Science Megathread

[Frodo]

Warm oceans helped first human migration from Asia to North America

New research reveals significant changes to the circulation of the North Pacific and its impact on the initial migration of humans from Asia to North America.

The international study, led by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and published Dec. 9 in Science Advances, provides a new picture of the circulation and climate of the North Pacific at the end of the last ice age, with implications for early human migration.

The Pacific Ocean contains around half the water in Earth’s oceans and is a vast reservoir of heat and carbon dioxide. However, at present, the sluggish circulation of the North Pacific restricts the movement of this heat and carbon dioxide, limiting its impact on climate.

The international team of scientists used sediment cores from the deep sea to reconstruct the circulation and climate of the North Pacific during the peak of the last ice age, roughly 21,000 years ago. Their results reveal a dramatically different circulation in the ice age Pacific, with vigorous ocean currents creating a relatively warm region around the modern Bering Sea.

“Our data shows that the Pacific had a warm current system during the last ice age, similar to the modern Atlantic Ocean currents that help to support a mild climate in Northern Europe,” said lead author James Rae, a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews.

The warming from these ocean currents created conditions more favorable for early human habitation, helping address a long-standing mystery about the earliest inhabitants of North America.

[Frodo]

Scientists find unexpected animal life far beneath Antarctica’s floating ice shelves
The discovery of what appear to be sponges in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of ice has biologists baffled.

Animal life was not what scientists were expecting to find in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of floating Antarctic ice, but it seems to have found a way with the discovery of sea creatures living in the extreme environment.

Geologists taking sediment cores from the seafloor beneath the giant Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf on the southern edge of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea discovered what biologists believe are types of sponge. The finding was published Monday in Frontiers in Marine Science.

The geologists were more than 150 miles from the open ocean when they bored a hole through the 3,000-foot-thick ice with a hot-water drill and lowered a coring device and a video camera into the dark seawater below it.

[Proud Houstonian]

In 2 Million years hawaii will go underwater

[Frodo]

Land conservation could play a huge part in solving human-induced climate change:

Protecting half the planet could help solve climate change and save species
A new map shows where new land protections could complement existing conserved areas

Earth faces two interrelated crises: accelerating loss of biodiversity and climate change. Both are worsened by human development of natural lands that would otherwise allow species to flourish and would store atmosphere-warming carbon, stabilizing the climate.

A new study argues that nations can help avert the biodiversity and climate crises by preserving the roughly 50 percent of land that remains relatively undeveloped. The researchers dub that conserved area a “Global Safety Net,” mapping out regions that can meet critical conservation and climate goals in a study published September 4 in Science Advances.

(...) Much of the land identified as important for biodiversity also stores a lot of carbon, underlining the connection between conservation and climate goals. But the researchers found an additional 4.7 percent of land, including forests in the northeastern United States, that would help keep climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere.

As a follow-up:

There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way.
Dozens of countries are backing an effort that would protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have been disregarded, or worse, in the past.

With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.

But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much.

In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous people put their bodies on the line to protect native lands threatened by loggers and ranchers. In Canada, a First Nations group created a huge park to block mining. In Papua New Guinea, fishing communities have set up no-fishing zones. And in Guatemala, people living in a sprawling nature reserve are harvesting high-value timber in small amounts. In fact, some of those logs could end up as new bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“If you’re going to save only the insects and the animals and not the Indigenous people, there’s a big contradiction,” said José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, who leads an umbrella group, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin. “We’re one ecosystem.”

[Frodo]

...and there was light:

How did early life on Earth start? It could have been lightning, study says


Cloud-to-ground lightning during a storm in Iowa. Kevin Skow/NOAA Photo Library

Lightning strikes could have sparked life on the early Earth, a new study suggests.

According to the research, billions of years ago, the bolts blasting into Earth would have unlocked the necessary minerals for the basis of life to begin.

“This work helps us understand how life may have formed on Earth and how it could still be forming on other, Earth-like planets,” said study lead author Benjamin Hess of Yale University.

