Los Angeles Times

Heres what the James Webb Space Telescope has seen in just a week of looking

A quintet of galaxies. A nursery of infant stars. A weather report for an exoplanet. And a preview of our own suns demise.

After years of delays, a 930,000-mile trip into space and months of speculation over whatthe James Webb Space Telelescopes first pictures might reveal, NASA on Tuesday released the first complete set of images captured by its $10-billion observatory.

They show stars in their infancy and in their final gasps, along with sweeping views of the cosmos and the majestic objects in it.

Every dot of light we see here is an individual star, not unlike our sun. And many of these likely also have planets, NASA astrophysicistAmber Straughnsaid while introducing an image of theCarina Nebula, a multihued landscape of gas and nascent stars.

It just reminds me that our sun and our planets and, ultimately, us were formed out of the same kind of stuff that we see here, she said. We humans really are connected to the universe. Were made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape.

Webb Images of Jupiter and More Now Available In Commissioning Data

On the heels of Tuesdays release of thefirst imagesfrom NASAs James Webb Space Telescope, data from the telescopes commissioning period isnow being released on the Space Telescope Science Institutes Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. The data includes images of Jupiter and images and spectra of several asteroids, captured to test the telescopes instruments before science operations officially began July 12. The data demonstrates Webbs to track solar system targets and produce images and spectra with unprecedented detail.

Fans of Jupiter will recognize some familiar features of our solar systems enormous planet in these images seen through Webbs infrared gaze. A view from the NIRCam instruments short-wavelength filter shows distinct bands that encircle the planet as well as the Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow the Earth. The iconic spot appears white in this image because of the way Webbs infrared image was processed.

In ominous sign for global warming, feedback loop may be accelerating methane emissions

If carbon dioxide is an oven steadily roasting our planet, methane is a blast from the broiler: a more potent but shorter lived greenhouse gas thats responsible forroughly one-thirdof the 1.2C of warming since preindustrial times. Atmospheric methane levels have risen nearly 7% since 2006, and the past 2 years saw thebiggest jumps yet, even though the pandemic slowed oil and gas production, presumably reducing methane leaks. Now, researchers are homing in on the source of the mysterious surge. Two new preprints trace it to microbes in tropical wetlands. Ominously, climate change itself might be fueling the trend by driving increased rain over the regions.

If so, the wetlands emissions could end up being a runaway process beyond human control, although the magnitude of the feedback loop is uncertain. We will have handed over a bit more control of Earths climate to microorganisms, says Paul Palmer, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of one of the studies,posted late last monthfor review atAtmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Study: Climate impacts to disproportionately hurt tropical fishers, farmers

Coastal communities in the tropics that rely heavily on both agriculture and fisheries are most vulnerable to the losses caused by high global carbon emissions, a new study says.

It looked at coastal communities in five countries within the Indo-Pacific region and found that most may face significant losses of agricultural and fisheries products two key food sources simultaneously in the event of the worst-case impacts of climate change. These potential losses may be coupled with other drivers of change, such as overfishing or soil erosion, which have already caused a decline in productivity, according to thestudypublished July 5 in the journalNature Communications. When looked at separately, the potential losses for the fisheries sector would be greater than for agriculture, the research showed.

But if carbon emissions can be effectively managed to a minimum, the studys authors said, fewer communities would experience losses in both the agriculture and fisheries sectors.

Pioneering climate change research reveals long-term global carbon cycle impacts

A new study in Nature Geoscience, co-authored byDr Heather Ford , uses a unique research model to illustrate how past geologic periods can help us understand future climate changes. []

In this new paper, Dr Ford used geologic data and a climate model of a time about three million years ago known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, which is often used as an analogue for future climate change, because global temperatures then were around 2.3C warmer than today but CO2 levels were similar.

Whats unique about this study is the climate model was run for 2000 years, allowing conditions in the deep ocean to balance naturally over time, and enabling much deeper insight. Dr Ford explained: Running global climate models for thousands of years is computationally expensive, but critical in thinking about long-term impacts of carbon cycling and climate change.

How climate change could drive an increase in gender-based violence

As extreme weather events occur more frequently something that climate scientists say is inevitable so, too, will violence towards women and people from gender minorities. Thats the conclusion of a review examining events in the aftermath of floods, droughts, cyclones and heatwaves, among other weather disasters, over the past two decades.

