Welcome to the Overnight News Digest, Saturday Science with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, Rise above the swamp and jeremybloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to): Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Topics in today’s digest include:
- Russia disrupting their GPS signals
- Get your free Covid test kits, again
- Taking a few pages from Tesla’s playbook
- Ancient Egyptian masterpiece
- Commercial dishwashers and gut health
- Seeing Earth from space
- Low-frequency sounds make people dance
- Asthma breakthrough
- Solving the genetic mystery of how life began
- Eco-friendly fertilizer
- JWST breaks Hubble record
- Aspartame link to anxiety
- What did big oil know, and when did they know it?
- If humans survive for a million years
- Flow batteries
Wired
by Matt Burgess
GOS signals are being disrupted in Russia
Every day, billions of people use the GPS satellite system to find their way around the world—but GPS signals are vulnerable. Jamming and spoofing attacks can cripple GPS connections entirely or make something appear in the wrong location, causing disruption and safety issues. Just ask Russia.
New data analysis reveals that multiple major Russian cities appear to have faced widespread GPS disruption during the past week. The signal interference follows Ukraine launching long-range drone attacks deep into Russian territory, and it may act as a way to potentially stop drones that rely upon GPS for navigation, experts say.
The GPS interference has “expanded on a scale that hasn't been seen before,” says Erik Kannike, a program manager at Estonian defense intelligence firm SensusQ who has been monitoring the situation. “What we're seeing now, since about a week ago, is GPS jamming bubbles covering hundreds if not thousands of kilometers around tactical cities.”
The GPS issues were first spotted by the monitoring system GPSJam, which uses data from planes to track problems with the satellite navigation system. The website has logged an increasing number of GPS disturbances in the Russian cities of Saratov, Volgograd, and Penza since the start of December. All of the cities are in western Russia and within hundreds of kilometers of the border with Ukraine.
The Verge
by Barbara Krasnoff
How to order free rapid covid tests from the US government — again
Winter is here, and once again, warnings are going up about the spread of the covid-19 virus — along with the flu and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. To try to minimize the upsurge, the US government is restarting a program that it canceled on September 2nd, 2022, and is once again offering free home rapid antigen tests to each US household. This is the fourth round of free tests that’s been made available; according to the government website, orders will start shipping the week of December 19th.
As before, it’s extremely simple to put in your order. You will not need to submit a credit card or any other financial information.
- Go to COVIDTests.gov.
- Tap on the button reading Order Free At-Home Tests.
Business Insider
by Alexa St. John
With electric car battery costs on the rise, auto companies are doing everything they can to make their EV offerings more affordable for the masses in the coming years.
Making that happen may require forgetting much of what they've learned about supply chains over a century, and replacing it with a few pages from Tesla's playbook.
Automakers have been trying to evade today's EV woes by exploring different kinds of batteries to slash their dependence on the in-demand materials found in traditional lithium-ion setups. They've also been ramping up battery recycling efforts and working to return lithium, nickel, cobalt and more into the supply chain.
These solutions come with challenges in terms of timing and expense, at least in the near term. That means car companies are seeking an alternative and racing to secure their battery supply in the US.
That means making investments in battery material sourcing, battery production, and more, to reduce the global supply disruptions the industry saw from the pandemic.
"Almost all the major companies are investing in that for that very reason: to vertically integrate more and get more control of their supply chain," said Peter Maithel, auto industry principal analyst at Infor.
Live Science
by Owen Jarus
An ancient Egyptian "masterpiece" painting of birds flying and perching within a verdant marsh is so detailed, modern researchers can tell exactly which species artisans illustrated more than 3,300 years ago.
The painting was discovered about a century ago on the walls of the palace at Amarna, an ancient Egyptian capital located about 186 miles (300 kilometers) south of Cairo. Although previous research has examined the mural's wildlife, the new study is the first to take a deep dive into the identity of all of the birds, some of which have unnatural markings.Many of the birds depicted are rock pigeons (Columba livia), but there are also images showing a pied kingfisher (Ceryle rudis), a red-backed shrike (Lanius collurio) and a white wagtail (Motacilla alba), study co-researcher Christopher Stimpson(opens in new tab), an honorary associate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and study co-author Barry Kemp(opens in new tab), professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, wrote in a study published Dec. 15 in the journal Antiquity(opens in new tab). The team studied a facsimile (a copy) of the artwork and used previously published ornithological and taxonomic research papers to identify the birds.
The Brighter Side News
by Cezmi A. Addis
Dishwashers can be very bad for your gut health, study says
Residue from rinse agents is left behind on dishes after they are cleaned in professional-grade dishwashers. This damages the natural protective layer in the gut and can contribute to the onset of chronic diseases, as demonstrated by researchers working with organoids at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research.
Whether it’s at a restaurant, at school or in the barracks, commercial dishwashers help plates, glasses and cutlery become squeaky clean and dry in a matter of minutes.These practical appliances come with risks, however, as was recently discovered in a new study by researchers at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research (SIAF), an associated institute of the University of Zurich (UZH). One ingredient in particular found in commercial rinse agents has a toxic effect on the gastrointestinal tract.
