Human birth canals are seriously twisted. Researchers think they've figured out why

There's an odd twist to human physiology not seen in any other primate, that makes giving birth more complicated for our species. Now, a study using biomechanical modelling on gait and posture has provided some insights into this long-standing mystery.

The narrow shape of the human birth canal is kinked at the inlet, so that contractions of the mother must rotate the baby's big brain and wide shoulders nearly 90 degrees to fit into the pelvis.

Imagine sliding a foot into a tight boot with a twisted entrance and you've got a rough idea of how challenging this can be. If the baby gets stuck, it can endanger both the life of the mother and child. In fact, this is thought to occur in as many as 6 percent of all births worldwide.

So what's the advantage? Surprisingly, for such a key element in the reproduction of our very species, we're still trying to figure that out. 

(Stansfield et al., BMC Biology, 2021)

Above: The rotational birth of humans. A) shows the head turning about 90° to fit into the largest dimension of the pelvic plane; B) shows the layers of the birth canal. 

Today, some of the most fundamental parts of human pregnancy are a complete mystery. We don't know, for instance, why our species undergoes such long and dangerous labors compared to other mammals.

Traditionally, it is thought the human pelvis is shaped the way it is to make walking easier. Evolutionarily speaking, the advantages of bipedal movement on a daily basis were clearly worth the extra risks that came with having narrow hips and big-brained babies.

In the new study, extensive biomechanical models of the pelvic floor suggest the shape of the birth canal doesn't help us walk so much as it helps us stand up.

"We argue that the transverse elongation of the pelvic inlet has evolved because of the limits on the front-to-back diameter in humans imposed by balancing upright posture, rather than by the efficiency of the bipedal locomotion", says Philipp Mitteroecker, who was also involved in this study."

If the inlet from the womb to the birth canal was a deeper oval, a baby could slide right through without very many fussy movements at all, as they do in other primates.

But in a human, this would require the pelvis to tilt at an even greater degree than it already does, which would add a deeper curve to the lower back. 

Ultimately, the new models suggest that extra curve would compromise the stability and health of our spines, which is possibly why the inlet to the birth canal evolved a new shape instead.

In comparison, other primates, like chimpanzees, can afford to have a deeper inlet to the pelvis because they are mostly on all fours and aren't putting a lot of weight on their hips. To get through to the birth canal, chimpanzee young only have to twist their heads a little.

The human baby, by comparison, has to move their body nearly 90 degrees to face the mother's spine to fit through the tight ellipsoid.

Even after this tricky maneuver, it's not a straight slide into the world. The outlet of the human birth canal is also shaped slightly different to primates. It requires the baby to once again turn to get its shoulders out, which are widest on a different axis to the head.

The models run by researchers suggest the outlet of the birth canal is shaped this way to better support the pelvic floor.

If the lower birth canal had an outlet that was wider still, the results indicate it would help pelvic floor stability even more; however, it would ultimately make childbirth too risky. The final twist would be too hard for the head and shoulders to shimmy through.

"Our results provide a novel evolutionary explanation for the twisted shape of the human birth canal," the authors conclude.

It's an intriguing idea from a well-thought out model, but real-world research will be needed to determine if this is really why humans are born with a twist and a shout.

Evolutionary studies, for instance, have shown female Neanderthals had birth canals more similar to chimpanzees, which suggests twisting is a uniquely human and relatively recent evolutionary development.

Given that Neanderthals also stood and walked on two feet, it would be interesting to compare the biomechanics of ancient humans to figure out why the modern human pelvis stands out.

The study was published in BMC Biology.

#Humans | https://sciencespies.com/humans/human-birth-canals-are-seriously-twisted-researchers-think-theyve-figured-out-why/

Gardening for wildlife enhances bird diversity beyond your own backyard

Households manage their yards in diverse ways and new research has found that their landscaping and management decisions have the potential to increase wild bird habitat and influence bird biodiversity in their yard and also at the neighborhood and city scale.

Across the United States, bird populations are declining due to decreases in availability of habitat. Recently, a team of scientists explored the value of the biggest chunk of green space found in cities -- residential yards -as wildlife habitat. A new study, "Residential yard management and landscape cover affect urban bird community diversity across the continental USA," was published this month in the journal Ecological Applications. The research was co-led by USDA Forest Service Research Ecologist Susannah Lerman and Post-Doctoral Researcher Desirée L. Narango from City University of New York and University of Massachusetts. Together with partners they conducted bird diversity observations in four residential yard types and in natural parks in six cities with distinctly different climate conditions: Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN; and Phoenix, AZ. The researchers found similar patterns in all six cities; although urban parks support more species of conservation concern (an official designation of species whose long-term persistence is in question) compared with yards, yards certified as wildlife habitat through the National Wildlife Federation's certification program support a wider variety of bird species compared with more traditional yard landscaping (e.g., lawn-dominated yards.) This suggests that landscape management for wildlife can contribute to region-wide bird diversity. The study also considered public interest levels based on Google searches and bird sightings and found that yards supported more popular species compared with parks.

"This study shows that when people landscape with wildlife in mind, householders can contribute to conservation right in their own back yards," said Lerman, who is with the Forest Service's Northern Research Station. "And our yards often support some of our most beloved backyard birds."

"Scientists are finding that we can't study cities in isolation. It will improve bird conservation efforts if we can understand which management practices are effective across regions and nationally, and which are effective at a more local level, " said Narango.

In addition to Lerman and Narango, co-authors include Meghan L. Avolio, Johns Hopkins University; Anika R. Bratt, Duke University and Davidson College; Jesse M. Engebretson, University of Minnesota; Peter M. Groffman, City University of New York and Cary Institute; Sharon J. Hall, Arizona State University; James B. Heffernan, Duke University; Sarah E. Hobbie, University of Minnesota; Kelli L. Larson, Arizona State University; Dexter H. Locke, USDA Forest Service; Christopher Neill, Woodwell Climate Research Center; Kristen C. Nelson, University of Minnesota; Josep Padullés Cubino, University of Minnesota and Masaryk University; and Tara L. E. Trammell, University of Delaware.

Story Source:

Materials provided by USDA Forest Service - Northern Research Station. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/gardening-for-wildlife-enhances-bird-diversity-beyond-your-own-backyard/

The nutritional value of giant kelp decreases as sea temperatures increase

As a foundational species, giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) is vital to the ecosystem of the temperate, shallow, nearshore waters where it grows. When the kelp flourishes, so do the communities that rely on the fast-growing species for food and shelter.

Giant kelp has proven resilient (so far) to some stressors brought on by climate change, including severe storms and ocean heatwaves -- an encouraging development for those interested in the alga's ability to maintain the legions of fish, invertebrates, mammals and birds that depend on it for their survival. But in a recent study published in the journal Oikos, UC Santa Barbara researchers reveal that giant kelp's ability to take a temperature hit may come at the cost of its nutritional value.

"The nutritional quality, or the amount of nutrients in the kelp tissue seems to be changing," said the study's lead author Heili Lowman, a biogeochemist with the University of Nevada, Reno, who conducted this research as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara. "We found that those changes were associated or correlated with changing seawater temperatures. From a big-picture standpoint, that's pretty important because there are a lot of things that rely on kelp as the primary food source."

"I guess you could call it one of the more hidden effects of ocean warming," said study co-author and graduate student researcher Kyle Emery. "We haven't necessarily lost kelp in places that have had these big temperature increases, but the kelp there has declined in terms of its nutritional content. So although it's still there, it's not able to provide the same function as when temperatures are lower."

These findings of ocean warming's hidden effects on kelp come from long-term data gathered at UCSB's Santa Barbara Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research (SBC-LTER) site, which consists of several kelp forests located in the Santa Barbara Channel. Thanks to data collected over almost two decades, researchers have been able to track patterns of nutrient content, which fluctuate seasonally, and identify significant trends.

