Overnight News Digest, aka OND, is a community feature here at Daily Kos. Each editor selects news stories on a wide range of topics.
The OND community was founded by Magnifico, who had no idea when he started the positive impact he'd have on so many.
Welcome to all, join us in the comment section to share a news articles and jump into the community chat. News is not required to pull up a chair and chat, just be kind to ceiling cat.
Climate Change Wilts Farming Yields
By Daniel Strain
Set a place at the table for climate change; hotter weather may have already taken a bite out of food crops worldwide.
Farms across the planet produced 3.8 percent less corn and 5.5 percent less wheat than they could have between 1980 and 2008 thanks to rising temperatures, a new analysis estimates. These wilting yields may have contributed to the current sky-high price of food, a team of U.S. researchers reports online May 5 in Science. Climate-induced losses could have driven up prices of corn by 6.4 percent and wheat by 18.9 percent since 1980
Giant ants once roamed Wyoming
By Susan Milius
It’s not a bird or a plane, but it is an ant the size of a hummingbird.
A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Horsetail Plant Developed Successful Set of Tools for Extreme Environments -- For Millions of Years
Science Daily
Over 100 million years ago, the understory of late Mesozoic forests was dominated by a diverse group of plants of the class Equisetopsida. Today, only one genus from this group, Equisetum (also known as horsetail or scouring rush), exists -- and it is a prime candidate for being the oldest extant genus of land plant.
There is some debate as to the evolutionary beginnings of the genus Equisetum. Molecular dating places the divergence of the 15 extant species of the genus around 65 million years ago (mya), yet the fossil record suggests that it occurred earlier than that, perhaps around 136 mya. A discovery of a new fossil Equisetum species now places this genus at 150 mya, living in an environment where it still can be found today -- hot springs.
Mars Express sees deep fractures on the Red Planet
By ESA, Noordwijk, Netherlands
Newly released images from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express show Nili Fossae, a system of deep fractures around the giant Isidis impact basin. Some of these incisions into the martian crust are up to 1,600 feet (500 meters) deep and probably formed at the same time as the basin.
Nili Fossae is a “graben” system on Mars, northeast of the Syrtis Major volcanic province, on the northwestern edge of the giant Isidis impact basin. Graben refers to the lowered terrain between two parallel faults or fractures in the rocks that collapses when tectonic forces pull the area apart. The Nili Fossae system contains numerous graben concentrically oriented around the edges of the basin.
It is thought that flooding of the basin with basaltic lava after the impact that created it resulted in subsidence of the basin floor, adding stress to the planet’s crust, which was released by the formation of the fractures.
Brain Dead Reporting from Fox News
By Steven Novella
I was recently pointed to this news report from a local Fox affiliate – about an inventor who has developed an engine that can burn water. This is a topic well-covered in skeptical and scientific circles. The inventor, Denny Klein, makes all the typical claims that are made for such systems.
Briefly – you cannot use water as a fuel source. What Klein is doing is using electricity to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then he burns the hydrogen gas back with oxygen, creating a flame and water. The news report begins with his demonstration of his “oxyhydrogen” torch. But then it goes on to claim that Klein can also use his technique to fuel a car. The problem with this approach is that it takes more energy to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen then is recouped by burning the hydrogen back with oxygen. Water is therefore not a source of energy. At best it is a source of hydrogen which can be used to store energy – but you have to put the energy into it in the first place. All Klein’s process adds is an unnecessary step that decreases engine efficiency.
More than 20 percent of atheist scientists are spiritual
Through in-depth interviews with 275 natural and social scientists at elite universities, the Rice researchers found that 72 of the scientists said they have a spirituality that is consistent with science, although they are not formally religious.
"Our results show that scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs," said Elaine Howard Ecklund, assistant professor of sociology at Rice and lead author of the study. "These spiritual atheist scientists are seeking a core sense of truth through spirituality -- one that is generated by and consistent with the work they do as scientists."