Big Think
by Ron Garan
”I went to space and discovered an enormous lie.”
A curious phenomenon often occurs when astronauts travel to space and look out on our planet for the first time: They see how interconnected and fragile life on Earth is, and they feel a sudden responsibility to protect it.
Astronaut Ron Garan experienced this so-called “overview effect” when he first saw Earth from space. When he looked out on the planet, he saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life, all protected by a remarkably thin atmosphere.
What he did not see was the thing that society often gives top priority: the economy. For Garan, seeing Earth from space revealed that problems like global warming, deforestation, and biodiversity loss are not disconnected. They are the symptoms of an underlying flaw in how we perceive ourselves as humans: We fail to realize that we are a planetary species.
Popular Mechanics
by Ashley Stimpson
This Key Element of Music Makes People Dance Even More
- Researchers at McMaster University in Canada fitted concertgoers with motion-sensing headbands to learn what musical factors made them dance.
- When speakers that played a very low bass frequency were turned on, the concertgoers’ movement increased by 12 percent.
- Very low frequency sounds are perceived as vibrations by the inner ear, which has close links to balance, rhythm, and the motor system. The researchers suspect it is this relationship that inspires people to dance.
Big news for DJs everywhere: scientists have figured out a surefire way to make people boogie. Surprisingly, it has little to do with audible sound, like a repetitive guitar lick or killer drum solo. Instead, according to a new study published in Current Biology, people dance more in the presence of very deep bass frequencies—those so low they’re inaudible to the human ear.
New Atlas
by Rich Hariday
Asthma breakthrough uncovers key mechanism behind airway thickening
New research from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology has brought a novel, long-term treatment for severe asthma a step closer. Building on a decade of work, the new findings present a potential way to block the thickening of airway muscle tissue seen in chronic asthma patients.
A foundational study published in 2011 revealed a particular immune molecule plays a crucial role in the thickening of asthma patients' airways. Dubbed LIGHT, the protein is produced by immune T cells in excessive volumes when the body is presented with an allergen.
[…]For several years the La Jolla team knew the LIGHT protein was fundamentally involved in these airway tissue changes. But the exact mechanisms at play were still unclear.
In this new study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the researchers looked at two key receptors expressed on smooth muscle cells in the airway. These two receptors are how LIGHT molecules bind to the airway muscle cells.
The big discovery here was that one of the receptors (LTβR) is vital for tissue remodeling to take place. Senior author on the study, Matthew Croft, said mouse studies revealed LIGHT molecules binding with LTβR receptors trigger the airway thickening seen in chronic asthma.
The Brighter Side of News
by Norifumi Morikawa
Scientists solve the genetic mystery to how all life on Earth began
The missing link isn’t a not-yet-discovered fossil, after all. It’s a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, developed by two researchers in Japan to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology.
They published their results in Nature Communications.“Chemical evolution was first proposed in the 1920s as the idea that life first originated with the formation of macromolecules from simple small molecules, and those macromolecules formed molecular assemblies that could proliferate,” said first-author Muneyuki Matsuo, assistant professor of chemistry in the Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life at Hiroshima University.[…]Matsuo partnered with Kensuke Kurihara, researcher at KYOCERA Corporation, to answer the century-old question: how did the free-form chemicals of early Earth become life? Like many researchers, they initially thought it came down to the environment: the ingredients formed under high pressure and temperature, then cooled into more life-friendly conditions. The issue was propagation.
“Proliferation requires spontaneous polymer production and self-assembly under the same conditions,” Matsuo said.They designed and synthesized a new prebiotic monomer from amino acid derivatives as a precursor to the self-assembly of primitive cells. When added to room temperature water at atmospheric pressure, the amino acid derivatives condensed, arranging into peptides, which then spontaneously formed droplets.
Popular Science
by Carla Delgado
Wastewater could be the secret to eco-friendly fertilizer
Nitrogen fertilizers play a significant role in global crop production. About half of the human population is supported by food grown with fertilizers. Although the planet’s atmosphere comprises approximately 78 percent nitrogen, it doesn’t come in a reactive form that plants can utilize. It wasn’t until 1908 that chemists developed a technique to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into a state of synthetic nitrogen that plants could use.
This technique, called the Haber-Bosch process, is how nitrogen is captured from the air and reacted with hydrogen to produce ammonia, an effective fertilizer that plants can absorb from the soil. This process is the standard industrial procedure for making ammonia today, but it accounts for about 1.4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.[…]In a recent Science of The Total Environment study, researchers evaluated the process of removing ammonia from wastewater and converting it into fertilizer, which can be a more sustainable alternative.
Municipal wastewater generally contains a high concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus, says Kar, who was involved in the study. At treatment facilities, the wastewater is treated to reduce this concentration and avoid issues—like eutrophication, which can lead to algae overgrowth— when it is discharged to surface water bodies, he adds.By capturing nitrogen from wastewater, producers may avoid the energy-intensive production of ammonia. In addition, it reuses nitrogen that is already fixed in the atmosphere. “One of the ways of capturing the nitrogen at wastewater treatment facilities is by air-stripping,” says Kar. “At a certain process temperature, excess ammonia from wastewater stream transfers from liquid to gaseous phase, which can further react with acids to form stable nitrogen-rich fertilizers.”