The review found that extreme weather events often catalyse episodes of gender-based violence particularly physical, sexual and domestic abuse. It is the most comprehensive and timely analysis of gender-based violence related to extreme weather and climate events that are expected to increase under anthropogenic climate change, according to lead author Kim van Daalen, who studies global public health at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Its Getting Harder for Forests to Recover from Disasters

Forests around the world are losing their resilience and becoming more vulnerable to disturbances as the planet warms. Thats especially true for ecosystems in tropical, temperate and dry parts of the world, according to a new study.

When a forest loses resilience, it means its gradually losing its ability to bounce back after fires, droughts, logging and other disruptive events, said thestudy, published on July 13 inNature. Past a certain point, some forests may approach a kind of tipping point a threshold that launches them into a rapid decline.

And beyond that, some studies suggest, a forest may not be able to fully recover at all. It may instead transform into some other ecosystem entirely, like a grassland or savanna.

Study provides new clues to killer frog disease

A new study aiming to unlock the secrets of a disease devastating frog populations has turned up some unexpected results, which may change how scientists combat the outbreak.James Cook University biologist Dr Donald McKnight said the disease chytridiomycosis has caused declines or extinctions in over 500 species of amphibians worldwide.

But not all amphibian species are susceptible to chytridiomycosis, and some species and populations that underwent initial declines are surviving or increasing, despite the continued presence of the pathogen, said Dr McKnight. []

The reasons for these differences among species and populations are not entirely clear, but variations in microbiomes - the bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms on the frogs - may play a key role, said Dr McKnight.

Machine learning identifies crater that ejected famous Martian rock

New Curtin-led research has pinpointed the exact home of the oldest and most famous Martian meteorite for the first time ever, offering critical geological clues about the earliest origins of Mars.

Using a multidisciplinary approach involving a machine learning algorithm, the new research published today inNature Communications identified the particular crater on Mars that ejected the so-called Black Beauty meteorite, weighing 320 grams, and paired stones, which were first reported as being found in northern Africa in 2011.

The researchers have named the specific Mars crater after the Pilbara city of Karratha, located more than 1500km north of Perth in Western Australia, which is home to one of the oldest terrestrial rocks.

Zombie fly fungus lures healthy male flies to mate with female corpses

Entomophthora muscaeis a widespread, pathogenic fungus that survives by infecting common houseflies with deadly spores. Now, research shows that the fungus has a unique tactic to ensure for its survival. The fungus 'bewitches' male houseflies and drives them to necrophilia with the fungal-infected corpses of dead females.

After having infected a female fly with its spores, the fungus spreads until its host has slowly been consumed alive from within. After roughly six days, the fungus takes over the behavior of the female fly and forces it to the highest point, whether upon vegetation or a wall, where the fly then dies. When the fungus has killed the zombie female, it begins to release chemical signals known as sesquiterpenes.

"The chemical signals act as pheromones that bewitch male flies and cause an incredible urge for them to mate with lifeless female carcasses," explains Henrik H. De Fine Licht, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagens Department of Environment and Plant Sciences and one of the studys authors.

Social support found to reduce stress levels in orphaned wild elephants

A team of researchers from Colorado State University, the Smithsonian Conservative Biology Institute and the Save the Elephants program in Kenya reports that social support by members of elephant herds in African savanna elephants reduces stress levels of orphaned youngsters. In their paper published in the journalCommunications Biology, the group describes their study of stress levels in orphaned wild elephants and their ability to rebound from a great loss.

Over the past several decades, African savanna elephants, the largest land animals in the world, have seen population declines due to increases in both poaching and droughta situation that has led to many elephants being orphaned. Because of the long maturation process (it takes 20 years for the elephants to reach their full size), the number of orphans has increased overall. Also, elephantcalvesare highly dependent on their mothers for the first decade of their lives. In this new effort, the researchers studied the stress levels of orphans as they adapted to sudden changes in their care.

To learn more aboutorphanstress levels, the researchers followed several herds for over a year, watching carefully when they defecated. They collected the samples and tested them for glucocorticoid metabolite (GCM) levelsa relatively easy way to measurestress levelsin mammals.

A woodpecker's brain takes a big hit with every peck: study

The brain of a woodpecker experiences a seemingly catastrophic impact every time beak meets wood.

