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Overnight Science News Digest: Solutions outweigh dire climate news this week! [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-28  

My science news roundups never begin with a theme in mind, it emerges as I organize the stories I collected because they caught my interest and seemed worthy of inclusion. This week’s theme is “Solutions,” and a welcome surprise because we all need positive news given the barrage of dire news climate change fires at us.

Solutions to problems such as bird collisions with windows, skin cancer, childhood malaria, and dengue rates are encouraging, while other solutions involve future actions to mitigate climate change consequences made possible by answering questions like “why do hurricanes intensify rapidly” and “how can we motivate people to make dietary changes that help reduce atmospheric carbon.”

First two personally meaningful science news stories.

I was stoked to find a study that answers a question I’ve had for decades: Why, when I’m sitting leaning against a wall in my tropical home, can I feel a scorpion that is only touching the tips of my hair, even though I can’t see it? I’ve not discounted the eerie sensory awareness that my hair is tingling and have looked back at the wall and spotted scorpions near my long hair dozens of times. Finally today, I have an answer although the study was in vitro so I’m still my only in vivo subject.

Imperial researchers have discovered a hidden mechanism within hair follicles that allow us to feel touch. The findings have been published in Science Advances. Previously, touch was thought to be detected only by nerve endings present within the skin and surrounding hair follicles. This new research from Imperial College London has found that that cells within hair follicles—the structures that surround the hair fiber—are also able to detect the sensation in cell cultures.

One more bit of personally significant science news: After 24 years of Lyme disease, the CDC has finally acknowledged my reality.

x BREAKING NEWS! In a change of language from the past, the CDC now puts Borrelia (#LymeDisease) on a list of "disease agents that have been linked to chronic symptoms."



What are the implications of this?



READ MORE https://t.co/Jh1GhCePeC pic.twitter.com/iBU8jxDOqz — LymeDisease.org (@Lymenews) October 28, 2023

On Earth

x This animation shows every recorded earthquake in sequence as they occurred from January 1, 1901, through December 31, 2000, at a rate of 1 year per second



[🎞️ NOAA]pic.twitter.com/Qj2oWxkCnh — Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 22, 2023

Off Earth

x A breathtaking zoom-in on LHA 120-N150



Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin pic.twitter.com/wMChIFokVc — World and Science (@WorldAndScience) October 28, 2023

Solutions

Up to a billion birds collide with glass buildings every year, but architecture has solutions — Phys.org

x Up to a billion birds collide with glass buildings every year, but architecture has solutions https://t.co/CXlvniLoAr via @physorg_com — Sarah Primate (@LangurLover) October 18, 2023

Chicago set an example for this in 2009, when U.S. architect Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower was completed. Its wave-like facade and fritted glass were in part designed to stop birds flying into the building's windows. Fritted glass is printed with ink and contains ultra-small particles of ground-up glass, giving it a frosted or otherwise slightly opaque appearance. [...] The Aqua Tower has curved balconies to soften the hard edges of what is an otherwise conventional skyscraper. The wave-like rippling effect also serves to minimize wind shear and create shade. In tandem with the fritted glass, the reflective qualities and hard edges of the glass are dampened, helping to prevent confusion, particularly at night. The tower demonstrates how architectural features usually chosen to enhance human lives can also benefit other organisms. This challenge was taken up by Buffalo-based architect Joyce Hwang in her project No Crash Zone from 2015. Hwang temporarily applied patterns to the windows of the Sullivan Center in Chicago, ostensibly to deter birds from flying into the glass, but also to add aesthetic interest to the material itself.

