“Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.” Alice Walker
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman, jck, and Besame. |
When Shaner and his team got the blue jellyfish—Aequorea australis—back to the lab, they prepared a sample for analysis. After sequencing its transcriptome—the genes expressed in the jelly’s body—Shaner was surprised to find several for light-producing proteins similar to green fluorescent protein (GFP), which scientists have used for decades to track proteins in cells and even create glow-in-the-dark cats. (Three researchers won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for the discovery and for the development of GFP as a fluorescent probe.) The original protein, known as avGEP, is found in the related A. victoria jellyfish; it has led to dozens of bioengineered GFP variants, some of which glow other colors like cobalt blue and turquoise.
Further analysis revealed the jelly A. australis produces five fluorescent proteins. These include two that glow green, two more that are blue under white light, and one that switches between yellow and clear when exposed to light . . . The researchers then took a second look at the original GFP jelly, A. victoria, and found genes for four more previously unknown fluorescent proteins.
Can plants sense natural airborne sounds and respond to them rapidly? We show that Oenothera drummondii flowers, exposed to playback sound of a flying bee or to synthetic sound signals at similar frequencies, produce sweeter nectar within 3 min, potentially increasing the chances of cross pollination. We found that the flowers vibrated mechanically in response to these sounds, suggesting a plausible mechanism where the flower serves as an auditory sensory organ. Both the vibration and the nectar response were frequency‐specific: the flowers responded and vibrated to pollinator sounds, but not to higher frequency sound.
Our results document for the first time that plants can rapidly respond to pollinator sounds in an ecologically relevant way. Potential implications include plant resource allocation, the evolution of flower shape and the evolution of pollinators sound. Finally, our results suggest that plants may be affected by other sounds as well, including anthropogenic ones.
Scientists working on the US-Mexico border face unique challenges when trying to study borderlands ecosystems, from outright harassment by Border Patrol officers to tight restrictions on travel and what natural materials can cross the border. It’s all gotten worse under the Trump administration.
“In the course of talking to scientists, I found that nearly everyone I spoke to had some story about how the wall and the crackdown on immigration is affecting their ability to do their work,” says Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb, who is producing a series of dispatches from the border.
Einstein’s theory says that light travelling out of a strong gravitational field loses energy and stretches to a longer, redder wavelength — an effect known as gravitational redshift. The first observations of this phenomenon around a black hole were made in 2018 by the GRAVITY collaboration during a study of the S-02 star, which orbits the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Now Tuan Do at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have independently confirmed GRAVITY’s finding with measurements that they say are more robust.
Biology creates features at sub-10nm scales routinely, but they are often structured in ways that are not useful for applications like computing. A Purdue University group has found ways of transforming structures that occur naturally in cell membranes to create other architectures, like parallel 1nm-wide line segments, more applicable to computing.
Inspired by biological cell membranes, Purdue researchers in the Claridge Research Group have developed surfaces that act as molecular-scale blueprints for unpacking and aligning nanoscale components for next-generation computers. The secret ingredient? Water, in tiny amounts.
"Biology has an amazing tool kit for embedding chemical information in a surface," said Shelley Claridge, a recently tenured faculty member in chemistry and biomedical engineering at Purdue, who leads a group of nanomaterials researchers. "What we're finding is that these instructions can become even more powerful in nonbiological settings, where water is scarce."
Exposure to artificial light at night has been shown to affect the immune responses of some birds, and now a study has found that light pollution can extend the infectious period of West Nile virus in house sparrows.
“These birds are a main reservoir of West Nile virus in nature. Mosquitoes will preferentially feed on some of these birds, and they live in urban, light-polluted habitats,” says Meredith Kernbach at the University of South Florida. “They’re likely one of the species that plays a key role in West Nile Virus transmission in light-polluted areas.” [...]
The sparrows housed with artificial light at night remained infectious longer than the birds housed under natural lighting conditions. According to the researchers’ calculations, this makes an outbreak of disease among sparrows 41 per cent more likely if the birds are exposed to artificial light. This, in turn, might make it more likely that the virus could jump to humans via mosquitoes that bite both sparrows and humans.
Somewhere in the middle of New Zealand, there is a kauri tree stump (Agathis australis) that should not be alive. But it is, thanks to the root systems of surrounding trees, which have kept the almost-dead stump on life support by sharing water and nutrients.
For years, scientists have suspected such sharing networks exist, thanks to other living stumps. But such resource transfers have never been proved, and reports by other researchers are decades old and mostly anecdotal.
Researchers first found the stump in question (above) on a hike in a rainforest in the Waitakere Ranges on New Zealand’s North Island. They were surprised to see it was alive despite missing both branches and leaves. To see whether the surrounding kauri trees could be playing a role, they measured sap and water flow in both the stump and its neighbors.
People can easily be re-identified from data that has been anonymized, Technology Review reports.
