(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest - How the universe sucks and an 18-year-old’s test to ID spiked drinks [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-29 Welcome to Saturday Science Overnight News Digest. Since 2007 the OND has been 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. Tonight’s stories include: What can we do or slow or reverse aging? Canadian farming shaded with solar panels Six philosophers grappling with how the mind & body interact Quantum discovery controls two light sources at once Preserving land for wildlife Asteroid Phaethon’s unusual tail Solving microfiber pollution Throat cancer epidemic Mystery of Mayan 819-day count solved How the universe sucks Identifying drinks spiked with Benadryl EuroNews byCamille Bello A new study from Germany has potentially found the answers to time-old questions: what drives ageing and what can we do to reverse it? Despite centuries of research and progress in medicine, there are still many mysteries that remain unresolved, chief among them being an understanding of what causes ageing and how can we slow it down or reverse it. But a new study by a team of scientists in Germany, published in the scientific journal Nature, may finally have found the answers to these questions. Researchers from the University of Cologne in Germany have not only discovered that gene transcription - the process in which a cell makes an RNA copy of a strand of DNA - becomes faster with age but less precise and more error-prone; they also found that certain processes could help us reverse this decline. The Conversation by Joshua M. Pierce How shading crops with solar panels can improve farming, lower food costs and reduce emissions If you have lived in a home with a trampoline in the backyard, you may have observed the unreasonably tall grass growing under it. This is because many crops, including these grasses, actually grow better when protected from the sun, to an extent. And while the grass under your trampoline grows by itself, researchers in the field of solar photovoltaic technology — made up of solar cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity — have been working on shading large crop lands with solar panels — on purpose. This practice of growing crops in the protected shadows of solar panels is called agrivoltaic farming. And it is happening right here in Canada. Such agrivoltaic farming can help meet Canada’s food and energy needs and reduce its fossil fuel reliance and greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Big Think by Scotty Hendricks 6 fascinating solutions to the ever-baffling “mind-body problem” One of the enduring problems in philosophy is determining how the world works from our subjective point of view. The “mind-body problem” — how mind and body interact and what they are composed of — takes us to the heart of the matter. While many resolutions have been suggested, some are less satisfactory than others. It is a difficult problem — how can mind and body appear simultaneously different and connected? Morrissey expressed our bafflement thus: “Does the body rule the mind? Or does the mind rule the body? I dunno.” Here, we outsource the problem to a roster of noted philosophers and explore how each of them took up the challenge where others left off. The Brighter Side ​​​​​​​by Michael Jenson Physicists make incredible quantum discovery In a new breakthrough, researchers at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with Ruhr University Bochum, have solved a problem that has caused quantum researchers headaches for years. The researchers can now control two quantum light sources rather than one. Trivial as it may seem to those uninitiated in quantum, this colossal breakthrough allows researchers to create a phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement. This in turn, opens new doors for companies and others to exploit the technology commercially. Going from one to two is a minor feat in most contexts. But in the world of quantum physics, doing so is crucial. For years, researchers around the world have strived to develop stable quantum light sources and achieve the phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement – a phenomenon, with nearly sci-fi-like properties, where two light sources can affect each other instantly and potentially across large geographic distances. Entanglement is the very basis of quantum networks and central to the development of an efficient quantum computer. The Conversation ​​​​​​​by David Jochawski In protecting land for wildlife, size matters – here’s what it takes to conserve very large areas Driving north on state Highway 66 through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, it’s easy to miss a small herd of bison lounging just off the road behind an 8-foot fence. Each winter, heavy snows drive bison out of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park – the only place in the U.S. where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times – and into Montana, where they are either killed or shipped off to tribal lands to avoid conflict with cattle ranchers. In the winter of 2022-2023 alone, over 1,500 bison have been “removed,” about 25% of Yellowstone’s entire population. The bison at Fort Belknap are refugees that have been trucked 300 miles to the reservation from past Yellowstone winter culls. Although bison are the U.S. national mammal, they exist in small and fragmented populations across the West. The federal government is working to restore healthy wild bison populations, relying heavily on sovereign tribal lands to house them. Indeed, tribal lands are the great wildlife refuges of the prairie. Fort Belknap is the only place in Montana where bison, critically endangered black-footed ferrets and swift foxes, which occupy about 40% of their historic range, all have been restored. Daily Kos ​​​​​​​by skralyx Asteroid-Phaethon-cause-of-the-annual-Geminid-meteor-shower-has-an-unexpected-kind-of-tail Most annual meteor showers are known to be caused by comets. When comets get close to the Sun, ice from their surfaces vaporizes and carries along some dust particles. When Earth later crosses the comet’s debris trail, those dust particles hit