Startup tests hybrid engine for small launch vehicle

WASHINGTON — A Maine startup made its first, albeit small, step towards space Jan. 31 with the successful launch of a rocket testing the engine technology it plans to use on future small launch vehicles.

The Stardust 1.0 rocket by Braunschweig, Maine-based bluShift Aerospace launched at about 3 p.m. Eastern from the Loring Commerce Centre, a former Air Force base in northern Maine. The rocket fired its hybrid rocket engine for about 10 seconds on a very low altitude flight, with the rocket parachuting back to the ground minutes later.

Two launch attempts earlier in the day were aborted. The first abort took place when the rocket’s igniter fired but an oxidizer valve failed to open. The second abort took place when the igniter failed to ignite. The company corrected both problems in time for a third, and ultimately successful, launch attempt later in the day.

“I don’t think we could have asked for anything better,” Sascha Deri, chief executive of bluShift, told reporters in a call after the launch. The rocket fell a little short of the planned apogee of about 1,500 meters, he said, possibly because some fuel grains in the rocket’s hybrid motor eroded during the first aborted launch attempt. Otherwise, “it went perfectly.”

The rocket carried three payloads, each the size of a three-unit cubesat, for two companies and a high school, as well as mementos flown by the company. However, the main purpose of the launch was to test the company’s technology, which it plans to later scale up for suborbital and orbital launch vehicles.

“The primary goal is to demonstrate that we are capable of more than just building a nifty, novel rocket engine, that we are capable of building full rockets, acquiring customers, going after a niche market that others are not going after in a unique way, so that we can attract private investors for funding the next stage of our company,” Deri said in a Jan. 30 briefing about the launch.

The successful launch may help the company raise a $650,000 angel round of investment so it can pursue a larger suborbital vehicle, Stardust 2.0. That vehicle could fly as soon as late this year, he said after the Stardust 1.0 launch, and be powerful enough to reach the edge of space, but provide only about a half a minute of microgravity.

The larger hybrid engine developed for Stardust 2.0 would serve as a “fundamental building block” for a larger suborbital launch vehicle, Stardust Rogue, and for Red Dwarf, a launch vehicle designed to place up to 30 kilograms into orbit. Those vehicles would require additional funding rounds, with Red Dwarf ready for launch no earlier than 2024.

All those vehicles will be powered by versions of the hybrid engine tested on the Stardust 1.0 launch. That engine uses nitrous oxide and a proprietary “bio-derived” solid fuel. Deri declined to provide details about that fuel other than it is nontoxic and easy to transport, and that it can be “produced on farms across America.”

Hybrid engines — so named because they use a solid fuel and liquid propellant — have struggled to find a niche in the space industry. The best-known application of hybrid engines was on Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne suborbital spaceplane and its successor, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. However, problems developing that hybrid propulsion system caused extensive delays in the development of SpaceShipTwo, and few other companies have considered using it.

Deri said a technical adviser for bluShift had been involved in work three decades ago by the American Rocket Company, or Amroc, that attempted to develop a launch vehicle using hybrid engines. “We were able to take advantage of his sage advice and guidance to not repeat some of the errors of the past,” he said. “Hybrid engines certainly have their unique challenges.”

Despite those challenges, he said bluShift was attracted to the lower complexity and cost that such engines promise compared to liquid-propellant engines, while trading off performance. “We will never become the Formula 1 of rockets,” he said. “We’re trying to become the Toyota Tercel: something reliable that gets there and is cost effective.”

That approach, he said, will allow it stand out in a crowded market of small launch vehicle companies, with 100 or more in various stages of development by some estimates. A particular focus will be on civil and academic customers who today rely on rideshare launch opportunities.

A flight test, even one to a low altitude, puts bluShift ahead of some other launch vehicle developers yet to make any kind of flights, but does not guarantee long-term success. Vector Space Systems performed two low-altitude flight tests of its Vector-R rocket in 2017. However, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2019 after one of its major investors pulled out, and only recently restarted operations under new ownership.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/startup-tests-hybrid-engine-for-small-launch-vehicle/

Stunningly preserved 220-million-year-old dinosaur footprint discovered by 4-year-old

A four-year-old girl stunned paleontologists after she found a perfectly-preserved dinosaur footprint that dates back 220 million years.

Lily Wilder made the discovery on January 23 while walking along a beach in South Wales with her father and dog. The family was on their way to the supermarket when Wilder saw the footprint imprinted on a rock.

"It was on a low rock, shoulder height for Lily, and she just spotted it and said, 'look, Daddy,' her mother, Sally Wilder, told NBC News. "She is really excited but doesn't quite grasp how amazing it is."

At first, the family thought the print, which is just over 10 cm (4 inches) long, was scratched out on the rock by an artist.

But mother Sally was aware that similar footprints had been found along that piece of the coast before, so she posted about their discovery on social media.

"I found this fossil identification page on Facebook and I posted it on there and people went a bit crazy," she told Wales Online.

Shortly after, The National Museum of Wales was in touch with the Wilder family, and officials have since retrieved the print and put it in the museum.

Experts believe the footprint was most likely left by a dinosaur that stood about 75 centimeters (29.5 inches) tall and 2.5 meters (about 8 feet) long and walked on its two hind feet.

It is impossible to identify exactly what type of dinosaur left it, although experts typically classify the print as a Grallator.

Welsh scientists are calling the girl's discovery "the finest impression of a 215 million-year-old dinosaur print found in Britain in a decade," according to Wales Online.

"It's so perfect and absolutely pristine. It's a wonderful piece," said Karl-James Langford from Archeology Cyrmu, according to Wales Online.

"I would say it's internationally important and that is why the museum took it straight away. This is how important it is. I would say it's the best dinosaur footprint found in the UK in the past 10 years," he added.

The family says their daughter's interest in dinosaurs has been ignited since the discovery and that she's been playing with a collection of dino toys and models.

The National Museum in Cardiff, which is currently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said that Lily and her classmates would be invited to the exhibition once it reopens.

"What's amazing is, if her name goes down as the finder in the museum, it could be her grandchildren going to visit that in the museum one day, and for years and years and generations to come, which is quite amazing," mother Sally told Wales Online.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/stunningly-preserved-220-million-year-old-dinosaur-footprint-discovered-by-4-year-old/

Forty years of coral spawning captured in one place for the first time

Efforts to understand when corals reproduce have been given a boost thanks to a new resource that gives scientists open access to more than forty years' worth of information about coral spawning.

Led by researchers at Newcastle University, UK, and James Cook University, Australia, the Coral Spawning Database (CSD) for the first time collates vital information about the timing and geographical variation of coral spawning. This was a huge international effort that includes over 90 authors from 60 institutions in 20 countries.

The data can be used by scientists and conservationists to better understand the environmental cues that influence when coral species spawn, such as temperature, daylight patterns and the lunar cycle.

By providing access to data going back as far as 1978, it can also help researchers identify any long-term trends in the timing of spawning and provide additional evidence for differentiating very closely related coral species.

It will also provide an important baseline against which to evaluate future changes in regional and global patterns of spawning times or seasonality associated with climate change.

Most corals reproduce by expelling eggs and sperm into open water during short night-time spawning events. These events can be highly synchronised within and among species, with millions of colonies spawning at much the same time resulting in one of nature's most spectacular displays.

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The discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian, or hard, corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. However, much of the data remained unpublished until now, meaning that there was little information about the month, date, and time of spawning or geographical variation in these factors.