In a video for a nationwide science competition, Heman Bekele spelled out his mission in a single sentence. “Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time.” In the two-minute video, Heman, a student at Fairfax County’s Frost Middle School, pitched his idea for a soap that could help fight skin cancer at a cost of less than $10 per bar. The soap, Heman explained, would be made with compounds that could reactivate the cells that guard human skin, enabling them to fight cancer cells. In April, Heman submitted the video to the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, an annual competition that invites students in grades five through eight to “change their world for the better with a single innovative idea.” [...] Heman’s idea for the competition came from the early years of his life in Ethiopia. “There, I always saw people who were constantly working under the hot sun,” Heman said. First malaria vaccine slashes early childhood mortality — science In a major analysis in Africa, the first vaccine approved to fight malaria cut deaths among young children by 13% over nearly 4 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week. The huge evaluation of a pilot rollout of the vaccine, called RTS,S or Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, also showed a 22% reduction in severe malaria in kids young enough to receive a three-shot series. [...] “The RTS,S malaria vaccine is already saving lives,” said John Tanko Bawa, director of malaria vaccine implementation at PATH, a nonprofit that develops vaccines and therapies for global health problems. He added, “What we have seen is a considerable impact of a vaccine described as having modest efficacy.” (A late-stage clinical trial delivered lackluster results on the durability of the vaccine’s protection.) The 13% drop in deaths is so remarkable that “I was surprised I didn’t hear any gasps when it was stated,” joked medical epidemiologist Mary Hamel, who led the WHO pilot program. The momentum of the solar energy transition — nature communications x New study finds: "due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies." https://t.co/kT8UqDJFK4 — David Roberts (@drvolts) October 18, 2023 Study shows simple diet swaps can cut carbon emissions and improve your health — science daily This one is especially encouraging because the benefits from less livestock rearing cascade through the environment and atmosphere. According to a new study co-authored by a Tulane University researcher and published in the journal Nature Food, making simple substitutions like switching from beef to chicken or drinking plant-based milk instead of cow's milk could reduce the average American's carbon footprint from food by 35%, while also boosting diet quality by between 4-10%, according to the study. These findings highlight the potential of a "small changes" approach that researchers believe could encourage more consumers to adopt climate-friendly eating habits. Food production accounts for 25-33% of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions with beef production being a primary contributor. "This study shows that cutting dietary carbon emissions is accessible and doesn't have to be a whole lifestyle change," said Diego Rose, senior author and nutrition program director at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. "It can be as simple as ordering a chicken burrito instead of a beef burrito when you go out to eat. When you're at the grocery store, move your hand one foot over to grab soy or almond milk instead of cow's milk. That one small change can have a significant impact." Meat-eating probably didn’t make us human — scientific american I included this in Solutions because it offers a rebuttal to entrenched carnivores who refuse to consider eating less meat. Why not fully embrace being human and take advantage of our “enormous metabolic adaptability?” Scientists are poking holes in the idea that meat-eating was key to human evolution. Meat was long considered to be essential for providing the energy needed for our large brains. But “proteins alone do not have a particularly high calorific value”, says evolution researcher Lutz Kindler. What makes us human might instead be our enormous metabolic adaptability. “Humans, unlike many other animals, are able to extract from different food sources in their environment what ensures their survival,” explains nutritional-medicine specialist Hans Hauner. Scientists find two ways that hurricanes rapidly intensify — science daily Hurricanes that rapidly intensify for mysterious reasons pose a particularly frightening threat to those in harm's way. Forecasters have struggled for many years to understand why a seemingly commonplace tropical depression or tropical storm sometimes blows up into a major hurricane, packing catastrophic winds and driving a potentially deadly surge of water toward shore. Now scientists have shed some light on why this forecasting challenge has been so difficult to overcome: there's more than one mechanism that causes rapid intensification. New research by scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) uses the latest computer modeling techniques to identify two entirely different modes of rapid intensification. The findings may lead to better understanding and prediction of these dangerous events. "Trying to find the holy grail behind rapid intensification is the wrong approach because there isn't just one holy grail," said NCAR scientist Falko Judt, lead author of the new study. "There are at least two different modes or flavors of rapid intensification, and each one has a different set of conditions that must be met in order for the storm to strengthen so quickly." Dengue rates drop after release of modified mosquitoes in Colombia — nature Three cities in Colombia saw a dramatic fall in the incidence of dengue in the years following the introduction of mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia, a bacterium that prevents the insect from transmitting viruses. In neighbourhoods where the Wolbachia mosquitoes were well established, dengue incidence dropped by 94–97%. The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were released by the World Mosquito Program (WMP), a non-profit organization that has been conducting similar experiments in Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam, among other countries. In Colombia, the modified mosquitoes were released in one of the country’s most populous regions. “That’s the largest continuous releases of Wolbachia [mosquitoes] globally so far, in terms of the population covered and the area,” says Katie Anders, an epidemiologist at the WMP and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Marine protected areas and climate change — eureka alert

An international team has developed the first comprehensive framework for designing networks of marine protected areas that can help vulnerable species survive as climate change drives habitat loss. In a paper published Oct. 26 in One Earth, the researchers outlined guidelines for governments to provide long-distance larval drifters, like urchins and lobsters, as well as migratory species, like turtles and sharks, with protected stopovers along coastal corridors.

