Science & TechnologyS


Fish

Octopuses and fish caught on camera hunting as a team

Helena Kudiabor
Nature
Mon, 23 Sep 2024 18:13 UTC
octopus fish partnership hunt
© Eduardo Sampaio and Simon GinginsAn octopus–fish hunting pack searches for prey.
Although typically considered solitary animals, octopuses sometimes work with fish to entrap prey.

Octopuses normally hunt alone, but footage captured by divers has revealed that they can collaborate with fish to find their next meal. The videos, described today in Nature Ecology & Evolution1, show that the different species even adopt specific roles to maximize the success of joint hunting expeditions.

"The octopus basically works as the decider of the group," says co-author Eduardo Sampaio, an animal-behaviour researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. "There's a sign that some cognition is occurring here, for sure."
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Mars

NASA says weird 'zebra rock' on Mars is unlike anything seen before on Red Planet

Sascha Pare
Live Science
Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:10 UTC
zebra rock mars
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASUNASA's Mars Perseverance rover captured this image of a black-and-white striped rock using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. This image was acquired on Sept. 13, 2024 (Sol 1268) at the local mean solar time of 12:40:29.
NASA's Perseverance rover has spotted a funky "zebra rock" on Mars' Jezero crater that's nothing like any rock seen on the Red Planet before.

The rover captured images of the black-and-white striped rock earlier this month using a camera mounted high on its mast. NASA scientists acquired the images Sept. 13, after Perseverance had already left the area, according to a statement.

The rock, which scientists dubbed "Freya Castle," has a never-before-seen texture. "Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes," NASA representatives wrote in the statement.
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Info

Scientists confirm there are 40 huge craters at the bottom of Lake Michigan

Sascha Pare
Live Science
Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:43 UTC
Researchers recently surveyed the bottom of Lake Michigan after spotting strange circles on the lakebed in 2022. New observations show the circles are craters, but how they formed remains unclear.
Lake Michigan Caters
© Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine SanctuaryResearchers determined that these splodges at the bottom of Lake Michigan are holes in the lakebed.
Two years ago, sonar images revealed strange circles at the bottom of Lake Michigan that scientists couldn't explain. Now, a survey has determined the shapes are giant holes — but there are many more secrets left to unravel, researchers say.

The holes were first discovered in 2022, when researchers embarked on a mission to map the lakebed inside the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, a protected area of Lake Michigan that contains 36 known shipwrecks, and may contain many more. Weird circles appeared on the map that looked natural rather than human-made, Russ Green, a maritime archaeologist and superintendent of the sanctuary who took part in the mapping project, told Live Science in an email. The shapes were likely depressions in the lakebed, but the researchers couldn't be sure.

"Any kind of new discovery in the Great Lakes is exciting," Green said. "But these features really stand out — they are in deeper water (500 feet [150 meters] ish) and weren't known before, as far as we can tell."

Brendon Baillod, a local shipwreck hunter, spotted the mysterious circles around the same time as Green and his colleagues while searching for a sunken freighter. To his eyes, the circles were clearly depressions, or craters, measuring between 20 and 40 feet (6 to 12 m) deep, Baillod told Live Science in an email. "There were dozens of them in our search grid," he said. "Most were 500 to 1,000 feet [150 to 300 m] in diameter and of irregular shapes."
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Arrow Down

Science publishing is a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme

Àlex Gómez-Marín
iai
Mon, 23 Sep 2024 18:21 UTC
Scientific publishing has been gamed to advance scientists' careers, not knowledge. While science communication has turned into a means of public indoctrination. In this essay, Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that real experts don't know "the truth," and that we should become pilgrims towards the unknown rather than the squatters of the broken records of ideological mantras.
Science Publishing
© iai
Science is in trouble. The problem comes from within and from without. Not only has scientific publishing been gamed to advance one's career rather than everyone's knowledge, but scientific communication has turned into a mechanism of public indoctrination. We don't seem to live in a world where people can "trust the experts" anymore. Worrisomely, the mantra "science says" either means almost everything or virtually nothing to most of us today. For instance, already at year 4 AC (After COVID), some citizens would never accept unconstitutional lockdowns or experimental inoculations again, while others still drive alone in their cars with the windows up and their masks on. Something is killing science softly. What is it, how is it happening, and why?

Despite relentless technological innovation, scientific progress is stalling compared to the prodigious revolutions in understanding that our ancestors provided us a century ago. We seem to have fallen into the habit of living off such scientific props, burning such a legacy and credibility quickly and unwisely. We need to transfer new funds to the science ledger, or else our scientific credentials will soon become hardly more than a pseudo-religious credo.

___

Science publishing has become a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme at the expense of taxpayers and scientists themselves.