For example, these scientists see both science and spirituality as "meaning-making without faith" and as an individual quest for meaning that can never be final. According to the research, they find spirituality congruent with science and separate from religion, because of that quest; where spirituality is open to a scientific journey, religion requires buying into an absolute "absence of empirical evidence."
Failure Cascading Through the Cloud
By Erica Naone
Recently two major cloud computing services, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Sony's PlayStation Network, have suffered extended outages. Though the circumstances of each were different, details that the companies have released about their causes show how delicate complex cloud systems can be.
Cloud computing services have grown in popularity over the past few years; they're flexible, and often less expensive than owning physical systems and software. Amazon's service attracts business customers who want the power of a modern, distributed system without having to build and maintain the infrastructure themselves. The PlayStation Network offers an enhanced experience for gamers, such as multi-player gameplay or an easy way to find and download new titles. But the outages illustrate how customers are at the mercy of the cloud provider, both in terms of fixing the problem, and in terms of finding out what went wrong.
The Elastic Compute Cloud—one of Amazon's most popular Web services—was down from Thursday, April 21, to Sunday, April 24. Popular among startups, the service is used by Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, and others. Users can rent virtual computing resources and scale up or down as their needs fluctuate.
Mozilla resists request to remove Firefox tool
physorg.com
The Department of Homeland Security has been seizing the Internet addresses of sites accused of piracy, so that visitors can't reach them by typing in those domain names. The sites, however, still exist under other addresses.
The MafiaaFire tool for Firefox, developed by an outside party but available through Mozilla, seeks to automatically match seized names with the alternate addresses, similar to a mail-forwarding service, so that visitors can reach the sites.
Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson said the DHS asked Mozilla to remove MafiaaFire from a site where Firefox users can add functions to the browser.
2nd Course:
Filthy toilets a blight on Asian prosperity
Social activists say dismal sanitation facilities are causing preventable diseases in poor communities where people would readily spend money on a mobile phone -- but not on a latrine.
"I think it's very prevalent," said Jack Sim, a Singaporean businessman who founded the sanitation advocacy group World Toilet Organisation. "The handphone is the competitor of the toilet."
Asia has led the rebound from the 2008-2009 global recession and major institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are predicting strong economic growth in the years ahead.
Ultracapacitors to Boost the Range of Electric Cars
A startup called Nanotune says its ultracapacitor technology could make electric cars cheaper and extend their range. The company, based in Mountain View, California, has developed a way to make electrodes that results in ultracapacitors with five to seven times as much storage capacity as conventional ones.
Conventional ultracapacitors, which have the advantage of delivering fast bursts of power and can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times without losing much capacity, are too expensive and store too little energy to replace batteries.
Nanotune, however, which has raised $3 million from the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says its ultracapacitors are close to competing with batteries in terms of energy storage, and could soon surpass them. Using a conventional electrolyte, the company has demonstrated energy storage of 20 watt-hours per kilogram, as opposed to roughly five watt-hours for a conventional ultracapacitor. Using a more expensive ionic-liquid electrolyte, it has made ultracapacitors that store 35 watt-hours per kilogram. By the end of the year, the company hopes to approximately double this storage capacity, says Nanotune CEO Kuan-Tsae Huang. At 40 watt-hours per kilogram, the ultracapacitors would be an improvement over the batteries used in some hybrid vehicles.
Cows, climate change and the high court
If you took all the cows in the United States and figured out how much greenhouse gas they emit, would you be able to sue all the farmers who own them?
That interesting legal question came from Justice Antonin Scalia during Supreme Court oral arguments about whether an environmental case against five big U.S. power companies can go forward.
At issue is whether six states can sue the country’s biggest coal-fired electric utilities to make them cut down on the climate-warming carbon dioxide they emit. One lower court said they couldn’t, an appeals court said they could and now the high court will consider where the case will go next. A ruling should come by the end of June.
For now, though, the question was cows.