"The temperature of the seawater and nutrient availability are really closely coupled in the Santa Barbara Channel, and we've known that for some time," Lowman said. Generally, the cooler temperatures bring nutrient-rich waters up from the deep, but during the warmer seasons, nutrients in the shallows and upper ocean -- particularly nitrogen -- become more scarce.

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"Physiologically, kelp plants can't store nitrogen for longer than a couple weeks, so whatever's happening around them in the water they're going to respond to very quickly because they need a constant supply of nitrogen to grow, and to continue to reproduce," she said.

Knowing this pattern, the researchers then sought out how nutrient content might play out over a longer period of time, as ocean temperatures rose. They did so by looking at data from the primary productivity sampling that is conducted in the waters at the SBC LTER on a monthly basis.

"As part of that sampling, kelp blades are collected from these sites, brought back to the lab and then processed for carbon and nitrogen content," Emery explained.

Over the 19-year period covered by the SBC LTER, according to the paper, nitrogen content of the giant kelp tissue declined by 18%, with a proportional increase in carbon content, according to the paper.

This apparent decline in nutritional content does not bode well for the consumers of kelp in and around the Santa Barbara Channel, which include sea urchins and abalone in the water, and intertidal beach hoppers and other invertebrates that consume the kelp wrack that washes up on the shore.

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"As a result, urchins, for example, might go in search of a lot more kelp and that could cause a shift in certain places, potentially from a kelp forest to an urchin barren, if they're just mowing down the reef looking for more food," Lowman said. Animals that feed on kelp might also expend more energy trying to eat enough to fulfill their nutritional requirements.

While urchins have the ability to go searching for more food, Emery added, the consumers on the shore are stuck with what they get.

"If you have greater demand, but there's not more kelp coming in, that poses a pretty challenging situation for them, whether it's being underfed or through population declines," he said.

In both cases, the effects could ripple out to the rest of the food web, the researchers said: Lower-nutrition kelp could mean smaller, fewer, perhaps less healthy beach hoppers, for instance, which would lead to less food for the shorebirds that eat them. In the water, less nutrition for urchins and abalone could mean less food for their consumers, including fish, lobster, sea otters and humans.

"Our results raise a lot of really interesting open-ended questions and suggest a lot of far-reaching effects," Emery said.

Having explored the potential relationships of seawater temperature to nutritional content, the researchers are considering broadening the spatial scale of the study.

"The next step would be thinking about what all is playing into determining the nutritional content and then how might we then be able to predict it into the future," Lowman said.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-nutritional-value-of-giant-kelp-decreases-as-sea-temperatures-increase/

The early bird gets…the truffle? Birds hunt for fungi, too

Humans like truffles, as do many mammals. Now new evidence suggests that birds may also seek out and disperse these ecologically important fungi.

A study conducted by University of Florida researchers found that two common ground-dwelling bird species in Patagonia regularly consume truffles and pass on viable truffle spores through their feces.

"Truffles are essentially mushrooms that grow underground. Unlike aboveground mushrooms, which release their spores into the air, truffles depend on animals consuming them to spread their spores," said Matthew E. Smith, senior author on the study and an associate professor in the UF/IFAS plant pathology department.

"Previously, it was assumed that only mammals consumed and dispersed truffle spores, so our study is the first to document birds doing this as well," said Marcos Caiafa, first author of the study, who recently received a doctorate in plant pathology from the UF/IFAS College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Smith was Caiafa's dissertation adviser.

The term "truffle" includes hundreds of species of underground fungi, only a few of which are the truffles people associate with high-end cuisine. While non-culinary truffles may not appeal to human foodies, each has evolved to attract different animals that can assist in its spread.

The spreading of truffle spores is an important part of a healthy forest ecosystem, Smith said, as many tree species have a symbiotic relationship with truffles, which colonize the roots of the trees.

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"These fungi form mycorrhizas, a relationship whereby the fungus helps the plant take up nutrients in exchange for sugars from the plant," explained Caiafa, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside.

The bird species they studied -- chucao tapaculos and black-throated huet-huets -- not only eat truffles but appear to search them out specifically. In the past these birds were known to eat invertebrates, seeds and fruits, but their consumption of fungi was not previously documented, the researchers said.

"The questions about birds and truffles emerged during an earlier research project in Patagonia. We are working in the forest, raking the soil and digging up the truffles, and we notice these birds keep following us around and checking out the areas where we had disturbed the soil. Then we find truffles with chunks pecked out of them. Marcos even saw a bird eat a truffle right in front of him. All of this led us to ask, are these birds hunting for truffles?" Smith said.

To confirm this hypothesis, the research team collected the droppings of chucao tapaculos and black-throated huet-huets and tested them for truffle DNA. They found truffle DNA in 42% of chucao tupaculo and 38% of huet-huet feces. They also used a special microscope technique, fluorescent microscopy, to confirm that the spores in the feces were viable, suggesting that the birds are spreading truffles to new areas.

"DNA-based diet analysis is exciting because it provides new insights into interactions between organisms that would otherwise be difficult to directly observe," said Michelle Jusino, one of the study's co-authors and a former postdoctoral researcher in Smith's lab.

"And, because sampling feces does not negatively impact the target species, I think these methods are invaluable for studying and protecting both common and rare species in the future," said Jusino, who is now a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Northern Research Station's Center for Forest Mycology Research.

The study's authors think that some truffles in Patagonia may have evolved to attract birds.

"Some of truffles that the birds eat are brightly colored and resemble local berries. Our future research may look to see if there is an evolutionary adaptation there -- that the truffles have evolved to look more like the berries that the birds also eat," Smith said.

The study was supported by a National Geographic Explorer Grant and a grant from the National Science Foundation. The paper is published in the journal "Current Biology."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Florida. Original written by Samantha Murray. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-early-bird-getsthe-truffle-birds-hunt-for-fungi-too/

New Chinese launch firm signs deal for reusable rocket engines

HELSINKI — Rocket Pi of China has signed a deal with a liquid rocket engine maker for supply of engines to power its Darwin-1 reusable launch vehicle.

The deal, announced by methane-liquid oxygen engine maker Jiuzhou Yunjian Oct. 30, is for Lingyun-70, 70-ton (sea level) thrust engines with deep throttling capabilities and 12.5-ton (vacuum) thrust Lingyun-10 engines and is worth “tens of millions of yuan” (10 million yuan = $1.56 million).

A single Lingyun-70 will power the first stage of the 2.25-meter-diameter Darwin-1 launcher with a Lingyun-10 engine on the second stage.

Rocket Pi secured financing of tens of millions of yuan in July. That report also stated that Darwin-1 was slated for a test flight in early 2023.

The launcher was previously stated to be capable of carrying 270 kilograms into low Earth orbit or 150 kg into a sun-synchronous orbit. However, these earlier plans also indicated that the Darwin-1 first stage would use five Lingyun-10 engines instead of a single Lingyun-70.

New Chinese launch entrant Rocket Pi announced itself in March, presenting plans to develop Darwin-1 and a larger, medium-lift launcher. It also stated plans to launch the “Sparkle-1” biology experiment payload on a Long March rocket in late 2021 as well as launching what was described as an orbital space biology lab around 2025.

Founder Cheng Wei also hinted at grander plans including contributing to the development of an “Earth-moon space economic zone,” a notion put forward by the leader of China’s main space contractor, CASC. Rocket Pi was co-founded by Zhuang Fengyuan, a professor of space life sciences at Beihang University. 

Jiuzhou Yunjian is a Beijing-based aerospace startup founded in 2017. This year JZJY has conducted numerous tests of its Lingyun-10 and Lingyun-70 engines, including full hot fire and restart tests. 

