Science & TechnologyS


Dig

Russian scientists grow watermelons in Antarctica


RT
Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:41 UTC
russia melons antarctic research station vostok
© Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI)Watermelon growing at Russia's Vostok research station in Antarctica
The researchers hope to eventually be able to grow other fruits and wild berries at all polar bases

Russian polar explorers have successfully grown a batch of watermelons at the Vostok station in Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, according to a statement published by the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI).

"The results of the experiment are impressive - we managed to grow the southernmost watermelons in the most severe conditions of Antarctica," said leading AARI geophysicist Andrey Teplyakov, who led the project at the Vostok station. "The taste and aroma are no worse than the ones we have at home! The size of the fruits is up to 13 cm in diameter, and their weight is up to 1 kg," he said.

The experiment was a joint project between the AARI and the Agrophysical Research institute and the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Magic Wand

Dormant 46,000-year-old nematode roundworm from Siberian permafrost brought back to life


Sputnik
Sun, 30 Jul 2023 09:50 UTC
Fossil rodent
© Sputnik International, 1920, 28.07.2023Fossil rodent burrow with herbaceous litter and seeds buried in permafrost deposits.
This microscopic female worm, now known as Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, was found in a state of suspended animation and later started reproducing in a laboratory dish.

Ancient 46,000-year-old roundworms from the Siberian permafrost called nematodes have been successfully revived by scientists. The discovery also revealed that the worm belongs to a new (or, in fact, old) species of nematode.

This remarkable revival serves a practical purpose beyond its "wow" factor. Scientists are interested in studying how these creatures enter a state of dormancy to survive extreme conditions.

Comment: See also: Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes

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Info

New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:59 UTC
Linguistics and genetics combine to suggest a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages.
Indo-European languages
© P. Heggarty et al., Science (2023)A hybrid hypothesis for the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages. The language family began to diverge from around 8100 years ago, out of a homeland immediately south of the Caucasus. One migration reached the Pontic-Caspian and Forest Steppe around 7000 years ago, and from there subsequent migrations spread into parts of Europe around 5000 years ago.
An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.

For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the 'Steppe' hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 6000 years ago, and the 'Anatolian' or 'farming' hypothesis, suggesting an older origin tied to early agriculture around 9000 years ago. Previous phylogenetic analyses of Indo-European languages have come to conflicting conclusions about the age of the family, due to the combined effects of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the datasets they used and limitations in the way that phylogenetic methods analyzed ancient languages.

To solve these problems, researchers from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology assembled an international team of over 80 language specialists to construct a new dataset of core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient or historical languages. This more comprehensive and balanced sampling, combined with rigorous protocols for coding lexical data, rectified the problems in the datasets used by previous studies.
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Archaeology

Fossil Friday: Another prediction vindicated

Günter Bechly
Evolution News
Fri, 28 Jul 2023 19:15 UTC
hominin tibia cut marks butchering cannibalism
© Pobiner et al. 2023Hominin tibia KNM-ER 741, after Fig. 1
In a recent article for Fossil Friday (Bechly 2023a) I discussed the controversial hominin taxon Homo habilis and said that "this ape-like creature was rather the animal prey of contemporary human hunters than a human ancestor and producer of stone tools." The virtual ink for this article had hardly dried when a story about a new discovery hit the news around the globe, reporting the earliest evidence of cannibalism by human ancestors about 1.45 million years ago (Bower 2023, Metcalfe 2023, Tozer 2023, Zhao 2023).

In 1970 the famous paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered a fragment of a hominin tibia at the Koobi Fora locality in the Turkana region of Kenya. It was first considered as belonging to Australopithecus (Leakey 1971, Leakey & Leakey 1977), but later attributed to Homo erectus (Walker & Leakey 1993). However, Wood (2011) remarked about this fossil in the prestigious Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution that its "current conventional taxonomic allocation is H. erectus or Hominin gen et sp. indet." and "because so little is known about the tibial morphology of early hominins other than Australopithecus afarensis it may be premature to rule out the possibility that it belongs to Homo habilis or Paranthropus boisei." Consequently, Pobiner et al. (2023) cautioned that "due to the taxonomic uncertainty of this fossil, we simply refer to it in this study as a hominin (hominin gen. et sp. indet)."
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Microscope 1

How an ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotl salamander regrow limbs

Sarah C. P. Williams
The Scope
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:13 UTC
graphic cell regeneration
© Samantha
It's one of the mysteries of nature: How does the axolotl, a small salamander, boast a superhero-like ability to regrow nearly any part of its body? For years, scientists have studied the amazing regenerative properties of the axolotl to inform wound healing in humans.

Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have made a leap forward in understanding what sets the axolotl apart from other animals. Axolotls, they discovered, have an ultra-sensitive version of mTOR, a molecule that acts as an on-off switch for protein production. And, like survivalists who fill their basements with non-perishable food for hard times, axolotl cells stockpile messenger RNA molecules, which contain genetic instructions for producing proteins. The combination of an easily activated mTOR molecule and a repository of ready-to-use mRNAs means that after an injury, axolotl cells can quickly produce the proteins needed for tissue regeneration.

The new findings were published July 26 in Nature.
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Magnet

Room-temperature superconductor 'breakthrough' met with scepticism

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
New Scientist
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 07:28 UTC
LK-99 superconductor
© Hyun-Tak Kim et al. (2023)LK-99 partially levitating
A team of researchers claims to have created the first materials that conduct electricity perfectly at room temperature and ambient pressure, but many physicists are highly sceptical. Speaking to New Scientist, Hyun-Tak Kim at the College of William & Mary in Virginia says he will support anyone trying to replicate his team's work.

