Science News
Ancient mass extinction led to dominance of tiny fish, paleontologist shows
When times are good, it pays to be the big fish in the sea; in the aftermath of disaster, however, smaller is better.
University of Pennsylvania
According to new research led by the University of Pennsylvania's Lauren Sallan, a mass extinction 359 million years ago known as the Hangenberg event triggered a drastic and lasting transformation of Earth's vertebrate community. Beforehand, large creatures were the norm, but, for at least 40 million years following the die-off, the oceans were dominated by markedly smaller fish.
"Rather than having this thriving ecosystem of large things, you may have one gigantic relict, but otherwise everything is the size of a sardine," said Sallan, an assistant professor in Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts & Sciences.
The finding, which suggests that small, fast-reproducing fish possessed an evolutionary advantage over larger animals in the disturbed, post-extinction environment, may have implications for trends we see in modern species today, such as in fish populations, many of which are crashing due to overfishing. The research is reported in Science.
|
Lost genetic history of Inca child mummy
By Helen Briggs
Scientists have unravelled part of the genetic code of a child who was sacrificed in a ritual ceremony by the Inca civilisation 500 years ago.
The boy's mummified remains were discovered on an Argentinean mountain.
Analysis of his mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child, showed that the boy's closest living relatives are in Peru and Bolivia.
He belonged to a population of native South Americans that almost disappeared after the Spanish conquest.
Researchers in Spain were given permission to extract mitochondrial DNA from the seven-year-old boy to study part of his genome.
By comparing his genetic code with hundreds of thousands of samples held in genetic databases, they found his genetic profile was very rare.
One match was to DNA from an individual belonging to the ancient Wari Empire, which ruled the Andes long before the Incas.
|
Technology News
To infinity: How Pixar brought computers to the movies
From CNET Magazine: "Toy Story," the first full-length computer-animated movie, turns 20 this month. Behind Woody and Buzz are a bunch of computer graphics geeks who, with help from Steve Jobs, changed movies forever.
by Richard Nieva
Ed Catmull's office could be a window into the brain of Pixar.
Catmull, president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, sits at a round wooden table at Pixar's whimsical headquarters in Emeryville, California. To his right, the walls are filled with items that inspire creativity. There's a plaster mold of his left hand: the star of the first computer-animated short he made in 1972 as a graduate student at the University of Utah. There are also toys galore, a collection of old watches, and trinkets that look like they were picked up at souvenir stands around the world.
To his left, though, it's all business: a dual-monitor Mac, two elegant gray armchairs and a row of framed, understated drawings from Pixar movies, featuring friends like Woody and Buzz Lightyear.
The room is a metaphorical manifestation of the cerebral hemispheres -- fitting for the co-founder of a studio that melded computer algorithms with art in a way no one had ever done before.
Twenty years ago this month, Pixar ushered in a new era in cinema with "Toy Story," the first full-length feature film created entirely with computers. Critics praised the animated film, with Roger Ebert calling it "a visionary roller-coaster ride of a movie."
|
Dubai Is Seriously Buying Jetpacks for Its Firefighters. Seriously.
Alex Davies
Dubai has a lot of money. But having money and having good ideas for how to spend it don’t always go together. That seems to explain why its fleet of police cars includes a Mercedes SLS AMG, Ferrari FF, a Bugatti Veyron, and Lamborghini Aventador. Also why, in 2014, the city seriously considered using a two-seater Lotus Evora and a couple of Ford Mustangs for shuttling paramedics to accidents at triple-digit speeds.
The latest example of Dubai’s … unconventional … approach to tackling emergency situations is a newly signed contract with Martin Aircraft Company, “for the intended future delivery of manned and unmanned jetpacks.”
Yup, jetpacks. “We see them performing a first-responder role,” said Lt Col Ali Hassan Almutawa, director of the Dubai Civil Defence Operations Department, according to the BBC. Almutawa added that they’d be especially good for handling fires in skyscrapers: “Sometimes, in fires, people go to the top of the building. You cannot always get ladders there, and you cannot always use the elevators.”
|
Environmental News
Earth’s water originated close to home, lava analysis suggests
Deuterium levels in mantle argue against comets as H2O source
By Thomas Sumner
Molecules entombed inside pristine magmas suggest that Earth’s water came from soggy dust, not icy comets.
The relative abundance of a heavier variety of hydrogen called deuterium serves as a fingerprint of where in the solar system a reservoir of H2O originated (SN: 5/16/15, p. 18). Previous work hunting for the source of Earth’s water measured deuterium in seawater, but that’s a tainted metric, researchers report in the Nov. 13 Science. Aboveground processes such as hydrogen atoms leaking into space can hike deuterium concentrations in the planet’s surface water (SN: 9/5/15, p. 8).
The researchers found that deuterium levels in water trapped inside molten rock unaltered since the planet’s early days are significantly lower than those in seawater. The lower deuterium fingerprint for Earth’s primordial water hints that the world’s wetness resulted from water-soaked dust grains present during the planet’s assembly, the researchers conclude.
|
Climate risk could undermine investments, report warns
By Mark Kinver
A report has warned that investors could be hit hard amid changes in short-term market swings, triggered by climate impact concerns.