Big Think
by Ethan Siegal
It’s real! JWST breaks Hubble’s all-time distance record!
- Although Hubble showed us the far reaches of the deep Universe as never before, it was fundamentally limited and couldn't see beyond 400 million years after the Big Bang.
- JWST was designed, in part, to surpass those limits, but in order to know which objects are truly the earliest, most distant ones, long observations with spectra were required.
- At last, the first ultra-distant galaxies from the JADES survey have been revealed by JWST's superior data, and the most distant one has smashed Hubble's old record: the first of likely many new records.
Neuroscience News
by Florida State University
Common sweetener linked to anxiety
Florida State University College of Medicine researchers have linked aspartame, an artificial sweetener found in nearly 5,000 diet foods and drinks, to anxiety-like behavior in mice.
Along with producing anxiety in the mice who consumed aspartame, the effects extended up to two generations from the males exposed to the sweetener.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“What this study is showing is we need to look back at the environmental factors, because what we see today is not only what’s happening today, but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer,” said co-author Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Biomedical Sciences.
The study came about, in part, because of previous research from the Bhide Lab on the transgenerational effects of nicotine on mice. The research showed temporary—or epigenetic—changes in mice sperm cells. Unlike genetic changes (mutations), epigenetic changes are reversible and don’t change the DNA sequence; however, they can change how the body reads a DNA sequence.
“We were working on the effects of nicotine on the same type of model,” Bhide said. “The father smokes. What happened to the children?”
Mother Jones
by Beth Gardiner
What Big Oil Knew About Its Products’ Climate Risks—and When
Carroll Muffett began wondering in 2008 when the world’s biggest oil companies had first understood the science of climate change and their product’s role in causing it. A lawyer then working as a consultant to environmental groups, he started researching the question at night and on weekends, ordering decades-old reports, books, and magazines off Amazon and eBay, or from academic libraries.
It became a years-long quest, and as he pressed on, Muffett noticed one report kept coming up in the footnotes of the memos and papers he was poring through—a 1968 paper commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful fossil fuel trade group, and written by Elmer Robinson and Bob Robbins, scientists at the Stanford Research Institute, known as SRI. Muffett wasn’t sure what it said, but it was cited so often he knew there must be something big in it.
Then part of Stanford University, SRI wasn’t an ordinary department, but a contract research outfit that had been intertwined from its founding with oil and gas interests. The paper had been delivered privately to the petroleum institute, not published like typical academic work, and only a few copies had spilled into the public realm. Long since forgotten, they had been gathering dust in a handful of university libraries. Eventually, through an interlibrary loan, Muffett managed to get a hold of one. “There seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe,” the authors wrote in the 1968 paper.
Inverse
by Anders Sandberg
IF HUMANS SURVIVE FOR A MILLION YEARS, THIS IS WHAT THE WORLD MIGHT LOOK LIKE
Most species are transitory. They go extinct, branch into new species, or change over time due to random mutations and environmental shifts. A typical mammalian species can be expected to exist for a million years. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for roughly 300,000 years. So what will happen if we make it to a million years?
Science fiction author H.G. Wells was the first to realize that humans could evolve into something very alien. In his 1883 essay, “The Man of the Year Million,” he envisioned what's now become a cliche: big-brained, tiny-bodied creatures. Later, he speculated that humans could also split into two or more new species.
While Wells' evolutionary models have not stood the test of time, the three basic options he considered still hold. We could go extinct, turn into several species or change.
An added ingredient is that we have biotechnology that could greatly increase the probability of each of them. Foreseeable future technologies such as human enhancement (making ourselves smarter, stronger, or in other ways better using drugs, microchips, genetics, or other technology), brain emulation (uploading our brains to computers), or artificial intelligence may produce technological forms of new species not seen in biology.
Cosmos Magazine
by Ellen Phiddian
In late September, a new power station opened in Dalian, northeastern China.
It’s a big battery – but it doesn’t look much like one that Tesla would sell you. The station is filled with tanks and pumps, moving liquids filled with vanadium throughout the facility. The only lithium to be had is in the phones of the staff operating the plant.
It’s a “flow battery”: a 40-year-old Australian invention that is receiving renewed focus as our energy grids transition.
How flow batteries work
Flow batteries were first developed in the 1980s, by now-Emeritus Professor Maria Skyllas-Kazacos at the University of New South Wales.
“Most of the batteries that we use are enclosed systems,” says Associate Professor Alexey Glushenkov, a chemist and research lead in battery materials at the Australian National University’s Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program.
In conventional batteries, the metals and salts that react to make electricity are all held in the one unit: the anode supplies electrons into an external circuit on one side, and the cathode accepts them on the other.
This is called a reduction-oxidation, or redox, reaction.
Flow batteries use the same chemical principle – they’re also called redox flow batteries – but their physical structure is different.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the science of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.