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. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) 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.
ScienceNews: The way the coronavirus messes with smell hints at how it affects the brain by Laura Sanders
The virus responsible for COVID-19 can steal a person’s sense of smell, leaving them noseblind to fresh-cut grass, a pungent meal or even their own stale clothes.
But so far, details remain elusive about how SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causesCOVID-19, can infiltrate and shut down the body’s smelling machinery. One recent hint comes from a young radiographer who lost her sense of smell. She had signs of viral infection in her brain. Other studies, though, have not turned up signs of the virus in the brain.
Contradictory evidence means that no one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 can infect nerve cells in the brain directly, and if so, whether the virus’s route to the brain can sometimes start in the nose. Understanding how people’s sense of smell is harmed (SN:5/11/20), a symptom estimated to afflict anywhere between 20 and 80 percent of people with COVID-19, could reveal more about how the virus operates.
One thing is certain so far, though: The virus can steal the sense of smell in a way that’s not normal.
Undark: Experts Say Tear Gas Is Dangerous, Especially During the Pandemic by Lisa Song
When Amira Chowdhury joined a protest in Philadelphia against police violence last Monday, she wore a mask to protect herself and others against the coronavirus. But when officers launched tear gas into the crowd, Chowdhury pulled off her mask as she gasped for air. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I felt like I was choking to death.”
Chowdhury was on a part of the Vine Street Expressway that ran underground. Everyone panicked as gas drifted into the dark, semi-enclosed space, she said. People stomped over her as they scrambled away. Bruised, she scaled a fence to escape. But the tear gas found her later that evening, inside her own house; as police unleashed it on protesters in her predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia, it seeped in.
“I can’t even be in my own house without escaping the violence of the state,” said Chowdhury, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania. On Wednesday, she said her throat still felt dry, like it was clogged with ash.
The Philadelphia protest was one of many instances in recent days in which police launched tear gas — a toxic substance that can cause lung damage — into crowds. In a statement, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said that officers had no choice but to release it after protesters threw rocks at them and refused to disperse, and that officers also used nonchemical white smoke to minimize the amount of the irritant “while maintaining a deterrent visual effect.” She called it “a means to safely diffuse a volatile and dangerous situation.”
Phys.org: History of insightful HIV research inspires neutron scattering approach to studying COVID-19 by Gage Taylor, Jeremy Rumsey, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory
As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, researchers are searching for novel ways to stop it. But for two scientists, looking to the future means drawing inspiration from the past.
In January of 2020, Andrey Kovalevsky and Daniel Kneller, researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), were preparing to use neutrons to study the relationship between a certain HIV protease—a protein enzyme that allows the virus to replicate itself within the human body—and a class of anti-retroviral drugs known as HIV protease inhibitors. Some types of HIV build resistance to these drugs. The researchers' goal was to gain a better understanding of how protease variations work, to aid the development of cutting-edge treatments to overpower even the toughest resistant strains of HIV.
When the team began their work, little did they know that, coincidentally, their efforts to study HIV would quickly put them on a new path to tackling COVID-19, the pandemic that now has the world in its grip.
LiveScience: How the pandemic upended our perception of time by Philip Gable
Think back to life before stay-at-home orders. Does it feel like just yesterday? Or does it seem like ages ago — like some distant era?
Of course, time is precise. It takes 23.9 hours for the Earth to make one rotation on its axis. But that's not how we experience time. Instead, internally, it's often something we feel or sense, rather than objectively measure.
It turns out our emotional state tends to play a big role in our perception of time — a dynamic that I've studied for 10 years. Much research has shown that relative to an emotional negative state, a positive one makes time appear to pass more quickly.
Back in the early days of the pandemic, when it became clear that the virus would upend our everyday lives, it wasn't a stretch to assume that the coming weeks and months would be an emotional roller coaster.
Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, my team and I developed a smartphone application to document the emotions, perceptions and behaviors of Americans during the pandemic on a month-by-month basis. We've been able to track the extent to which Americans' internal clocks went haywire — and explore why this might have happened.
ScienceDaily: Ancient crocodiles walked on two legs like dinosaurs
An international research team has been stunned to discover that some species of ancient crocodiles walked on their two hind legs like dinosaurs and measured over three metres in length.
University of Queensland palaeontologist Dr Anthony Romilio said the researchers first thought the similar-shaped fossilised footprints were from another ancient animal known as the pterosaurs.
"At one site, the footprints were initially thought to be made by a giant bipedal pterosaur walking on the mudflat, we now understand that these were bipedal crocodile prints," Dr Romilio said.
"The footprints measure around 24 centimetres, suggesting the track-makers had legs about the same height as human adult legs.
"These were long animals that we estimate were over three metres in length.
"And while footprints were everywhere on the site, there were no handprints."
The research team, led by Professor Kyung Soo Kim from Chinju National University of Education, soon found clues as to why there were no handprints.
Science: Like humans, these big-brained birds may owe their smarts to long childhoods by Amanda Heidt
A Canada jay.
