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Researchers find some species of wasps learn to recognize faces


PhysOrg
Tue, 28 Jan 2020 15:27 UTC
northern paper wasp
© Judy Gallagher/Flikr
The Northern Paper Wasp (Polistes fuscatus)
One wasp species has evolved the ability to recognize individual faces among their peers — something that most other insects cannot do — signaling an evolution in how they have learned to work together.

A team led by Cornell University researchers used population genomics to study the evolution of cognition in the Northern paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus. The research suggests the wasps' increasing intelligence provided an evolutionary advantage and sheds light on how intelligence evolves in general, which has implications for many other species — including humans.

"The really surprising conclusion here is that the most intense selection pressures in the recent history of these wasps has not been dealing with climate, catching food or parasites but getting better at dealing with each other," said Michael Sheehan, professor of neurobiology and behavior, and senior author on the paper. "That's pretty profound."
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Fireball 2

NASA: 2 asteroids currently heading for close encounter with Earth

Inigo Monzon
International Business Times
Sun, 26 Jan 2020 20:31 UTC
Over 17,000 near-Earth asteroids
© NASA
Over 17,000 near-Earth asteroids remain undetected in our solar neighborhood. Pictured; an artistic illustration of an asteroid flying by Earth.
NASA's asteroid tracking agency is currently monitoring two space rocks that are currently headed for Earth. According to the agency's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the two asteroids belong to a family of cosmic rocks that are known to intersect Earth's orbit.

The first asteroid that will approach Earth tomorrow has been identified by CNEOS as 2020 BN3. According to CNEOS, this asteroid is currently traveling towards Earth at an impressive speed of almost 65,000 miles per hour. The agency estimated that the asteroid is about 167 feet wide.

Trailing behind 2020 BN3 is an asteroid known as 2020 BY4. As indicated in CNEOS' database, this asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 115 feet. The agency noted that the asteroid is traveling across space with an average velocity of 115 feet.

According to CNEOS, both 2020 BN3 and 2020 BY4 are both classified as Apollo asteroids. This means that these two asteroids follow wide orbits around a couple of planets in the Solar System. From time to time, these asteroids cross the Earth's path as it goes around the Sun.

Comment: Other records of near-Earth space rocks over the last few days:
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Bizarro Earth

'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' is a myth: Survey shows there is no 'rubbish island, but a dense concentration of microplastics

Sarah Knapton
The Telegraph
Wed, 05 Oct 2016 18:01 UTC
pacific ocean garbage patch
© Ocean Cleanup
Estimated size of the Pacific Ocean garbage patch in 2018
The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' has been billed as a floating island of plastic debris, stretching out across an area of ocean the size of India, a testament to man's abuse of the planet.

So when images emerged from the first aerial survey of the area they proved somewhat underwhelming.

Far from showing a vast swathe of plastic containers, fishing nets and rubbish, the detritus was seen to be scattered over a wide area, with just 1,000 large objects discovered in a survey of thousands of square miles.

Although The Ocean Cleanup, the charity who carried out the sweep, claimed that they had found more plastic than was expected, other experts said the 'garbage patch' was a myth which had never been substantiated by any proper scientific research and risked diverting attention from the real problem - a dangerous build of microplastics in the area.

Comment: Australian researchers: 'We found evidence of microplastics pretty much everywhere we looked'


The Ocean Cleanup has continued its research and development since the above article was published. It ran a proof-of-concept mission in October 2019, with a positive result. They have also extended their work to rivers in an effort to head off plastic and other debris from reaching the oceans.

