Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck and Rise above the swamp. 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.
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.
Some of the science topics in tonight’s digest:
- Dinosaur fossils showing asteroid impact,
- Chernobyl’s black fungi superpower,
- Chernobyl before and after troops arrived,
- Is light a wave or a particle?
- Using iron to target only cancer cells,
- EPA bans cancer-causing asbestos,
- Pancreatic cancer’s early detection possibility,
- Rare coin features rare image of Charlemagne,
- Ancient stone road traversed by ships,
- Ancient Egypt’s surprising medical knowledge,
- Solar panels made from food waste,
- ”Flying-V plane” reduces fuel consumption
- A new citizen-science project.
NATURE
DailyKos
Fossils of animals killed by the asteroid found
by Lib Dem FoP
The association between the end of the age of dinosaurs and an asteroid impact off what is now Mexico is well evidenced. Their fossil evidece [sic] ends at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, formerly known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary. This is formed of material thrown high into the atmosphere by the hit. Diagnostic of the formation are tiny glass like balls of materials melted by the energy of the impact and raining down from on high.
There has never been published evidence of animals being killed by the impact — until now! For three years a BBC crew followed the excavation of a fossil deposit in Tanis, North Dakota. Robert DePalma, the University of Manchester, UK, graduate student who leads the Tanis dig believes they are the remains of animals deposited by tsunami after impact. Two fossils in particular show the violence of the event. A turtle had been skewered by wood. One fossil was a perfectly presrved [sic] dinosaur leg complete with skin that shows every evidence of being torn off by the water.
Axios Obscura
Chernobyl’s strange black fungi have a superpower
by Eden Arielle Gordon
ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2022, Russian troops descended on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine. The defunct power plant—still undergoing cleanup and decommissioning—was overtaken by the invaders and the employees held hostage. By the end of March, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that Russian troops have pulled out, and is sending experts to assess safety and security there.
It has been a harrowing time for people who know the site well. On the day the plant was seized, shells were falling on Tatiana Tugai’s home city of Kyiv. “Explosions are constantly heard,” she wrote in an email that day. Even then, her thoughts turned to Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukrainian, where, decades ago, she and a team of scientists had conducted groundbreaking research in the aftermath of the 1986 disaster—research that continues to be relevant in surprising new ways today.
Five years after the disaster, in 1991, remotely piloted robots discovered a jet-black fungus growing on the inside of the reactors. Intrigued, a team of microbiologists from the Kyiv Institute of Microbiology and Virology began visiting the area regularly.
“The first impressions from my personal trips to the Chernobyl zone were very sad,” wrote Tugai. “[The zone] resembled frames from a science fiction film about a dead city. Empty houses without windows.” As years went by, life began to come back, and “the closed exclusion zone gradually began to look like a nature reserve,” she added. But the scientists “constantly walked with a dosimeter, and it reminded us that radiation was nearby.”
[…]
Across dozens of visits in the 1990s, Tugai and a team led by Nelli Zhdanova found more than 200 fungal species at the site, including jet-black fungi with melanin, a pigment that, among other things, influences the color of human and animal hair, skin, and eyes, and can protect against ultraviolet light. At the Institute for Nuclear Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the scientists began to study the fungi’s ability to thrive around extreme radiation.
WIRED
Chernobyl was a wildlife haven. Then Russian troops arrived
by Matt Reynolds
The area around the defunct power plant has been an unexpected rewilding success story. Now attempts to monitor progress are hampered by the war.
[…]
During the Russian occupation, most research in Chernobyl ground to a halt. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was created shortly after the nuclear disaster and now covers 2,8000 [sic] square kilometers in northern Ukraine, making it the third-largest nature reserve in mainland Europe. The abandoned area extends north into Belarus, which has a separately managed Exclusion Zone called the Polesie State Radiological Reserve. For more than 30 years, the area has been mostly deserted, save for the workers tasked with decommissioning the power plant safely and a rotating cast of researchers who come to study how nature responds to nuclear disasters.
[…]
Jim Smith, a professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth, UK, has been visiting the areas around Chernobyl since 1994. The most remarkable thing about the Exclusion Zone, he says, is how quickly nature rebounded after the site was abandoned by people. “I think the chronic radiation we see now at Chernobyl is probably causing some subtle effects that we can maybe see, but it isn’t causing big ecosystem effects,” Smith says. In the wake of the disaster, animals flooded back into the nearby forests. It’s now home to Eurasian lynx, brown bears, and black storks. In the mid-2010s, camera traps spotted the first European bison in the area for 300 years—a lone male that is thought to have migrated to the area after bison were introduced to the Belarusian side of the zone in 1996.