Superconductors are materials through which electricity can move without encountering any resistance, and so would significantly cut down the energy costs of electronics. But for over a century, researchers have been unable to make them work except under extreme conditions like very low temperatures and remarkably high pressures.

Now, Kim and his colleagues claim to have made a material that is superconductive at room temperature and pressure.

If their claims hold up to scientific scrutiny, this new work would be truly extraordinary, so the burden of proof for the research team is equally exceptional. The fact that some previous reports of breakthroughs in superconductivity were later retracted and that other teams failed to replicate the results also raises the stakes.

To make the new material, called LK-99, Kim and his colleagues mixed several powdered compounds containing lead, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus, then heated them at a high temperature for several hours. This made the powders chemically react and transform into a dark grey solid.
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Shamrock

Exquisitely preserved, 5 million year old fossil forest uncovered in Japan

Fiona MacDonald
Science Alert
Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:26 UTC
fossil forest
© David Johnson/iStock/Getty Images PlusRepresentative image of a fossilized tree stump.
A beautifully preserved fossil forest uncovered on a river bank in Japan has been described in detail for the first time.

The rare site takes scientists one step closer to reconstructing an entire Eurasian plant from the late Miocene epoch, and filling in one of the many gaps in the botanical tree of life.

The late Miocene epoch stretched from around 10.4 to 5 million years ago, and the forest was located beneath what is now the Kiso River, north-east of Nagoya.

Comment: See also: When Antarctica was a rainforest

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Blue Planet

Experts have possible theory of why Indian Ocean has a 'gravity hole' where sea levels are 300ft lower

Jonathan Chadwick
The Daily Mail
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 19:13 UTC
indian ocean geoid low gravity iogl
© International Centre of Global Earth Models (ICGEM)Also known as a geoid, the gravity hole isn't a physical hole, but a region of the ocean where gravity is lower than average. The Indian Ocean geoid low (IOGL) is the deepest geoid on Earth
Indian Ocean has a 'gravity hole' where sea levels are 300ft lower - experts think they know why 7-8 minutes

Scientists have known about the existence of a 'gravity hole' in Indian Ocean for decades but have long been left puzzled as to why it exists.

Known officially as the 'Indian Ocean Geoid Low', it isn't a conventional physical hole, but rather a region of the ocean where gravity is lower than average. This dip in gravity means the water level is around 340 feet lower than the surrounding area - like a groove in a 'bumpy potato'.

Now, a team of researchers in India claim the gravity hole was formed by plumes of low-density magma that rose up from Earth's mantle.

These plumes were generated by the remains of a sunken tectonic plate called Tethys, lost when India became part of Asia 50 million years ago.

Comment: Missing mass - what is causing a geoid low in the Indian Ocean?

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Satellite

NASA briefly loses contact with ISS after power outage, relies on backup systems for first time - Russia's agency notified them of problem


The Guardian
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 01:34 UTC
NASA iss space station
© APA Nasa power outage disrupted communication between mission control and the International Space Station on Tuesday for about 90 minutes.
A power outage at Nasa's building in Houston disrupted communication between mission control and the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday, forcing the space agency to rely on backup control systems for the first time.

The outage meant mission control lost command, telemetry and voice communications with the station in orbit. The power outage hit as upgrade work was under way in the building at Houston's Johnson Space Center.

The crew was notified of the problem through Russian communication systems, within 20 minutes of the outage.

Space station program manager Joel Montalbano said neither the astronauts nor station were ever in any danger and that backup control systems took over to restore normal communications within 90 minutes. "It wasn't an issue on board. That was purely a ground problem," he said. "At no time was the crew or the vehicle in any danger."


Comment: It's not clear whether Russia was the first to notify them of the problem, or whether they already knew.


Comment: It seems as though NASA has been beset with troubles of late; Roscosmos hasn't been without its issues either: See also: China, Russia 'deploying space weapons to attack US satellites', Space Force chief claims following $3.7 billion budget increase

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Info

Siberia's growing 'gateway to the underworld,' the largest permafrost depression in the world

Jennifer Nalewicki
Live Science
Tue, 25 Jul 2023 20:53 UTC
Newly released drone footage confirms that the Batagay crater in Siberia continues to grow in size.
The Batagay crater
© Padi Prints/Troy TV Stock/Alamy Stock PhotoThe Batagay crater is considered to be the largest permafrost depression in the world.
A massive crater in Siberia dubbed the "gateway to the underworld" by locals is continuing to grow larger, new drone footage reveals.

The footage, which was released on July 12, offers viewers a bird's-eye view of the Batagay (also spelled Bagatayka and Batagaika) crater, considered to be the largest permafrost depression in the world, according to Ruptly.tv.

Covering approximately 0.3 square miles (0.8 square kilometers) — equivalent to the area of about 145 football fields — the deep scar cutting through the east Siberian woodlands was likely triggered by deforestation during the 1940s. This led to erosion, which then exacerbated seasonal melting of the permafrost and created a "megaslump," or the massive crater in the ground. Because the permafrost in this region is comprised of 80% ice, the large amounts of melting forced sediment on the hillside to collapse, revealing what looks like a giant gash slashing through the landscape in Russia's Sakha Republic.

And it's not just drone imagery that shows that the crater continues to expand. Over the years, satellite imagery has also confirmed that the megaslump has grown in size. As the land has retreated, it has revealed "tens of thousands of years of frozen remains," dating as far back as the Middle Pleistocene, which ended 126,000 years ago.
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