Jiuzhou Yunjian as carried out hot fire restart tests for its Longyun 80tn-thrust methane-liquid oxygen engine. Deep throttling and long hot fire tests to follow as steps towards reusable engine. https://t.co/hwsKY164bf pic.twitter.com/bH3CKN363y

— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) May 24, 2021

JZYJ also secured an undisclosed amount of funding in January in a round led by Zhongguancun Qihang Investment. The investment fund belongs to Zhongguancun Development Group, a hi-tech commercialization platform backed by the Beijing government and part of efforts to support the Zhongguancun technology innovation hub in Beijing’s Haidian District.

Jiuzhou Yunjian previously signed a contract with Linkspace in 2019 following the success of the latter’s 300-meter-altitude hop test with an ethanol-powered tech demonstrator. JZYJ were to supply 10-ton-thrust engines for a larger tech demonstrator as a next step towards an orbital launch vehicle. 

Linkspace has been quiet ever since however, with the recent exception of a recruitment notice posted in March this year.

Another new Chinese launch startup, Deep Blue Aerospace, conducted its own 100-meter-level vertical landing and vertical takeoff test earlier this month using a kerosene-LOX powered test article.

Rocket Pi and Deep Blue Aerospace are just one of a number of Chinese private launch companies developing reusable launchers. Others include early movers in the Chinese commercial sector Landspace and iSpace, along with newer entrants such as Space Pioneer and Galactic Energy.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/new-chinese-launch-firm-signs-deal-for-reusable-rocket-engines/

Listening To Music Perks Up Your Brain Just Like Exercise Does

When mental fatigue hits at the end of a long day, your usual tasks suddenly become so much harder and it feels like you can’t think clearly. A cup of coffee often helps to clear the brain fog for a few hours, but according to a new study there may be another simple solution for people who are avoiding caffeine: brief exercise or listening to music. 

Using exercise to clear your mind is a well-known trick. If you go for a walk during your break you’ll probably feel more refreshed afterwards than if you were sitting at your desk. But in a recent study published in the journal Neuroscience, researchers from the Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Nice, France,  found that listening to your favourite music has a very similar effect. 

They recruited 37 volunteers and asked them to carry out a series of tasks. First they had to rapidly touch a series of targets on a screen, then they carried out a cognitively demanding task for half an hour. Some participants then took a break by carrying out 15 minutes of physical activity by cycling on an exercise bike, while others listened to their music of choice for 15 minutes. After that, they carried out a final task by rapidly pointing at touch targets on screen again. In between these tasks, they took questionnaires to assess how mentally fatigued they felt. In a control experiment without exercise or music, people still reported feeling less mentally fatigued after they took a 20-minute break, but they didn’t perform as well on their last pointing task as they did on the first. Even though they didn’t feel tired, they weren’t as alert as before. On the other hand, the group that exercised and the group that listened to music both did better on that final task than the people who only took a break, which suggested that both exercise and listening to music reduced their mental fatigue. 

This was a very small study, with only about a dozen people in each group, so there was a lot of variation between individuals. Even though they all arrived well-rested at the start of the experiment, some felt much more mentally fatigued than others throughout the test. That makes it difficult to draw any big conclusions from this study, but it does seem to match up with some other studies. For example, earlier this year a study looked at how well runners performed when they were mentally exhausted, and found that listening to music helped them overcome some of the mental fatigue.  

How exactly music and exercise help clear brain fog is something that researchers are still trying to figure out. It could be related to dopamine release, but that would need to be checked with new experiments. 

Still, these are easy activities to incorporate in your day if you’re feeling mentally drained. And if you can’t drink coffee or don’t have the opportunity to move around for a few minutes, it’s good to know that listening to your favourite music could be equally effective at temporarily clearing the cobwebs in your brain.

#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/listening-to-music-perks-up-your-brain-just-like-exercise-does/

Hyten blasts ‘unbelievably’ slow DoD bureaucracy as China advances space weapons

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten said he regrets that DoD has not "achieved a resilient space architecture"

WASHINGTON — Just weeks before retiring from military service, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten warned that bureaucratic inertia and fear of failing are thwarting innovation in the U.S. Department of Defense while China continues to roll out new military and space technologies.

“Although we’re making marginal progress, the DoD is still unbelievably bureaucratic and slow,” Hyten said Oct. 28 at a Defense Writers Group event.

If he had to offer any advice to his successor it would be to “reinsert speed into the process,” Hyten said.

Hyten, the nation’s second highest-ranking military officer, is scheduled to retire next month. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs runs the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) that oversees all military acquisitions. 

The Biden administration has not yet nominated a new vice chairman to replace Hyten.

A former commander of the Air Force Space Command and of U.S. Strategic Command, Hyten has been a long-time critic of the plodding ways of the Pentagon, particularly in the development of next-generation weapon systems.

DoD takes decades to develop and field new systems, he said. “The answer to every question on how long it’s going to take to get a follow on capability is 10 years or 15 years,” he said. A case in point is a new intercontinental ballistic missile that DoD is developing to replace the Cold War-era Minuteman 3. 

That program, called the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, started around 2015. “If everything goes right, it will reach initial operational capability in 2030 and full operational capability in 2035,” Hyten said. 

China’s orbital glider

Hyten said he could not discuss specifics of China’s recently reported test of a hypersonic guide vehicle that orbited the Earth and reentered the atmosphere. 

“All the facts I know about the test are classified,” he said. “A test did occur, it is very concerning.” Hyten also declined to comment on whether the Chinese tested a new capability the United States didn’t know about.

Without explaining what exactly was concerning about the test, Hyten called it another sign that China is executing its game plan to become a global superpower. 

“What you need to be worried about is that in the last five years, or maybe longer, the United States has done nine hypersonic missile tests, and in the same time the Chinese have done hundreds,” said Hyten. “Single digits vs hundreds is not a good place.”

DoD is developing hypersonic missiles, he said, but is not moving as fast as China due to a risk-averse culture that fears negative media coverage and scrutiny.

Decades ago the Pentagon made fast strides in weapons development by using iterative testing and accepting frequent failures in order to learn and improve the system for the next attempt. 

“We are not doing that anymore,” said Hyten. He mentioned a hypersonic technology vehicle program led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that more than a decade ago developed next-generation systems “ahead of everyone else in the world.” But a couple of failed tests led to years of investigations “and then we canceled the program.”

Hyten suggested that China is “doing it the way we used to do it, and they move fast.” Meanwhile, “we won’t test until we’re highly confident it will work. We’re going to study it to death before we move on again,” Hyten added. “We have to understand risk in development. Technology is hard.”

Failing fast and moving fast is “how you learn,” he said. “But somehow we’ve decided failure is bad.” If that mindset doesn’t change, he warned, China will eventually surpass the United States in military technology. 

Russia’s hypersonic weapons program is less of a concern than China’s, Hyten said. “We have to worry about Russia in the near term. They continue to experiment with hypersonics but not nearly at the pace of China, not anywhere close to the pace of China.”

The Pentagon accurately calls China a “pacing threat,” said Hyten. “At the pace they’re on, they will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it,” he said. “It goes back to the speed issue. We have to be able to insert speed back into our processes.”

Hypersonic missile defense

In response to China’s and Russia’s weapons developments, Hyten has been a proponent of deploying sensors in space that can detect and track hypersonic missiles. 

DoD’s Space Development Agency is designing a network of satellites in low Earth orbit to detect and track hypersonic missiles. But Hyten cautioned that a space-only solution is unaffordable and missile defenses will require an integrated system of satellites, aircraft and ground-based radars from the United States and allies around the world. 

“It’s not one magic constellation of satellites that can see all threats,” he said. “If you try to do it all in space, it’s one of those infinite budget problems you can never catch up to.”