In 2015, Smith coauthored a scientific paper arguing that the chronic radiation around Chernobyl had no long-term negative impact on the abundance of mammals in the area. “Our conclusion was that human occupation had a much bigger impact on the ecosystem than the world’s worst nuclear accident,” he says, referring to the people who had lived and worked there before 1986. But the arrival of Russian troops in the area could put this respite from humanity at risk. “War can impact ecosystems because, you know, if soldiers aren’t fed properly then they get hungry and they go and shoot wild boar and things like that. So it's quite possible that there’ll be an impact on the edible mammal population,” Smith says.
PHYSICS
Space.com
The double-slit experiment: is light a wave or a particle?
by Daisy Dobrijevic
The double-slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in physics and definitely one of the weirdest. It demonstrates that matter and energy (such as light) can exhibit both wave and particle characteristics — known as the particle-wave duality of matter — depending on the scenario, according to the scientific communication site Interesting Engineering(opens in new tab).
According to the University of Sussex(opens in new tab), American physicist Richard Feynman referred to this paradox as the central mystery of quantum mechanics.
We know the quantum world is strange, but the two-slit experiment takes things to a whole new level. The experiment has perplexed scientists for over 200 years, ever since the first version was first performed by British scientist Thomas Young in 1801.
HEALTH
BIG Think
Is iron the Achilles heel for cancer?
by Peter Rogers
Good medical treatment destroys bad stuff while leaving the good stuff untouched. One of the tricky parts of treating cancer is that the stuff that needs to be destroyed (cancer cells) is painfully similar to the stuff that needs to be untouched (healthy cells). This means drugs that kill cancer cells usually harm healthy cells as well.
Recently, however, a team of scientists at UC San Francisco discovered a way to leverage cancers’ unique metabolic profile to ensure that drugs only target cancer cells.
[…]
Cancer cells hoard iron at a far greater rate than healthy cells, according to previous studies. Although the reason for this remains unclear, the UCSF team realized this could be leveraged to increase the specificity of cancer drugs. If a cancer drug, such as cobimetinib, were only activated in the iron-rich environment of a cancer cell, the drug would be inert when it interacts with healthy cells. It’s something like a two-factor authentication system for cancer drugs.
To test this, the scientist synthesized an iron-activated (IA) cobimetinib that only blocks MEK in an iron-rich environment. The experimental drug inhibited tumor growth as efficiently as standard cobimetinib, but it spared healthy cells. Using a mouse-lung cancer model, mice receiving either IA-cobimetinib or standard cobimetinib had fewer lung lesions and showed prolonged overall survival compared to vehicle-treated mice. When the scientists evaluated IA-cobimetinib’s effect on healthy human retinal and skin cells, they found the healthy tissue was about 10-fold less sensitive than cancer cells to IA-cobimetinib.
AXIOS
EPA proposes “historic” effort to ban cancer-causing asbestos
by Oriana Gonzales
Asbestos exposure is linked to nearly 40,000 deaths in the U.S. every year and 255,000 worldwide, according to the American Public Health Association.
- Asbestos has been banned in at least 70 countries around the world.
- "Asbestos causes mesothelioma and cancer of the lung, larynx, and ovary, in addition to pleural diseases such as asbestosis; it is also strongly associated with cancer of the pharynx, stomach cancer, and colorectal cancer," the APHA writes.
[…] That specific type, also known as "white asbestos," is the only known form of asbestos imported into the U.S., the EPA said.
- It's used in roofing materials and can also be found in sheet gaskets, brake blocks and aftermarket automotive brakes and linings, per the EPA.
Details: The EPA's proposed ban would prohibit all manufacturing, processing, importation and commercial distribution of products containing white asbestos.
BIG THINK
New technique detects 95% of pancreatic cancer
by Peter Rogers
- Some cancers are difficult to detect during their early stages, when treatment success is the highest.
- Scientists developed a new screening technique that analyzes the contents of extracellular vesicles (EVs) — bubble-like blobs that mediate cell-to-cell communication.
- The technique was very successful at detecting early stage pancreatic cancer.