The emergence of life on Earth was dependent on a precise cocktail of critical ingredients, one of which is phosphorus, a key component of DNA, RNA and cell membranes.

Phosphorus is essential to life and plays a key role in all life processes from movement to growth and reproduction.

"Specifically, phosphorus forms the backbone of the double helix structure of DNA and RNA, and phosphorus is part of the lipid layers which make up the cell wall, or membrane. So, phosphorus is needed for molecules that form basic cell structures and control key cell functions like reproduction," Hess told USA TODAY.

Prior to this study, it had been thought that meteorites provided the needed ingredients for life on Earth to begin.

[Frodo]

Physicists Discover the Elusive Odderon, First Predicted 50 Years Ago

Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery.

The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the name for a compound of three gluons that gets exchanged between protons (or a proton and its antimatter twin, the antiproton) when they collide violently but aren’t destroyed. Gluons are subatomic particles so named because they “glue” together other particles called quarks; quarks are the tiny things that make up the bigger particles like protons and neutrons that form the atoms we all know and love.

Gluons are funny in that they don’t like to be alone; they’re almost always found together. When it’s an even-numbered group of gluons (two, four, etc.), we call it a pomeron. When the number of gluons in the group is odd (three, five, etc.), well, you guessed it: That’s an odderon. The odderon, for mysterious reasons, is very rarely produced, and though hints of it have popped up over the decades, the evidence was never quite strong enough to say it existed for sure. But the generally accepted theory of quantum physics says odderons should exist, so scientists have continued to hunt for them.

[Frodo]

Knowing what we now know of quantum physics, what could Yoda be referring to by 'the Force'?  

Gluons, maybe?

[Frodo]

The remains of another ancient planet are believed to have been found within our own planet, from the same cataclysmic impact that created our Moon:

Remains of impact that created the Moon may lie deep within Earth


An artist's rendering of the collision that created the moon (Paul Wootton/ /Science Photo Library/Corbis)

Scientists have long agreed that the Moon formed when a protoplanet, called Theia, struck Earth in its infancy some 4.5 billion years ago. Now, a team of scientists has a provocative new proposal: Theia’s remains can be found in two continent-size layers of rock buried deep in Earth’s mantle.

For decades, seismologists have puzzled over these two blobs, which sit below West Africa and the Pacific Ocean and straddle the core like a pair of headphones. Up to 1000 kilometers tall and several times that wide, “they are the largest thing in the Earth’s mantle,” says Qian Yuan, a Ph.D. student in geodynamics at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe. Seismic waves from earthquakes abruptly slow down when they pass through the layers, which suggests they are denser and chemically different from the surrounding mantle rock.

The large low-shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs), as seismologists call them, might simply have crystallized out of the depths of Earth’s primordial magma ocean. Or they might be dense puddles of primitive mantle rock that survived the trauma of the Moon-forming impact. But based on new isotopic evidence and modeling, Yuan believes the LLSVPs are the guts of the alien impactor itself. “This crazy idea is at least possible,” says Yuan, who presented the hypothesis last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

[Frodo]

Does everyone remember Christian fundamentalist claims that humans lived alongside dinosaurs?  They were wrong about humans, obviously, but there is a possibility they weren't entirely wrong as far as our distant ancestors are concerned:

Did ancient primates walk alongside T. rex? New evidence backs up theory.
The oldest known primate fossils were dated to just after the extinction event 66 million years ago—suggesting some primate ancestors lived even longer ago.


Image credit: Andrey Atuchin

Shortly after an asteroid strike triggered a cataclysmic extinction event 66 million years ago, a group of mammals with a proclivity for climbing trees and eating fruit began to thrive. These animals—the early relatives of primates—would give rise to a lineage that led to the first monkeys, including great apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and eventually, humans.

Now, scientists have discovered fossils of the oldest known primate among a cache of unusual teeth tucked away in a museum drawer for decades. Some of these teeth, recently described in the journal Royal Society Open Science, belonged to the new species Purgatorius mckeeveri, a pint-sized precursor to modern primates that lived 65.9 million years ago, just 100,000 years after the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period.