“What we have to do with our allies is an integrated sensor architecture that can see hypersonics. You have to integrate ground, air and space systems,” Hyten said. 

He also warned about China’s deployment of space weapons that could threaten U.S. satellites in orbit. “They’re going counterspace in a big way, they’re deploying weapons in space,” said Hyteon. “They are doing all those things because they saw how the United States has used space for dominant advantage.”

Hyten admitted that he got himself “in trouble” for describing U.S. military satellites as “big juicy targets.” But he said he stands by that characterization “and I will use it again because it’s accurate.”

The term suggests that U.S. satellites are so technologically advanced and sophisticated that they make prized targets.  Hyten has called for a shift to a different architecture of lower cost surveillance satellites that can be mass produced and deployed fast. He lamented that has not yet been accomplished.

“I wish we’d achieved a resilient space architecture,” he said. “We talked about it for over a decade, and we designed it for over a decade, the design is out there.” 

Because of DoD’s failure to deploy a resilient architecture “we actually put the president in a tough spot because we have a handful of fat juicy targets, while the adversary has built hundreds of targets that are difficult to get after,” he added. “We could have done something differently.”

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/hyten-blasts-unbelievably-slow-dod-bureaucracy-as-china-advances-space-weapons/

Analysis of mummy may completely rewrite the history of ancient Egyptian mummification

A new analysis of an ancient Egyptian mummy suggests that advanced mummification techniques were used 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, rewriting the understood history of ancient Egyptian funerary practices.

The discovery centers around a mummy, known as Khuwy, believed to have been a high-ranking nobleman. He was excavated at the necropolis, a vast ancient burial ground of Egyptian pharaohs and royals near Cairo, in 2019.

Scientists now believe that Khuwy is much older than previously thought, dating back to Egypt's Old Kingdom, which would make him one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever to be discovered, The Observer reported.

The Old Kingdom spanned 2,700 to 2,200 BCE and was known as the "Age of the Pyramid Builders."

Khuwy was embalmed using advanced techniques thought to have been developed much later.

His skin was preserved using expensive resins made from tree sap, and his body was impregnated with resins and bound with high-quality linen dressings.

The new analysis suggests that ancient Egyptians living around 4,000 years ago were carrying out sophisticated burials.

The interior of Khuwy's tomb, located at the Saqqara necropolis. (Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP via Getty Images)

"This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head," Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told The Observer. 

"If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised."

"Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation – not always successful – no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs," Ikram told The Observer.  

Ikram was surprised by the amount of resin used to preserve the mummy, which is not often recorded in mummies from the Old Kingdom.

She added that typically more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior. 

"This mummy is awash with resins and textiles and gives a completely different impression of mummification. In fact, it is more like mummies found 1,000 years later," she said.

Ikram told The National that the resin used would have been imported from the Near East, most likely Lebanon, demonstrating that trade with neighboring empires around that time was more extensive than previously thought.

The discovery has been documented in National Geographic's new series, Lost Treasures of Egypt, which starts airing on 7 November. 

Tom Cook, who produced the series for Windfall Films, told The Observer that Ikram initially could not believe that Khuwy dated back to the Old Kingdom because of the advanced mummification techniques.

"They knew the pottery in the tomb was Old Kingdom but [Ikram] didn't think that the mummy was from [that period] because it was preserved too well," Cook told the outlet.

"But over the course of the investigation she started to come round [to the idea]."

New #archaeological discovery in #Saqqara, #Egypt: An exceptionally painted tomb of a fifth Dynasty dignitary named #Khuwy pic.twitter.com/wI34aXQS3J

— Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (@TourismandAntiq) April 14, 2019

Khuwy's ornate tomb featured hieroglyphics that suggested the burial took place during the Fifth Dynasty period, spanning the early 25th to mid-24th century BCE, Smithsonian Magazine said.

Archeologists also found pottery and jars used to store body parts during the mummification process that dated back to that time.

Ikram's team will conduct more tests to confirm that the remains do belong to Khuwy.

She told The National that one possibility was that another person could have been mummified and buried centuries later in a re-purposing of the tomb.

"I remain hesitant until we can conduct carbon-14 dating," Ikram told the outlet, adding that it would likely take six to eight months.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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#Humans | https://sciencespies.com/humans/analysis-of-mummy-may-completely-rewrite-the-history-of-ancient-egyptian-mummification/

Lifting the veil over mysterious desert truffles: Terfezia’s ecology and diversity towards cultivation

In a caring, symbiotic relationship, mycorrhizal fungi live and feed in the roots of specific plants, while providing water and nutrients to their 'companion'. In arid and semi-arid environments, mycorrhization processes are essential to the survival of both plants and fungi. Moreover, the fungus' hyphal network, which spreads within the soil connecting several plant individuals, is of utmost importance to enhancing soil quality and fertility.

Researchers of the University of Évora in Portugal, led by biologist Celeste Santos e Silva, worked on Terfezia fungi, the most diverse and species-rich genus among desert truffles. Their study, published in the open-access journal MycoKeys, might prove particularly valuable to rural populations in the Mediterranean basin, where desert truffles, highly valued in local markets, are an important food source. Increasingly turning into an exquisite component of the Mediterranean diet, Terfezia products can also be very profitable. Furthermore, these fungi are essential for soil conservation, preventing erosion and desertification.

After 8 years of exhaustive field exploration in search of desert truffles and many hours in the molecular biology lab, the researchers noted some previously unknown trends in the ecology of Terfezia species. They recorded seven species that were new to Portugal, including two that are new to science -- Terfezia lusitanica and Terfezia solaris-libera. This brings the number of Terfezia species known to be growing in the country to ten. Particularly important was the discovery of a broader ecological range for many of the studied species (e.g. Terfezia grisea). Adding valuable information about their possible hosts, symbionts and ecological constraints, these findings help open new opportunities for truffle cultivation.

"It is very difficult to identify all specimens given that the Terfezia species look so much alike, and molecular biology was absolutely fundamental here," explains the researcher. "The technique was essential to update and solve problems about their taxonomy and the relationship between the species in the genus."

Furthermore, the discoveries are also expected to positively impact the local communities by stimulating agriculture produce, business and even employment.

Knowledge gained in this research about the conditions in which different Terfezia species grow is an important step to desert truffle cultivation: the fungi are hard to find in the wild, which is why it would make a big difference -- including financially -- for local communities if they figure out a way to grow truffles themselves.

Within the project "Mycorrhization of Cistus spp with Terfezia arenaria (Moris) Trappe and its application in the production of desert truffles" (ALT20-03-0145-FEDER-000006), the researchers took a step forward towards achieving mycorrhizal association of desert truffles with perennial plants (rock roses), which would allow their mass production for various sectors such as food, medicine and soil recovery. This new form of production, assures the MED researcher and leader of the project, "will make it possible to create more jobs, reversing the current trend towards desertification in rural areas, while being a great tool for ecosystem recovery and restoration."

Story Source:

Materials provided by Pensoft Publishers. The original text of this story is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/lifting-the-veil-over-mysterious-desert-truffles-terfezias-ecology-and-diversity-towards-cultivation/

After California’s 3rd-largest wildfire, deer returned home while trees were ‘still smoldering’

While many animals have adapted to live with wildfires of the past -- which were smaller, more frequent and kept ecosystems in balance across the West -- it's unclear to scientists how animals are coping with today's unprecedented megafires. More than a century of fire suppression coupled with climate change has produced wildfires that are now bigger and more severe than before.

In a rare stroke of luck, researchers from the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, were able to track a group of black-tailed deer during and after California's third-largest wildfire, the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire. The megafire, which torched more than 450,000 acres in northern California, burned across half of an established study site, making it possible to record the movements and feeding patterns of deer before, during and after the fire. The results were published Oct. 28 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"We don't have much information on what animals do while the flames are burning, or in the immediate days that follow after wildfires," said co-lead author Kaitlyn Gaynor, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. "It was kind of a happy accident that we were able to see what these animals were doing during the wildfire and right after, when it was still just a desolate landscape."