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Better Earth

Waves of ice inside droplet behaves in way never observed before

Ir. W. R. Van Der Veen, University of Twente
Phys.org
Mon, 27 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
ice water droplet
© University of Twente
A droplet falling on a surface that is considerably supercooled has been found to freeze in a way never observed before. Instead of the well-known growth of crystals, a colder surface results in moving circular ice fronts. These fronts move out of the center to the edge of the freezing drop. Scientists of the University of Twente and the Max Planck Center for Complex Fluid Dynamics have demonstrated this effect for the first time, and give an explanation for the physical mechanism involved in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When rain falls on a surface that is still frozen, it makes the road very slippery in a short time. This is an example of liquid droplets falling on a surface that has a temperature below the melting point — it is "supercooled." The freezing of the droplet and crystallization evoke the star-shaped dendritic structures often observed in snowflakes. If the surface is colder, however, the droplet not only freezes faster, but the mechanism changes, as well. At a surface that is cold enough, a remarkable phenomenon occurs: From the center of the droplet, ice fronts move toward the edge while the droplet is still spreading. This happens repeatedly, until the droplet is fully frozen.

Comment: See also:

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Comet 2

49-foot asteroid will scrape past earth on Tuesday - 2nd such close approach by space rock in 3 days

Alexandra Lozovschi
Inquisitr
Sun, 26 Jan 2020 10:35 UTC
Close approach
© MASTERTUX / PIXABAY
Close approach
Next week, Earth is in for a brush with a swift asteroid that will come extremely close to the planet's surface, NASA has announced. The space rock is known as asteroid 2020 BJ7 and is an Apollo-type asteroid that orbits the sun once every 1.9 years. The object is not particularly large but is incredibly fast, and is hurtling through space at formidable speeds of more than 45,000 mph. The rock will skim Earth from a very short distance, flying nearly as close as the moon.

Size-wise, the near-Earth asteroid fares somewhat on the smaller side. The rock — which was discovered a mere two days ago — is estimated to measure no more than 49 feet in diameter. As such, the object is only a little smaller than the famous Chelyabinsk meteor that penetrated the Earth's atmosphere nearly seven years ago. Though only slightly larger than asteroid 2020 BJ7, the meteor caused a substantial amount of damage when it exploded in the sky over Russia on February 15, 2013, destroying more than 7,200 buildings and injuring nearly 1,500 people.

Thankfully, the tiny asteroid won't give us any cause for concern when it comes swooping by in two days' time. NASA assures that the rock will safely pass by our planet and uneventfully exit the inner solar system as it circles the sun.

Comment: Related: 32-foot asteroid just skimmed Earth from VERY CLOSE by shortly after discovery

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Fireball 2

32-foot asteroid just skimmed Earth from VERY CLOSE by shortly after discovery

Alexandra Lozovschi
Inquisitr
Sat, 25 Jan 2020 10:47 UTC
close call

Close call
A tiny space rock has just scraped past Earth in what was the closest asteroid encounter not only of 2020 so far, but also in quite a long time. The teeny rock was one of the smallest to traipse through our cosmic neighborhood in recent months — and managed to creep in closer than any other asteroid has done in the past year.

Today's celestial visitor is known as asteroid 2020 BH6. The object flew extremely close to our planet's surface, skimming Earth closer than the moon. According to a report released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the space rock approached Earth shortly after midnight, swooping past us at 12:11 a.m. ET. At the time, the asteroid was traveling at an incredible speed of 22,800 mph and buzzed Earth from only 37,200 miles away.

To put that into perspective, the moon sits at an average distance of 238,900 miles from Earth. This means that the asteroid passed at 0.18 times the distance to the moon during today's near-miss. The last time an asteroid came comparably close to Earth was in late November, when a 42-foot space rock zoomed past our planet from 65,100 miles away, or 0.28 times the lunar distance.

Comment: 49-foot asteroid will scrape past earth on Tuesday - 2nd such close approach by space rock in 3 days

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Bulb

Forward thinking company is using plastic waste to make roads that are 60% stronger than traditional ones

Jade Small
The Mind Unleashed
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 03:27 UTC
Roads made with plastic
The first plastic created by Leo Hendrik Baekeland in 1907 was based on synthetic polymer made from phenol and formaldehyde. Since then plastic has been used to create just about anything you could think of. It is cheap to manufacture and affordable to buy and replace. It is also used for almost all products we use and throw away without a second thought.