Human beings typically don’t leave the nest until well into our teenage years—a relatively rare strategy among animals. But corvids—a group of birds that includes jays, ravens, and crows—also spend a lot of time under their parents’ wings. Now, in a parallel to humans, researchers have found that ongoing tutelage by patient parents may explain how corvids have managed to achieve their smarts.
Corvids are large, big-brained birds that often live in intimate social groups of related and unrelated individuals. They are known to be intelligent—capable of using tools, recognizing human faces, and even understanding physics—and some researchers believe crows may rival apes for smarts.
Meanwhile, humans continue to grow their big brains and build up their cognitive abilities during childhood, as their parents feed and protect them. “Humans are characterized by this extended childhood that affects our intelligence, but we can’t be the only ones,” says Natalie Uomini, a cognitive scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. But few researchers have studied the impact of parenting throughout the juvenile years on intelligence in nonhumans.
Scientific American: ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Building Up in the Arctic—and Likely Worldwide by Annie Sneed
The Arctic can appear to be a pristine, isolated frozen land. But human pollution has reached even this remote corner of the world—which the World Wildlife Fund has called “the chemical sink of the globe.” Now researchers have discovered that a virtually indestructible type of chemical has been building up in the region since the 1990s. The presence of these “forever chemicals” is undoubtedly growing worldwide, scientists say. And the potential impacts on the health of humans and ecosystems are not yet fully known.
The problem paradoxically started because of an effort to fix another environmental issue: the hole in the ozone layer. Under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, countries agreed to phase out ozone-destroying chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But industry needed something to replace those substances, which were used in a vast range of products ranging from refrigerators to hair spray. Manufacturers turned to chemicals such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).
When these replacements rise into the atmosphere, however, they react with other chemicals to form several types of substances known as short-chain perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (scPFCAs). These compounds then drop down and deposit on Earth’s surface. Because of this process, scientists have suspected since the early 1990s that scPFCAs would increase in the environment. But until now, researchers did not have enough data to understand what was occurring with them over time. “We knew, in theory, it was going to happen. But we didn’t know to what extent it was happening in the real environment,” says Cora Young, an assistant professor of chemistry at York University in Toronto.
WIRED: Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain by Matt Simon
Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.
Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it's shocking.”
It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.
Nature: Pluto probe offers eye-popping view of neighbouring star Proxima Centauri by Davide Castelvecchi
NASA’s New Horizons probe wowed the world in 2015 with unprecedented pictures of Pluto, and, more recently, with the first close-up images of an object in the Kuiper belt of asteroids. Now the mission has achieved yet another first: measuring the distances of two stars from the outer reaches of the Solar System.
“It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement released 11 June.
Most space telescopes, from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope to the brand new European planet hunter CHEOPS, stay in the vicinity of Earth: being outside the atmosphere is enough to provide a great view, and there is usually no reason to venture farther. But there are sometimes advantages to making observations from deep space.
On 22 and 23 April, the New Horizons team pointed the probe’s main camera at Proxima Centauri — the star closest to the Sun — which is about 1.3 parsecs (4.2 light years) away, as well as another star, called Wolf 359. NASA asked professional and amateur astronomers to take pictures of these two stars, at exactly the same time, from Earth. Because New Horizons is now 46 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, the two points of view are distant enough that the stars’ positions look slightly different with respect to other, more distant objects. By measuring that difference, astronomers can calculate the two stars’ distances from Earth.
Phys.org: Astrophysicists confirm cornerstone of Einstein's Theory of Relativity
An international collaboration of scientists has recorded the most accurate confirmation to date for one of the cornerstones of Einstein's theory of general relativity, 'the universality of free fall."
The new research shows that the theory holds for strongly self-gravitating objects such as neutron stars. Using a radio telescope, scientists can very accurately observe the signal produced by pulsars, a type of neutron star and test the validity of Einstein's theory of gravity for these extreme objects. In particular, the team analyzed the signals from a pulsar named "PSR J0337+1715' recorded by the large radio telescope of Nançay, located in the heart of Sologne (France).
The universality of free fall principle states that two bodies dropped in a gravitational field undergo the very same acceleration independently of their composition. This was first demonstrated by Galileo who famously would have dropped objects of different masses from the top of Pisa's tower to verify that they both reach the ground simultaneously.
Guardian: Archaeologists discover 'amazing' details of Roman city by Esther Addley
Archaeologists have mapped a complete Roman city for the first time using ground-penetrating radar, revealing highly detailed images that they say could revolutionise our understanding of how such sites worked.
As well as a bath house, theatre, shops and several temples, the team from the universities of Cambridge and Ghent have discovered a large public monument of a kind never seen before, which may relate to the religious practices of the people who lived in the area before the Romans.
The detailed scanning of the town of Falerii Novi, just over 30 miles (50km) north of Rome, has uncovered the layout of the city’s water system, offering new clues to how it was planned and laid out.
In addition, experts say their research reveals evidence of a route around the outskirts of the city that was probably used as a religious processional way, and which was unlikely to have been uncovered by excavation alone.
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting a Saturday night owls thread tonight.
Everyone have a good evening!