The coronavirus pandemic is a global DIY science lab experiment where everyone in the community is your lab partner. Two-thirds of the materials needed for this experiment are unavailable and must be substituted. An unknown portion of the instructions haven’t been provided. Which traditional lab partner are you? Evaluate yourself on a scale of 1 to 6.
- 1 is least useful — Constantly wings it based on their attitude of the moment, if they show up at all.
- 3 is midrange useful — No telling which version they’ll be today, sometimes sharp and on top of it; other times vacuous.
- 6 is the one who keeps the whole team viable — Paid attention to lectures, read the textbook, figured out options for the missing instructions, and prepared all the materials including the 2/3 substitutions.
Remember, this experiment is pass/fail. Here’s the grading scale.
- 5-6 — All those with a score of 6 will pass. Most of the fives also will pass but a random few will fail and which is which has nothing to do with their performance.
- 3-4 — People with scores of 3-4 will randomly be placed in either pass or fail regardless of how often they followed the protocols. It’s possible all will fail or all will pass. No telling ahead of time.
- Almost everyone who scores 1-2 fails, although one or two may (or may not) pass.
No one who fails the course will have a chance to repeat it next semester … or ever.
The title quote comes from an author of this study on climate change consequences to wildlife populations: The projected timing of abrupt ecological disruption from climate change.
Climate change could result in a more abrupt collapse of many animal species than previously thought, starting in the next decade if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, according to a study published this month in Nature.
The study predicted that large swaths of ecosystems would falter in waves, creating sudden die-offs that would be catastrophic not only for wildlife, but for the humans who depend on it.
“For a long time things can seem OK and then suddenly they’re not,” said Alex L. Pigot, a scientist at University College London and one of the study’s authors. “Then, it’s too late to do anything about it because you’ve already fallen over this cliff edge.”
Since the worldwide coronavirus lockdown started, many of us have been having vivid dreams. Google searches for “weird dreams” have doubled since this time last year, and there is a spate of articles on the topic, that seem to be asking: “You too, huh?” [...]
Is there any point in analysing your pandemic dreams? Perry says it is useful to be curious, particularly if they are bothering you. “The Gestalt method [suggests] every aspect in your dream represents a part of you because you dreamt them,” says Perry. So you could analyse your pandemic dreams from the perspective of the other objects and characters in your dream: the person chasing you perhaps, or from the perspective of your tooth that keeps falling out.
Perry adds that in sleep, we often dwell on unfinished business: “I tend to think all dreams are on our side, even the nightmares, because they are trying to tell us something we can get done.”
So what do these weird dreams of yours look like? We asked a few of you to be brave enough to share them.
A global plan under negotiation envisions designating 30 percent of land and sea as protected by 2030 — and 50 percent by 2050 — in order to revive ecosystems and safeguard the diversity of species on Earth, according to a draft text of the agreement under the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity.
But is 30 percent, or even 50 percent, enough? And enough for what exactly — to slow extinction rates, or to protect everything that’s possible to protect, or something else entirely? [...]
As the decade draws to a close, many targets remain unmet. Currently, about 15 percent of land and 7.4 percent of seas are in some way protected, or in line for protection, according to the U.N. Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Even so, current extinction rates are estimated to be 1,000 times higher than historical levels. Even common animals, such as American sparrows, have seen their numbers drop in recent decades (SN: 9/19/19).
That’s led scientists and governments to conclude that the 2011 targets didn’t go far enough.
science daily —
The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology, reveals that prior to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, birds and non-avian dinosaurs had similar relative brain sizes. After the extinction, the brain-body scaling relationship shifted dramatically as some types of birds underwent an explosive radiation to re-occupy ecological space vacated by extinct groups.
"One of the big surprises was that selection for small body size turns out to be a major factor in the evolution of large-brained birds," says Dr. Daniel Ksepka, Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum and lead author of the study. "Many successful bird families evolved proportionally large brains by shrinking down to smaller body sizes while their brain sizes stayed close to those of their larger-bodied ancestors."
Two specific nose cell types have been identified as likely initial infection points for COVID-19 coronavirus. Scientists discovered that goblet and ciliated cells in the nose have high levels of the entry proteins that the COVID-19 virus uses to get into our cells, which could help explain the high rate of transmission. The study with Human Cell Atlas Lung Biological Network found cells in the eye and some other organs also contain the viral-entry proteins.
As the 21st century progresses, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations will cause urban and indoor levels of the gas to increase, and that may significantly reduce our basic decision-making ability and complex strategic thinking, according to a new CU Boulder-led study. By the end of the century, people could be exposed to indoor CO2 levels up to 1400 parts per million -- more than three times today's outdoor levels, and well beyond what humans have ever experienced.
