Science Megathread

[Continential]

Don't know where to put this, so I'll put this here.

Climate change: Large-scale CO2 removal facility set for Scotland

A large facility capable of extracting significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air is being planned for north east Scotland.

The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year - the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees.

The extracted gas could be stored permanently deep under the seabed off the Scottish coast.

[Frodo]

You will never look at dirt quite the same again:

Neandertal DNA from cave mud shows two waves of migration across Eurasia
Genetic material left behind in sediments could yield troves of data



Sediments from the Galería de las Estatuas cave (pictured) in Spain contain Neandertal DNA. That genetic material is helping researchers piece together the migration history of these ancient hominids.
JAVIER TRUEBA/MADRID SCIENTIFIC FILMS

A few years ago, scientists showed that it’s possible to extract prehistoric human DNA from dirt, which contains genetic material left behind by our ancestors from skin flakes, hair or dried excrement or bodily fluids such as sweat or blood. Genetic analysis of ancient sediments could therefore yield valuable insights on human evolution, given that ancient human fossils with enough DNA suitable for analysis are exceedingly rare (SN: 6/26/19).

Until now, the ancient human DNA analyzed from sediments came from mitochondria — the organelles that act as energy factories in our cells — not the chromosomes in cell nuclei, which contain the actual genetic instructions for building and regulating the body. Although chromosomes hold far more information, retrieving samples of this nuclear DNA from caves proved challenging because of its relative scarcity. A human cell often possesses thousands of copies of its mitochondrial genome for every one set of chromosomes, and the vast majority of any DNA found in ancient dirt belongs to other animals and to microbes.

To extract ancient human chromosomal DNA from caves, Vernot and colleagues identified regions in chromosomes rich in mutations specific to hominids to help the team filter out nonhuman DNA. This helped the researchers successfully analyze Neandertal chromosomal DNA from more than 150 samples of sediment roughly 50,000 to 200,000 years old from a cave in Spain and two caves in Siberia.

[Frodo]

Scientists show a single catalyst can perform the first step of turning CO2 into fuel in two very different ways
Their work aims to bridge two approaches to driving the reaction – one powered by heat, the other by electricity – with the goal of discovering more efficient and sustainable ways to convert carbon dioxide into useful products.


Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

[John Dule]

Important step towards nuclear fusion!

[FT-02 Senator A.F.E. 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

S******g bricks? Nah, I prefer pissing bricks out.  

Cosmic concrete developed from space dust and astronaut blood

Transporting a single brick to Mars can cost more than a million British pounds—making the future construction of a Martian colony seem prohibitively expensive. Scientists at The University of Manchester have now developed a way to potentially overcome this problem, by creating a concrete-like material made of extra-terrestrial dust along with the blood, sweat and tears of astronauts.

In their study, published today in Materials Today Bio, a protein from human blood, combined with a compound from urine, sweat or tears, could glue together simulated moon or Mars soil to produce a material stronger than ordinary concrete, perfectly suited for construction work in extra-terrestrial environments.

The cost of transporting a single brick to Mars has been estimated at about US$2 million, meaning future Martian colonists cannot bring their building materials with them, but will have to utilize resources they can obtain on-site for construction and shelter. This is known as in-situ resource utilization (or ISRU) and typically focusses on the use of loose rock and Martian soil (known as regolith) and sparse water deposits. However, there is one overlooked resource that will, by definition, also be available on any crewed mission to the Red Planet: the crew themselves.

In an article published today in the journal Materials Today Bio, scientists demonstrated that a common protein from blood plasma—human serum albumin—could act as a binder for simulated moon or Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material. The resulting novel material, termed AstroCrete, had compressive strengths as high as 25 MPa (Megapascals), about the same as the 20–32 MPa seen in ordinary concrete.

However, the scientists found that incorporating urea—which is a biological waste product that the body produces and excretes through urine, sweat and tears—could further increase the compressive strength by over 300%, with the best performing material having a compressive strength of almost 40 MPa, substantially stronger than ordinary concrete.