___

I believe the key lies in the way we make science public. This entails a double-stranded path: the inner route of publishing scientific results and the outer route of publicizing them. Much like in M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands, thinking and communication are "a strange loop" (borrowing Douglas Hofstadter's phrase), namely, a self-referential paradoxical system. Knowledge circulates via peer-reviewed publications within the walls of academia. Then, outside the citadel, we do science outreach which, in turn, directs public attention and funding to certain topics and ways of doing science back to academia. Both routes are severely compromised:

First, science publishing has become a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme at the expense of taxpayers and scientists themselves. Top journals charge obscene fees to publish results already paid for by those taxpayers in the form of grants, while we peer-review there "for free". Moreover, such "reviews" tend not to be the critical, objective, and dispassionate appraisal of the work one might think they are, especially when results threaten the dominant worldview or simply one's tiny conceptual condominium or scientific business niche. The line between editorial curation and censorship is thin, even dashed.
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Microscope 1

Creatures the size of a dust grain hide in California's Mono Lake

Robert Sanders
PhysOrg
Tue, 24 Sep 2024 16:15 UTC
choanoflagellates dust grain mono lake
© Kayley Hake, Nicole King lab, UC BerkeleyA colony of choanoflagellates stained to show its features. Cyan indicates DNA — the doughnut-shaped DNA of the choanoflagellate cells and a cloud of bacterial DNA inside the colony — while flagella are white and microscopic hairs (villi) on each cell are red.
Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada is known for its towering tufa formations, abundant brine shrimp and black clouds of alkali flies uniquely adapted to the salty, arsenic- and cyanide-laced water.

University of California, Berkeley researchers have now found another unusual creature lurking in the lake's briny shallows — one that could tell scientists about the origin of animals more than 650 million years ago.

The organism is a choanoflagellate, a microscopic, single-celled form of life that can divide and develop into multicellular colonies in a way that's similar to how animal embryos form. It's not a type of animal, however, but a member of a sister group to all animals. And as animals' closest living relative, the choanoflagellate is a crucial model for the leap from one-celled to multicellular life.
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Galaxy

Gargantuan black hole jets are biggest seen to date

Whitney Clavin
Cal Tech
Wed, 18 Sep 2024 17:28 UTC
Porphyrion black hole jets largest
© E. Wernquist / D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration) / M. OeiAn artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, these jets span roughly 7 megaparsecs, or 23 million light-years.
The jumbo jets blast hot plasma well beyond their own host galaxy

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.

"This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total," says Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of a new Nature paper reporting the findings. "The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions."

The jet megastructure, nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, dates to a time when our universe was 6.3 billion years old, or less than half its present age of 13.8 billion years. These fierce outflows — with a total power output equivalent to trillions of suns — shoot out from above and below a supermassive black hole at the heart of a remote galaxy.

Comment: There are alternative theories:

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Syringe

DNA contamination in mRNA covid shots up to 145 times regulatory limit, first independent Australian study shows

Rebekah Barnett
The Daily Sceptic
Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:00 UTC
DNA strand
© screenshotThere are genes that help to regulate metabolic changes tied to hibernation. This DNA, if targeted, could be beneficial to human health, some scientists think.
Synthetic plasmid DNA contamination has been detected in Australian vials of Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines at levels of between seven and 145 times the allowable limit, a new study shows.

The independent study of three modified RNA (mod-RNA) vaccine vials, including lots for children and adults, was commissioned to provide evidence in a Federal Court lawsuit over the validity of the regulatory status of the vaccines.

The case, brought by legal firm P.J. O'Brien & Associates, alleges that the vaccines contain unlicensed genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the form of synthetic DNA contamination and mod-RNA-LNP complexes which could pose an untested safety risk, including the potential for DNA integration into the human genome.

In an affidavit provided to legal firm P.J. O'Brien & Associates, molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher said that the amount of synthetic DNA he detected in all three Australian vials "far exceeded" the allowable regulatory limit set by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).

Given scientific evidence suggesting that synthetic DNA can enter the cell nucleus and potentially integrate into the human genome: "It is important to investigate whether integration can take place in primary cells in the vaccinated population."

The Australian study confirms independent lab findings of high levels of residual DNA in mod-RNA Covid vaccines from Germany, the U.S. and Canada, highlighting that this is a global concern.
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Books

The big bluff: What ever happened to Darwin's 'big book'?

Denyse O'Leary
Salvo
Fri, 05 Jul 2024 19:08 UTC
Charles Darwin
© Maull and Polyblank, Literary and Scientific Portrait ClubCharles Darwin in 1855
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) has become a mythical figure of gigantic proportions. His theory drives a surprising amount of popular discussion. I often hear pundits referring to "evolution" and by that, they always mean Darwinism. It's as much science as they care to know, in most cases.