As populations grew, the use of plastics grew as did plastic waste — one of the biggest threats to humanity, animals, and the environment.

While scientist and experts try to find solutions to non-recyclable plastic waste, we're running out of landfill sites and continue to poison our air by incinerating plastic waste and choking our oceans. Thankfully forward thinking companies are finding ways of reusing plastic waste while many others are focusing on finding biodegradable alternatives to replace plastics altogether.

As an example of recycling waste plastic, UK company MacRebur has developed a product by recycling plastic bottles to improve the quality, durability, and cost of asphalt roads.
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Info

Behavior of slow earthquakes explained by new evidence


University of Ottawa
Wed, 22 Jan 2020 21:03 UTC
Earth from Space
© University of Ottawa
A team of researchers at the University of Ottawa has made an important breakthrough that will help better understand the origin and behavior of slow earthquakes, a new type of earthquake discovered by scientists nearly 20 years ago.

These earthquakes produce movement so slow - a single event can last for days, even months - that they are virtually imperceptible. Less fearsome and devastating than regular earthquakes, they do not trigger seismic waves or tsunamis. They occur in regions where a tectonic plate slides underneath another one, called ''subduction zone faults'', adjacent but deeper to where regular earthquakes occur. They also behave very differently than their regular counterparts. But how? And more importantly: why?

Pascal Audet, Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at uOttawa, along with his seismology research group (Jeremy Gosselin, Clément Estève, Morgan McLellan, Stephen G. Mosher and former uOttawa postdoctoral student Andrew J. Schaeffer), were able to find answers to these questions.
"Our work presents unprecedented evidence that these slow earthquakes are related to dynamic fluid processes at the boundary between tectonic plates," said first author and uOttawa PhD student, Jeremy Gosselin. "These slow earthquakes are quite complex, and many theoretical models of slow earthquakes require the pressure of these fluids to fluctuate during an earthquake cycle."
Using a technique similar to ultrasound imagery and recordings of earthquakes, Audet and his team were able to map the structure of the Earth where these slow earthquakes occur. By analyzing the properties of the rocks where these earthquakes happened, they were able to reach their conclusions.
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Pills

Researchers identify 102 genes linked to autism, but still won't look into vaccines or diet


Healthline
Sun, 26 Jan 2020 19:10 UTC
autism
In the largest genetics study of its kind to date, scientists have identified 102 genes associated with the risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Researchers also gained further insight into which of these genes are associated with both ASD and other disorders that cause intellectual disability and developmental delay.

For the study, an international team of researchers analyzed more than 35,000 participant samples, including almost 12,000 from people with ASD.

Researchers used a genetic technique called "exome sequencing," which looks at all the regions of a person's genetic information — or genome — that are translated into proteins. This testing can pick up rare genetic mutations that might not show up with other methods.

Comment: Parents need to educate themselves in order to advocate for their children. Besides pushing back on mandatory shots, there is much that can be done without getting on the medical treadmill:

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Telescope

Scientists solve a mystery about aurorae

Nathaniel Scharping
Astronomy
Fri, 01 Feb 2019 18:55 UTC
Rainbow auroras NW of Calgary
© Harlan Thomas
Aurorae: They're colorful, mesmerizing and, most of all, mysterious. Scientists understand the basic physics behind how charged particles interact with our atmosphere to produce these dancing lights. But the larger mechanics of when, why and how auroras appear still isn't very well understood.

One particular mystery is that the northern and southern lights don't always match up like researchers would expect. For years, scientists assumed that aurora borealis and aurora australis would mirror each other. That is, people in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles would see a similar show if their positions were just right. But recent research has shown that's not the case. And now a team led by scientists from the University of Bergen in Norway thinks they have an answer.

Comment: More on the Carrington Event:

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