[Frodo]

Does everyone remember the 'Great Oxidation Event' we all learned about in science class that made it possible for creatures like us to exist?  Now it is being theorized that volcanic eruptions are what got that ball rolling:

Volcanic eruptions may have spurred first ‘whiffs’ of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere

[Meclazine for Israel]

New photos of Mercury.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-03/spacecraft-captures-first-glimpse-of-mercury/100510338

[Frodo]

Enormous 'shipyard' of ancient galaxies discovered 11 billion light-years away
A similar protocluster may have created our Milky Way.


The G237 protocluster with its galaxies in different colors representing different wavelengths of observations. (Image credit: ESA/Herschel and XMM-Newton; NASA/Spitzer; NAOJ/Subaru; Large Binocular Telescope; ESO/VISTA. Polletta, M. et al. 2021; Koyama, Y. et al. 2021)

Astronomers have discovered a massive "shipyard" where galaxies are built, similar to the one our Milky Way grew up in.

The giant structure, called a protocluster, contains more than 60 galaxies and is 11 billion light-years from Earth, so far away that scientists are observing a part of the universe that is only 3 billion years old.

Researchers released a paper on the protocluster named G237 in January, but its existence has now been confirmed by an international team of astronomers, who published their follow-up findings on Oct. 26 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"You can think of galaxy protoclusters such as G237 as a galaxy shipyard in which massive galaxies are being assembled, only this structure existed at a time when the universe was 3 billion years old," study co-author Brenda Frye, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a statement.

Gravity pulls stars and other matter together to form galaxies, which then have a tendency to group together to form clusters. Scientists know little about protoclusters, partly because these conglomerations are too faint to be detected with optical light, according to Frye.

Researchers first observed G237 in the far-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum using the European Space Agency's Planck telescope.

Scientists have now confirmed its existence through follow-up observations, using the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the Subaru Telescope in Japan, as well as archival data, the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

[Frodo]

Water Detected in Ancient, Distant Galaxy From The Beginnings of The Universe


Artist's impression of emission from water and carbon in SPT0311-58. (ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO))

Some of the ingredients necessary for life didn't take very long to emerge after the Universe winked into existence.

According to a new analysis of a pair of galaxies at the dawn of time, water was present in the Universe just 780 million years after the Big Bang – when the Universe was just 5 percent of its current age.

This suggests that, even though heavy elements were still relatively scarce, no time was wasted in the creation of molecules.

The galaxies, at least as we see them after their light has traveled 12.88 billion years, are in the process of merging together into one big galaxy, collectively known as SPT0311-58, and they're among the oldest known galaxies in the Universe.

The gravitational disruptions caused by their interactions are thought to be triggering a wave of star formation that's using up all the available molecular gas. But there's still enough gas that astronomers were able to peer into it, obtaining spectral signatures that reveal the presence of certain molecules.

[Frodo]

Scientists, archaeologists, and linguists believe they have found the geographic source for those peoples speaking the ancestral tongues that gave rise to Mongolian, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese, among other Northeast Asian languages (those who spoke ancestral Chinese dialects were farming elsewhere along the Yellow River valley further south):

Japanese-Korean-Turkish language group traced to farmers in ancient China


source: carinteriordesign.net

A study combining linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence has traced the origins of the family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian and the people who speak them to millet farmers who inhabited a region in northeastern China about 9,000 years ago.

The findings detailed on Wednesday document a shared genetic ancestry for the hundreds of millions of people who speak what the researchers call Transeurasian languages across an area stretching more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km).

The findings illustrate how humankind's embrace of agriculture following the Ice Age powered the dispersal of some of the world's major language families. Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.

There are 98 Transeurasian languages. Among these are Korean and Japanese as well as: various Turkic languages including Turkish in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia; various Mongolic languages including Mongolian in Central and Northeast Asia; and various Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia.

This language family's beginnings were traced to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area encompassing parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across northeastern Asia, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and the steppes and east into the Korean peninsula and over the sea to the Japanese archipelago over thousands of years.

[FT-02 Senator A.F.E. 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

-snip-

Inb4 Emperor Xi uses this to justify claiming more territory

[Frodo]

Earth's 1st continents may have appeared 750 million years earlier


Credit: Science Photo Library

The new work suggests Earth's cratons first started emerging up to 3.3 billion years ago, roughly three-quarters of a billion years earlier that most prior models predicted. In addition, the researchers noted that plate tectonics likely did not play a major role in the rise of these cratons.

