Science Megathread

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That poisonous gas so essential to the first stirrings of life on Earth apparently being hydrogen cyanide:

The first life on Earth depended on a deadly poisonous gas, study suggests

Could the toxic gas used in chemical weapons today have been involved in the birth of life on Earth?

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So the geological periods referred to are the Paleoproterozoic and the Neoproterozoic eras, as well as spanning the great Cambrian Explosion:

Supermountains controlled the evolution of life on Earth


source: https://www.scienceabc.com

Giant mountain ranges at least as high as the Himalayas and stretching up to 8,000 kilometers across entire supercontinents played a crucial role in the evolution of early life on Earth, according to a new study by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU).

The researchers tracked the formation of these supermountains throughout Earth's history using traces of zircon with low lutetium content—a combination of mineral and rare earth element only found in the roots of high mountains where they form under intense pressure.

The study found the most giant of these supermountains only formed twice in Earth's history—the first between 2,000 and 1,800 million years ago and the second between 650 and 500 million years ago. Both mountain ranges rose during periods of supercontinent formation.

Lead author, ANU Ph.D. candidate Ziyi Zhu, said there are links between these two instances of supermountains and the two most important periods of evolution in Earth's history.

"There's nothing like these two supermountains today. It's not just their height—if you can imagine the 2,400 km long Himalayas repeated three or four times you get an idea of the scale," she said.

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I love how they make it sound like this event is about to happen any day now...

2 monster black holes are headed toward a collision that will rock the fabric of space-time
The two black holes will merge about 10,000 years from now and ripple the fabric of space-time in the process.


source: https://cosmosastronaut.com/

Astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes that are 99% of the way to a violent collision that will rock the very fabric of space-time.

The black holes, which share the name PKS 2131-021, are locked in a dance of doom about 9 billion light-years from Earth, according to a study published Feb. 23 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The two objects have moved steadily toward each other for about 100 million years, according to a statement from NASA, and now they share a binary orbit, with the two black holes orbiting each other every two years or so.

About 10,000 years from now, the two black holes will merge, sending gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time originally predicted by Albert Einstein — surging across the universe, the researchers said. Though none of us will witness that epic collision, studying PKS 2131-021 now could reveal new information about how supermassive black holes form and what happens when two of them collide.

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And we have every reason to expect Congress and our international partners (even Russia) to sign off on the extension, which is likely to be the last for the International Space Station:

White House directs NASA to extend International Space Station operations through 2030
But the outpost's other partners have to sign on as well.


source

What We Learned from the Space Station this Past Year

20 Breakthroughs from 20 Years of Science aboard the International Space Station

In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its repercussions, it is a good bet that though Russia will continue cooperating with the United States on maintaining the International Space Station until 2030, it will likely be for the last time:

The Russian invasion of Ukraine will have myriad impacts on spaceflight

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Here is an excellent beginners guide to the new James Webb Space Telescope:

https://twitter.com/BalboaCapital/status/1501364396483829762

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I know people are going to get confused when this article talks about a 'land bridge' between Europe and Asia, so I am going to post a map of the world (as best we know) at the time of the Eocene 50 million years ago:

Millions of years of animal migration hold clues to the mystery of ‘lost continent’
A low-lying landmass, which scientists have dubbed Balkanatolia, enabled mammals from Asia to cross into Europe.

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There was a silver lining to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that was the Space Race, sparked by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite and culminating with the U.S. beating the Soviets to the moon by landing astronauts to the lunar surface and safely bringing them back, while seeing major advances in science and engineering along the way.  The same competitive drive we saw then could see humanity reach new heights in a new Space Race while we are in the beginning stages of a new Cold War, this time between the United States and the People's Republic of China:

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Apparently the original Human Genome Project from around 2000 (and I remember the news hype around the discovery) wasn't able to sequence the entire genome, although they did get over 90% of it.  This time, researchers were able to finish the remaining portion:

https://twitter.com/PBS/status/1509953814484377606

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https://twitter.com/NYTScience/status/1512595610918039553
And just to orient ourselves:



This is how the shoreline would have looked at the time of the impact.  The asteroid hit what was a shallow sea.

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Early human habitats linked to past climate shifts


Preferred habitats of Homo sapiens (purple shading, left), Homo heidelbergensis (red shading, middle), Homo neanderthalensis (blue shading, right) calculated from a new paleoclimate model simulation conducted at the IBS Center for Climate Physics and a compilation of fossil and archeological data. Lighter values indicate higher habitat suitability. The dates (1 ka = 1000 years before present) refer to the estimated ages of the youngest and oldest fossils used in the study. Credit: Institute for Basic Science

A study published in Nature by an international team of scientists provides clear evidence for a link between astronomically-driven climate change and human evolution.

By combining the most extensive database of well-dated fossil remains and archeological artifacts with an unprecedented new supercomputer model simulating earth's climate history of the past 2 million years, the team of experts in climate modeling, anthropology and ecology was able to determine under which environmental conditions archaic humans likely lived.