The researchers were surprised by what they learned. Of the 18 deer studied, all survived. Deer that had to flee the flames returned home, despite some areas of the landscape being completely burned and void of vegetation to eat. Most of the deer returned home within hours of the fire, while trees were still smoldering.

Having access to this location information -- from previously placed wildlife cameras and GPS collars -- is rare when studying how animals respond to extreme and unpredictable events, like megafires.

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"There are very few studies that aim to understand the short-term, immediate responses of animals to wildfires. When a fire sweeps through and dramatically changes the landscape, its impact in those initial days is undervalued and absent in the published literature," said co-lead author Samantha Kreling, a doctoral student at the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

The study took place northwest of Sacramento at the University of California's Hopland Research and Extension Center, where the researchers were studying the movements of black-tailed deer. Before the Mendocino Complex Fire started, the team had placed tracking collars on 18 deer and positioned several dozen motioned-activated wildlife cameras across the area.

On July 27, 2018, the research team based in Hopland saw smoke nearby. Within hours, they were told to leave immediately and not return to the property, as large flames swept through. In total, a little over half of the research center's land was burned by the Mendocino Complex Fire that was, at the time, California's largest wildfire.

Kreling, who needed data from the site for her senior-year undergraduate thesis at UC Berkeley, decided to pivot -- or, in the words of her collaborators, "turn lemons into lemonade." The wildlife tracking technology and photos allowed Kreling and co-authors instead to look at how deer change their use of space during and immediately after large disturbances like wildfires, and how this event influenced their body condition and survival.

"Seeing the drastic changes on the landscape got me wondering what it's like for animals on the land to actually deal with the repercussions of having an event like this sweep through," Kreling said. "Having the infrastructure in place was very useful to see what happened before, compared to what happened after."

Despite the challenges of having little to eat, all of the deer returned soon after the fire. Deer from burned areas had to work harder and travel farther to find green vegetation, and researchers noticed a decline in body condition in some of these animals. Still, their loyalty to home is a tactic that likely helped this species survive past wildfires.

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It's unknown whether this loyalty-to-home strategy will prove helpful, or harmful, in the future. Smaller wildfires encourage new vegetation growth -- tasty for deer -- but massive wildfires can actually destroy seed banks, which reduces the amount of plants available to eat. In this case, some of the deer that had to expand their home range to eat did so at the expense of their body condition.

"These deer have evolved this behavioral strategy that has clearly worked for them, but the big question mark is, as fires get more intense and frequent, will this behavior actually trap animals in these habitats that are seeing massive disturbances on the scale of nothing that has happened before in their evolutionary history," Gaynor said.

The specific patterns observed with these deer likely can't be applied to other large mammals in different regions, the authors said. But it's an interesting case study to explore what extreme disturbances, like large wildfires, might mean for animals. Meanwhile, co-author Kendall Calhoun, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, is continuing to look at the long-term effects of the fire on the health and reproductive capacity of this population of deer, which is still being tracked.

Other co-authors are Alex McInturff and Justin Brashares at UC Berkeley. This research was funded by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/after-californias-3rd-largest-wildfire-deer-returned-home-while-trees-were-still-smoldering/

Terran Orbital plans to go public through SPAC merger

SAN FRANCISCO – Terran Orbital, the parent company of Tyvak and PredaSAR, announced plans Oct. 28 to go public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in a deal that includes AE Industrial Partners and Lockheed Martin.

The transaction, expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2022, would list Terran Orbital shares on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial valuation of $1.58 billion.

Terran Orbital is merging with Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that holds $345 million in capital. A concurrent private investment in public equity (PIPE) round is providing an additional $50 million. Francisco Partners and Beach Point Capital have announced additional financial commitments of $75 million.

PIPE participants include AE Industrial Partners, Lockheed Martin, Beach Point Capital, Daniel Staton and Fuel Venture Capital. Francisco Partners and Lockheed Martin also have made debt commitments of $125 million subject to certain undisclosed conditions.

Terran Orbital, a veteran of the small satellite industry, manufactures and operates satellites for commercial and government customers including military and intelligence agencies, NASA and the European Space Agency. The firm has won contracts to build satellites and provide services for more than 80 missions.

Terran Orbital announced an agreement last month with Space Florida to establish a manufacturing facility on Florida’s Merritt Island large enough to produce more than 1,000 satellites per year.

In addition to filling customer orders, Terran Orbital is establishing its own constellation of small Earth-observation satellites to offer customers speedy access to global imagery captured day and night thanks to synthetic-aperture radar.

“With our high volume, innovative manufacturing of small satellites, we will be able to deliver emerging technologies to space faster, more affordably and with greater reliability than anyone,” Marc Bell, Terran Orbital co-founder and CEO who established the company in 2013, said in a statement.

Lockheed Martin Ventures announced a strategic investment in Terran Orbital in 2017.

“We actively pursue working with organizations that are developing disruptive technologies and leveraging alternative business models,” Rick Ambrose, Lockheed Martin Space executive vice president, said in a statement. “Our experience with Tyvak, which is part of Terran Orbital, has helped us expand our core capabilities to enable hybrid, networked architectures and we look forward to continuing to work together for the benefit of our customers.”

AE Industrial Partners is well known in the space sector since it founded Redwire in 2020, a firm that went public through a SPAC merger.

“Small satellites will play a critical role in the future of space infrastructure and exploration, as well as provide customers with real time data to make informed and actionable decisions,” Kirk Konert, partner at AE Industrial Partners, said in a statement. “Terran Orbital is entering into commercial partnerships with BigBear.ai and Redwire to develop and enhance next generation artificial intelligence and space solutions offerings, which is why we’re pleased to back the company and support its future growth.”

The space industry has seen a wave of SPACs in recent months. While not all of the deals have been well received, Bell said he is confident Terran Orbital’s SPAC merger will be successful because “we have real revenues, a real backlog, a real pipeline and real customers.”

Longtime investors, Lockheed Martin and Beachpoint Capital, also are sticking with Terran Orbital, which Bell sees as a vote of confidence. “They continue to follow us,” Bell noted.

Between the recently announced deal with Space Florida and the SPAC, Terran Orbital “has a lot of momentum,” Bell said.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/terran-orbital-plans-to-go-public-through-spac-merger/

Researchers are figuring out why some people can 'hear' the voices of the dead

Scientists have identified the traits that may make a person more likely to claim they hear the voices of the dead.

According to research published earlier this year, a predisposition to high levels of absorption in tasks, unusual auditory experiences in childhood, and a high susceptibility to auditory hallucinations all occur more strongly in self-described clairaudient mediums than the general population.

The finding could help us to better understand the upsetting auditory hallucinations that accompany mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, the researchers say.

The Spiritualist experiences of clairvoyance and clairaudience – the experience of seeing or hearing something in the absence of an external stimulus, and attributed to the spirits of the dead – is of great scientific interest, both for anthropologists studying religious and spiritual experiences, and scientists studying pathological hallucinatory experiences.

In particular, researchers would like to better understand why some people with auditory experiences report a Spiritualist experience, while others find them more distressing, and receive a mental health diagnosis.

"Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they are often then able to control," explained psychologist Peter Moseley of Northumbria University in the UK when the study first came out.

"Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too."

He and his colleague psychologist Adam Powell of Durham University in the UK recruited and surveyed 65 clairaudient mediums from the UK's Spiritualists' National Union, and 143 members of the general population recruited through social media, to determine what differentiated Spiritualists from the general public, who don't (usually) report hearing the voices of the dead.

