(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest, Saturday Science 9/30/2023 - Green New Deal, JWST, Sleep study, [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-30 Welcome to Overnight News Digest- Saturday Science. 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. Topics in this edition include: Students at 50 US high schools launch Green New Deal climate initiative. Microbiologist reports how to avoid food-borne illness. Creating value from food waste Rerun of Thursday’s OND — Climate Science JWST reveals structure of ancient galaxies The perfect temperature for sleep Ancient man ate grasshoppers; discovery due to evidence of constipation Hopeton Earthworks newest UNESCO World Heritage site Solar-powered desalination of seawater is cheaper than tap water Search for nuclear tests led to discovery of a pod of rare pigmy blue whales Einstein was right; antigravity doesn’t exist. The Guardian by Maanvi Singh ‘Whatever it takes’: students at 50 US high schools launch climate initiative Students at more than 50 high schools across the US are proposing a Green New Deal for Schools, demanding that their districts teach climate justice, create pathways to green jobs after graduation and plan for climate disasters, among other policies. The campaign, coordinated by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate justice collective, is a reaction to rightwing efforts to ban or suppress climate education and activism at schools. The national effort could include teach-ins and walkouts, as well as targeted petitions to school boards and districts in the coming weeks, organizers with Sunrise told the Guardian, ahead of the Monday launch. “We are prepared to do whatever it takes,” said Adah Crandall, 17, an organiser for the Sunrise Movement based in Portland, Oregon. “The far right has waged this battle against school boards and against public education, and they put a lot of time and money into trying to do things like ban books and prevent us from learning the truth about the climate crisis,” said Crandall. “And all of these things, all of these things are happening while the climate crisis is raging outside of our windows.” The Conversation by Primrose Freestone I’m a microbiologist and here’s what (and where) I never eat Every year, around 2.4 million people in the UK get food poisoning – mostly from viral or bacterial contamination. Most people recover within a few days without treatment, but not all are that lucky. As a microbiologist, I’m probably more acutely aware of the risk of food-borne infections than most. Here are some of the things I look out for. Salon by Alan Labas, Benjamin Matthew Long & Dylan Liu New study shows we can create value from food waste by turning it into a highly desirable material Food waste is a global problem with approximately 1.3 billion tons of food wasted each year throughout the food lifecycle — from the farm to food manufacturers and households. Across the food supply chain, Australians waste around 7.6 million tons of food each year. This costs our economy approximately A$36.6 billion annually. In a recent study published in Bioresource Technology Reports, we have found a way to use food waste for making a versatile material known as nanocellulose. In particular, we used acid whey — a significant dairy production waste material that it usually difficult to dispose of. Daily Kos by Mokurai Overnight News Digest: We did it! Humanity 55% likely to cross 1.5 degrees C of warming this year! Reposted with lots of important science news. Space by Sharmilla Kuthunur James Webb Space Telescope reveals ancient galaxies were more structured than scientists thought What did galaxies in the early universe look like? Surprisingly close to our own Milky Way, according to the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ), whose unprecedented infrared eye has been rewriting what we thought we knew about the early universe. Astronomers have long thought that newly minted galaxies that began merging together just after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, were too fragile to boast any noticeable structures like spiral arms, bars or rings. Those galactic features were thought to form during a time at least six billion years after the Big Bang. According to the new study, however, these delicate shapes could've manifested as early as 3.7 billion years after the Big Bang — which is almost at the beginning of the universe . "Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years," Christopher Conselice, an astronomy professor at The University of Manchester in the U.K. and a co-author of the new study, said in a statement published Friday (Sept. 22). Science Focus by Dr. Katie Mack The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of ancient galaxies that shouldn't exist. A cosmologist explains what could be going on. According to current thinking, the Universe isn’t old enough to contain such massive galaxies. Since it first started sending back science data in mid-2022, the internationally funded, state-of-the-art James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been giving us images of distant galaxies that appear to have formed and matured far earlier than our models predicted. It’s enough of a problem that some are calling it a challenge to our entire cosmic timeline. […] JWST is looking at galaxies that are so distant that their light has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. Based on what we think we know about these galaxies, and what we think we know about the age of the Universe, it looks like there hasn’t been enough time since the Big Bang for massive galaxies to have formed. […] Headlines have circulated calling this a crisis for cosmology, a threat to the Big Bang theory, or support for speculative hypotheses about other cosmic mysteries, like dark matter. But before we throw out all our cosmology textbooks, let’s dig a little deeper into the data. The Brighter Side by Peter Dizikes Scientists identify the perfect temperature to increase sleep and decrease stroke risk In a world of hustle and bustle, where the night owl's work overlaps with the early bird's routine, one question that often echoes is: “How did you sleep last night?” For an alarmingly significant number of Americans, the response is far from positive. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 35% of US adults regularly miss out on the recommended amount of sleep. This statistic isn't just a mere inconvenience, as consistently sleeping under seven hours is correlated with a heightened risk of several health problems: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and frequent mental distress. The issue of insufficient sleep is especially pronounced among the elderly. Despite needing the same 7 to 9 hours of sleep recommended for all adults, older individuals often grapple with disruptive sleep patterns. […] The team compiled nearly 11,000 person-nights of sleep and environmental data from a sample of 50 older adults. Utilizing wearable sleep monitors and environmental sensors, they closely tracked sleep patterns and environmental conditions over a prolonged period within the participants' residences. The study, published in the esteemed Science of the Total Environment journal , unveiled some fascinating insights. The optimal bedroom temperature for restful sleep in older adults was found to be between 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Outside this range, particularly as temperatures soared from 77°F to 86°F, there was a 5 to 10% decrease in sleep efficiency. IFL Science by James Felton Ancient Man Who Died Of Constipation Had Been Eating Grasshoppers For Months Nobody wants to die, but when we do we hope for two things: that it's painless, and that a thousand years later somebody doesn't study your remains and tell your ancestors "this guy was heavily constipated". No such luck for one man, who archaeologists discovered in 2019 had suffered a fatal case of constipation, swelling his colon up to six times its normal diameter. The Skiles mummy was found in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of South Texas. Up to 150 mummified bodies have been found in the area, but one adult male from around 1,200 years ago attracted particular attention for study due to how well-preserved his naturally mummified remains were. As well as having a full head of hair – rarely found in the other mummified remains – he had "a very large desiccated fecal mass, which encompasses the majority of what would have been the gastrointestinal tract", according to the authors of one study. Given the size of the backup, the fecal matter allowed researchers to examine the man's diet in the months prior to his death. Meanwhile, the hair allowed the team to analyze his nutritional uptake. Comparing this diet to typical diets of the time – inferred partly through the fecal matter of other individuals – several teams were able to discover a surprising amount about his final months. Slate by Dan Kois Sites in Ohio may be as vital to human history as the pyramids. Why have they been ignored for so long? Dr. Bret Ruby is a National Park Service archaeologist who drives a ruby-red Camaro with the license plate DR RUBY.* He is notably passionate about his work, which is why I felt a little guilty on a recent Ohio morning as he enthusiastically showed me around a historic monument that did not, honestly, look like all that much to me. We stood on a hill overlooking the Hopeton Earthworks near Chillicothe, Ohio, south of Columbus. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Native Americans built 800,000-square-foot geometric shapes in this meadow, an enormous circle and square aligning with the movements of the sun and the moon. That is, obviously, very impressive. The problem was what had happened since then: centuries of erosion, followed by more centuries of farming and plowing, which meant that even from above, it took me a long time to see the square and circle down in that field. It mostly looked like a scrubby field with a gravel plant on the other side. Eventually I picked out a few straight lines of dark grass, a gradual curve at the far end of the meadow. As we ambled down the hill, Ruby pointed out a swell in the landscape. “That hump there is the earthwork wall. That’s melted out from plowing. These walls were once 12 feet tall.” I nodded in admiration, and I did admire these walls, in theory. In the distance, a staffer drove a tractor; the NPS engages in “interpretive mowing,” Ruby said, using differing lengths of grass and a mix of native plants to distinguish the earthworks for visitors. There was one visitor. She was walking her dog. This was supposed to be the United States’ newest UNESCO World Heritage Site? BBC Future by Richard Fisher Scientists built this listening network to detect nuclear bomb tests. It found blue whales instead For generations, the creatures swam through the ocean without crossing paths with any human beings. Some of them grew to 24m (80ft) long and weighed 90 tonnes. But if these enormous animals did encounter any boats, those meetings went unrecorded. Until recently, we didn't even know they were there: a pod of pygmy blue whales in the Indian Ocean. Their discovery in 2021 was all the more striking because of how they were found. We wouldn't have come across them if it wasn't for nuclear weapons. What have atomic bombs got to do with a pod of whales? The answer lies in a global network of sensors, placed in some of the world's most remote locations. Since the 1990s, its operators in a control room in Vienna, Austria have been listening for rogue nuclear tests. But as the years have passed, their network has also picked up many other sounds and rumblings throughout the ocean, ground and atmosphere – and that's now proving a surprising boon to science. boingboing.net by Mark Frauenfelder New solar device makes desalinated seawater cheaper than tap water Engineers at MIT and China have jointly developed a solar-powered system that extracts fresh water from seawater so efficiently it is "cheaper than tap water," says one of the researchers who invented the system. The inventors say the system could provide clean drinking water sustainably to off-grid coastal communities and families living near a sea water source. From MIT News: The configuration of the device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, in a manner similar to the much larger "thermohaline" circulation of the ocean. This circulation, combined with the sun's heat, drives water to evaporate, leaving salt behind. The resulting water vapor can then be condensed and collected as pure, drinkable water. In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device, rather than accumulating and clogging the system. Inverse by Kiona Smith Einstein Was Right, Again: Novel Experiment Proves Antigravity Doesn’t Exist It turns out that Einstein was right yet again. A recent experiment just proved that antigravity doesn’t exist and we probably won’t ever get to use antimatter to levitate or build a perpetual motion machine or power warp drives (sorry, Star Trek). Antimatter itself is very real. Made of particles that mostly behave like regular matter, but their electrical charges are reversed, an anti-proton looks just like a proton but has a negative charge, while an anti-electron (or positron) looks and moves just like an electron but has a positive charge. When a bit of antimatter bumps into a bit of matter, they explode so dramatically that all of their combined mass is converted into energy. Now we know that matter and antimatter are drawn toward each other — not pushed apart — by gravity. Physicist Albert Einstein predicted this in his theory of general relativity years before the first positron was discovered, but Aarhus University physicist Emma Anderson and her colleagues at ALPHA (the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) just tested the theory by watching atoms of anti-hydrogen — a single anti-electron orbiting an anti-proton — fall downward under the pull of Earth’s gravity. The researchers recently published their work in the journal Nature. This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the science news of the day. Please share your articles and stories in the comments. 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