Endangered California condors can have "'virgin births," according to a study released Thursday.

Researchers with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance said genetic testing confirmed that two male chicks hatched in 2001 and 2009 from unfertilized eggs were related to their mothers. Neither was related to a male.

The study was published Thursday in the the Journal of Heredity. It's the first report of asexual reproduction in California condors, although parthenogenesis can occur in other species ranging from sharks to honey bees to Komodo dragons.

But in birds, it usually only occurs when females don't have access to males. In this case, each mother condor had previously bred with males, producing 34 chicks, and each was housed with a fertile male at the time they produced the eggs through parthenogenesis.

The researchers said they believe it is the first case of asexual reproduction in any avian species where the female had access to a mate.

Using the Advanced Photon Source, scientists have recreated the structure of ice formed at the center of planets like Neptune and Uranus.
Everyone knows about ice, liquid and vapor — but, depending on the conditions, water can actually form more than a dozen different structures. Scientists have now added a new phase to the list: superionic ice.

This type of ice forms at extremely high temperatures and pressures, such as those deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus. Previously superionic ice had only been glimpsed in a brief instant as scientists sent a shockwave through a droplet of water, but in a new study published in Nature Physics, scientists found a way to reliably create, sustain and examine the ice.

"It was a surprise — everyone thought this phase wouldn't appear until you are at much higher pressures than where we first find it," said study co-author Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor and beamline scientist at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory. ​"But we were able to very accurately map the properties of this new ice, which constitutes a new phase of matter, thanks to several powerful tools."

The A.30 variant of the coronavirus, detected in Angola and Sweden, is highly resistant to antibodies induced by the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, a new lab study has shown.

A team from Germany looked at the rare A.30 variant that was first recorded in Tanzania and later detected in several patients in Angola and Sweden this spring. They compared the mutation to the Beta and Eta variants. Beta was chosen because it has "the highest level" of resistance to antibodies, the researchers said.

According to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Cellular & Molecular Immunology this week, the A.30 variant showed improved ability to enter most host cells, including kidney, liver, and lung cells.

The study found the mutation

"enters certain cell lines with increased efficiency and evades antibody-mediated neutralization. In summary, A.30 exhibits a cell line preference not observed for other viral variants and efficiently evades neutralization by antibodies elicited by ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 [AstraZeneca] or BNT162b2 [Pfizer] vaccination."

The variant also proved to be resistant to monoclonal drug Bamlanivimab, which is used for Covid-19 treatment, but was vulnerable to a cocktail of Bamlanivimab and Etesevimab.

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.

"I don't know much about whales. I have never seen a whale in my life," says Michael Bronstein. The Israeli computer scientist, teaching at Imperial College London, England, might not seem the ideal candidate for a project involving the communication of sperm whales. But his skills as an expert in machine learning could be key to an ambitious endeavor that officially started in March 2020: an interdisciplinary group of scientists wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the language of these marine mammals. If Project CETI (for Cetacean Translation Initiative) succeeds, it would be the first time that we actually understand what animals are chatting about — and maybe we could even have a conversation with them.

It started in 2017 when an international group of scientists spent a year together at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Radcliffe Fellowship, a program that promises "an opportunity to step away from usual routines." One day, Shafi Goldwasser, a computer scientist and cryptography expert also from Israel, came by the office of David Gruber, a marine biologist at City University of New York. Goldwasser, who had just been named the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, had heard a series of clicking sounds that reminded her of the noise a faulty electronic circuit makes — or of Morse code. That's how sperm whales talk to each other, Gruber told her. "I said, 'Maybe we should do a project where we are translating the whale sounds into something that we as humans can understand,'" Goldwasser recounts. "I really said it as an afterthought. I never thought he was going to take me seriously."

But the fellowship was an opportunity to take far-out ideas seriously. At a dinner party, they presented the idea to Bronstein, who was following recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI that deals with the automated analysis of written and spoken speech — so far, just human language. Bronstein was convinced that the codas, as the brief sperm whale utterances are called, have a structure that lends them to this kind of analysis. Fortunately, Gruber knew a biologist named Shane Gero who had been recording a lot of sperm whale codas in the waters around the Caribbean island of Dominica since 2005. Bronstein applied some machine-learning algorithms to the data. "They seemed to be working very well, at least with some relatively simple tasks," he says. But this was no more than a proof of concept. For a deeper analysis, the algorithms needed more context and more data — millions of whale codas.

A team led by Southwest Research Institute has updated its asteroid bombardment model of the Earth with the latest geologic evidence of ancient, large collisions. These models have been used to understand how impacts may have affected oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere in the Archean eon, 2.5 to 4 billion years ago.

When large asteroids or comets struck early Earth, the energy released melted and vaporized rocky materials in the Earth's crust. The small droplets of molten rock in the impact plume would condense, solidify and fall back to Earth, creating round, globally distributed sand-size particles. Known as impact spherules, these glassy particles populated multiple thin, discrete layers in the Earth's crust, ranging in age from about 2.4 to 3.5 billion years old. These Archean spherule layers are markers of ancient collisions. "In recent years, a number of new spherule layers have been identified in drill cores and outcrops, increasing the total number of known impact events during the early Earth," said Dr. Nadja Drabon, a professor at Harvard University and a co-author of the paper.

