Category: SCI

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Archaeology NWT_Animals SCI

Baby snake from dinosaur age found frozen in amber

For the first time ever, scientists discovered an ancient snake embryo contained in 105-million-year-old amber. The discovery reveals important information on the evolution of modern snakes.

“This snake is linked to ancient snakes from Argentina, Africa, India and Australia,” said paleontologist Michael Caldwell, lead author of the study and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “It is an important—and until now, missing—component of understanding snake evolution from southern continents, that is Gondwana, in the mid-Mesozoic.”

Caldwell and his team, which includes researchers from China, Australia, and the United States, tracked the migration of the ancient Gondwanan snakes all the way back to 180 million years ago when they were transported by tectonic movements created by continents and their parts.

The team also gained information from the amber fragment that encased the specimen.

“It is clear that this little snake was living in a forested environment with numerous insects and plants, as these are preserved in the clast,” Caldwell said. “Not only do we have the first baby snake, we also have the first definitive evidence of a fossil snake living in a forest.”

The team used computerized tomography (CT) scans to study the ancient snake and compare it with the children of modern snakes, shedding light on the embryology and development of the ancient specimen.

“All of these data refine our understanding of early snake evolution, as 100-million year-old snakes are known from only 20 or so relatively complete fossil snake species,” Caldwell said. “There is a great deal of new information preserved in this new fossilized baby snake.”

The findings were published in Science Advances.

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HEALTH Research SCI

Green public spaces decrease depression in city dwellers, study says

A new study suggests that greening vacant urban land decreases feelings of depression and increases overall mental health for residents in its proximity. The interesting findings could have implications for all cities across the United States, where approximately 15 percent of land is considered “vacant.”

“Dilapidated and vacant spaces are factors that put residents at an increased risk of depression and stress, and may explain why socioeconomic disparities in mental illness persist,” said lead author Eugenia South of the University of Pennsylvania. “What these new data show us is that making structural changes, like greening lots, has a positive impact on the health of those living in these neighborhoods. And that it can be achieved in a cost-effective and scalable way—not only in Philadelphia but in other cities with the same harmful environmental surroundings.”

Interestingly, the study revealed that interventions of trash clean-up did not significantly alter self-reported mental health.

“The lack of change in these groups is likely because the trash clean-up lots had no additional green space created,” said co-author John MacDonald, Ph.D., a professor of criminology and sociology at Penn. “The findings support that exposure to more natural environments can be part of restoring mental health, particularly for people living in stressful and chaotic urban environments.”

The study reveals how turning blighted neighborhood environments into green regions can create better trajectories for residents’ mental health.

“Greening vacant land is a highly inexpensive and scalable way to improve cities and enhance people’s health while encouraging them to remain in their home neighborhoods,” said senior author Charles C. Branas of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

“While mental health therapies will always be a vital aspect of treatment, revitalizing the places where people live, work, and play, may have broad, population-level impact on mental health outcomes,” he added.

The findings were published in JAMA Network Open.

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Physics Research SCI

Scientists build a super battery using quantum mechanics

If you are exasperated by waiting hours for your smartphone to charge, a new research project at the University of Adelaide might change that. Ramsay Fellow, Dr. James Quach, wants to use quantum mechanics’ unique properties to build the fastest charging battery in the world.

Dr. Quach is an expert in the field and he said that the possibility of instantaneous charging is on the horizon. He wants to use the entanglement method.

Entanglement is a phenomenon where two entangled objects share their individual properties with each other, even when spatially separated. Performing an action on one object affects the other object.

This occurs at a molecular level, where normal physics laws do not work. According to Quash, it is because of this property that it is viable to speed up the charging process.

His invention is based on a theory that the more quantum batteries the faster they charge. This does not apply to conventional batteries.

For example, if one quantum battery takes an hour to charge, adding another will decrease the time to 30 minutes. Once developed, it might cut charging times to zero.

“Entanglement is incredibly delicate, it requires very specific conditions – low temperatures and an isolated system – and when those conditions change the entanglement disappears,” Quash said. With the support of the academic community in Adelaide, interstate and globally, his goal is to extend the theory of the quantum battery and build a lab conducive to the conditions for entanglement to materialize.

 

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NWT_Climate NWT_Environment SCI

Climate impact is evident in the seasons

Scientists have determined that people are responsible for global warming by looking at weather records. They also can dust for fingerprints (ecological footprints) in other places.

A new study led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Ben Santer looked for prints in a new place: the seasonal cycle of temperatures. The perfect tool for analyzing this is the global temperature record satellites produce.

The satellites do not go back quite as far as weather-station records, but the dataset is now long enough to be useful for climate studies. Several groups maintain separate satellite temperature datasets.

A huge amount of work went into all the necessary processing to produce temperature maps. Therefore, the different datasets do not always line up perfectly with each other.