That fact makes reading Robert F. Shedinger's Darwin's Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished (Discovery Institute Press 2024) an unusual experience. Meticulously analyzing Darwin's and his associates' massive correspondence, Shedinger, professor of religion at Luther College, quietly blows up the Darwin myth. He shows that — in actual history — Darwin never demonstrated to his colleagues' satisfaction that natural selection acting on random mutation accounted for the history of life.
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Camera

Pando: Documenting a tree that redefines what a tree can be

Lance Oditt
National Forest
Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:47 UTC
largest tree world aspen
© Lance OdittA green outline indicates the approximate boundaries of Pando, a 106-acre aspen tree located in Fishlake National Forest in Utah.
In the high wilds of Southern Utah in the Fishlake National Forest stands Pando, a 106-acre aspen tree that is the largest, heaviest and, very likely, the oldest tree on earth. Comprised of over 40,000 stems that appear on first glance to be individual trees, each branch of Pando is in fact, a genetically identical part of the same tree connected by a vast underlying root system that could span some 12,000 miles if laid end-to-end according to rapid field estimates by scientist Paul Rogers. Weighing in at 13.2 million pounds, Pando is the largest tree by weight, three to five times larger than the largest known redwoods. Although Pando cannot be aged using current techniques, most scientists agree that the Pando seed set down sometime between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago when climate currents in the region shifted at the end of the last ice age. The largest, the heaviest and likely the oldest tree, above ground and below, Pando redefines what a tree is or, can be. It serves as an extraordinary reminder that there is much we have to learn about the planet we call home.

Comment: More on the remarkable organism that is the aspen:
It's hard to decide what is most memorable about aspen: the vibrant yellow in the fall, the tall, tube-like clusters of white stands or the sound of the "quaking" leaves. Regardless of what comes to mind when you think of aspens, they hold the title of the most widespread tree in North America. From the Midwest, across Canada, north into Alaska and across the West through to Arizona and New Mexico, quaking aspens dot the edge of conifer forests in clusters or "clones."

One aspen tree is actually only a small part of a larger organism. A stand or group of aspen trees is considered a singular organism with the main life force underground in the extensive root system. Before a single aspen trunk appears above the surface, the root system may lie dormant for many years until the conditions are just right, including sufficient sunlight. In a single stand, each tree is a genetic replicate of the other, hence the name a "clone" of aspens used to describe a stand.

Older than the massive Sequoias or the biblical Bristlecone Pines, the oldest known aspen clone has lived more than 80,000 years on Utah's Fishlake National Forest. Not only is the clone the oldest living organism, weighing in at an estimated 6,600 tons, it is also the heaviest. Even if the trees of a stand are wiped out, it is very difficult to permanently extinguish an aspen's root system due to the rapid rate in which it reproduces.

Among swaths of dark green conifers, the deciduous aspen stands thrive in a variety of environments. Aspens quickly colonize recently burned or bare areas to establish a stand of young trees given the proper conditions. They prefer moist soil but can survive near springs in desert conditions. Of the many variables for a healthy clone of aspens, the one that cannot waver is the need for abundant sunshine.

Aspens grow all the time — even in winter. Beneath the thin, white outer bark layer is a thin green photosynthetic layer that allows the tree to create sugars and grow when other deciduous trees would otherwise be dormant. During hard winters, the green, sugary layer provides necessary nutrients for deer and elk. Throughout the year, young aspens provide food or a variety of animals including moose, black bear, beaver, porcupine, ruffed grouse and rodents .

Although a soft wood, aspen is relatively strong and has been used in unique ways.
  • Matches - aspen wood is not as flammable as other species
  • Saunas - aspen wood does not splinter easily
  • Chopsticks - aspen is flexible and strong for your next tasty eggroll.
  • Ailments - historically used because aspen contains salicylates, chemicals similar to aspirin
Today, many places in the West have seen diebacks of aspen. In areas where grass is limited, deer and other ungulates are heavily feeding on young aspens, preventing the trees and clone from reaching maturity.


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Info

Scientists identify new blood group after a 50 year mystery

Tessa Koumoundouros
Science Alert
Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:50 UTC
Human Blood Cells
© Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library/Brand X Pictures/Getty ImagesScanning electron micrograph of red and white human blood cells.
When a pregnant woman had her blood sampled back in 1972, doctors discovered it was mysteriously missing a surface molecule found on all other known red blood cells at the time.

After 50 years, this strange molecular absence finally led researchers from the UK and Israel to describe a new blood group system in humans.

"It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients," UK National Health Service hematologist Louise Tilley says, after nearly 20 years of personally researching this bloody quirk.

While we're all more familiar with the ABO blood group system and the rhesus factor (that's the plus or minus part), humans actually have many different blood group systems based on the wide variety of cell-surface proteins and sugars that coat our blood cells.

Our bodies use these antigen molecules, amongst their other purposes, as identification markers to separate 'self' from potentially harmful not-selves.
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