Welcome to Overnight News Digest- Saturday Science. Since 2007 the OND has been a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Topics in this edition include:
- Reducing meat and milk consumption in half will cut agricultural emissions by one third
- Pumping groundwater causes huge fissures in US southwest
- Depressing reality of urban development
- Swiss EV does 0 to 100 (62 mph) in less than a second
- Astronomers discover the first “bounce” in our universe
- Egyptian shipwreck proves Greek historian, Herodotus right
- We’re thinking about climate risk all wrong
- EV innovation could increase range to 3,000 miles on a single charge
- Mini plug-in solar panels selling out in Europe
- How to beat anxiety
Grist
by Max Graham
What would happen if the world cut meat and milk consumption in half?
Cows are often described as climate change criminals because of how much planet-warming methane they burp. But there’s another problem with livestock farming that’s even worse for the climate and easier to overlook: To feed the world’s growing appetite for meat, corporations and ranchers are chopping down more forests and trampling more carbon-sequestering grasslands to make room for pastures and fields of hay. Ruminants, like cattle, sheep, and goats, need space to graze, and animal feed needs space to grow. The greenhouse gases unleashed by this deforestation and land degradation mean food systems account for one-third of the world’s human-generated climate pollution.
Environmental advocates have long argued that there’s a straightforward solution to this mess: Eat less meat. Convincing more people to become vegetarians is a very effective way to limit emissions. Getting rid of meat is one question; replacing it is another. A paper published on Tuesday seeks to address both, finding that giving up meat in favor of meatlike plant products would yield significant benefits for the climate, biodiversity, and even food security in coming decades.
Science Alert
by Marya Fichte and Sebastian Cahill
Giant Cracks Emerging Across US Southwest, Scientists Warn
The United States has been pumping so much groundwater that the ground is beginning to split open across southwestern parts of the country for miles on end.
These giant cracks, aka fissures, have been spotted in states including Arizona, Utah, and California.
Groundwater is one of the main sources of freshwater on Earth– it provides almost half of all drinking water, and about 40% of global irrigation.
But humans are pumping groundwater faster than Earth can naturally replenish it.
The Cooldown
by Leo Collis
AERIAL BEFORE-AND-AFTER ILLUSION REVEALS ‘DEPRESSING’ REALITY OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT
If you get fooled when you see this image on first glance, you probably won’t be the only one.
One Redditor took to the platform to share an apparent before-and-after aerial picture of an urban development in the middle of a desert.
But upon closer inspection — and after a quick reveal from the Redditor in the caption — it turns out to be an image of a real community in Arizona, with one long road separating the desert on the left from the housing on the right.
“This looks so surrealistic to me,” said one commenter. “It’s weird how there’s only houses and no businesses/downtown area. Looks almost like something out of a dream.”
New Atlas
by Loz Blain
0-100 km/h in less than a second: Swiss EV team destroys world record
A Swiss student team has absolutely smashed the record for the world's fastest-accelerating EV. Surreal-looking video shows driver Kate Maggetti rocketing from 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph) in a staggering time just under one second. Here's how they did it.
The Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ), comprising students from ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences, has been building these record-breaking EV racers for many years now outside school hours. Indeed, team AMZ took its first world acceleration record back in 2014, and again in 2016.Since then, a competing team from the University of Stuttgart has had a stranglehold on the record, which has inched its way down from the 1.7-second zone to sit at 1.461 seconds since September 2022.
So when we say the AMZ team smashed the record, we're talking about chopping more than a third off the time. An extraordinary leap.
Big Think
by Ethan Siegel
Astronomers spot the first “bounce” in our Universe
- All throughout the Universe, regions that start off with more matter than average gravitationally grow into stars, galaxies, and even larger structures, while underdense regions give up their matter to become cosmic voids.
- But imprinted in this structure are "bouncing" signals from early on: where gravitating normal matter was pushed out by the pressure from energetic radiation.
- This should lead to a series of spherical shells of structure in the Universe: baryon acoustic oscillations. Thought to be largely a statistical phenomenon, astronomers now appear to have robustly spotted an individual one.
Greek Reporter
by Nick Kampouris
Egyptian Shipwreck Proves Ancient Greek Historian Herodotus Right
An ancient shipwreck proves the Greek historian Herodotus was correct about the observations he made about Egyptian vessels nearly twenty-five centuries ago, archaeologists said recently.
The shipwreck, discovered in the Nile River near the ancient, and now sunken, city of Thonis-Heracleionwas of a ship called a “baris.”
This exact type of vessel was described in great detail by Herodotus in his text “Histories” (Greek: ἹΣΤΟΡΙΑΙ) after a visit he made to the port city of Thonis-Heracleion in Egypt.
Herodotus was amazed by the way people were constructing the ship, which was used to sail across the Nile River.For centuries, scholars and archaeologists believed that the type of ship Herodotus described never actually existed because such ships had never once been discovered by anyone on Earth.
Mother Jones
by David Spratt
We’re Thinking About Climate Risk All Wrong
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Would you live in a building, cross a bridge, or trust a dam wall if there were a 10 percent chance of it collapsing? Or 5 percent? Or 1 percent? Of course not! In civil engineering, acceptable probabilities of failure generally range from 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-10-million.
So why, when it comes to climate action, are policies like carbon budgets accepted when they have success rates of just 50 to 66 percent? That’s hardly better than a coin toss.Policy-relevant scientific publications, such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), focus on the probabilities—the most likely outcomes. But, according to atmospheric physicist and climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances” because “when the issue is the survival of civilization is at stake, conventional means of analysis may become useless.”
The Brighter Side
by Staff Writer
Groundbreaking innovation could extend EV range to over 3,000 miles on a single charge
In the rapidly evolving world of electric vehicles (EVs), a significant leap has been made in battery technology, promising an unprecedented boost in energy storage capacities. At a time when the electric vehicle industry is experiencing explosive growth, this discovery couldn't have been timelier.
Researchers from Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH) have unveiled a groundbreaking technique to amplify the energy storage capacity of batteries tenfold. This development not only advances battery technology but could also reshape the entire electric vehicle landscape.
DW English
by Geri Rueter
Mini plug-in solar panels: Are they worth it?
Germany has seen a massive surge in the installation of plug-in solar systems. The number of small systems registered increased more than seven-fold in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year, according to official figures.
"The market is gigantic," plug-in solar advocate Christian Ofenheusle told DW. He runs the Berlin-based company EmpowerSource which promotes these relatively cheap mini systems. By 2030, he predicts there could be "12 million plug-in solar systems in Germany."
Science Focus
by Christian Jarrett
How to beat anxiety: 8 simple, concrete strategies to take control of your mind
Anxiety can be, at times, truly debilitating, making it hard to go about your day. However, feelings of unease, worry and fear – whether mild or more severe – can be dealt with. In the moment of an anxiety attack or any feelings of uneasiness, there are ways to step back and bring yourself back to a more comfortable feeling.
Equally, for those who deal with anxiety on a constant basis, there are longer-term ways to address anxiety. Here are eight, science-backed methods, to lessen feelings of anxiety, both in the long- and short-term.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the science news of the day. Please share your articles and stories in the comments.