Santer’s study involved using the most recent two versions of three different datasets. Each one tracks different layers of the atmosphere.

One record covers the lower troposphere. The other one covers the middle troposphere that is a little higher.

By tracking the difference between the coldest months and warmest summer months, they were able to see interesting regional patterns. The team averaged together the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitude stripe and discovered a larger seasonal temperature swing than in the Southern Hemisphere. The reason for this is there is a much greater area of land.

Nevertheless, this seasonal cycle has also increased significantly since 1979. It is a result of summer temperatures in the atmosphere rising faster than winter temperatures.

 

Categories
Research SCI TECH_Technology

Eagled-eyed machine learning algorithm outperforms human experts

University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers just trained artificial intelligence to consistently and quickly analyze and detect microscopic radiation damage in materials considered for nuclear reactors better than human experts.

“Machine learning has great potential to transform the current, human-involved approach of image analysis in microscopy,” said Wei Li, who participated in the research.

“In the future, I believe images from many instruments will pass through a machine learning algorithm for initial analysis before being considered by humans,” said engineering professor Dane Morgan, Li’s graduate school advisor.

The job in question is crucial for the development of safe nuclear materials and could make the time-consuming process more effective and efficient.

“Human detection and identification is error-prone, inconsistent and inefficient. Perhaps most importantly, it’s not scalable,” Morgan said. “Newer imaging technologies are outstripping human capabilities to analyze the data we can produce.”

After training the machine with 270 images, the neural network, in combination with a cascade object detector machine learning algorithm, was able to identify and classify about 86 percent of dislocation loops in a set of sample pictures. In comparison, human experts only found 80 percent of the defects.

“When we got the final result, everyone was surprised, not only by the accuracy of the approach, but the speed,” said Oak Ridge staff scientist Kevin Field. “We can now detect these loops like humans while doing it in a fraction of the time on a standard home computer.”

“This is just the beginning,” Morgan said. “Machine learning tools will help create a cyber infrastructure that scientists can utilize in ways we are just beginning to understand.”

Categories
NWT_Climate Research SCI

Great Barrier Reef ‘close to collapse’ due to climate change

A plan endorsed by Australian federal and state governments suggests that the current climate change path means that the Great Barrier Reef is heading toward a “collapse.” A “new and improved” Reef 2050 plan released on Friday attempts to acknowledge that climate change poses a huge threat to the reef.

“Coral bleaching is projected to increase in frequency … those coral reefs that survive are expected to be less biodiverse than in the past,” the plan says, recognizing that “holding the global temperature increase to 1.5°C or less is critical to ensure the survival of coral reefs”.

“Respected coral scientists have documented in peer-reviewed journals that most of the world’s coral reefs will not survive unless the global temperature increase is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” it continued.

WWF-Australia head of oceans Richard Leck claims that Australia’s emissions reductions are not in line with limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

“It is simply not good enough for the revised plan to suggest the global community must work to limit warming when Australia is not doing its fair share,” he said.

Australian Marine Conservation Society’s reef campaign director Imogen Zethoven claims that increased climate change recognition must be followed by action, suggesting that bleaching events would happen less often under an average temperature increase of 1.6 degrees Celsius.

“The onset of twice-a-decade bleaching will then become the onset of annual bleaching and eventually [the entire reef] will be affected,” she said.

Whether or not Australia will be able to save the Great Barrier Reef in time is yet to be seen.

Categories
SCI Science

World’s most extensive family tree sheds light on more than 11 generations

Scientists have compiled the world’s largest family tree, an endeavor that reveals new insights into both European and North American history.

Researchers from Columbia University used Geni.com to create the tree, which encompasses roughly 13 million people. After downloading over 80 million public profiles, researchers used mathematical analysis to organize the data. That allowed them to create an interconnected family tree that spans out over 11 generations.

“Family trees have vast applications in multiple fields from genetics to anthropology and economics,” the authors wrote in the study, according to Newsweek. “However, the collection of extended family trees is tedious and usually relies on resources with limited geographical scope and complex data usage restrictions.”

Nearly 85 percent of people looked at in the study came from either Europe or North America. As a result, the tree allowed the team to get a look into how both continents are connected. While they learned a range of interesting things, one of the most useful was the shifting patterns of marriage and migration over time.

For instance, before 1850, many people married within the family. Though researchers previously believed people in the West stopped marrying relatives as a result of improved transport networks, the new data revealed that between 1800 and 1850 people were more likely to marry a fourth cousin. As a result, the team believes the practice died out because it became less socially acceptable over time.

Another surprising discovery is that women in both North America and Europe migrated more than men over the last 300 years. However, when men did migrate they traveled greater distances on average.

This new data is important because it could help answer a wide range of genealogical and scientific questions.