The new, open access database collates much of the disparate data into one place. The CSD includes over 6,000 observations of the time or day of spawning for more than 300 scleractinian species from 101 sites in tropical regions across the Indian and western Pacific oceans.

Dr James Guest, from the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University, said: "Coral spawning times can be used to address many significant and fundamental questions in coral reef ecology. Knowing when corals spawn can assist coastal management -- for example, if dredging operations cease during mass spawning events. It also has enormous potential for scientific outreach, education and tourism if spawning events can be witnessed in person or remotely."

Professor Andrew Baird from the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs Studies at James Cook University added: "The CSD is a dynamic database that will grow over time as new observations become available. Anyone can add data at any time by contacting us and we will update the online database annually.

"Our vision is to help advance many aspects of coral reef science and conservation at a time of unprecedented environmental and societal change. It will accelerate our understanding of coral reproductive biology and provide a baseline against which to evaluate any future changes in the time of spawning."

Coral reefs are one of the most species-rich marine ecosystems on the planet and provide enormous societal benefits such as food, tourism and coastal protection. Corals are the ecosystem engineers on reefs and provide much of the habitat complexity in much the same way that trees do in forests.

Coral reefs around the world are in sharp decline due to overfishing, pollution and warming seas caused by climate change and successful reproduction is one of the main ways that reefs can recover naturally from human disturbances. It is hoped therefore that the CSD will improve our ability to manage and preserve these remarkable ecosystems.

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Materials provided by Newcastle University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/forty-years-of-coral-spawning-captured-in-one-place-for-the-first-time/

This Woman Is Training Citizen Scientists To Save Virgin Forests In The Philippines

Conservationist KM Reyes leading a biodiversity research training expedition in 2019 at Cleopatra’s ... [+] Needle Critical Habitat in the Philippines.

Kyle Venturillo

Conservationist KM Reyes helped get a forested area one-third the size of Los Angeles legally designated as a critical habitat in the Philippines, now she's training citizen scientists, including indigenous people, to collect conservation data in the country's Palawan province.

Reyes, a National Geographic Explorer and a co-Founder of the Centre for Sustainability PH, a women-led, youth, environmental NGO says the country was once 95 percent covered in rain forest, now only 3 percent remains.

A large proportion of what remains is in Palawan, which is also the ancestral domain of the last 200 members of the disappearing indigenous Batak tribe, and countless unique and endemic fauna and flora, including the highly-poached Pangolin.

But, Reyes, said, the forests there, particularly the 41,350 hectares of the Cleopatra’s Needle Critical Habitat (CNCH), which was protected by law in 2017, are little studied with vast tracts of rain forest lacking even a baseline biodiversity or social survey.

"Due to our remote location in far-western Philippines, there is a dearth of researchers/scientists here, so by equipping our communities through our training program, we lessen our dependence on outside scientists to understand the biological importance of our forests, and empower more citizenry to effectively defend and protect our island’s fresh water supplies," she said.

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Reyes said her organisation now provides a 315-hour parabiology and communications course called the The Knowledge is Power (to the Forest) program, to up-skill the indigenous and community forest rangers who live in and around CNCH.

"First, they are trained as parabiologists to conduct independent biodiversity monitoring and assessment surveys in riverine habitats while on patrol," she said, "These are skills that have traditionally been reserved for scientists and researchers, covering both data collection (eg. completing data sheets, identifying diagnostic characters of taxa, describing habitat parameters, field journaling) and standardised survey methods (eg. line transect/visual encounter surveys, and proper specimen collection & preservation).

The participants are also trained as science communicators to gain the skills and confidence to defend and share their findings to educate their communities, and influence political decision-makers.

From Australia to the World

"I was born and raised in Australia to Filipino parents," Reyes said, "In large part due to the alienation, racism, and sexism I experienced growing up and into adulthood as an Australian woman of color, I opted to spend more time abroad where I worked in empowerment projects with impoverished urban communities in Europe, Latin America, and North Africa," she said.

Reyes said that after so many years abroad, she was finally ready to see the Philippines for the first time and decided to settle there in 2014.

"We started the Cleopatra’s Needle project with my local colleagues and eventually founded CS together," she said.

Building Capacity in the Global South

"The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted more urgently than ever before the importance of community-led research and conservation," Reyes said, "In and around our wild places across the planet, major research gaps have occurred for scientists who are remote from their research sites with no locals trained to do the data collection and research in their absence."

Reyes says that the course is a simple idea that is scalable and replicable. That means any indigenous and local community from north to south, east to west, can participate in to contribute and influence science and conservation in their area.

"For instance, our indigenous and community forest rangers/parabiologists from Cleopatra’s Needle in central Palawan are already actively working with CS and the indigenous Tagbanua tribe on biodiversity data collection toward the establishment of our proposed Kensad Critical Habitat in southern Palawan, in collaboration with the indigenous Tagbanua tribe who have inhabited the area since time immemorial," she said.

Setting up mist netting during a biodiversity research training expedition in 2019 at Cleopatra’s ... [+] Needle Critical Habitat in the Philippines.

Kyle Venturillo

Another young conservationist from the Philippines is Anna Oposa, co-founder of conservation NGO Save Philipines Seas. She also goes by another title: Chief Mermaid.

MORE FROM FORBESWho Is The Chief Mermaid? How Is She Saving Philippines Sharks?By Andrew Wight

And although the title might raise a smile, it has also helped to raise funds for serious marine conservation work. Her organisation, Save Philippine Seas aims to conserve and restore coastal and marine resources via environmental education and community-based projects.

#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/this-woman-is-training-citizen-scientists-to-save-virgin-forests-in-the-philippines/

NASA seeks input on Europa Clipper launch options

WASHINGTON — NASA has issued a request for information for launch services for its Europa Clipper mission, a sign the agency is taking advantage of language in a recent appropriations bill that allows it to consider alternatives to the Space Launch System.

The Jan. 26 request for information seeks data from companies that believe they have vehicles that can launch the mission, which will go into orbit around Jupiter and make dozens of close approaches to Europa, an icy, potentially habitable moon.

The launch vehicle would have to be able to launch the spacecraft, weighing at least 6,065 kilograms, on a trajectory that would incorporate gravity-assist flybys of Mars and Earth before arriving at Jupiter. The launch would take place during a three-week window in October 2024.

At a July 2020 briefing to a National Academies committee, Europa Clipper project officials presented a proposal for once such trajectory. A launch in October 2024 would be followed by flybys of Mars in February 2025 and of Earth in December 2026, with the spacecraft entering orbit around Jupiter in April 2030. NASA’s Launch Services Program, the briefing stated, had determined that trajectory using a “commercial option” for a launch vehicle was feasible.

The SLS had been the preferred vehicle for the Europa Clipper mission because it could get the spacecraft to Jupiter much more quickly. The same briefing described a launch window in August 2024 that, using SLS, would get the spacecraft to Jupiter in no more than three years, without the need for flybys.

NASA, in recent budget proposals, sought to launch Europa Clipper on a commercial vehicle rather than SLS. It argued that doing so would save the agency as much as $1.5 billion and free up SLS vehicles for use in the Artemis program of human lunar exploration. Congress, though, mandated the use of SLS for Europa Clipper in appropriations bills through fiscal year 2020.

Another factor in the launch vehicle debate emerged in August, when NASA disclosed it was investigating “potential hardware compatibility issues” between SLS and Europa Clipper. The agency didn’t elaborate on the specific issues, believed to be associated with vibrations and other environmental factors the spacecraft would experience during launch.