University of Cambridge experts said global investment portfolios could see losses of up to 45%.
No investor was "immune from the risks posed by climate change", they added.
In a recent speech to the City, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said climate change would "threaten financial resilience".
The report, Unhedgeable Risk: How Climate Change Sentiment Impacts Investment, was commissioned by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership (CISL) and the Investment Leaders Group.
|
Medical News
Blood sample new way of detecting cancer
Umea University
A new RNA test of blood platelets can be used to detect, classify and pinpoint the location of cancer by analysing a sample equivalent to one drop of blood. Using this new method for blood-based RNA tests of blood platelets, researchers have been able to identify cancer with 96 per cent accuracy. This according to a study at Umeå University in Sweden recently published in the journal Cancer Cell.
"Being able to detect cancer at an early stage is vital. We have studied how a whole new blood-based method of biopsy can be used to detect cancer, which in the future renders an invasive cell tissue sample unnecessary in diagnosing lung cancer, for instance. In the study, nearly all forms of cancer were identified, which proves that blood-based biopsies have an immense potential to improve early detection of cancer," according to Jonas Nilsson, cancer researcher at Umeå University and co-author of the article.
In the study, researchers from Umeå University, in collaborations with researchers from the Netherlands and the US, have investigated how a new method of blood-based RNA tests of the part of the blood called platelets could be used in detecting and classifying cancer.
|
Mindfulness meditation trumps placebo in pain reduction
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found new evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo.
This is significant because placebo-controlled trials are the recognized standard for demonstrating the efficacy of clinical and pharmacological treatments.
The research, published in the Nov.11 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that study participants who practiced mindfulness meditation reported greater pain relief than placebo. Significantly, brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation produced very different patterns of activity than those produced by placebo to reduce pain.
"We were completely surprised by the findings," said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and lead investigator of the study. "While we thought that there would be some overlap in brain regions between meditation and placebo, the findings from this study provide novel and objective evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain in a unique fashion.
|
Space News
Mighty winds fuel megastorms on Titan
Long-lasting squalls on the Saturn moon flood the surface with liquid methane, simulations suggest
By Christopher Crockett
OXON HILL, Md. — Beneath the orange haze of Saturn’s moon Titan, methane rains from the sky and pools in lakes — and might even burst forth from massive storm squalls like those seen on Earth.
Titan has garden-variety thunderstorms that bring a bit of rain, then disappear. Now, the Cassini orbiter has seen phenomena that can’t be explained by these run-of-the-mill storms: cloud outbursts, liquid-carved channels and dark regions “reminiscent of rain falling on a parking lot,” planetary scientist Scot Rafkin reported November 11 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.
Using computer simulations of cloud systems, Rafkin found that with a bit of wind shear, Titan could produce giant, long-lasting storm systems. On Titan, though, these storms would be beefed up: The squalls would last for longer than 24 hours and travel for more than 1,000 kilometers while dumping a couple of meters’ worth of methane from clouds three times as high as their counterparts on Earth.
|
Astronomers spot most distant object in the solar system, could point to other rogue planets
By Eric Hand
NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND—Astronomers have found the most distant object ever in our solar system, three times farther away than Pluto. The dwarf planet, which has been designated V774104, is between 500 and 1000 kilometers across. It will take another year before scientists pin down its orbit, but it could end up joining an emerging class of extreme solar system objects whose strange orbits point to the hypothetical influence of rogue planets or nearby stars.
“We can’t explain these objects’ orbits from what we know about the solar system,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who announced the discovery here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. V774104 currently sits 15.4 billion kilometers from the sun, or 103 astronomical units (AU) away. One AU is the distance between Earth and the sun.
The dwarf planet could eventually join one of two clubs. If its orbit one day takes it closer to our sun, it would become part of a more common population of icy worlds whose orbits can be explained by gravitational interactions with Neptune. But if its orbit never brings it close to the sun, it could join a rare club with two other worlds, Sedna and 2012 VP113.
|
Odd News
Mysterious 'Blood Rain' Tints Water a Gruesome Hue
by Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer
Residents of several villages in northwest Spain received an unpleasant surprise last fall, when they noticed that the water in their fountains had turned a gory shade of red. The tint wasn't left behind by a guilty murderer's bloody hands, but rather by microscopic algae that arrived in a recent rainfall.
But at the time, no one knew what had caused their pristine reservoirs to suddenly resemble grisly crime scenes. Speculation ran rampant, blaming everything from contaminants dropped from airplanes to biblical plagues (a similar "blood rain" episode in Kerala, India, in 2001 sparked suggestions that the rain had extraterrestrial origins). Joaquín Pérez, who lived nearby, decided to collect rainwater to see if he could detect the culprit, according to a statement by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology.
Over the next several months, Pérez gathered samples, noticing particles in the water that stained it red. He sent the samples to researchers at the University of Salamanca, where they confirmed in a study that the "blood rain" was teeming with microscopic freshwater algae called Haematococcus pluvialis, which produce a red pigment when they're stressed
|