Climate Change

Kristin Laidre is an ecologist who specializes in arctic mammals, which are especially cornered by global warming.

Keith Parker is a senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe in Northern California. Across the West, salmon stocks have been devastated by dams, water diverted for agriculture and climate change.

Since Andrés Rivera started studying glaciers in the 1980s, a series of globally monitored glaciers have gone from losing almost seven inches a year to losing almost three feet a year.

have gone from losing almost seven inches a year to losing almost three feet a year. Hannah Mounce leads a team trying to save forest birds on Maui, where warmer weather is expanding the range of mosquitoes that transmit bird-killing avian malaria. Her main focus is a species called the kiwikiu. Only about 130 are left.

For 40 years, Dee Boersma has studied a single colony of Magellanic penguins in Argentina’s coastal desert, documenting a decline of about 1 percent a year.

David Obura has been studying coral reefs since 1992. During that time, the world’s oceans have lost perhaps a quarter of their coral.

Patrick Gonzalez is a forest ecologist and climate-change scientist who studies tree deaths in the Sahel region of Africa.

Amid the chaos of climate change, humans tend to focus on humans. But Earth is home to countless other species, including animals, plants and fungi. For centuries, we have been making it harder for them to exist by cutting down forests, plowing grasslands, building roads, damming rivers, draining wetlands and polluting. Now that wildlife is depleted and hemmed in, climate change has come crashing down. In 2016, scientists in Australia announced the loss of a rodent called the Bramble Cay melomys, one of the first known species driven to global extinction by climate change. Others are all but certain to follow. How many depends on how much we let the planet heat. The seven scientists here document the impacts of global warming on the nonhuman world. Their work brings them face to face with realities that few of us see firsthand. Some are stubborn optimists. Some struggle with despair. To varying degrees, they all take comfort in nature’s resilience. But they know it goes only so far. These scientists are witnesses to an intricately connected world that we have pushed out of balance. Their faces show the weight they carry.

Agriculture and hot temperatures interactively erode the nest success of habitat generalist birds across the United States — science

Habitat transformation into agricultural and urban land uses is expanding and is accompanied by warming temperatures and increasing climate extremes. These dual stresses may interact to affect animal fitness because forests can buffer extreme temperatures more than open habitats such as agricultural lands. Using data from the citizen science program Project NestWatch, Lauck et al. examined how extreme heat influences birds’ fledgling success in forests, grassland, developed areas, and agricultural lands across the continental US. They found different effects of extreme heat in different land uses. Birds nesting in agricultural lands had lower fledgling success at extreme warm temperatures, but the opposite was true in forests. Future warming will likely negatively affect bird reproduction in human-dominated areas, especially among species of conservation concern.

A new hybrid subspecies of puffin is likely the result of climate change — ars technica

The brisk increase in warming rates in the Arctic is bringing rapid shifts in range for plants and animals across the region’s tree of life. Researchers say those changes can lead species that normally wouldn’t encounter each other to interbreed, creating new hybrid populations. Now, scientists have presented the first evidence of large-scale hybridization that appears to have been driven by climate change. In a paper published this month in the journal Science Advances, researchers report that a hybrid Atlantic puffin population on the remote Norwegian island of Bjornoya seems to have emerged in a period coinciding with the onset of a faster pace of global warming. The hybrid puffins likely arose from the breeding between two subspecies within the past 100 or so years, coinciding with the onset of the 20th-century warming pattern, the study concludes. Strikingly, the hybridization occurred after a subspecies migrated southward, not poleward toward cooler temperatures, as might have been expected, a finding that highlights the complexity of the changes underway in the Arctic ecosystem.