Congress, in the fiscal year 2021 omnibus spending bill passed last month, gave NASA some flexibility regarding the launch of Europa Clipper. The bill again directed the use of SLS for the mission, but only if “the SLS is available and if torsional loading analysis has confirmed Clipper’s appropriateness for SLS.” The latter condition refers to the hardware compatibility issues previously reported by NASA.

The most likely commercial option for launching Europa Clipper is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4 Heavy, an earlier option, is no longer available since the remaining vehicles have all been assigned to national security launches. ULA plans to retire the vehicle by the middle of the decade as it transitions to the Vulcan Centaur.

Both Vulcan Centaur and Blue Origin’s New Glenn could be alternatives, but neither vehicle has made its first flight. The request for information states that the vehicle for Europa Clipper must meet NASA’s Category 3 requirements for launch services, which requires a vehicle have at least three successful launches, including at least two consecutive successful launches. Falcon Heavy has flown three times so far, all successfully.

The appropriations bill that gave NASA the option to consider alternatives to SLS did direct the agency to conduct a “full and open competition” for launch services if it chose not to use SLS, including allowing vehicles that are not currently on its NASA Launch Services 2 contract.

Responses to the request for information are due to NASA by Feb. 8. NASA hasn’t stated when it will decide on how to launch Europa Clipper, or issue a formal request for proposals for launch services, but agency officials said last summer they had hoped to decide how they would launch the mission by the end of 2020.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/nasa-seeks-input-on-europa-clipper-launch-options/

Here's how a 635 Million-Year-Old Microfossil may have helped thaw 'snowball Earth'

An international team of scientists in South China accidentally discovered the oldest terrestrial fossil ever found, about three times more ancient than the oldest known dinosaur.

Investigations are still ongoing and observations will need to be independently verified, but the international team argues the long thread-like fingers of this ancient organism look a lot like fungi.

Whatever it is, the eukaryote appears to have fossilised on land roughly 635 million years ago, just as Earth was recovering from a global ice age.

During this massive glaciation event, our planet resembled a big snowball, its oceans sealed from the Sun by more than a kilometre (0.6 miles) of solid ice. And then, in a geologic 'flash', our world began to inexplicably thaw, allowing life to thrive on land for the first time.

Fungi might have been among the first life forms to colonise that fresh space. The date of this new microfossil certainly supports the emerging idea that some fungi-like organisms ditched the oceans for a life on land even before plants.

In fact, this transition might have been what helped our planet recover from such a catastrophic ice age.

"If our interpretation is correct, it will be helpful for understanding the paleoclimate change and early life evolution," says geobiologist Tian Gan, from the Virginia Tech College of Science. 

Today, the early evolution of fungi remains a big mystery, in large part because without bones or shells, these organisms do not fossilise easily. Not too long ago, many scientists didn't even think it was possible for fungi to last that long.

The genome of modern-day fungi suggests their common ancestor lived over a billion years ago, branching off from animals at that time, but unfortunately, there could be a 600 million year break before the first obvious fungi fossil shows up in our records.

In recent years, a stream of intriguing and contentious discoveries have helped bridge that gap. 

In 2019, scientists reported the discovery of a fungi-like fossil in Canada, which had fossilised a billion years ago in an estuary. The implications were huge - namely that the common ancestor of fungi may have been around much earlier than the common ancestor of plants.

In 2020, a similar fossil with a resemblance to fungi was found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it was fossilised in a lagoon or lake between 810 and 715 million years ago.

Controversy still exists over whether or not these ancient organisms were actually fungi, and the new microfossil found in China will no doubt spur similar debate. After carefully comparing the organism's features to other fossils and living life forms, the authors identify it is a eukaryote and "probable fungi". 

"We would like to leave things open for other possibilities, as a part of our scientific inquiry," says geoscientist Shuhai Xiao from Virginia Tech.

"The best way to put it is that perhaps we have not disapproved that they are fungi, but they are the best interpretation that we have at the moment."

That said, the new discovery provides more evidence that fungi-like organisms may have predated plants on land.

"The question used to be: 'Were there fungi in the terrestrial realm before the rise of terrestrial plants'," explains Xiao. 

"And I think our study suggests yes."

The next question is: How did that fungi survive? 

Today, many species of terrestrial fungi are incapable of photosynthesis. As such, they rely on a mutualistic relationship with the roots of plants, exchanging water and nutrients from rocks and other tough organic matter for carbohydrates.

Because of this relationship, it was thought that plants and fungi emerged together to help populate the land. But the oldest terrestrial plant fossil only dates to 470 million years ago. 

The recently unearthed fungi-like microfossil is much older than that and was found hidden within the small cavities of limestone dolostone rocks, located in the Doushantuo Formation in South China.

The rock in which the fossil was found appears to have been deposited roughly 635 million years ago, after our snowball Earth had melted. Once open to the elements, the authors suspect carbonate cement began to fill in the cavities between the sheets of limestone, possibly entombing the micro-organisms living inside these bubbles.

These fungi-like life forms might even have roomed with other terrestrial micro-organisms, which were also widespread at the time, such as cyanobacteria or green algae.

If fungi-like animals were equally ubiquitous, then it's possible these life forms helped accelerate chemical weathering, delivering phosphorus to the seas and triggering a wave of bioproductivity in the marine environment.

On land, they might have even helped unearth clay minerals for carbon sequestration in Earth's soil, making a fertile environment for plants and animals and possibly changing the very atmosphere of our planet.

"Thus," the authors conclude, "the Doushantuo fungus-like micro-organisms, as cryptic as they were, may have played a role in catalyzing atmospheric oxygenation and biospheric evolution in the aftermath of the terminal Cryogenian global glaciation."

The study was published in Nature Communications. 

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/heres-how-a-635-million-year-old-microfossil-may-have-helped-thaw-snowball-earth/

Rare Scraps of Mineralized Anglo-Saxon Textiles Found in England

Last year, two companies developing land near the small village of Overstone in Northamptonshire, England, discovered a pair of subterranean surprises: a trove of 1,500 year-old Anglo-Saxon treasures and remnants of 4,000-year-old Bronze-Age burials and structures.

Barratt and David Wilson Homes had hired archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) to excavate the area ahead of construction. The researchers announced their finds earlier this month following an extensive, year-long dig.

Altogether, reports Carly Odell for the Northamptom Chronicle & Echo, the 15-hectare (37-acre) tract of land boasts a rich deposit of artifacts that spans thousands of years. The Anglo-Saxon cemetery is likely the largest of its kind ever discovered in the East Midlands county.

Per the statement, the team unearthed two Anglo-Saxon sites side-by-side: a cemetery with 154 burials and the remains of a settlement made up of 22 structures. (Another 20 Anglo-Saxon buildings were scattered across the area.) Researchers extracted more than 3,000 objects total, from jewelry, including 50 brooches, 15 rings and 2,000 beads, to weapons, such as 40 knives, 25 spears and 15 shield bosses, or conical pieces placed at the center of shields. Other finds included combs carved out of bone and cosmetic kits.

As Harry Baker reports for Live Science, the trove also included a scrap of Anglo-Saxon textiles attached to a metal brooch. After being buried in close proximity to the object for hundreds of years, the cloth fragments had mineralized but remained remarkably intact.

Aerial view of the archaeological dig at Overstone Farm, a parcel of land set to welcome a new housing development

(Courtesy of the Museum of London Archaeology)

An Anglo-Saxon brooch is among the finds discovered at the Overstone burial site.