“It reconfigures our view of evolution,” says Gregory Wilson Mantilla, lead author of the study and a biology professor at the University of Washington who studies early mammals.

The discovery also bolsters a theory that the ancestors of primates lived alongside the dinosaurs—and somehow survived the extinction event that killed off about three-quarters of life on Earth. Two of the teeth in the new study belonged to a second, previously known species, Purgatorius janisae, which also lived 65.9 million years ago. And if two ancient primate species existed at this time, some unknown animal must have come before.

“The critical thing about there being two species is it drags the origin of the group further back,” says Mary Silcox, a paleontologist with the University of Toronto who was not involved with the study. “They have to have come from somewhere.”

[Frodo]

NASA measures direct evidence humans are causing climate change

It may come as a surprise, given the extensive body of evidence connecting humans to climate change, that directly-observed proof of the human impact on the climate had still eluded science. That is, until now.

In a first-of-its-kind study, NASA has calculated the individual driving forces of recent climate change through direct satellite observations. And consistent with what climate models have shown for decades, greenhouse gases and suspended pollution particles in the atmosphere, called aerosols, from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for the lion's share of modern warming.

In other words, NASA has proven what is driving climate change through direct observations — a gold standard in scientific research.

"I think most people would be surprised that we hadn't yet closed this little gap in our long list of evidence supporting anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change," says Brian Soden, co-author of the study and professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

[Frodo]

Ancient eggshells and a hoard of crystals reveal early human innovation and ritual in the Kalahari


The archaeological site at a rock shelter in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert. More than 100,000 years ago, people used the so-called Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter for spiritual activities. (Photo by Jayne Wilkins)

A rockshelter in South Africa’s Kalahari documents the innovative behaviours of early humans who lived there 105,000 years ago. We report the new evidence today in Nature.

The rockshelter site is at Ga-Mohana Hill — a striking feature that stands proudly above an expansive savanna landscape.

Many residents of nearby towns consider Ga-Mohana a spiritual place, linked to stories of a great water snake. Some community members use the area for prayer and ritual. The hill is associated with mystery, fear and secrecy.

Now, our findings reveal how important this place was even 105,000 years ago, documenting a long history of its spiritual significance. Our research also challenges a dominant narrative that the Kalahari region is peripheral in debates on the origins of humans.

We know our species, Homo sapiens, first emerged in Africa. Evidence for the complex behaviours that define us has mostly been found at coastal sites in South Africa, supporting the idea that our origins were linked to coastal resources.

This view now requires revision.

[Lourdes]

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/research-shows-promising-development-hunt-hiv-vaccine/story?id=76904202

Research shows promising development in hunt for HIV vaccine

After more than 30 years of attempts, there may be a promising advance in the search for a vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS if left untreated.

Now, preliminary data from an early stage clinical trial out of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, suggests that a new HIV vaccine may hold promise.

"These are very early studies. But nonetheless, they are provocative," said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventative medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who was not involved in the clinical trial.

Although the vaccine candidate will still need to be tested in larger studies, experts are hopeful this vaccine might succeed where others have failed.

[Frodo]

https://twitter.com/BBCPallab/status/1379883999909326850

[muon2]

https://twitter.com/BBCPallab/status/1379883999909326850

I was on the Zoom call of the announcement yesterday. It's important to note that neither of the two experimentalists nor the theorist who jointly made the presentation made any mention, yet alone claims, relating to a fifth force. That appears to come from a quote from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, not the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab.

Here's a Fermilab picture of Muon g-2. It is the answer to the question "Have I ever caused an interstate highway to be blocked for over four hours?" I was responsible for arranging the route to transport the ring from a barge to the laboratory in 2013.

[Frodo]

There was apparently more extensive (conjugal) mixing of the species than previously thought:

Interactions between early modern humans and Neanderthals were a lot more common than we thought

The Neanderthal DNA in East Asians today can be traced back to interactions between Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe 45,000 years ago.

The oldest known remains of modern humans in Europe have been identified in the Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, according to new research published last week in the journal Nature.