Overall, 44.6 percent of the Spiritualists reported hearing voices daily, and 79 percent said the experiences were part of their daily lives. And while most reported hearing the voices inside their head, 31.7 percent reported that the voices were external, too.

The results of the survey were striking.

Compared to the general population, the Spiritualists reported much higher belief in the paranormal and were less likely to care what other people thought of them.

The Spiritualists on the whole had their first auditory experience young, at an average age of 21.7 years, and reported a high level of absorption. That's a term that describes total immersion in mental tasks and activities or altered states, and how effective the individual is at tuning out the world around them.

In addition, they reported that they were more prone to hallucination-like experiences. The researchers noted that they hadn't usually heard of Spiritualism prior to their experiences; rather, they had come across it while looking for answers.

In the general population, high levels of absorption were also strongly correlated with belief in the paranormal - but little or no susceptibility to auditory hallucinations. And in both groups, there were no differences in the levels of belief in the paranormal and susceptibility to visual hallucinations.

These results, the researchers say, suggest that experiencing the 'voices of the dead' is therefore unlikely to be a result of peer pressure, a positive social context, or suggestibility due to belief in the paranormal. Instead, these individuals adopt Spiritualism because it aligns with their experience and is personally meaningful to them.

"Our findings say a lot about 'learning and yearning'. For our participants, the tenets of Spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums," Powell said when the study was published.

"But all of those experiences may result more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough."

Future research, they concluded, should explore a variety of cultural contexts to better understand the relationship between absorption, belief, and the strange, spiritual experience of ghosts whispering in one's ear.

The research has been published in Mental Health, Religion and Culture.

A version of this article was first published in January 2021.

#Humans | https://sciencespies.com/humans/researchers-are-figuring-out-why-some-people-can-hear-the-voices-of-the-dead/

Warming climate will increase number of harmful algae blooms

When algae go wild, bad things can happen, especially when those algae produce toxic substances. The ripple effects can be potent and long-lasting.

Examples include the so-called "dead zone" that arises periodically in the Chesapeake Bay, when decaying algal blooms suck the oxygen out of an area and threaten all plant and animal life there. Toxins produced by a 2014 algal bloom in Lake Erie polluted the water supply of Toledo, Ohio, forcing a closure of a water plant there. These harmful blooms can be deadly to water-loving dogs, cause illness in humans and wreak havoc on a region's economy.

Scientists have shown how warming temperatures contribute to an increasing number of these harmful algal blooms.

A new study shows how changes in light conditions have a significant influence on the growth and impact of these algae. The study, led by University of Delaware Associate Professor Kathryn Coyne of the College of Earth Ocean and the Environment, was published Wednesday, Oct. 27 in PLOS ONE.

The bottom line: a warming climate looks good for the growth of toxic algae and may disrupt other organisms that are part of the food web -- whether they graze on this algae or are consumed by it.

"Especially for blooms that occur near shore, these are likely to get worse and extend not just temporally as the growing season is longer, but also geographically, where the temperature or light regime was not favorable for growth before," Coyne said.

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This study focused on one species of microscopic algae -- Karlodinium veneficum, also known as the "fish killer," which appears in the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware's inland bays.

This kind of algae is "mixotrophic," which means it's especially resourceful, getting its fuel sometimes from sunlight, sometimes by eating other algae and bacteria. Though it is a single-cell organism, K. veneficumhas two flagella that propel it forward to connect to its prey and stun it with toxins.

The study shows this alga can change its growth strategy under different light conditions. These changes in light interacted with carbon dioxide and temperature to affect the growth and amount of carbon and nitrogen stored in each cell.

In low-light conditions, the population did not increase. Instead, the alga packed its cell with carbon and nitrogen.

In high-light conditions, the population increased, but the cells had lower levels of carbon and nitrogen.

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"You alter the light and end up with completely different results than you had before," Coyne said.

Over the course of this study, this alga also acclimated to increased temperatures (to 30 degrees Celsius/86 degrees Fahrenheit) it had not been known to tolerate previously.

"This suggests that temperatures used in this study are not going to constrain their growth," she said. "If they are exposed to higher temperatures over a long period of time, they eventually become acclimated to it."

Those kinds of changes also will affect the creatures that eat this alga, as they may be less nutritious under climate change conditions. That reduces the strength of organisms that normally would constrain the algal population, giving K. veneficum multiple advantages over predators as well as other algae.

Coyne's collaborators included UD's Mark Warner, professor of marine science and policy, and former student Lauren Salvitti; Alicia Mangum and Gulnihal Ozbay of Delaware State University; Christopher Main of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control; and Zohreh Kouhanestani of Gorgan University of Agricultural Science and Natural Resources in Iran.

In other work, Coyne and colleagues are collaborating on biological control methods such as "bacteria bullets" or DinoSHIELDS, that use Shewanella bacteria to prevent harmful algae blooms. Development continues on that project.

The new study was supported by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ECOHAB (Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algae Blooms) program, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/warming-climate-will-increase-number-of-harmful-algae-blooms/

Physicists set a record by measuring time distortion across a single millimeter

Venture close enough to a black hole and you'll quickly learn how the force of gravity warps the very fabric of reality.

Here on Earth, gravity's time-bending effect is nowhere near as strong. It is, however, still measurable. What's more, physicists have set a new record in describing our planet's influence on the Universe's 'fabric' – they have done so on a millimeter scale.

It's a milestone well worth paying close attention to. Zooming in so close to the gentle curve of reality's foundations could help us resolve one of the most pressing problems in all of physics.

Researchers at JILA, a joint effort of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, used a specially designed atomic clock to measure the timing of light waves separated by 1 millimeter (about 0.04 inches), resulting in a difference equal to just 0.76 millionths of a trillionth of a percent.

The difference was the result of something called gravitational redshift – a phenomenon caused by the influence of gravity over the frequency of two identical waves as compared with one another.

As incomprehensibly small as the figure might appear, it comes as no surprise to the researchers. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts this very result, after all.

What seem like two distinct constants of space and time is in reality a single four-dimensional sheet in which the Universe lies. Any time something with mass sinks into it, the surrounding spacetime changes shape.

The result means the length of a second close to an object – be it Earth, a black hole, or even a jellybean – won't be the same length of a second further away.

The mathematics are so precise, and so thoroughly tested, we can predict this difference for incredibly small distances even when the gravitational warping is as mild as Earth's.

They also have to be wrong. At least on some tiny level.

Quantum mechanics is another area of physics that has been thoroughly tested. One of its less intuitive implications is that as you confine a measurement of one sort, other properties become fundamentally less precise.

As dependable as the two monolithic fields of physics are, they don't exactly play well together. Time isn't as central in quantum mechanics as it is in general relativity, for one thing.

More importantly, that seamless sheet of spacetime curving ever so gracefully for general relativity would be a fuzzy mess under a quantum microscope because of the problem with less precise properties we mentioned earlier. This would create a nightmare for anybody looking for a way to mesh the two ideas together.

What we need is an indication of either theory failing, which could mean finding where our predictions falter on some itty-bitty level.

A little over a decade ago, researchers managed to measure a difference in the relative frequency of light emitted by atoms separated by a vertical distance of just over 30 centimeters (about a foot).

In this new study, using a new kind of cavity for enhancing the experiment's power, researchers managed to squeeze the atomic density down by an order of magnitude, reducing the height from centimeters to a handful of millimeters.

Into this chamber they shoved 100,000 strontium atoms, which they forced to a virtual standstill by removing as much heat as possible.

They then measured the light emitted from the top and bottom of the stack of atoms and corrected for any effects that weren't gravitational in nature.

After 92 hours of watching these tiny clocks tick, they had an average that looked more or less like the result expected if general relativity were true.