Researchers from Imperial College London and the Catholic University of Louvain developed a model using data from five publicly available sources, including the US Census, that showed people could be re-identified from anonymized data with high accuracy, as they report this week in Nature Communications. In particular, they found that 81 percent of Americans could be identified from an anonymized dataset based on the three demographic data points of zip code, gender, and date of birth, and 99.98 percent of Massachusetts residents could be identified based on 15 demographic data points.
Climate Crisis Section
History is littered with pockets of warmer and cooler periods, but current warming is “not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years”, says new research from climate-change scientist Raphael Neukom and his colleagues. Neukom tells the Nature Podcast how he determined that, for more than 98% of the globe, the warmest period has been within the past 100 years.
A new study of soil nematodes co-authored by [BYU professor Byron] Adams reveals that there are 57 billion of them for every single living human being—much greater than previously estimated. They also have a total biomass of about 300 million tons, approximately 80 percent of the combined weight of Earth's human population.
The study, co-authored by Adams and published Wednesday in Nature, provides conclusive evidence that the majority of these tiny animals live somewhere experts did not expect: high latitude arctic and sub-arctic soils (i.e. tundra, boreal and temperate forests, and grasslands).
"Until recently, life beneath our feet has pretty much been terra incognita" says Adams. "Since we didn't know much about life in the soil, most scientists just assumed that patterns of abundance below ground would match what we see above ground. We figured the tropics must be where it's at. Turns out, that's not true at all. The reason this paper is kind of a big deal is that we show just the opposite is true."
Knowing where these tiny worms live matters because nematodes play a critical role in the cycling of carbon and nutrients and heavily influence CO2 emissions. An important finding of the paper is that nematode abundance is strongly correlated with soil carbon (more carbon = more worms). Understanding the little organisms at a global level is critical if humans are going to understand and address climate change.
Alexandra Kravchenko, Michigan State University professor in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, and several of her colleagues recently discovered a new mechanism determining how carbon is stored in soils that could improve the climate resilience of cropping systems and also reduce their carbon footprints.
The findings, published last week in the scientific journal Nature Communications, reveal the importance of soil pore structure for stimulating soil carbon accumulation and protection.
"Understanding how carbon is stored in soils is important for thinking about solutions for climate change," said Phil Robertson, University Distinguished Professor of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, and a co-author of the study. "It's also pretty important for ways to think about soil fertility and therefore, crop production."
While fungal diseases have devastated many animal and plant species, humans and other mammals have mostly been spared. That’s probably because mammals have body temperatures too warm for most fungi to replicate as well as powerful immune systems. But climate change may be challenging those defenses, bringing new fungal threats to human health, a microbiologist warns. [...]
...C. auris may have become tolerant of the average normal body temperature of humans — about 37° Celsius — because the fungi acclimated to warming in the environment caused by climate change, Casadevall and colleagues argue. If this hypothesis turns out to be true, C. auris “may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change” that poses a risk to humans [...]
Meanwhile, other fungi are wreaking destruction on many animals and plants, including frogs (SN: 4/27/19, p. 5), snakes (SN: 1/20/18, p. 16) and trees (SN: 5/3/03, p. 282). “A lot of our fellow creatures are being wiped out,” Casadevall says. And while mammals have tended to be “remarkably resistant to invasive fungal diseases,” he says, bats have been hit hard by outbreaks of a fungus that causes white nose syndrome in part because their body temperature drops during hibernation (SN Online: 7/15/19).
“The fungal kingdom is just so vast,” Casadevall says. If another fungus dangerous to humans can evolve to “defeat our thermal barrier, who knows what it will do to us?”
Fun stuff so you don’t have nightmares tonight after reading the climate crisis news
Imagine powering your devices by walking. With new technology that possibility might not be far out of reach. An energy harvester is attached to the wearer's knee and can generate 1.6 microwatts of power while the wearer walks without any increase in effort. The energy is enough to power small electronics like health monitoring equipment and GPS devices.
You might not want to admit it, but emojis are 💯. That is, they are very good. Far from being, as their detractors claim, representations of an infantile – or senile – lack of written language skills, the iconography born of Japanese text messages in the 1990s is increasingly crucial to clear communication online, as well as adding yet another rich vein to the inventive history of English prose.
Let’s start at the top. Emojis help convey tone in text conversations that sometimes sorely lack this. “Come here please 😠” is very different from “come here please 😍”. “I loved it ☺️” conveys sincerity, while “I loved it 🙄” implies a sarcastic affectation. [...]
The ability of emojis to communicate tone is more than just a matter of literacy with this new communication method. According to a new paper in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology, “the use of emoji faces in computer-mediated communication produces neural responses that are similar to those that are observed in face-to-face communication.” Seeing a happy face while talking to someone affects us on an emotional level, and it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot whether that face is on a person or on a screen. Fantastic! 😀
🦋 ✨🦜 🌈