These remains, which belong to five individuals, were radiocarbon dated between 42,580 and 45,930 years ago. Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago.

By analyzing the ancient genomes from the Bacho Kiro remains, researchers were able to determine their relation to humans today, as well as the complexity of populations as humans migrated from Africa to Eurasia thousands of years ago.

"These individuals represent an early expansion of modern humans into Europe that was previously unknown in the genetic record, with implications for the broader out-of-Africa expansion," said Mateja Hajdinjak, study author, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Individual Fellow within the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in England.

"Crucially, the genomes of Bacho Kiro Cave individuals point out that the early human groups in Europe commonly mixed with Neanderthals."

The researchers believe that mixing between modern humans and Neanderthals was much more common than they had previously thought, especially when the first modern humans arrived on the scene in Europe.

[Frodo]

I am so looking forward to the newest version of Jurassic Park if the creators faithfully incorporate the latest research into the movie.  It is going to look so different from what we have seen, what with feathered dinosaurs, and tyrannosaurs hunting in packs (so better resembling lions, saber-toothed cats, and wolves instead of tigers, jaguars, and leopards), among other updates:

Mass fossil site may prove tyrannosaurs lived in packs

And it looks like there were far more of them than anyone thought:

Billions of T. rex likely roamed the Earth, paleontologists report

[vitoNova]

I'm actually surprised there are even people at that Fermi lab.

I thought it turned into a crack ghetto years ago and all the whiz kids were whisked off to Geneva.  

Note:  I am not insulting Chicago.  It's just that you rarely hear about the goings-on at Fermi in the news ever since the LHC went online.  

[Frodo]

It is interesting that cattle is what united nearly all the ancient societies (including the predecessors of who would later become the Nubians, Egyptians, and Arabians) who dwelt in the lands now covered by desert from North Africa to the Arabian peninsula.  Goes to show just how radically different the landscape must have been during the Neolithic.

These mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia are older than the pyramids
Researchers think the region’s "mustatils" form the oldest ritual landscape in the world. But exactly what they were for isn’t clear.


AAKSA and Royal Commission for AlUla/Antiquity

According to researchers, it better resembled the open savannah that we are more accustomed to seeing in Kenya and Tanzania.

[Frodo]

We're getting closer and closer to turning the world of Star Wars and Star Trek into reality:

Physicists Have Broken The Speed of Light With Pulses Inside Hot Plasma

Sailing through the smooth waters of vacuum, a photon of light moves at around 300 thousand kilometers (186 thousand miles) a second. This sets a firm limit on how quickly a whisper of information can travel anywhere in the Universe.

While this law isn't likely to ever be broken, there are features of light which don't play by the same rules. Manipulating them won't hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology.

Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.

This time, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York have managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around one-tenth of light's usual vacuum speed to more than 30 percent faster.

This is both more – and less – impressive than it sounds.

[Frodo]

The Oldest Known Spiral Galaxy Was Just Detected, And It Has Some Surprises For Us

Scientists have captured a picture of the oldest known spiral galaxy, which was formed 12.4 billion years ago.

The galaxy, officially named BRI 1335-0417, was snapped by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.

It shows that spiral galaxies were formed as early as 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang.

The photo was taken as part of a study published in the peer-reviewed Science journal on Thursday.

"It puts us back the time when we knew that galaxies started to look like modern-day galaxies by roughly 1 billion years," Dr. Kai Noeske, communications officer for the European Space Agency and distant galaxy researcher told Insider.

Spiral galaxies are more mature forms of galaxies.

And check out this computer simulation of how a spiral galaxy forms:

[certified hummus supporter 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

Researchers see atoms at record resolution

In 2018, Cornell researchers built a high-powered detector that, in combination with an algorithm-driven process called ptychography, set a world record by tripling the resolution of a state-of-the-art electron microscope. As successful as it was, that approach had a weakness. It only worked with ultrathin samples that were a few atoms thick. Anything thicker would cause the electrons to scatter in ways that could not be disentangled. Now a team, again led by David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, has bested its own record by a factor of two with an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) that incorporates even more sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms.