x I think the refusal among large swathes of the left to acknowledge that the economy is improving springs in part from the same motivation that prevents them from acknowledging that we're making progress on climate change: if we admit that, everyone will declare victory & quit! — David Roberts (@drvolts) October 27, 2023

Critters

x Our biologists observed this elk herd playing in the snow on the crossing above I-90 this morning. pic.twitter.com/Fd9RrSqTDn — Snoqualmie Pass (@SnoqualmiePass) October 25, 2023

Periodical cicadas emerge en masse every 13 or 17 years, bringing not just a continuous drone of noise but also an influx of food for birds and other predators. Getman-Pickering et al. performed a set of experiments in the years before, after, and during the 2021 Brood X cicada emergence to determine how this addition of resources affected trophic dynamics in an eastern US forest (see the Perspective by Parker). They found that, compared with nonemergence years, cicada emergence led to lower caterpillar predation by birds, higher caterpillar densities, and higher herbivory rates on oak saplings. As birds opportunistically switched to cicada prey, their control over herbivory declined, showing the far-reaching short-term impacts of a resource pulse.

x Spiders and ants from a recent leaf litter sample in southwest Virginia pic.twitter.com/CwvzotPM6T — Derek Hennen, Ph.D. (@derekhennen) October 24, 2023

Wild Chimps Shown to Undergo Menopause for the First Time — scientific american

FYI — “for the first” time in that poorly constructed headline refers to “shown,” to humans finding this out, not to the chimps doing it for the first time.

Menopause is rare in the animal kingdom. In mammals, menopause occurs one year after an individual’s final natural ovulation cycle and is marked by changes in hormone levels and infertility. It has only been documented in a few species, including humans, orcas and short-finned pilot whales. But new evidence shows that some wild chimpanzees experience menopause as well. [...] Why these chimps undergo menopause is a bit trickier to explain. After all, it’s a bit of an evolutionary mystery why an organism would outlive its reproductive capacity. One of the prevailing explanations for menopause in humans, known as the “grandmother hypothesis,” posits that it is evolutionarily advantageous for older women to stick around and help raise the next generation. But “that’s not really possible for chimpanzees because they don’t live with their daughters,” says Peter Ellison, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study. Adult female chimps tend to move to a different family when it’s time for them to have babies, and they tend to raise them communally, meaning that there is no genetic incentive for the primates to favor their own grandchildren. Instead the research suggests that menopause may simply be a feature of mammalian reproductive systems that emerges if such an animal lives long enough.

x The defensive display of a dead leaf mantis, a giant mouth with huge spiked teeth



But this is an illusion



What you are looking at is the front spiny legs folded to create this intense deception



This is called Deimatic behaviour

pic.twitter.com/vEWOgOEbmE — Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 23, 2023

Roosters might recognize themselves in the mirror — science daily

Fiendishly clever study design — read the article for full details.

Researchers at the Universities of Bonn and Bochum, together with the MSH Medical School Hamburg, have found evidence that roosters could recognize themselves in a mirror. Whether this is successful, however, depends on the experimental conditions -- a finding that points beyond the experiment with roosters and could also be of importance for other animal species. "Some chickens, but especially roosters, warn their conspecifics by special calls when a predator -- such as a bird of prey or fox -- appears." On the other hand, if the roosters are confronted with the predator alone, they usually remain silent to avoid attracting the attention of the predator themselves and becoming victims. "The alarm call is the perfect behavior to integrate into a more ecologically relevant test of self-awareness...” The research team first wanted to check whether the roosters really emit alarm calls in the presence of a conspecific and stay silent when they are alone. For this purpose, the researchers from the University of Bonn set up a test arena on the Campus Frankenforst. A grid separated two compartments through which the roosters could see each other. Then a bird of prey was projected onto the ceiling of one compartment.

x The secret autumn conversations between fungi and slime molds happening just below the leaf litter! pic.twitter.com/izujeOI1QG — Matt Kasson, PhD 🍄🧫 (@ImperfectFunGuy) October 24, 2023

What science news intrigued you this week?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/10/28/2200193/-Overnight-Science-News-Digest-Solutions-outweigh-dire-climate-news-this-week

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