“We hope people use it,” said Yaniv Erlich, a data scientist and computational biologist at the New York Genome Center, according to National Geographic. “You can look at local disasters, individual families, anthropological questions, fertility rates—the data could be used for all of those things.”

A new study published in the journal Science reports.

Categories
HEALTH HND_Disease SCI

Foodborne illness might be on the rise, report says

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that foodborne illness might be on the rise. Approximately 48 million people get sick from one of 31 pathogens each year, sending about 128,000 people to the hospital and causing 3,000 deaths.

Catherine Donnelly, a professor of food science at the University of Vermont, believes that the increase might at least partly be due to improvements in the tools that detect food contamination as well as outbreak reporting, surveillance, and investigation.

“Surveillance has drastically improved, and state public health labs are linked to databases at CDC, allowing quick identification of patterns of illness and links to food products,” she said. “As a result, we see more reports of foodborne illness.”

“People are tending to eat more produce and eat it in different forms, and those are good things, because we want people to eat more fresh produce, but when that happens, you’re likely to increase the risk,” said FDA deputy commissioner Mike Taylor.

And this risk is likely due to the fact that fresh produce is “sold and prepared without any kill step” to remove illness-causing germs.

“Foods travel longer distances to get from farms to consumers, and pathogens can be introduced along the way,” Donnelly said. “There is wider geographic distribution of centrally produced foods, so when something goes wrong during production, the impacts are widespread.

“Many outbreaks linked to poultry, eggs and meat can be traced back to farms where intensive production practices can lead to [the] spread of highly virulent pathogens,” she said, and some reflect “poor food handling practices.”

Regardless, Taylor doesn’t think there’s cause for a huge alarm.

“People should know that there’s a lot of high tech, high-powered science going into figuring out how to do better at preventing foodborne illness,” Taylor said. “People should know that the system — government and industry — they’re not just sitting back.”

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HEALTH HND_Cancer SCI

Cancer patients who use alternative therapies ‘twice as likely’ to die

A new study of 1,290 United States cancer patients suggests that people who opt for alternative therapies are “twice as likely” to die. Often, these patients refuse life-saving treatments like surgery or chemotherapy in favor of alternative therapies.

“The reality is despite the fact that many patients believe that these types of unproven therapies will improve their survival and possibly even improve their chances of a cure, there’s really no evidence to support that claim…” said Skyler Johnson of from Yale School of Medicine, lead author of the study.

“Although they may be used to support patients experiencing symptoms from cancer treatment, it looks as though they are either being marketed or understood to be effective cancer treatments,” he added.

Martin Ledwick, Cancer Research United Kingdom’s head information nurse, believes that complementary medicine can increase quality of life and wellbeing for some patients.

“But it is important that patients considering them do not see them as an alternative to conventional treatments that have been shown though clinical trials to make a real difference to survival,” he said.

And Arnie Purushotham, director at King’s Health Partners Comprehensive Cancer Centre, believes that there is a clear difference between complementary treatments and alternative therapies.

“The medical community is united in agreeing that alternate therapy is not an effective means of treating cancer patients,” he said.

“However, there is increasing evidence that complementary therapy like acupuncture, yoga and relaxation therapy may be beneficial in alleviating cancer patients’ symptoms like pain and fatigue.”

The findings were published in JAMA Oncology.

Categories
Geology Research SCI

Study reveals new clues about Great Dying, Earth’s largest mass extinction

A new study sheds light on the causes of the largest mass extinction in the Earth’s history, also referred to as the End-Permian Extinction and the Great Dying.

The event took place approximately 250 million years ago when a giant volcanic eruption hit what is now Russia’s province of Siberia. The eruption sent almost 90 percent of life into extinction. In geology, the eruption is referred to as the Siberian Flood Basalts, which ran for nearly one million years.

“The scale of this extinction was so incredible that scientists have often wondered what made the Siberian Flood Basalts so much more deadly than other similar eruptions,” said Michael Broadley of the Centre for Petrographic and Geochemical Research in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France, and lead author of the study.

The research was co-authored by the late Lawrence Taylor, who is the former director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“Taylor was instrumental in supplying samples of mantle xenoliths, rock sections of the lithosphere [a section of the planet located between the crust and the mantle] that get captured by the passing magma and erupted to the surface during the volcanic explosion,” Broadley said. “Taylor also provided advice throughout the study.”

The team analyzed samples to determine the lithosphere composition, which revealed that prior to the Siberian Basalt floods, it was loaded with bromine, iodine, and chlorine, all of which belong to the halogen chemical group. After the volcanic eruption, they disappeared.

“We concluded that the large reservoir of halogens that was stored in the Siberian lithosphere was sent into the earth’s atmosphere during the volcanic explosion, effectively destroying the ozone layer at the time and contributing to the mass extinction,” Broadley said.

The findings were published in Nature Geoscience.