^{This image shows an electron ptychographic reconstruction of a praseodymium orthoscandate (PrScO3) crystal, zoomed in 100 million times.}

[Frodo]

Science says we can never live as long as the Dúnedain:

Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests
A study counts blood cells and footsteps to predict a hard limit to our longevity

Although I think I read somewhere that the average Dúnedain (who weren't of royal blood) generally had lifespans short of 200 years, so we aren't that far off from them potentially, assuming all goes well in our lives...  

[Benjamin Frank]

Question about technology/and on about a science fiction story.

Some people who know about the history of computers know about this, otherwise, not so much.

In 1946, Will F. Jenkins, under the pen name Murray Leinster, had published in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, a short story called "A Logic Named Joe."

This is the short story:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm

1.This short story, written before television came into common use, is not only one of the few works of science fiction to predict personal computers and the internet, it does so with fairly stunning accuracy:
"Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in."

The only thing not mentioned is the interactivity the internet has led to.

2.It even mentions the major societal changes the internet has led to:
"Shut down the tank?" he says, mirthless. "Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doin' all the computin' for every business office for years? It's been handlin' the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement— Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!

He smiles a haggard smile at me and snaps off. And I sit down and put my head in my hands. It's true. If something had happened back in cave days and they'd hadda stop usin' fire— If they'd hadda stop usin' steam in the nineteenth century or electricity in the twentieth— It's like that. We got a very simple civilization. In the nineteen hundreds a man would have to make use of a typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper, reference library, encyclopedias, office files, directories, plus messenger service and consulting lawyers, chemists, doctors, dieticians, filing clerks, secretaries—all to put down what he wanted to remember an' to tell him what other people had put down that he wanted to know; to report what he said to somebody else and to report to him what they said back. All we have to have is logics. Anything we want to know or see or hear, or anybody we want to talk to, we punch keys on a logic. Shut off logics and everything goes skiddoo."

3.This is the most interesting part for me though, could say quantum computers actually do things like this:
"It is a matter of record that part of the Mid-Western Electric research guys had been workin' on cold electron-emission for thirty years, to make vacuum tubes that wouldn't need a power source to heat the filament. And one of those fellas was intrigued by the "Ask your logic" flash. He asked how to get cold emission of electrons. And the logic integrates a few squintillion facts on the physics data plates and tells him."  

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

Southern Ocean officially declared as fifth in the world: National Geographic

Earth is 71% water, and those who are informed about world geography are aware that the mainland is surrounded by four oceans.

Four? There are now five oceans, not four.

National Geographic, one of the world's most prestigious and well-known mapmakers, has declared the presence of a fifth ocean.

This is the body of water that surrounds Antarctica, and is known as the Southern Ocean.

National Geographic, one of the world's most prestigious and well-known mapmakers, has declared the presence of a fifth ocean.

This is the body of water that surrounds Antarctica, and is known as the Southern Ocean.

[...]

Whales, penguins, and seals all have substantial populations in the Southern Ocean.

However, commercial fishing on krill and Patagonian toothfish has been a source of concern for decades, according to National Geographic.

By legally altering the name of the water body, it wanted to raise attention to these challenges, as well as the fast warming of the Southern Ocean as a result of global warming.

[Blue3]

We're getting closer and closer to turning the world of Star Wars and Star Trek into reality:

Physicists Have Broken The Speed of Light With Pulses Inside Hot Plasma

Sailing through the smooth waters of vacuum, a photon of light moves at around 300 thousand kilometers (186 thousand miles) a second. This sets a firm limit on how quickly a whisper of information can travel anywhere in the Universe.

While this law isn't likely to ever be broken, there are features of light which don't play by the same rules. Manipulating them won't hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology.

Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.

This time, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York have managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around one-tenth of light's usual vacuum speed to more than 30 percent faster.

This is both more – and less – impressive than it sounds.

Not really. The article itself says so.

I’d also recommend this video:
https://youtu.be/mTf4eqdQXpA