the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up, giving us “shooting stars”. But the Geminid meteor shower we see every December is different. It seems to be caused by the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, whose orbit lines up just right to account for it. Most asteroids don’t actively shed material and show a tail, but a group of 40 or so of them, including Phaethon, are known to do that. These are called the “ active asteroids ”. Salon ​​​​​​​by Saqib Rahim How do-you-tackle-microplastics? Start-with-your-washing-machine As environmental challenges go, microfiber pollution has come from practically out of nowhere. It was only a decade or so ago that scientists first suspected our clothing, increasingly made of synthetic materials like polyester and nylon, might be major contributors to the global plastic problem. Today a growing body of science suggests the tiny strands that slough off clothes are everywhere and in everything. By one estimate, they account for as much as one-third of all microplastics released to the ocean. They've been found on Mount Everest and in the Mariana Trench, along with tap water, plankton, shrimp guts, and our poo. Research has yet to establish just what this means for human and planetary health. But the emerging science has left some governments, particularly in the Global North, scrambling to respond. Their first target: the humble washing machine, which environmentalists say represents a major way microfiber pollution reaches the environment. Science Alert ​​​​​​​by Hisham Mehanna Throat Cancer Is Becoming an Epidemic, And Our Sex Lives Could Be Behind It Over the past two decades, there has been a rapid increase in throat cancer in the west, to the extent that some have called it an epidemic. This has been due to a large rise in a specific type of throat cancer called oropharyngeal cancer (the area of the tonsils and back of the throat). The main cause of this cancer is the human papillomavirus (HPV), which are also the main cause of cancer of the cervix. Oropharyngeal cancer has now become more common than cervical cancer in the US and the UK. HPV is sexually transmitted. For oropharyngeal cancer, the main risk factor is the number of lifetime sexual partners, especially oral sex. Those with six or more lifetime oral-sex partners are 8.5 times more likely to develop oropharyngeal cancer than those who do not practice oral sex. […] The prevailing theory is that most of us catch HPV infections and are able to clear them completely. However, a small number of people are not able to get rid of the infection, maybe due to a defect in a particular aspect of their immune system. In those patients, the virus is able to replicate continuously, and over time integrates at random positions into the host's DNA, some of which can cause the host cells to become cancerous. PHYS.org ​​​​​​​by Bob Yirka Anthropologist pair solve the mystery of Mayan 819-day count A pair of anthropologists at Tulane University has solved the mystery of the Mayan 819-day count, a type of ancient Mesoamerican calendar system. In their paper published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, John Linden and Victoria Bricker suggest that the calendar might be representing a much longer timescale than others had considered. In studying ancient Maya inscriptions, prior researchers had come across mention of a system they referred to as the 819-day count, which appeared to be in reference to a calendar of some sort. But the astronomers had not left behind any other sort of definition or text describing how it might fit in with their regular calendar system. Prior researchers had found some evidence suggesting that it might be tied to the synodic period, the cyclic period that describes when a given planet will appear at a given point in the sky. They noted that for Mercury, the synod period is 117 days, which, when multiplied by seven, equals 819. Unfortunately, the same formulation did not work with the other planets , leaving the 819-day count a mystery—until now. […] The researchers conclude that the early Maya astronomers had simply extended the time period by the amount needed to predict the synodic period for all of the planets. Are Technica ​​​​​​​by Paul Sutter The Universe sucks: The mysterious Great Attractor that’s pulling us in Our Milky Way galaxy is speeding through the emptiness of space at 600 kilometers per second, headed toward something we cannot clearly see. The focal point of that movement is the Great Attractor, the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution. But we'll never reach our destination because, in a few billion years, the accelerating force of dark energy will tear the Universe apart. Of course, the Great Attractor lies within the Zone of Avoidance. For decades, we had little to no information about the structure of the Universe in that direction and hence had almost no clue about the identity or contents of the Great Attractor. Something was over there—we could conclusively determine that based on our movement—but we didn’t know exactly what. […] Astronomers had two options. First, they could wait for the natural orbit of the Solar System around the center of the Milky Way to wheel us into a better viewing position. But that would take approximately 100 million years (slightly longer than typical grant-funding cycles), so that wasn't feasible. […] The second option was to get creative. Never ones to let a celestial object go unobserved, astronomers turned to other wavelengths of light to peer behind the dust of our galaxy and into the depths of the Universe. X-ray light is great at penetrating dust, but it only reveals the brightest galaxies actively undergoing star formation and the massive-but-rare clusters of galaxies. Thankfully, infrared is much more versatile and is able to peer into great distances, as the James Webb Space Telescope has so aptly demonstrated. Smithsonian Magazine ​​​​​​​by Teresa Nowakowski This 18-Year-Old Developed a Test to Find Out If Your Drink Has Been Spiked [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/29/2166230/-Overnight-News-Digest-How-the-universe-sucks-and-an-18-year-old-s-test-to-ID-spiked-drinks Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/