HISTORY
Live Science
French farmer finds rare coin featuring Charlemagne just before his death
by Laura Geggel
A rare 1,200-year-old silver coin featuring Charlemagne — one of the only known portraits made of the emperor during his lifetime — was recently rediscovered and promptly taken on a wild journey from a farm in France, to the bidding grounds of eBay and, finally, to a museum in Germany.
The coin's modern travels began when a man in France wanted to build a house but was short on cash. He remembered that he had inherited a coin collection from his grandfather, a farmer in the Paris region. After going through his grandfather's collection, the man discovered the Charlemagne coin, known as a denarius, and he put it up for auction on eBay.
"We have here some experts that regularly check what is on eBay concerning archaeology," said Frank Pohle, director of the Route Charlemagne, a group of municipal museums in Aachen, Germany, that focus on cultural history. "One of them told me 'Hey, there is a piece of money in eBay France that could be a real denarius of Charlemagne."
Greek Reporter
Ancient Diolkos stone road allowed ships to travel from Ionian to Aegean
by Patricia Claus
The Diolkos stone road, a marvel of engineering from the time of Ancient Greece, allowed ships to travel overland from the Ionian Sea to the Aegean, bypassing the Peloponnesian Peninsula.
Like the Corinth Canal to which it ran almost parallel, which was finally constructed millennia later, it made passage around the peninsula much safer for the vessels — but it also meant backbreaking labor for the unlucky men who were tasked with pulling the vessels across the isthmus.
The cobblestone roadway upon which the ancients transported ships from the Corinthian Gulf to the Saronic Gulf is now being restored, due to the efforts of the Greek Ministry of Culture, as befits this wonder of technology and innovation.
The Collector
The surprisingly advanced medicine of ancient Egypt
by Thea Baldrick
The advanced medicine of ancient Egypt included effective wound care, contraceptives, more drugs than a modern pharmacy, accurate diagnoses of heart disease, and more.
[…]
George Ebers, a professor of Egyptology at Leipzig University, came into possession of a remarkable document in 1862. As he translated it, he discovered that it was written about 1500 BCE but was apparently rewritten from an original a thousand years older. It stands as the earliest documentation of deductive reasoning. Written as a reference for practicing physicians, it set rigid procedures for patient care. First, the physician was directed to question the patient. Second, they conducted a physical exam using their sense of smell, checking the pulse and feeling for palpitations. Third, urine, feces, and spit were examined, a process that mirrors the purpose of modern lab analysis. Finally, a prognosis is reached consisting of three options. The physician decides if it is a treatable disease, a disease that could be battled, or a disease for which nothing can be done.
The rest of the Ebers Papyrus has over seven hundred remedies and incantations. Many of the herbal ingredients are still unknown due to translation difficulties, but the translated material demands respect for the depth of knowledge implicit in the 3500-year-old medicine.
ENERGY
The Brighter Side of News
Solar panels, made from food waste, produce energy without sunlight
by Chris Young
Solar panels are a cornerstone of the clean energy revolution. And yet, they have one great flaw: when the clouds roll in their productivity dives.
Now, a new type of solar panel has been developed by an electrical engineering student at Mapua University that harvests the unseen ultraviolet light from the sun that makes it through even dense cloud coverage.
Carvey Ehren Maigue, who in 2020 won the James Dyson Sustainability Award for his creation, hopes it will soon be used on the windows and walls of large buildings, turning them into constant sources of energy.
BIG Think
Radical new “flying V-plane” aims to transform flight
by Kristin Houser
- Commercial air travel accounts for about 3% of global carbon emissions. If the industry were a nation, it would be the sixth biggest emitter in the world.
- Unlike typical passenger planes, which have wings that stick out from the center of a tube-shaped fuselage, the Flying-V has two fuselages connected at an angle.
- The V shape produces less drag, helps keep the plane's weight down, and could increase fuel efficiency by 20%.
This month’s citizen science project:
Zooniverse
Biodiversity is at the core of a sustainable agriculture, therefore Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) maintains collections of living and preserved biological material, predominantly of Canadian origin. These add up to millions of insects, plants, fungi, bacteria, and nematodes whose information is primarily held on physical specimen labels.
AAFC recently completed a multi-year digitization project which included imaging over one million specimens from our plant and insect collections. Our new Notes from Nature expeditions are bringing those images to the Zooniverse for your help transcribing their labels. With your contributions, we can bring this biodiversity data online and available for research and discovery.
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