(Courtesy of the Museum of London Archaeology)

Anglo-Saxon skeleton found at the site

(Courtesy of the Museum of London Archaeology)

“It is rare to find both an Anglo-Saxon settlement and a cemetery in a single excavation,” says Simon Markus, project manager at MOLA, in the statement. “… The human remains will tell us about diet, health and even the origins of the people themselves whilst their buildings can teach us what their day-to-day lives were like and how they utilized the local landscape in these two different periods.”

Nearby, researchers also unearthed evidence of a separate—and much older—Bronze Age settlement. Archaeologists found traces of 46 burials and the remnants of seven structures, including three barrow mounds and four buildings.

According to Historic England’s Heritage Calling blog, circular, ring-shaped mounds like the one discovered in Overstone were common burial places in Bronze Age England. As the British Museum notes, the Bronze Age in Britain is generally thought to have begun around 2000 B.C., when the Bell Beaker culture migrated from mainland Europe to the British Isles.

Simon Mortimer, archaeological consultant at RPS Group, an English project management group involved in the work, notes that this recent find offers an example of how private companies and archaeologists can work together.

“These are ‘once a lifetime discoveries’ for the archaeologists on site and none of this was known about before we started on site,” says Mortimer in the MOLA statement. “This is huge advance in our understanding of two key periods in the history of Northamptonshire … and there is a unique story to tell which links populations across 3,000 years.”

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#History | https://sciencespies.com/history/rare-scraps-of-mineralized-anglo-saxon-textiles-found-in-england/

Earth Loses 1.2 Trillion Tons of Ice Per Year, a Nearly 60% Increase From 1994

A new study finds that Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017, reports Chelsea Harvey for E&E News.

In a clear illustration of climate change’s worrying acceleration, the rate at which our planet is losing its ice skyrocketed from an average annual loss of roughly 760 billion tons of ice in the 1990s to more than 1.2 trillion tons per year in the 2010s, according to the study published this week in the journal Cryosphere.

Human activities, which have warmed our planet’s atmosphere and oceans by 0.47 degrees Fahrenheit and 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the 1980, respectively, drove the massive ice loss.

This study’s staggering total of lost ice is the first global assessment that accounts for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, as well as ice lost from mountain glaciers the world over, according to E&E News. All told, the massive loss of ice has raised global sea levels by 1.3 inches since 1994.

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” says Thomas Slater, a climate researcher at the University of Leeds and the Cryosphere study’s lead author, in a statement. “Sea level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.”

The IPCC’s estimates suggest that ice loss could raise sea level by up to 16 inches by 2100.

A second study, published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances, suggests that Earth’s ice loss is unlikely to stop accelerating, report Chris Mooney and Andrew Freeman for the Washington Post. The Science Advances paper finds 74 major ocean-terminating glaciers in Greenland are being weakened from beneath by intruding waters from warming seas.

“It’s like cutting the feet off the glacier rather than melting the whole body,” Eric Rignot, a study co-author and a glacier researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine, tells the Post. “You melt the feet and the body falls down, as opposed to melting the whole body.”

Speaking with the Post, Rignot says the study’s results suggest current estimates of sea level rise’s progression may be overly conservative. “As we peer below we realize these feedbacks are kicking in faster than we thought,” he says.

The worst-case scenario projected by the IPCC—the one that the Cryosphere study suggests Earth is currently tracking—might not actually be the worst-case scenario. Instead, ice loss and sea level rise could progress more rapidly than even the IPCC’s most pessimistic projections unless more is done to account for warm ocean water undercutting glaciers like the 74 in Greenland that the Science Advances paper identifies. Per the Post, the IPCC’s next report is expected later this year.

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#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/earth-loses-1-2-trillion-tons-of-ice-per-year-a-nearly-60-increase-from-1994/

FAA reviews delay SpaceX Starship test

WASHINGTON — A test flight of SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle is on hold as the company awaits approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, a delay that has publicly aggravated the company’s chief executive.

SpaceX had planned to perform a suborbital flight of its Starship SN9 vehicle at its Boca Chica, Texas, test site Jan. 28. The vehicle would have made a flight similar to that by the SN8 vehicle Dec. 9, this time going to an altitude of 10 kilometers before landing back at Boca Chica.

However, temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) closing airspace around the test site were unexpectedly lifted around the middle of the day, even as SpaceX was preparing the vehicle for the flight. A source familiar with the discussions between the FAA and SpaceX said that the agency requested additional information about the vehicle and flight plan before giving final approval.

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk berated the FAA for the delay. “Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,” he tweeted. “Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

The company proceeded with launch preparations Jan. 28, leaving some to wonder if the company might perform a launch without a TFR in place or other FAA approvals. That turned out to be a wet dress rehearsal, with the vehicle fueled but the countdown halted before engine ignition.

A second launch attempt Jan. 29 did not get nearly as far. An FAA air traffic advisory early in the day stated that the launch had been canceled, although the TFR remained in place. By midmorning, though, SpaceX said it was now targeting no earlier than Feb. 1 for the SN9 launch.

Neither SpaceX nor FAA have disclosed additional details about the issue preventing FAA approval for the launch. “We will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight,” FAA spokesperson Steven Kuhn told SpaceNews Jan. 29.

The conflict between the FAA and SpaceX stands in contrast to the FAA’s public stance of working constructively with industry. That has included a streamlining of launch and reentry regulations the FAA concluded last fall. Those new regulations take effect 90 days after their official publication in the Federal Register Dec. 10.

At an appearance Jan. 26 at a space investment webinar by IPO Edge, Wayne Monteith, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said he understood the industry’s desire to move quickly. “As soon as that rocket’s ready to go and that payload’s ready to go, they want to go. So that we don’t become an impediment to the success of U.S. companies, we, as the primary regulator in this industry, have to be ready as well.”

Monteith said he was willing to talk directly with launch company executives if there were regulatory issues. “CEOs and presidents of companies also have my direct line. They can reach out to me directly if our teams are miscommunicating or not communicating well with each other,” he said. Issues that might take staff “weeks or months” to resolve, he said, “we can sometimes fix in a single phone call.”

“While nobody likes to be regulated, it’s important,” he said. “For one, it keeps everyone safe, and number two, it provides that stable environment for investors.”

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/faa-reviews-delay-spacex-starship-test/

Next SpaceX commercial crew mission to launch in April

WASHINGTON — The second operational SpaceX commercial crew mission to the International Space Station will now launch in mid-April, carrying astronauts from Europe, Japan and the United States.

NASA said Jan. 29 that it set a launch date of April 20 for the Crew-2 mission to the station. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur will be the commander and pilor, respectively, with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency Thomas Pesquet on board as mission specialists.

The four will replace the Crew-1 astronauts who flew to the station in November on the first operational Crew Dragon mission. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will return in that spacecraft in late April or early May, assuming Crew-2 launches on its current schedule.

NASA earlier announced a no-earlier-than launch date for Crew-2 of March 30. However, it delayed the mission to allow the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test 2 mission by Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle to launch no earlier than March 25 for an approximately one-week mission. Both Starliner and Crew Dragon dock to one of two ports on the station, one of which is occupied by the Crew-1 Crew Dragon spacecraft.

The delay to April 20 also accommodates a Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz MS-18, scheduled to launch around April 10. It will bring three Russian cosmonauts to the station, with Soyuz MS-17 returning to Earth a week later with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, on board.

“Around the mid-March timeframe we’ll really start to ramp up our preparations for doing some visiting vehicle operations,” Kenny Todd, deputy manager of the ISS program at NASA, said during a Jan. 22 briefing about an upcoming series of spacewalks at the station.

