshua Sokol
Decades ago, scientists first harnessed the echoes of earthquakes to make a map of Earth’s deep interior. They didn’t just find the onion layers you might remember from a grade school textbook — core and mantle covered by a cracked crust. Instead, they saw the vague outlines of two vast anomalies, unknown forms staring back from the abyss.
Over the years, better maps kept showing the same bloblike features. One huddles under Africa; the other is beneath the Pacific. They lurk where the planet’s molten iron core meets its rocky mantle, floating like mega-continents in the underworld. Their highest points may measure over 100 times the height of Everest. And if you somehow brought them to the surface, God forbid, they contain enough material to cover the entire globe in a lava lake roughly 100 kilometers deep.
“It would be like having an object in the sky, and asking, ‘Is that the moon?’ And people are like, no. ‘Is that the sun?’ No. ‘What is it?’ We don’t know!” said Vedran Lekić, a seismologist at the University of Maryland. “And whatever it is, it is intimately tied to the evolution of the Earth.”
New York Times: Hints of Phantom Crater Found Under Volcanic Plateau in Laos by Katherine Kornei
Earth has had many run-ins with space rocks. They’ve triggered the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, lit up daytime skies over Russia in thousands of dash cam videos and even struck a human.
But one major meteorite impact that occurred roughly 800,000 years ago has long baffled researchers. They know it happened because millions of blobs of glass known as tektites were launched over 10 percent of the planet’s surface, from Southeast Asia to Antarctica and across wide swathes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
The impact that flung these Australasian tektites would have excavated a crater at least several miles in diameter and hundreds of feet deep. But nearly a century of sleuthing failed to turn up any direct trace of the strike.
“That’s a very difficult size hole to make go away,” said Aaron Cavosie, a planetary scientist at the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
Space.com: On This Day in Space: Jan. 11, 1787: William Herschel discovers 2 moons of Uranus by Hanneke Weitering
On January 11, 1787, the English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered two moons at Uranus!
Oberon and Titania were the first two Uranian moons ever discovered. The finding came just six years after Herschel actually discovered the planet itself. By now astronomers have discovered 27 moon at Uranus, and all of them are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
Titania is the largest moon of Uranus and is named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
Oberon is the second-largest and is named after the mythical king of the fairies in the same story.
LiveScience: No One Can Agree How Fast Universe Is Expanding. New Measure Makes Things Worse. by Adam Mann
HONOLULU — A crisis in physics may have just gotten deeper. By looking at how the light from distant bright objects is bent, researchers have increased the discrepancy between different methods for calculating the expansion rate of the universe.
"The measurements are consistent with indicating a crisis in cosmology," Geoff Chih-Fan Chen, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis, said here during a news briefing on Wednesday (Jan. 8) at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu.
At issue is a number known as the Hubble constant. It was first calculated by American astronomer Edwin Hubble nearly a century ago, after he realized that every galaxy in the universe was zipping away from Earth at a rate proportional to that galaxy's distance from our planet.
This does not mean that Earth is at the center of the cosmos. Instead, the finding told scientists that the universe is expanding and that there is a direct relationship between how far apart two objects are and how fast they are receding from one another. The Hubble constant has a value that incorporates this speed-distance connection.
Phys.org: Always counterclockwise: Puzzle of early Neolithic house orientations finally solved
Human behaviour is influenced by many things, most of which remain unconscious to us. One of these is a phenomenon known among perception psychologists as "pseudo-neglect." This refers to the observation that healthy people prefer their left visual field to their right, and therefore divide a line regularly left of centre.
A study published on Friday, January 10 in PLOS ONE now shows for the first time what effect this inconspicuous deviation had in the prehistoric past. A Slovak-German research team has investigated the alignment of early Neolithic houses in Central and Eastern Europe. Scientists from Kiel University (CAU) and the Slovakian Academy of Sciences were able to prove that the orientation of newly built houses deviated by a small amount from that of existing buildings, and that this deviation was regularly counterclockwise.
Archaeologist Dr. Nils Müller-Scheeßel, who coordinated the study, says, "Researchers have long assumed that early Neolithic houses stood for about a generation, i.e., 30 to 40 years, and that new houses had to be built next to existing ones at regular intervals. By means of age determination using the radiocarbon method, we can now show that the new construction was associated with a barely perceptible rotation of the house axis counterclockwise. We see pseudoneglect as the most likely cause of this."
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting a Saturday night owls open thread tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!