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Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday, 8 [1]
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Date: 2022-08-06
Stable isotopes unveil one millennium of domestic cat paleoecology in Europe
From an ecological perspective, the domestic cat is a very flexible animal. Despite being a hypercarnivore (i.e., highly dependent on a daily supply of meat), cats select prey opportunistically1,2. They can adjust to various conditions and successfully colonize a broad spectrum of environments1,3. Even when fed enough by their human owners, they search for other food sources and easily become feral (fully independent of people)1,3. The history of the domestic cat and its ecological adaptations are currently highly debated topics4. Its domestication and rodent-controlling ability, followed by its global dispersal, is essential for our understanding of the diversity and evolution of human–animal relationships and the history of husbandry5,6,7,8,9,10. The domestic cat has become a widespread and abundant predator, and is considered one of the most detrimental species in the world that negatively impacts a wide range of wild native species3,11,12,13,14. Domestic cats also pose a serious threat to wildcat native populations through hybridization15,16 and competition17,18. Thus, the study of domestic cat ecology is important from various points of view—from the history of one of the world's most popular pet to conservation biology.
New discovery of panda species which may have been Europe's last
Lumbering through the forested wetlands of Bulgaria around six million years ago, a new species of panda has been uncovered by scientists who state it is currently the last known and "most evolved" European giant panda. Unearthed from the bowels of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History, two fossils of teeth originally found in the eastern European nation in the late 1970s, provide new evidence of a sizable relative of the modern giant panda. Unlike today's iconic black and white bear however, it was not reliant on purely bamboo. "Although not a direct ancestor of the modern genus of the giant panda, it is its close relative," explains the Museum's Professor Nikolai Spassov, whose findings are today published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Fiddler crab eye view inspires researchers to develop novel artificial vision
Artificial vision systems are implemented in motion sensing, object detection, and self-driving vehicles. However, they are not suitable for changing external environments and are limited to a hemispherical field-of-view (FOV). Addressing this issue, researchers have now developed a novel artificial vision with 360-degree FOV that can image both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The system, modeled after the eye structure of the fiddler crab, could help realize the all-weather vision and panoramic object detection.
x West Texas storm chaser Laura Rowe captured the picture of a lifetime, fantastic shot of a mature supercell thunderstorm, illuminated at varying heights from the setting sun. pic.twitter.com/MxHsoG7g9N — Counts My CannaBlessings⁴²⁰🆓️ (@IntoTheShitter) August 5, 2022
Midnight Comes a Fraction Sooner as Earth Spins Faster
If time feels tighter than ever of late, blame it on the revolution. On 29 June this year, Earth racked up an unusual record: its shortest day since the 1960s, when scientists began measuring the planet's rotation with high-precision atomic clocks. From a report: Broadly speaking, Earth completes one full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years. But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected. The past few years have seen a flurry of records fall, with shorter days being notched up ever more frequently. In 2020, the Earth turned out 28 of the shortest days in the past 50 years, with the shortest of those, on 19 July, shaving 1.47 milliseconds off the 86,400 seconds that make up 24 hours. The 29 June record came close to being broken again last month, when 26 July came in 1.5 milliseconds short.
So is the world speeding up? Over the longer term -- the geological timescales that compress the rise and fall of the dinosaurs into the blink of an eye -- the Earth is actually spinning more slowly than it used to. Wind the clock back 1.4bn years and a day would pass in less than 19 hours. On average, then, Earth days are getting longer rather than shorter, by about one 74,000th of a second each year. The moon is mostly to blame for the effect: the gravitational tug slightly distorts the planet, producing tidal friction that steadily slows the Earth's rotation. To keep clocks in line with the planet's spin, the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations body, has taken to adding occasional leap seconds in June or December -- most recently in 2016 -- effectively stopping the clocks for a second so that the Earth can catch up. The first leap second was added in 1972. The next opportunity is in December 2022, although with Earth spinning so fast of late, it is unlikely to be needed.
Super-Earth skimming habitable zone of red dwarf
A super-Earth planet has been found near the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only 37 light-years from the Earth. This is the first discovery by a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope and offers a chance to investigate the possibility of life on planets around nearby stars. With such a successful first result, we can expect that the Subaru Telescope will discover more, potentially even better, candidates for habitable planets around red dwarfs.
An effective new treatment for chronic back pain targets the nervous system
People challenged with chronic back pain have been given hope with a new treatment that focuses on retraining how the back and the brain communicate, a randomised controlled trial run by researchers at UNSW Sydney and Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) and several other Australian and European universities has shown.
Out with a bang: Explosive neutron star merger captured for the first time in millimeter light
Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -- an international observatory co-operated by the US National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) -- have for the first time recorded millimeter-wavelength light from a fiery explosion caused by the merger of a neutron star with another star. The team also confirmed this flash of light to be one of the most energetic short-duration gamma-ray bursts ever observed, leaving behind one of the most luminous afterglows on record. The results of the research will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Perceived choice in music listening is linked to pain relief
A new study explores the use of music-listening to relieve acute pain, finding that people who were given the impression that they had control over the music they heard experienced more pain relief than people who were not given such control. Dr. Claire Howlin of Queen Mary University of London, U.K., and colleagues from University College Dublin, Ireland, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 3, 2022. Music listening can be used for pain relief, especially for chronic pain, i.e., pain lasting more than 12 weeks. However, the underlying mechanisms of these benefits are unclear, especially for acute pain, i.e., pain lasting less than 12 weeks. Basic musical features, such as tempo or energy, seem to be less important for pain relief; instead, feeling able to make decisions about the music may be key for pain relief. However, previous work has largely focused on findings from lab-based samples that did not explore real-world, pre-existing acute pain.
x Unfolding the evolution of human cognition
https://t.co/dNHErHScfH — Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. 🦖💕 (he/him) (@TomHoltzPaleo) July 31, 2022
Global spread of powdery mildew through migration and trade
The worldwide distribution of one of the most important cereal pathogens is the result of human activity. Researchers at the University of Zurich have traced the history and spread of wheat powdery mildew along wheat trade routes and found that mixing of genetic ancestries of related powdery mildew species played a central role in the evolution and adaptation of the pathogen. Wheat is one of the world's most important staple foods -- its significance for global food security was recently thrown into focus by the loss of grain exports from Ukraine due to the war. A more common threat to crops are fungal diseases, which can result in economic losses and famine. One of the most destructive pathogens is powdery mildew, a fungus which drastically reduces crop yields.
Volcanic super eruptions are millions of years in the making -- followed by swift surge
Researchers at the University of Bristol and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre have discovered that super-eruptions occur when huge accumulations of magma deep in the Earth's crust, formed over millions of years, move rapidly to the surface disrupting pre-existing rock. Using a model for crustal flow, an international team of scientists were able to show that pre-existing plutons -- a body of intrusive rock made from solidified magna or lava -- were formed over a few million years prior to four known gigantic super eruptions and that the disruption of these plutons by newly emplaced magmas took place extraordinarily rapidly. While the magma supplying super eruptions takes place over a prolonged period of time, the magma disrupts the crust and then erupts in just a few decades.
Earth’s Days Have Been Mysteriously Increasing in Length – Scientists Don’t Know Why
Earth’s rotation around its axis has been speeding up over the past few decades. Since this determines how long a day is, this trend has been making our days shorter. In fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so. However, despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown. Now, days are getting longer again, and the reason so far remains a mystery. While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation can vary ever so slightly. These changes sometimes occur over periods of millions of years, and other times almost instantly. For example, even earthquakes and storm events can play a role.
Huge, potentially disruptive sunspot will swing round to face Earth this weekend
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