The impact of climate change on human evolution has long been suspected, but has been difficult to demonstrate due to the paucity of climate records near human fossil-bearing sites. To bypass this problem, the team instead investigated what the climate in their computer simulation was like at the times and places humans lived, according to the archeological record. This revealed the preferred environmental conditions of different groups of hominins. This study considers the following hominin species: Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis (including African and Eurasian populations), Homo erectus and early African Homo (including Homo ergaster and Homo habilis). From there, the team looked for all the places and times those conditions occurred in the model, creating time-evolving maps of potential hominin habitats.

"Even though different groups of archaic humans preferred different climatic environments, their habitats all responded to climate shifts caused by astronomical changes in earth's axis wobble, tilt, and orbital eccentricity with timescales ranging from 21 to 400 thousand years," said Axel Timmermann, lead author of the study and Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea.

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This is our first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.  Not as sexy as the computer animations we are accustomed to seeing admittedly:

Here's our first real image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole


This long-exposure image of our galaxy's supermassive black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Credit: EHT Collaboration

https://twitter.com/BBCEarth/status/1524757183577083904

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Central Asia (the crossroads of the Silk Road, as it happens) is the most likely source of the bacterium that caused the Black Death pandemic that devastated medieval Europe:

Where Did the Black Death Start? Thanks to Ancient DNA, Scientists May Have Answers
The devastating disease possibly began in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan


A map of the area where researchers believe the plague began -Nature

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Built on backs of slaves: New mapping shows clearer picture of SC’s historic rice fields

More than 236,000 acres of rice fields spanning 160 miles once covered coastal South Carolina, according to a recent mapping project that used modern tools to document the massive footprint of the Lowcountry’s antebellum rice culture.

Building the ponds and dikes and maintaining them with slaves could be deadly work, with disease such as malaria, extreme heat and even alligators constant threats.

“Imagine the labor it took two centuries ago to convert our woodland swamps and coastal marshes into agricultural fields and how these workers learned to use the river tides to water and drain these fields,” said Ernie Wiggers. “It is an uncomfortable story to tell because enslaved people provided the labor.”

Wiggers, a wildlife biologist who led the project, said the revised acreage — which is more than double previous estimates — contextualizes the human and ecological toll of “forced conversion” of land for agriculture.

South Carolina, at one point, was the country’s No. 1 rice producer. But turning swamps into rice fields and managing the labor-intensive crop, Wiggers said, came at a “huge cost” in the lives of slaves for hundreds of years before the system collapsed following the Civil War.

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Artificial intelligence has officially made its debut in the world of science and medicine:

https://twitter.com/hstump/status/1553211909750415360
And here is the original source.

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The James Webb Space Telescope may have taken much of the glory, but it is worth noting it is not the only telescope that is coming online:

https://twitter.com/MikeOtley/status/1557619908162322432

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It seems we were bipedal long before Lucy started walking through the African savannah:

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1563009595877953537

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https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1563745690089656321

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We weren't just scavengers 2 million years ago:
 
Ancient Humans Were Apex Predators For 2 Million Years, Study Finds

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Another theory posits that Neanderthals were essentially screwed out of existence by Homo Sapiens, as opposed to being simply hunted down and killed.  Or being out-competed because we were more innovative than they were, and we had more expansive social networks that enabled us to find more mates and have more children.  I suspect the truth is a mix of all of the above:

Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals
More evidence emerges that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens made love and not war thousands of years ago.

 

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Study reveals how ancient fish colonized the deep sea

The deep sea contains more than 90% of the water in our oceans, but only about a third of all fish species. Scientists have long thought the explanation for this was intuitive — shallow ocean waters are warm and full of resources, making them a prime location for new species to evolve and thrive. But a new University of Washington study led by Elizabeth Miller reports that throughout Earth’s ancient history, there were several periods of time when many fish actually favored the cold, dark, barren waters of the deep sea.

In some ways, this discovery raised more questions than it answered. What was causing fish to prefer one habitat over another? What made some fish able to move into the deep sea more easily than others? And how did these ancient shifts help create the diversity of species we have today?

When Miller mapped these flip-flopping speciation rates onto a timeline of Earth’s history, she was able to identify three major events that likely played a role.

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https://twitter.com/AP/status/1612490704118288396

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These new spacesuits are coming out later this decade:

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It may soon be time to rewrite those geology textbooks:

https://twitter.com/sciam/status/1628930116892995584

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Science is suggesting that birds could be making music through their bird songs (distinct from bird calls), paralleling our own.  So could our first compositions from deep prehistory be derived from birdsong?  

It Rocks in the Tree Tops, but Is That Bird Making Music?
Scientists are finding more evidence that birdsong parallels human-made music.

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A key ingredient for life has been found on one of Saturn's moons:

Phosphate, a key building block of life, found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus


Nasa/JPL/Space Science Institute

And they did so by exploring one of these geysers that periodically erupt from the moon's ocean underneath the ice:


Geysers on Enceladus, imaged by Cassini. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)