At the briefing he didn’t give a schedule for those missions. “We are still working with our Russian colleagues as well as the Commercial Crew Program to firm up the schedules for the Soyuz 64S and Crew-2 flights,” he said in a Jan. 27 statement to SpaceNews, using the NASA designation for Soyuz MS-18. “Both flights are currently targeting spring 2021, but specific launch dates have yet to be finalized.”

Two of the Crew-1 astronauts, Hopkins and Glover, performed the first in a series of spacewalks Jan. 27, working on the exterior of the Columbus module to support the Bartolomeo external payload platform and to install a new communications antenna there. A second spacewalk on Feb. 1 will complete the installation of a new battery for the station’s power system.

Another pair of spacewalks is tentatively planned for late February or early March, Todd said at the briefing. Those would take place after the arrival of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft currently scheduled for launch Feb. 20.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/next-spacex-commercial-crew-mission-to-launch-in-april/

Family photo snapped by Solar Orbiter shows Venus, Earth and Mars gleaming like stars

Every now and again, we get a little glimpse of just how far human ingenuity has gone.

Quite literally: The above image was taken by a spacecraft travelling through the Solar System while it was at a distance of 251 million kilometres (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between Earth and the Sun by nearly half again.

It was snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on 18 November 2020, while en route to its destination. It joins a burgeoning tradition of photos of Earth taken by instruments far beyond where humans ourselves can venture.

But it's not just Earth in Solar Orbiter's image; Venus and Mars make an appearance, too, 48 million and 332 million kilometres from the spacecraft, respectively. It's a lovely family portrait when you think about it – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very different from each other – seen through a scientific instrument – the Heliospheric Imager – designed to study the heart of the Solar System.

(ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI)

The Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, and its flight was planned to make several Venus flybys to take advantage of the planet's gravity for a speed boost, a manoeuvre known as a gravity assist. The image of the planets was taken as the Solar Orbiter was moving towards Venus for one of these flybys.

By the time Solar Orbiter arrives in position around the Sun to start operations in November 2021, it will be swooping far outside the planetary plane to glimpse the Sun's polar regions. This will be tremendously exciting since, due to our vantage point on Earth, we've never directly imaged the Sun's poles.

While it is in transit, the Solar Orbiter is making observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team back here on Earth calibrate and test the instruments on board, but that data can be used for scientific analysis, too, of planets, of the solar wind, of space weather.

It gives us a little inspiring reminder, too, of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such photos always call to mind the words of Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, of a photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 on its way out of the Solar System.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives," he wrote.

"The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/family-photo-snapped-by-solar-orbiter-shows-venus-earth-and-mars-gleaming-like-stars/

Beetle parents engage in a smelly war of disinformation to keep their nests

Biologists are accustomed to hearing stories of microbes manipulating their host – a fungus that turns ants into suicidal zombies, a protozoan that makes rats seek out cat urine – but there are few examples of hosts turning the tables on their microbes.

My colleagues and I just published a paper that demonstrated that the burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis, found in eastern North America, alters the odors produced by microbes from their subterranean nest to thwart competitors that would steal the beetles' cache.

A series of unpleasant odors

I have studied burying beetles for over 30 years, at first to understand their parental behavior and physiology, but more recently their role in the community of carrion insects that recycle vital nutrients into the soil.

The olfactory environment of burying beetles is one that disgusts many humans but has fascinated me because it is the context in which beetles find their food, advertise for a mate, and compete with rivals.

The volatile chemicals that microbes produce as they flourish on a corpse change as the animal decomposes. This changing bouquet of molecules attracts a succession of different insect species.

The different mixes of odors represent specific stages of decay that will cue insects that specialize on a fresh corpse or the remains at the end of decomposition, or something in between. Such information may be useful in criminal cases to determine the post-mortem interval.

The focus of a burying beetle nest is a small dead animal that a male-female pair moves underground to prepare as food for its young.

Microbes living on a fresh mouse carcass begin to metabolize proteins, emitting sulfurous byproducts that waft in the breeze. These odors attract a flying burying beetle searching for a breeding opportunity.

Working with Paula Philbrick, a microbiologist, I began with field trials to identify the chemicals that burying beetles respond to, so we could discover which ones they might want to manipulate.

We tested two chemicals – dimethyl disulfide and dimethyl trisulfide – known to attract carrion insects. These chemicals are used by corpse-mimicking plants in their own manipulation – fooling carrion-seeking flies and beetles into pollinating their putrid flowers.

When we tried these compounds as supplements next to a fresh mouse carcass, however, free-flying burying beetles showed little interest.

With our best guess off the mark, we were overwhelmed at the thought of randomly testing each of the more than 500 chemicals associated with a rotting carcass.

Tell us what you know

Rather than playing a chemical guessing game, we decided to take another approach, to see whether the beetles could show us what was important to them.

Our colleagues Sandra Steiger and Johannes Stökl at the University of Bayreuth used a technique called gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy to compare the volatile molecules emitted from carcasses prepared by a pair of N. orbicollis with those emitted from carcasses that had not been touched by beetles.

Surprisingly, two sulfur compounds that were not known to be an important cue for any insect – methyl thiocyanate and methyl thiolacetate – were both reduced more than twentyfold by the beetles' labor on the carcass. Why would they do this, and how?

Methyl thiocyanate turns out to be a great cue for burying beetles searching for a carcass.

When we went back to the field and placed methyl thiocyanate next to carcasses, over 90 percent were discovered by burying beetles the first night, compared with a discovery rate of 0 percent to 20 percent for fresh carcasses without the chemical supplement.

Methyl thiocyanate appears to be heaven-scent for a beetle searching for that rare, newly deceased mouse or bird somewhere in the forest that is unclaimed by a vertebrate predator or scavenger.

Once a carcass is discovered, however, the resident beetles face a problem. The same odors that alerted them could also reveal their carrion prize to competitors.

Burying beetles are excellent at detecting and responding to information, but do they control this information as well?

A disinformation campaign

The transformation of a mouse carcass into beetle food is astonishing. After burying the carcass, the pair works day and night to remove the hair, round the carcass into a ball, and apply anal secretions to the exposed skin, dragging their abdomens in a zigzag pattern while circling the carcass.

Scientists used to believe that the resident pair of burying beetles might be sterilizing the carcass, eliminating the microbes that release the telltale odors from the carcass hidden beneath the forest floor.

While the secretions do contain antimicrobials, they also contain microbes from the beetles' gut. The result is a microbial community where the microbes are just as numerous as on an unprepared carcass, but with fewer microbial species than in the normal mix.

This manipulated microbiota emits far less methyl thiocyanate, and surprisingly, much greater amounts of dimethyl trisulfide – the aforementioned compound that is associated with the middle stages of decomposition where competing blowfly larvae make the carcass worthless to a burying beetle.

When we placed dimethyl trisulfide next to a fresh mouse carcass, free-flying beetles were not likely to land, apparently deterred by an odor that indicates a carcass is too far decomposed for breeding burying beetles.

A resident pair of beetles makes it difficult for beetle competitors to use odors to find their carcass in two ways: by decreasing chemical attractants and by disinforming rivals by increasing chemical deterrents.

When we took beetle-prepared carcasses from the lab and buried them in the field, they were much less likely to be discovered than similar-aged carcasses that had not been prepared by breeding beetles. Although resident burying beetles will fight to the death if an intruder shows up, the beetles prefer to avoid combat altogether.