The team hasn't published the work for peer review yet, but the results are available on the pre-print server arXiv for anybody to check out.

The degree of difference between the gravitationally redshifted emissions was so small, it sets a record for how fine a difference we can detect, giving us a measure of the phenomenon nearly 100 times more precise than anything achieved in the past.

It's not exactly the theory-busting result we crave, but it is a lesson in how we can shrink technology to a scale necessary for finding kinks in two of physics' greatest ideas.

#Physics | https://sciencespies.com/physics/physicists-set-a-record-by-measuring-time-distortion-across-a-single-millimeter/

Satellite images show positive impact of conservation efforts for China's coastal wetlands

Coastal wetlands support diverse and vital ecosystems central to coastal areas' biodiversity and economic vitality. However, coastal wetlands are threatened by sea level rise that can lead to flooding and land use changes that alter the way people can live or work in these areas. These impacts are large. Approximately 600 million people live less than 10 meters, approximately 6 miles, above sea level, while 2.4 billion people live within 100 km, or around 60 miles, of the coast.

An international, interdisciplinary research team led by University of Oklahoma professor Xiangming Xiao is using satellite images to measure the changes of coastal wetlands in China from the early 1980s to the present. The research team is also assessing the effects of conservation efforts on preserving and recovering these important ecosystems. Their findings on China's coastal wetlands are now published in the journal, Nature Sustainability.

Xiao is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, and the director of the Center for Earth Observation and Modeling at OU. Xinxing Wang, a graduate student at Fudan University in China, is the first author of the paper.

Since the 1980s, the coastal zone of China has experienced increased urbanization, industrialization and population growth, combined with increased sea level rise, that has led to significant decreases of wetland areas.

"Because coastal wetlands provide diverse important ecosystem goods and services, their loss has reduced biodiversity, affecting water quality, carbon storage and coastal protection from storm events and increased regional vulnerability to sea level rise which, together, pose threats to human health and coastal sustainability," Xiao explained.

"We wanted to know how these coastal zones have changed over recent decades, which had been very difficult to do," he said. "However, in the past 10 years or so, cloud computing facilities like Google Earth Engine have become available, and a lot of satellite imagery has become freely available, so the technology has come to the point where we can track, at a high spatial resolution, coastal zone changes over time and space."

The researchers analyzed more than 62,000 satellite images of coastal wetlands in China taken between 1984 to 2018. They generated two three-year maps (1985-88 and 1988-91) and 29 annual maps of coastal wetlands for the period 1990 to 2018, for a total of 31 maps. They also identified and mapped three types of coastal wetland areas, tidal flats, saltmarshes and mangroves.

They were interested in seeing whether these images could show the impact of China's development and enforcement of environmental laws and regulations on mitigating the loss of wetland areas. They found that wetland areas significantly decreased during 1984 through 2011. However, following increased conservation and restoration efforts under China's drive for sustainable development and ecological civilization, the outlook improves.

"We found a substantial increase in saltmarsh area and a stable trend of tidal flat areas after 2012, driven by decreased anthropogenic activities (pollution) and increased conservation and restoration efforts," said Xiao.

"To achieve the sustainability of coastal wetlands, China must continue to give top priority to conservation and the restoration of coastal wetlands and their ecosystem services," he added. "Our satellite-based mapping tools and resultant maps of coastal wetlands at high spatial resolution (30-m) are important in assessing, monitoring, reporting and verifying future changes in the coastal wetlands of China and the world."

This work also supports a project funded by the National Science Foundation that links wetlands, wild birds and infectious diseases.

#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/satellite-images-show-positive-impact-of-conservation-efforts-for-chinas-coastal-wetlands/

Weather delays Crew-3 launch

DUBAI, U.A.E. — Poor weather at locations in the Atlantic that could be used for Crew Dragon aborts will delay the launch of the next commercial crew mission to the International Space Station by three days.

NASA announced early Oct. 30 that it was postponing the launch of the Crew-3 mission that has been scheduled for 2:21 a.m. Eastern Oct. 31 from the Kennedy Space Center. The agency said it rescheduled the launch for 1:10 a.m. Eastern Nov. 3.

Weather was the cause of the delay, but not at the launch site itself. Conditions were forecast to be good at KSC, with a 90% chance of acceptable conditions according to a forecast delivered late Oct. 29 during a briefing after the launch readiness review for the mission.

Instead, the agency cited high winds and waves in the Atlantic Ocean along the path Crew Dragon will follow as its Falcon 9 rocket sends it to orbit. Should the spacecraft have to abort because of a problem with the rocket, it could splash down in hazardous conditions along parts of the flight path.

Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said at the briefing that abort weather conditions were “marginal” at the time. “The weather has been no-go the last couple days in some of our commit criteria in the downrange portion,” she said. “The ascent corridor has been trending better, so we’re just waiting to see what may evolve.”

A couple hours after the briefing, though, NASA postponed the launch. Weather conditions are expected to improve in the corridor by the new launch attempt, and forecasts at KSC call for an 80% chance of acceptable weather for the new launch attempt.

Nov. 3 is the earliest next possible launch date independent of the weather. “We have a couple days, November first and second, that just aren’t favorable for orbital mechanics,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager.

Crew-3 will send to the station NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, for a six-month stay. All but Marshburn are making their first space flight; Barron has noted in interviews that she has not even attended a launch.

At the briefing, NASA and SpaceX confirmed that they had resolved the final work associated with a problem with the toilet on the Crew Dragon spacecraft found on the Inspiration4 private mission in September. On that mission, a tube came disconnected in a storage tank for urine, allowing liquid to leak into a fan system. That led to minor corrosion where the liquid pooled under the floor of the capsule.

Stich said analyses found no risk to the structure of the Crew-2 capsule, Endeavour, currently docked to the station, which also has the malfunctioning storage system. “There’s no issue for the structure to return. That vehicle is fully safe to return and enter,” he said. “There’s no more work to do.”

While technicians have fixed to toilet on the Crew-3 capsule, Endurance, the repairs to the toilet on Endeavour will have to wait until after it returns. Walker said that SpaceX and NASA agreed to “limit the system’s use during the Crew-2 return, downhill portion of the mission.”

Asked what it meant to “limit” the use of the toilet, Stich clarified that “our intent is to not use the system at all for the return leg home” because of concerns about leakage. “We have other means to allow the crew to perform the functions they need to do,” referring to undergarments the astronauts wear under their suits. The time from undocking to landing will be on the order of several hours.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/weather-delays-crew-3-launch/

Condors had 'virgin births' despite having access to fertile mates, a first for birds

Results from a recent study by US wildlife scientists found that two female California condors gave birth to chicks without any male genetic DNA, BBC reported.

"This is truly an amazing discovery," Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) and a co-author of the study, said in a press release. "We only confirmed it because of the normal genetic studies we do to prove parentage. Our results showed that both eggs possessed the expected male ZZ sex chromosomes, but all markers were only inherited from [female condors], verifying our findings."

🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨

Scientists at SDZWA discovered two California condor chicks have hatched from unfertilized eggs. This sort of asexual reproduction, known as parthenogenesis, is a first for the species and provides new hope for their recovery. Read more: https://t.co/m5MZhqt21l pic.twitter.com/vRxGbKZy2S

— San Diego Boo 👻 Wildlife Alliance (@sandiegozoo) October 28, 2021

Researchers made the discovery during a routine analysis of biological samples, which have been collected from more than 900 condors over the last three decades as part of a collaboration between the zoo and the California Condor Program.

Previously, scientists had only observed the rare phenomenon of "virgin births" in certain species of birds – such as domestic turkeys and chickens – that had been separated from males, according to the Journal of Heredity.

The births marked the first documentation of asexual reproduction in an avian species where the female bird had access to a mate. Both of the female condors were consistently housed with a fertile male and produced several offspring with mates over the years, according to an SDZWA press release.