"It's amazing how high CO2 levels get in enclosed spaces," said Kris Karnauskas, CIRES Fellow, associate professor at CU Boulder and lead author of the new study published today in the AGU journal GeoHealth. "It affects everybody -- from little kids packed into classrooms to scientists, business people and decision makers to regular folks in their houses and apartments."
Defined as the largest animals in the oceans, with a body mass that exceeds 45kg, examples include sharks, whales, seals and sea turtles.
These species serve key roles in ecosystems, including the consumption of large amounts of biomass, transporting nutrients across habitats, connecting ocean ecosystems, and physically modifying habitats.
Traits, such as how large they are, what they eat, and how far they move, determine species' ecological functions. As a result, measuring the diversity of traits allows scientists to quantify the contributions of marine megafauna to ecosystems and assess the potential consequences of their extinction.
short answer = no
No fundamental obstacle prevents us from developing an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Other troubles of human nature, such as violence, greed and intolerance, have a bewildering variety of daunting causes and uncertainties. But Alzheimer's, at its core, is a problem of cell biology whose solution should be well within our reach. There is a fairly good chance that the scientific community might already have an unrecognized treatment stored away in a laboratory freezer among numerous vials of chemicals. And major insights may now reside, waiting to be noticed, in big databases or registries of clinical records, neuropsychological profiles, brain-imaging studies, biological markers in blood and spinal fluid, genomes, protein analyses, neuron recordings, or animal and cell culture models.
But we have missed those clues because for decades we have spent too much time chasing every glossy new finding in Alzheimer's research and too little time thinking deeply about the underlying biology of this ailment. Instead our work has been driven by a number of assumptions. Among those assumptions has been the central and dominant role of the protein fragment called beta-amyloid. A large amount of data supports the idea that beta-amyloid plays an important part in the disease. We have developed drugs that can reduce concentrations of the protein fragments in people with Alzheimer's, yet by and large they have not stopped patients' cognitive decline in any meaningful way.
The bacterium that causes syphilis, Treponema pallidum, likely uses a single gene to escape the immune system, research from UW Medicine in Seattle suggests.
The finding may help explain how syphilis can hide in the body for decades, thereby frustrating the
immune system's attempts to eradicate it. It might also account for the bacterium's ability to re-infect people who had been previously been infected and should have acquired some immunity to it. [...]
One reason for this is that until recently it was impossible to grow it in a laboratory dish. As a consequence, many of the laboratory tools used to study other bacteria had not been developed for syphilis specifically.
In a new study, researchers compared the genomes of syphilis bacteria collected from a man who had been infected four times. He was enrolled in a UW Medicine study of spinal fluid abnormalities in individuals with syphilis conducted by Dr. Christina Marra, professor of neurolgy.
phys.org —
During World War II, a devoted group of botanists guarded the world's oldest collection of plants over the 28-month-long siege of Leningrad. Nearly a dozen of them starved to death, valuing the survival of the collection over their temptation to eat seeds. [...]
This tragic story resonates with many scientists today who have dedicated careers to cataloging and preserving Earth's biological diversity. Many are risking their personal health during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure the survival of awe-inspiring assemblages of algae, arthropods, bacteria, fungi, mammals, plants, viruses and fishes.
Staying on top of these collections is time-consuming during the best of times, and this task becomes even more complex in the age of social distancing. Yet hundreds of scientists across the United States are doing just that, maintaining everything from crickets, to tissue cultures, mice, powdery mildews, nematodes, psyllids, zebrafish and even rust fungi.
A new way of looking at marine evolution over the past 540 million years has shown that levels of biodiversity in our oceans have remained fairly constant, rather than increasing continuously over the last 200 million years, as scientists previously thought.
A team led by researchers from the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham have used a big data approach to study this question, which has been disputed by palaeobiologists in recent years.
Using
fossil data collected over the past two centuries, and compiled by hundreds of researchers in the Paleobiology Database over the last 20 years, the team was able to show regional-scale patterns of
diversity across
geological time from the so-called Cambrian Explosion—the point at which most major groups of
animals started to appear in the
fossil record—to the present day. Their results are published today in
Science.
Astronomers may have discovered a new kind of survival story: a star that had a brush with a giant black hole and lived to tell the tale through exclamations of X-rays.
Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton uncovered the account that began with a
red giant star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 250 million light years from Earth. The black hole, located in a galaxy called GSN 069, has a mass about 400,000 times that of the Sun, putting it on the small end of the scale for
supermassive black holes.
Once the red giant was captured by the black hole's gravity, the outer layers of the star containing hydrogen were stripped off and careened toward the black hole, leaving the core of the star—known as a white dwarf—behind.
Did your neighborhood howl tonight?
Around the world, people are collectively making noise while social distancing. In Colorado, we're howling like wolves. Joanna Lambert, a professor in the Program of Environmental Studies, studies wolf communication.
She discusses with CU Boulder Today why
wolves howl, why Coloradans may be howling each night to connect with each other, and how to most accurately join in this nightly chorus.