Complex adaptations of animals with their microbiota are most often associated with gut microbes that aid host digestion, or cultured microbes that provide food.

It makes sense, however, for resource specialists like burying beetles that consistently encounter an external microbiota to evolve similar levels of complexity.

Odors emitted by microbes are essential components of animal communication, social interactions, sexual selection, predator-prey interactions, and plant-fungi symbioses.

While the control of microbially derived odors by burying beetles might be one of the better examples, the ubiquity of microbes and their chemical products suggest that similar host manipulations will be common, even though humans have been oblivious to these adaptations and their importance.

Stephen Trumbo, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/beetle-parents-engage-in-a-smelly-war-of-disinformation-to-keep-their-nests/

Scientists Discover This Peculiar New Zealand Reptile Has Two 'Powerhouse' Genomes

Smithsonian Voices National Museum of Natural History

Intern Helps Find First Vertebrate With Two “Powerhouse” Genomes

January 29th, 2021, 9:48AM
/ BY





Abigail Eisenstadt

The Tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, is a unique reptile found in New Zealand. New research suggests the species has two mitochondrial genomes. (Robert Sprackland)

250 million years ago, many tuataras roamed the world. Now, only one species remains. In fact, the modern tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, is the only surviving family member of its taxonomic order, Rhynchocephalia.

Today, a new paper in Communications Biology suggests there is something even more remarkable about this little survivor. Scientists have now found that the species may have two mitochondrial genomes, making it unlike any other vertebrate in the world.

All animals have nuclear DNA found in the cell’s nucleus and mitochondrial DNA, located in the so-called cellular “powerhouse,” the mitochondria. By examining both types of genomes, scientists are building pictures of countless species' evolution throughout millennia.

“If you know the right mathematical tricks, you can find a story of evolution hidden in a dump of data,” said Ella Buring, a former high school intern for the Global Genome Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author on the paper.

But her and her colleagues’ discovery of a second mitochondrial genome complicates the tuatara’s evolutionary tale.

Two(atara) mitochondrial genomes

In the lab, Buring set up and ran experiments to amplify tuatara DNA samples and hunt for clues about the reptile’s genome. (Office of Academic Services, Smithsonian)

It all started when Buring was in high school, volunteering at Q?rius, the museum’s science education center. She was intrigued by the tuatara’s mitochondrial genome, because at the time scientists thought it was missing a few standard genes. Her interest led her to an internship with the museum’s Global Genome Initiative (GGI), where she planned to study the reptile to uncover its past.

“I was very drawn to this idea that the past tells a story, if you just know how to analyze it right,” said Buring.

At GGI, she began working with Dr. Dan Mulcahy, a former biological science laboratory technician and current research collaborator with the museum as well as head of the tissue and DNA collections at the Museum für Naturkunde, in Berlin, to analyze the tuatara’s genome.

With the help of Dr. Vanessa González, a computational genomics scientist at GGI, they analyzed existing tuatara DNA sequences and compared them to other reptilian DNA. They soon realized that the genome was not as incomplete as scientists initially thought.

While writing a paper about this discovery, the three joined an international team of scientists studying the tuatara’s genome for other abnormalities. As that research progressed, the group realized there were too many spare, mysterious sequences of DNA in the reptile’s mitochondrial genome.

“We started going deeper and ended up constructing a complete second mitochondrial genome,” said Mulcahy.

With the international team and new data from the entire sequenced genome, they identified a complete second mitochondrial genome that is ten percent different from the ‘typical’ tuatara mitochondrial genome.

Although the discovery of a second mitochondrial genome was only confirmed in a single specimen, its presence is still surprising. If scientists find double mitochondrial genomes are common in tuataras, they could use these multiple genomes to find out when each genome appeared and when it split from the other in time. The research could help zoologists understand what exactly makes the species so genetically different from all other reptiles.

From past generations of reptiles to future generations of scientists

Buring presents early research on the Tuatara genome with Mulcahy at the Global Biodiversity Genomics Conference in 2017. (Lee Weigt, Laboratories of Analytical Biology, Smithsonian)

But, the tuatara genomic discovery is more than a tale of two mitochondrial genomes. It is an example of the importance placed on mentorship at the museum. Through her internship at the Global Genome Initiative, Buring was able to be a part of an international scientific discovery and co-author of a paper. She now attends the University of Chicago, where she continues to study divergence but now for linguistics.

She still uses the scientific methods she learned while studying the tuatara’s evolutionary divergence in the laboratory — a success for the museum’s leadership, who are dedicated to training future scientists.

“Now more than ever, science, technology, and evidence-based critical thinking are essential for understanding some of the biggest challenges to our planet,” said Dr. Rebecca Johnson, the museum’s Associate Director for Science and Chief Scientist. “As the custodians of the largest natural history collection in the world, one of our most important roles at the National Museum of Natural History is in training the next generation of scientists and museum professionals.”

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Abigail Eisenstadt is a Communications Assistant at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She brings science to the public via the museum's Office of Communications and Public Affairs, where she tracks media coverage, coordinates filming activities, and writes for the museum’s blog, Smithsonian Voices. Abigail received her master's in science journalism from Boston University. In her free time, she is either outdoors or in the kitchen.

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#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/scientists-discover-this-peculiar-new-zealand-reptile-has-two-powerhouse-genomes/

Snowy Owl Stops in Central Park for the First Time Since 1890

On January 27, a crowd gathered in New York’s Central Park to see a rare spectacle: a snowy owl that made a pit stop at the North Meadow baseball and softball diamonds.

The last reported sighting of a snowy owl in Manhattan was in 1890, when an large number of the charismatic white raptors flew unusually far south along the east coast, all the way to Delaware. But in 1890, there was not a swarm of camera-wielding birdwatchers to capture photographic proof of the event. However, 2021 is a different story.

"It’s a mega-rarity," says New York City Audubon’s director of development Kellye Rosenheim to the Gothamist’s Jake Offenhartz. "This is a very important sighting. It’s extremely rare in Manhattan."

Yesterday's SNOWY OWL in the Central Park North Meadow, a once-in-a-lifetime sight. pic.twitter.com/SaCpWJbAIX

— Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) January 28, 2021

Snowy owls spend most of the year in the Arctic tundra of northern Canada. They travel south each winter, and their normal winter range barely crosses the U.S.-Canada border, according to the National Audubon Society. When they travel south, the owls tend to look for habitats that resemble their tundra home.

That brings them to chilly shores, open fields and airports. Around New York, snowy owls have been spotted at Jones Beach, Randalls and Liberty Islands, and a courtyard at Rikers Island city jail, Willy Blackmore reports for Curbed.

Reports of the Central Park owl began to spread on Wednesday morning, and the birder who runs the Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert amplified the message to over 38,000 followers just after 10:30 AM. That’s when crowds converged. Luckily for the owl, the baseball fields it picked that day had been fenced off to let grass regrow, which kept onlookers at a respectful distance. Urban Park Rangers managed the crowd, and just one photographer crossed a line in pursuit of a birds-eye view.

“We had to correct one drone condition,” says Parks Department ranger Dan Tainow to Andy Newman at the New York Times. The drone was about 50 feet in the air. “Someone was trying to get that overhead photo. The owl was aware of it. It was stressing it out.”

On top of the crowd of about 100 excited birdwatchers and the drone, the owl also had to face off with a few feathered foes. Several crows hopped around the owl defensively, possibly because snowy owls have been known to hunt and eat crows. A red-tailed hawk also tried to shoo the owl away—red-tailed hawks are notoriously territorial, and both feed on small mammals.