"Instead, the first continents probably rose above sea level as they were inflated by progressive injection of magma derived from deep in the Earth," Mulder said. "The processes that likely caused the rise of the first continents above the oceans are completely different to the processes that produce elevated subaerial crust on the Earth today."

The chemical breakdown of continental rock traps the global warming gas carbon dioxide. "The emergence and weathering of the earliest landmasses on the Earth between 3.3 billion and 3 billion years ago would have sequestered carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lead to global cooling," Chowdhury said. "Indeed, this hypothesis is supported by the first appearance of glacial deposits in the geological record around 3 billion years ago."

[FT-02 Senator A.F.E. 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

After record low, monarch butterflies return to California

PACIFIC GROVE, Calif. (AP) — There is a ray of hope for the vanishing orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies.

The number wintering along California’s central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food due to drought.

An annual winter count last year by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Mendocino County to Baja California, Mexico, in the south in the 1980s. Now, their roosting sites are concentrated mostly on California’s central coast.

This year’s official count started Saturday and will last three weeks but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites, said Sarina Jepsen, director of Endangered Species at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

“This is certainly not a recovery but we’re really optimistic and just really glad that there are monarchs here and that gives us a bit of time to work toward recovery of the Western monarch migration,” Jepsen said.

Western monarch butterflies head south from the Pacific Northwest to California each winter, returning to the same places and even the same trees, where they cluster. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March.

The Western monarch butterfly population has declined by more than 99% since the 1980s.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-california-butterflies-habitat-destruction-ffc90bc85fe95c60acc368e00966d025

[FT-02 Senator A.F.E. 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

How to read a jellyfish's mind


^{Clytia hemisphaerica from the side. Credit: B. Weissbourd}

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections. Understanding the precise circuits of brain cells that orchestrate all of our day-to-day behaviors—such as moving our limbs, responding to fear and other emotions, and so on—is an incredibly complex puzzle for neuroscientists. But now, fundamental questions about the neuroscience of behavior may be answered through a new and much simpler model organism: tiny jellyfish.

Caltech researchers have now developed a kind of genetic toolbox tailored for tinkering with Clytia hemisphaerica, a type of jellyfish about 1 centimeter in diameter when fully grown. Using this toolkit, the tiny creatures have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated. Because a jellyfish is transparent, researchers can then watch the glow of the animal's neural activity as it behaves naturally. In other words, the team can read a jellyfish's mind as it feeds, swims, evades predators, and more, in order to understand how the animal's relatively simple brain coordinates its behaviors.

[Lourdes]

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211209-experimental-mrna-vaccine-for-hiv-shows-promise-in-animals

Experimental mRNA vaccine for HIV shows promise in animals

Washington (AFP) – An experimental HIV vaccine based on mRNA -- the same technology used in two highly successful Covid-19 vaccines -- has shown promise in experiments in mice and monkeys, according to a study published Thursday in Nature Medicine.

The research, which was carried out by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Moderna and other institutions, demonstrated that the vaccine was safe and prompted desired antibody and cellular immune responses against an HIV-like virus.

Rhesus macaques that received a priming shot followed by multiple boosters had a 79 percent lower per-exposure risk of infection by simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV) compared to unvaccinated animals.

[Frodo]

It is expected to last for a decade.  Hopefully it will surpass that:

NASA Launches IXPE, a New X-ray Space Telescope
The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer will probe the physics behind black holes, neutron stars and other dynamic cosmic objects

[Frodo]

Its launch date is now Christmas Day:

What The Giant James Webb Telescope Will See That Hubble Can't
The invisible will become visible.

[Frodo]

Shouldn't the name of this spacecraft be 'Icarus' instead?

NASA craft 'touches' sun for 1st time, dives into atmosphere


source: the Independent

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Scientists are closing in on an HIV vaccine

Thanks to researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institutes of Health, there is evidence that an experimental mRNA vaccine has been successful in treating against an HIV-virus relative in mice and rhesus macaques. Such animal research is generally the first step towards producing a successful human vaccine.

mRNA vaccines differ from their conventional vaccine counterparts, which typically contain dead or weakened versions of the target pathogen — or, alternatively, contain pieces of the genetic code of a pathogen wrapped up in a different, harmless virus's genetic code. However, mRNA vaccines actually inject a strand of bespoke RNA that instructs one's cells to produce proteins similar to the ones found on pathogens (microscopic organisms that cause disease). One's immune system then recognizes those proteins and produces antibodies for fighting them.