"Current bombardment models underestimate the number of late Archean spherule layers, suggesting that the impactor flux at that time was up to 10 times higher than previously thought," said SwRI's Dr. Simone Marchi, lead author of a paper about this research in Nature Geoscience. "What's more, we find that the cumulative impactor mass delivered to the early Earth was an important 'sink' of oxygen, suggesting that early bombardment could have delayed oxidation of Earth's atmosphere."

The abundance of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is due to a balance of production and removal processes. These new findings correspond to the geological record, which shows that oxygen levels in the atmosphere varied but stayed relatively low in the early Archean eon. Impacts by bodies larger than six miles (10 km) in diameter may have contributed to its scarcity, as limited oxygen present in the atmosphere of early Earth would have been chemically consumed by impact vapors, further reducing its abundance in the atmosphere.

Researchers from National Institute of Polar Research and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics published maps indicating how the auroral zone has moved over the last three millennia.
"The Poetic Edda", an Old Norse collection of poems believed to have been most likely drawn up between 1000 and 1100 AD, contains the gods and giants of ancient Scandinavian lore but lacks perhaps the most magical of real phenomena — auroras. A century later, another Old Norse text, called "The King's Mirror", describes auroras over modern-day Greenland. Around the same time, auroras were witnessed across Japan, including written records of red and white curtain-like lights just north of Kyoto.

Why the discrepancy? Researchers set out to better understand the auroral zone and its movement over the last 3,000 years in an effort to predict how it might change in the future. The team published maps indicating how the auroral zone has moved over the last three millennia on Aug. 20 in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate.

"The accurate knowledge of the auroral zone over the past 3,000 years — via worldwide old witness record of auroras, including those even from low-latitude Japan — helps us understand the extreme magnetic storms," said first author Ryuho Kataoka, associate professor at the National Institute of Polar Research.

One spring evening six years ago, hundreds of miles underground, our planet began to rumble from a series of peculiar earthquakes. Most of Earth's temblors strike within a few dozen miles of the surface, but these quakes stirred at depths where temperatures and pressures grow so intense that rocks tend to bend rather than break.

The first jolt, which struck off the coasts of Japan's remote Bonin Islands, was recorded at magnitude 7.9 and up to 680 kilometers (423 miles) underground, making it one of the deepest quakes of its size. Then another oddity emerged in the cascade of aftershocks that followed: a tiny temblor that, if confirmed, would be the deepest earthquake ever detected.

A breakthrough in the fight against hunger, three Nobel Prizes, and 150 million tonnes of annual production - yet still a tricky topic for research: For over 100 years, the chemical industry has been using the Haber-Bosch process to convert atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia, an important component of mineral fertilizers and many other chemical products. Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung have now found a surprisingly simple way to produce ammonia at ambient temperature - and even at atmospheric pressure - and thus under much milder conditions than those required for the Haber-Bosch process. The reactants are passed through a mill that grinds the catalyst used to facilitate the reaction between the inert nitrogen and hydrogen. The result is a thin but continuous stream of ammonia.

Five hundred degrees Celsius and 200 bar - these are the conditions usually required to get nitrogen to combine with hydrogen to generate ammonia. Only in this form can the nitrogen be used by plants. Despite all the controversy surrounding mineral fertilizers, the Haber-Bosch process is making an essential contribution to feeding the growing world population. It is thus no wonder that Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch as well as Max Planck researcher Gerhard Ertl, who elucidated exactly what happens in the process, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Nevertheless, chemists are still fixated on the synthesis of ammonia. "This has been a dream reaction for 100 years", says Ferdi Schüth, Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr. This expresses both how economically important the transformation is and how difficult it is to achieve. Because ammonia is considered a potential storage medium for hydrogen produced with renewable energy, it could become even more important.

Chemists would like to dispense with the harsh reaction conditions - also because of the amount of energy required. Considerable efforts have been made to find an alternative method of production: other catalysts, light as an energy source, electrolysis, and even mechanocatalysis - processes that take place in a ball mill. But these methods have yielded only minute amounts of ammonia (if any at all).

Here are three unrelated but surprising discoveries that will be of interest to the intelligent design community.

Shared Code

Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We're leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!

A person can leave DNA on a surface without directly touching it, a Flinders University study has found, with the longer someone spends in a room the more likely they are to leave a trace of themselves behind.

The researchers placed DNA collection plates half a meter to five meters apart in offices that had been sanitized.

Without anyone directly touching the collection plates, DNA from multiple people was present after only one day, with the DNA profiles stronger the closer the plates were to an individual and the longer they stayed out. [Emphasis added.]

They published their findings in Forensic Science International Genetics.

Everyone knows about ice, liquid and vapor — but, depending on the conditions, water can actually form more than a dozen different structures. Scientists have now added a new phase to the list: superionic ice.

This type of ice forms at extremely high temperatures and pressures, such as those deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus. Previously, superionic ice had only been glimpsed in a brief instant as scientists sent a shockwave through a droplet of water, but in a new study published in Nature Physics, scientists found a way to reliably create, sustain, and examine the ice.

"It was a surprise — everyone thought this phase wouldn't appear until you are at much higher pressures than where we first find it," said study co-author Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor and beamline scientist at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. "But we were able to very accurately map the properties of this new ice, which constitutes a new phase of matter, thanks to several powerful tools."