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California condor is a critically endangered species that has recuperated from borderline extinction due to major conservation efforts. Captive-bred California condors have been released throughout the Southwest and Mexico, raising the species' current number to approximately 500.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

More from Business Insider:

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/condors-had-virgin-births-despite-having-access-to-fertile-mates-a-first-for-birds/

Sending up the bat signal on forest use by endangered species

Deep in an Indiana forest, a team of scientists skulked atop hillsides after dark. Carrying radios and antennas, they fanned out, positioning themselves on opposite ridges to wait and listen. Their quarry? Endangered Indiana bats and threatened northern long-eared bats.

The goal was to track individual bats from the moment they left the roost at dusk to the time they returned near dawn. Having fitted each bat with a tiny radio transmitter, the scientists traversed the dark forest to triangulate the bats' positions through the night. The work was painstaking, and it took four years to track just 58 individuals.

The results are published in Forest Ecology and Management.

Tracking the bats' movements through Indiana's state forests didn't just provide some of the first descriptions of the foraging behavior and home ranges of these species. It also revealed the animals' preference for certain timber harvesting strategies, such as thinning and patch cuts.

"There's a perceived conflict between forest management and endangered bats. Folks would like to harvest without any restrictions, but because these bats are there, they have to pay attention to when they're present and what kind of habitat they're using, and then potentially change the timing or the nature of harvests or prescribed fires to accommodate for the bats," says Joy O'Keefe, assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois and co-author on the study.

Tim Divoll, a data scientist at SWCA Environmental Consultants and lead author on the paper, adds, "We know a lot about where these bats like to roost, but no one has studied the foraging behaviors in detail when both species share the same forest. That's going to tell us a lot more about how they use these forests and how we might accommodate the variety of behaviors."

The research team was interested in whether timber harvest strategies and other forest management decisions had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the bats.

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"We found, with the exception of larger clear cuts, most of these harvest types are probably neutral for these bats. In some cases, they might even be positive, but we didn't really find any evidence that small patch cuts and thinning are negative. So, I'd say the way they're already managing these forests is compatible with bat conservation," O'Keefe says.

Indiana bats and northern long-eared bats need all the conservation help they can get. Like an increasing number of bat species, both suffer from extreme habitat loss and the detrimental effects of the fungal disease white-nose syndrome.

"White-nose syndrome has really devastated northern long-eared bats in this forest. It turns out we did this study just in the nick of time, because right after we finished the study in 2017, we could no longer catch them out there. Their populations just tanked. Thankfully, my students caught four individuals this year," O'Keefe says. "The results of this study will help forest managers to make decisions that boost bat populations recovering from this disease."

Because the Indiana bat has been on the endangered species list since the law's inception in 1967, it has received a great deal of research attention. The northern long-eared bat isn't as well studied, having only been federally listed as threatened in 2015 due to white-nose syndrome. So, much of what the research team observed for the species was previously unknown.

According to the study, the home range for northern long-eared bats is about half the size of Indiana bats, and they spend most of their time foraging near ponds, in forest sections that were previously thinned, or in patch cuts smaller than 10 acres.

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Indiana bats had similar preferences for previously thinned sections and small cuts, but more of them ventured across larger clear cuts.

O'Keefe says the difference in home range size may come down to foraging strategy. Northern long-eared bats are gleaners, meaning they scoop up their insect prey from surfaces, at least some of the time. If they can find enough to eat on the trees near their roost, they don't need to go far to fill up. Indiana bats eat flying insects, so they might have to fly farther to locate swarms of bugs.

Without spending years tracking individual bats, these subtleties might have been lost.

"When you put in the effort to track many individual bats over multiple nights, then you have a much more robust and precise way of assessing how they use habitat," O'Keefe says. "It was a lot of work to get these data points. Every time we tracked one bat, there were four people on the landscape, each with an antenna and receiver, listening for several hours. So, what we did is pretty remarkable."

The researchers' findings were based on a few dozen bats in a specific forest in south-central Indiana, but the patterns likely hold for other forests in the bats' range.

"I think as long as you maintain a heterogeneous forest that has all these different components -- mature forest, thinned forest, some openings -- they're probably both going to be happy, at least from the foraging perspective," O'Keefe says.

The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences is in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/sending-up-the-bat-signal-on-forest-use-by-endangered-species/

Indonesia orders Thales Alenia Space satellite to replace lost Nusantara-2

TAMPA, Fla. — Indonesia has ordered a high-throughput communications satellite from Thales Alenia Space for a 2024 delivery to fill a gap left by last year’s loss of Nusantara-2 to a Chinese launch failure.

The satellite, dubbed HTS 113BT, will be operated in geostationary orbit by Telkomsat, a subsidiary of Indonesian state-owned telecoms operator Telkom that ran an open tender for the contract.

Based on Thales Alenia Space’s Spacebus 4000B2 platform, HTS 113BT will weigh about 4,000 kilograms at launch, designed to provide more than 32 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity over Indonesia with C-band and Ku-band beams.

The satellite aims to improve connectivity for the thousands of islands across the Indonesian archipelago from the 113 East orbital slot above the country.

“The [HTS 113BT] satellite will help strengthen the capacity, quality, and capability of digital connectivity in Indonesia, especially in areas that are not yet reached and lack terrestrial networks,” Telkomsat President Director Endi Fitri Herlianto said in a statement.

“Hopefully this step can support the realization of Indonesia’s digital sovereignty.”

Telkom-3S, the last satellite Thales Alenia Space built for Telkomsat, was also based on the Spacebus 4000B2 platform and was launched in 2017.

Need for speed

Despite the growing popularity of all-electric, software-defined satellites among GEO operators, Indonesia’s government opted for speed-to-orbit by choosing Spacebus 4000B2.

“This platform has the advantage of being chemically propelled, allowing the satellite to be put into orbit in a few days, as opposed to several months for more recent electrically propelled satellites,” a Thales Alenia Spaceofficial said via email.

“It was a requirement of the customer who had a constraint on the date of commissioning following the launch failure of the satellite that HBT 113 BT is replacing.”

That satellite is Nusantara-2, formerly Palapa-N1, which was destroyed when a Chinese Long March 3B rocket failed April 9, 2020.

China Great Wall Industry Corp. built Nusantara-2 for an Indonesian joint venture between telco Indosat Ooredoo and Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN), a private-sector satellite operator.

The Indonesian government owns about 14% of Indosat Ooredoo, which is majority-owned by Qatari multinational telecoms company Ooredoo.

String of failures

Nusantara-2 is part of a series of setbacks for Indonesian satellite operators.

The Telkom-3S satellite that Thales Alenia Space made for Telkomsat was ordered to replace Telkom-3, built by ISS Reshetnev, which was lost in an August 2012 failure of Russia’s Proton rocket.

In August 2017, Telkomsat’s aging Telkom-1 satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, exploded in orbit after experiencing an antenna failure.

Meanwhile, PSN’s Maxar-built Nusantara-1 satellite, also known as PSN-6, is reportedly suffering a power anomaly after being launched in 2019. Maxar was unable to comment before this article was published.

The private Indonesian operator has another satellite on order called SATRIA, which Thales Alenia Space is building for a launch in the first semester of 2023.

As well as being prime contractor for Telkomsat’s HTS 113BT, including its ground control segment, Thales Alenia Space will handle the satellite’s early orbital positioning phase, in-orbit tests, and provide in-orbit support throughout its expected 15-year lifetime. 

Thales Alenia Space also built Indosat Ooredoo’s Palapa D satellite, which launched in 2009 and was supposed to be replaced by Nusantara-2. 

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/indonesia-orders-thales-alenia-space-satellite-to-replace-lost-nusantara-2/