Onlookers identified the snowy owl as a young female because of its thick black stripes, per the Times. The birder who runs Manhattan Bird Alerts, David Barrett, suspects that the owl landed in the park because it mistook the sandy baseball diamonds for a beach, he tells Gothamist.

The serendipitous sighting was exciting for birders, since the snowy owl is a “bucket list” species for many.

"Seeing the snowy owl is like winning the lottery, especially if you're new to birding and you'd never seen a snowy owl, it definitely felt like winning the lottery yesterday in central park," says Audubon Society outreach manager Molly Adams to Eyewitness News.

Birders returned to the park on Thursday and Friday hoping to catch another glimpse of the owl, but it seems to have moved on to calmer territory. Snowy owls tend to stay south until February or March before returning to the Arctic.

“I’m not surprised it moved on,” says the American Museum of Natural History’s ornithology collection manager Paul Sweet to the New York Times. The other birds had clearly claimed that turf, and they wouldn’t let the owl rest. “It wasn’t being left alone — it was being quite bothered.”

#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/snowy-owl-stops-in-central-park-for-the-first-time-since-1890/

U.S. Space Force mostly sticking with Air Force ranks

The only change the Space Force made is in four categories of Air Force enlisted ranks called “airman.” The equivalent ranks in the Space Force will be “specialist.”

WASHINGTON — It’s now official: There will be no admirals in the U.S. Space Force.

The Space Force on Jan. 29 revealed its new rank structure for officers and enlisted personnel. The service for the most part is adopting the U.S. Air Force ranks.

The only change the Space Force made is in four categories of Air Force enlisted ranks called “airman.” The equivalent ranks in the Space Force will be “specialist.” All the officers’ ranks stay the same as the Air Force, said the Jan. 29 memo. The new ranks are effective Feb. 1.

Since the Space Force was established in December 2019, officials had been internally debating whether to create a new rank structure to set the space branch apart from its parent service, the Air Force.

Discussions ground to a halt in June after the House of Representatives passed an amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Space Force to use the Navy’s rank structure.

The use of Navy ranks was proposed by former Navy SEAL Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas). His proposal was nicknamed the “Starfleet amendment” and drew attention after William Shatner wrote an op-ed calling on the Space Force to adopt the Star Trek naval ranks for its officers and enlisted personnel. 

The Senate version of the NDAA did not include the provision on naval ranks. In a compromise bill, the House agreed to strike the language. The NDAA directed the secretary of the Air Force to brief committees on the Space Force’s recommended rank structure for officers and enlisted personnel at least 15 days prior to implementation.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/u-s-space-force-mostly-sticking-with-air-force-ranks/

World's driest desert was once transformed into a fertile oasis by bird poop

The Atacama Desert has a fearsome reputation. The world's driest non-polar desert, located along the Pacific coast of northern Chile, constitutes a hyperarid, Mars-like environment – one so extreme that when it rains in this parched place, it can bring death instead of life.

Yet life, even in the Atacama Desert, finds a way. The archaeological record shows that this hyperarid region supported agriculture many hundreds of years ago – crops that somehow thrived to feed the pre-Columbian and pre-Inca peoples who once lived here.

"The transition to agriculture began here around 1000 BCE and eventually supported permanent villages and a sizeable regional population," a team of researchers, led by bioarchaeologist Francisca Santana-Sagredo from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, writes in a new study.

"How was this development possible, given the extreme environmental conditions?"

Thanks to Santana-Sagredo and her team, we have a solution to the mystery. It was already known that part of the puzzle could have been the use of ancient irrigation techniques, but water availability by itself wouldn't be the only prerequisite for a successful agricultural system in the Atacama Desert, the researchers say.

Based on previous research by some of the same team – analysing chemical isotopes preserved in human bones and dental remains of pre-Inca peoples – the researchers suspected fertiliser was also used to help the plants grow.

Now, in their new work, there's fresh evidence to back up the hypothesis.

"We set out to collect and analyse hundreds of archaeological crops and wild fruits from different archaeological sites of the valleys and oases of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile," Santana-Sagredo and some of her co-authors explain in a perspective article on the research.

In total, 246 ancient plants were analysed – the specimens being conveniently well-preserved by Atacama's dryness – including maize, chilli pepper, gourd, beans, and quinoa, among others.

(UC Anthropology)

Using radiocarbon dating, and also testing for isotopic composition, the results showed a dramatic increase in nitrogen isotope composition beginning around 1000 CE – a reading so high, in fact, it's never been seen before in plants, with the exception of certain plants on Antarctic nunataks where seabirds nest.

Amongst the plants tested, maize was the most affected, and at the same time (around 1000 CE), it also became the most widely consumed crop, based on a separate analysis of archaeological human bone and dental remains from the region, which also showed high readings of the nitrogen isotope.

According to the researchers, the "most parsimonious explanation" for the surge in nitrogen values is ancient bird poop – technically known as guano, which has a history of usage as a fertiliser in pre-modern times, including most likely in the Atacama Desert, as a growth enhancer for pre-Inca crops.

While the fertilisation capabilities of seabird guano (aka 'white gold') might have taken this ancient culture's agriculture to a new level, securing the manure wouldn't have been an easy – nor pleasant – job.

"Before [1000 CE] populations perhaps used other types of local fertilisers such as llama dung, but the introduction of guano, we believe, triggered a considerable intensification of agricultural practices, a step-change that increased production of crops, particularly maize, which rapidly became one of the central foods for human subsistence," the researchers explain.

"This shift is remarkable also considering the costs in human (and llama) labour involved – guano had to be painstakingly collected at the coast and transported ~100 km [about 60 miles] inland."

Despite the challenges, the new findings suggest that's just what Chile's desert-dwellers did, and historical accounts from centuries later suggest the practice continued well into the era of European contact – it's just we never had any evidence to suggest the custom began an entire millennium ago.

"Ethnohistorical records from the 16th to 19th centuries describe how local people travelled in small watercraft to obtain guano from rocky islets off the Pacific shore, from southern Peru to the Tarapacá coast in northern Chile, and how seabird guano was extracted, transported inland and applied in small amounts to obtain successful harvests," the authors write in their paper.

"Although guano was said in early historical accounts to be equitably distributed to each village, the same sources state that access to guano was strictly regulated, warranting the death penalty for those who extracted more than authorised or entered their neighbour's guano territory, emphasising its high value."

The findings are reported in Nature Plants.

#Humans | https://sciencespies.com/humans/worlds-driest-desert-was-once-transformed-into-a-fertile-oasis-by-bird-poop/

In Central Europe, Climate Change Could Boost Truffle Cultivation by 2050

For their earthy scent and intense flavor, truffles are a frequent feature in the world’s finest dishes. Périgord truffles (Tuber melanosporum) often called “black diamonds,” are found in various parts of Europe. With one pound fetching up to 750 Euros ($907.70 U.S. dollars), black truffles are one of the most expensive fungi globally. The lucrative business has scientists researching how truffle cultivation will fare with climate change, reports Katherine Kornei for Eos.

But fear not truffle lovers, new research shows global warming may increase the number of Périgord truffles harvested by 2050 in Central Europe, according to a study published in Scientific Reports in December 2020.