This new experimental vaccine does this against simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV), which is similar to HIV. The SHIV vaccine actually targets two proteins that appear on the SHIV virus, known as Env and Gag, and thus contains the mRNA instructions for one's (human) cells to replicate those proteins.

As lead researcher Paolo Lusso of NIAID's Laboratory of Immunoregulation told Salon, Env is analogous to an "outer coat," while Gag is a "major component of what we call the core of the virus."

The vaccine convinces muscle cells in inoculated animals to produce virus-like particles (VLPs) with copies of Env all over its surface. Lusso added that Gag was also included because it is "a big inducer of T-cell immunity, which to use an imprecise but useful metaphor are cells that will recognize and infect the [pathogen] and kill it, or facilitate destruction."

In the case of the experimental SHIV vaccine, the early results are promising. When the studies included mice, two injections of the mRNA vaccine induced neutralizing antibodies in all of the tested animals. After the scientists moved on to rhesus macaques — which, as primates, are closer to humans than mice — they found that the inoculations (dispensed in a much more complex study) were largely successful. They produced only mild side effects, like loss of appetite. By the 58th week of study, all of the monkeys had measurable levels of neutralizing antibodies against most of the strains in an SHIV test panel.

[...]

While Lusso was excited as he described the vaccine's future, he also cautioned that scientists are in the very early stages of developing it. Vaccine clinical trials require multiple complex phases of human testing so that experts can be as certain as possible that a vaccine is safe before it is distributed to the public. Usually there are three or four phases in a vaccine trial; the COVID-19 vaccine — which was made in under a year and can thus be considered an unusually accelerated case of vaccine development — was sped up by having multiple phases take place simultaneously. In contrast, the SHIV vaccine has yet to officially commence with phase one. Once it does, researchers will have their work cut out for them.

"The major challenge will be to make this vaccine practical," Lusso told Salon, noting that HIV is a difficult target for the immune system, and therefore immunologists need to figure out how to reduce the number of necessary booster shots.

"It's hard to imagine that we could use less than four booster injections, or let's say four injections altogether, one initial vaccine and three boosters," Lusso explained. "And we may still not get the level of protection we want, so that may require even additional boosters, but there are ways probably to just make each of these boosters more efficient."

[Frodo]

This is not the first time water has been found on Mars (previously limited to the poles or deep underground), but this new discovery shows these particular deposits are potentially much more easily accessible to future astronauts, which means this could be a game-changer, and make human settlement of Mars more likely:

Scientists discover ‘hidden water’ just three feet below Mars’ Grand Canyon


Mars’ own Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris, is shown on the surface of the planet in this composite image made aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft (Getty Images)

[Frodo]

Its launch date is now Christmas Day:

What The Giant James Webb Telescope Will See That Hubble Can't
The invisible will become visible.

Finally it is off into space:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1474820506109059080

[emailking]

There's also a thread for the telescope now on USGD.

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=476492

[Frodo]

Here is some of what's coming down the pipeline as far as space is concerned:

https://twitter.com/SPACEdotcom/status/1475089641435021320

[Frodo]

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

[Frodo]

This is interesting:

Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought, study finds


source: geochembio.com

The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century—decades earlier than records suggest—due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.

An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of ocean warming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard.

Using the chemical signatures found in marine microorganisms, the researchers found that the Arctic Ocean began warming rapidly at the beginning of the last century as warmer and saltier waters flowed in from the Atlantic—a phenomenon called Atlantification—and that this change likely preceded the warming documented by modern instrumental measurements. Since 1900, the ocean temperature has risen by approximately 2 degrees Celsius, while sea ice has retreated and salinity has increased.

The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, provide the first historical perspective on Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean and reveal a connection with the North Atlantic that is much stronger than previously thought. The connection is capable of shaping Arctic climate variability, which could have important implications for sea-ice retreat and global sea level rise as the polar ice sheets continue to melt.