Truffles are finicky. They require specific conditions to grow, and some truffles, like the prized and exorbitant European white truffle, can’t be cultivated through traditional agricultural methods. Even then, truffles grown on plantations, called truffieres, need tree roots to grow. The tasty fungi are naturally found deep within the roots of various trees, like oaks, hazels, spruces, and pines, because of the two organisms share a symbiotic relationship. Truffles will take sugar and water from the roots while feeding soil nutrients back into the tree, reports Alejandra Borunda for National Geographic. Soil pH is another important factor in dictating whether truffle spores will grow into the delicacy.

Using 57 previously published studies on truffles’ best-growing conditions, Tomáš Čejka, a climate change scientist at the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno, and his team studied how warmer conditions increased the range where the truffles could thrive. Čejka and his colleagues found that truffle cultivation under future climate change conditions would be most manageable with drought-tolerant oaks.

Founder of New World Truffieres Inc. and past president of the North American Truffling Society Charles Lefevre, tells Eos that the study's models could be used as a guide to see how climate change may affect truffle growth in other places.

But the researchers’ study was based on parameters within the Czech Republic and did not represent everywhere truffles grow in the world. In France, for example, black truffle cultivation is suffering from high heat and droughts, reports National Geographic. Before the winter harvest, summer rainfall is needed to produce truffles, and France’s pattern of drier summers is leaving truffles both in the wild and on plantations in trouble.

Lefevere hopes researchers will apply their models in the United States and Australia next. Both locations are home to growing truffle production. "Australia is already the fourth-largest producer of Périgord truffles and could potentially overtake Italy in the next few years,” he tells Eos.

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#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/in-central-europe-climate-change-could-boost-truffle-cultivation-by-2050/

Have Scientists Finally Unraveled the 60-Year Mystery Surrounding Nine Russian Hikers' Deaths?

In February 1959, university student Mikhail Sharavin made an unexpected discovery on the slopes of the Ural Mountains.

Dispatched as a member of a search party investigating a group of nine experienced hikers’ disappearance, Sharavin and his fellow rescuers spotted the corner of a tent peeking out beneath the snow, as he told BBC News’ Lucy Ash in 2019. Inside, they found supplies, including a flask of vodka, a map and a plate of salo (white pork fat), all seemingly abandoned without warning. A slash in the side of the tent suggested that someone had used a knife to carve out an escape route from within, while footprints leading away from the shelter indicated that some of the mountaineers had ventured out in sub-zero temperatures barefoot, or with only a single boot and socks.

Perplexed, the search party decided to toast to the missing group’s safety with the flask found in their tent.

“We shared [the vodka] out between us—there were 11 of us, including the guides,” Sharavin recalled. “We were about to drink it when one guy turned to me and said, ‘Best not drink to their health, but to their eternal peace.’”

Over the next several months, rescuers recovered all nine hikers’ bodies. Per BBC News, two of the men were found barefoot and clad only in their underwear. While the majority of the group appeared to have died of hypothermia, at least four had sustained horrific—and inexplicable—injuries, including a fractured skull, broken ribs and a gaping gash to the head. One woman, 20-year-old Lyudmila Dubinina, was missing both her eyeballs and her tongue. The wounds, said a doctor who examined the bodies, were “equal to the effect of a car crash,” according to documents later obtained by the St. Petersburg Times.

Memorial honoring the nine victims of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Today, the so-called Dyatlov Pass Incident—named after the group’s leader, 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov—is one of Russia’s most enduring mysteries, spawning conspiracy theories as varied as a military cover-up, a UFO sighting, an abominable snowman attack, radiation fallout from secret weapons tests and a clash with the indigenous Mansi people. But as Robin George Andrews reports for National Geographic, new research published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment points toward a more “sensible” explanation, drawing on advanced computer modeling to posit that an unusually timed avalanche sealed the hikers’ fate.

“We do not claim to have solved the Dyatlov Pass mystery, as no one survived to tell the story,” lead author Johan Gaume, head of the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, tells Live Science’s Brandon Specktor. "But we show the plausibility of the avalanche hypothesis [for the first time]."

In 2019, Russian authorities announced plans to revisit the incident, which they attributed not to a crime, but to an avalanche, a snow slab or a hurricane. The following year, the inquiry pinned the hikers’ deaths on a combination of an avalanche and poor visibility. As the state-owned RIA news agency reported in July 2020, the official findings suggested that a torrent of snow slabs, or blocky chunks, surprised the sleeping victims and pushed them to seek shelter at a nearby ridge. Unable to see more than 50 feet ahead, the hikers froze to death as they attempted to make their way back to their tent. Given the official findings’ lack of “key scientific details,” as well as the Russian government’s notorious “lack of transparency,” however, this explanation failed to quell the public’s curiosity, per National Geographic.

Critics of the slab avalanche theory cite four main counterarguments, says Gaume to Live Science: the lack of physical traces of an avalanche found by rescuers; the more than nine-hour gap between the hikers building their camp—a process that required cutting into the mountain to form a barrier against the wind—and their panicked departure; the shallow slope of the campsite; and the traumatic injuries sustained by the group. (Asphyxiation is a more common cause of death for avalanche victims.)

Gaume and co-author Alexander M. Puzrin, a geotechnical engineer at ETH Zürich, used historical records to recreate the mountain’s environment on the night of the Dyatlov incident and attempt to address these seeming inconsistencies. Then, the scientists write in the study, they simulated a slab avalanche, drawing on snow friction data and local topography (which revealed that the slope wasn’t actually as shallow as it had seemed) to prove that a small snowslide could have swept through the area while leaving few traces behind.

The authors theorize that katabatic winds, or fast-flowing funnels of air propelled by the force of gravity, transported snow down the mountain to the campsite.

“[I]t was like somebody coming and shoveling the snow from one place and putting it on the slope above the tent,” Puzrin explains to New Scientist’s Krista Charles.

Eventually, the accumulating snow became too heavy for the slope to support.

“If they hadn’t made a cut in the slope, nothing would have happened,” says Puzrin in a statement. “[But] at a certain point, a crack could have formed and propagated, causing the snow slab to release.”

The researchers unraveled the final piece of the puzzle—the hikers’ unexplained injuries—with the help of a surprising source: Disney’s 2013 film Frozen. According to National Geographic, Gaume was so impressed by the movie’s depiction of snow that he asked its creators to share their animation code with him. This simulation tool, coupled with data from cadaver tests conducted by General Motors in the 1970s to determine what happened to the human body when struck at different speeds, enabled the pair to show that heavy blocks of solid snow could have landed on the hikers as they slept, crushing their bones and causing injuries not typically associated with avalanches. If this was the case, the pair posits, those who had sustained less serious blows likely dragged their injured companions out of the tent in hopes of saving their lives.

Configuration of the Dyatlov group's tent, installed on a flat surface after making a cut in the slope below a small shoulder

(Gaume / Puzrin)

Jim McElwaine, a geohazards expert at Durham University in England who wasn’t involved in the study, tells National Geographic that the slabs of snow would have had to be incredibly stiff, and moving at a significant speed, to inflict such violent injuries.

Speaking with New Scientist, McElwaine adds that the research “doesn’t explain why these people, after being hit by an avalanche, ran off without their clothes on into the snow.”

He continues, “If you’re in that type of harsh environment it’s suicide to leave shelter without your clothes on. For people to do that they must have been terrified by something. I assume that one of the most likely things is that one of them went crazy for some reason. I can’t understand why else they would have behaved in that way unless they were trying to flee from someone who’s been tracking them.”

Gaume, on the other hand, views the situation rather differently.

As he tells Live Science, “When [the hikers] decided to go to the forest, they took care of their injured friends—no one was left behind. I think it is a great story of courage and friendship in the face of a brutal force of nature.”

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