"When you see these birds in action, hitting their head against a tree quite violently, then as humans we start wondering how does this bird avoid getting headaches or brain damage," saysSam Van Wassenbergh, a researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

In the past, scientists havesuggestedthe bird's brain is protected from the impacts, perhaps bya skull that acts as a cushion, or a beak that absorbs some of the force, or a tongue that wraps around the brain.But Van Wassenberg wasn't convinced.

"Nobody has ever explained it very well, in my opinion," he says.

Difficult and costly. Snake dams should be breached, says Biden administration report

Breaching one or more of the lower Snake River dams in Eastern Washington is called for in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration draft report released Tuesday.

The draft report looks at the state of the science on restoring salmon and steelhead populations in the Columbia River Basin and the large scale actions needed to make progress toward healthy and harvestable fish stocks.

It has become overwhelmingly clear that business as usual will not restore the health and abundance of Pacific Northwest salmon, said Brenda Mallory, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, at a news media briefing Monday afternoon. []

The NOAA draft report, Rebuilding Interior Columbia Basin Salmon and Steelhead, said the science calls for acting, and acting now.

Inaction will result in the catastrophic loss of the majority of Columbia River Basin salmon and steelhead stocks, the draft report said.

Knots in the resonator: elegant math in humble physics

At the heart of every resonator be it a cello, a gravitational wave detector, or the antenna in your cell phone there is a beautiful bit of mathematics that has been heretofore unacknowledged. Yale physicists Jack Harris and Nicholas Read know this because they started finding knots in their data.

In a new study in the journal Nature, Harris, Read, and their co-authors describe a previously unknown characteristic of resonators. A resonator is any object that vibrates only at a specific set of frequencies. They are ubiquitous in sensors, electronics, musical instruments, and other devices, where they are used to produce, amplify, or detect vibrations at specific frequencies.

The new characteristic the Yale team found results from equations that any high school algebra student would recognize, but which physicists had not appreciated as a basic principle of resonators.

Bat Virus Studies Raise Questions About Laboratory Tinkering

In mid-2020, a team of scientistscatching bats in Laotian cavesdiscovered coronaviruses that were strikingly similar to the one that had begun wreaking havoc around the world.

In the months since, some of those researchers have been studying one of these mysterious bat viruses in a high-security laboratory in Paris, hoping to discover clues about how its cousin, SARS-CoV-2, went on to become a global threat that has killed anestimated 15 million people.

Their work has been scientifically fruitful. Last year, the scientists discovered thatthe bat virus was capable of latching onto human cells, at least in Petri dishes. Last month, the teamreportedmore reassuring news: that the virus is not particularly harmful to lab animals. The finding suggests that SARS-CoV-2 evolved its abilities to spread quickly and cause deadly disease only after the two lineages branched apart on the viral evolutionary tree.

Mysterious glow of a milky sea caught on camera for first time

Waking at 10pm, a sailor looked out from the deck of the superyacht Ganesha to see that the ocean had turned white. There is no moon, the sea is apparently full of plankton, but the bow wave is black. It gives the impression of sailing on snow, they wrote.

For centuries, mariners have described navigating unearthly night-time waters, lit up by a mysterious glow, but such milky seas have long eluded scientific inquiry owing to their remote, transient and infrequent nature.

Id say theres only a handful of people currently alive who have seen one. Theyre just not very common maybe up to one or two per year globally and theyre not typically close to shore, so you have to be in the right place at the right time, said Steven Miller, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

An Army of Turtles Is Doing Cyclone Reconnaissance

Even with good data, its hard to predict tropical cyclones, which often appear with little warning and wander drunkenly around the worlds oceans. But five years ago, Olivier Bousquet, now the research director for Frances Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, was tasked with forecasting storms strengths and paths in the cyclone-infested southwest Indian Ocean. The need for better predictions was great. On average, the area gets nine or 10 cyclones a year, and the storms are getting stronger. Tropical Cyclone Idai, in 2019, killed more than 1,000 people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi and 2014s Gafilo killed 363 in Madagascar.

Unlike in some other parts of the oceansuch as the North Atlantic, where the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flies weather dronesBousquet had almost no data to work with. Sure, there are satellites that spy on the oceans surface, but those are biased around coastlines and blind in clouds, which storms have in spades. Just a handful of floating oceanographic buoys collected temperature, depth, and salinity information where Bousquet needed it. So he set out to find a new source of data.

For the past few decades, scientists have been using satellite-tagged animals to collect ocean data. For instance, in the Southern Ocean off Antarcticaa famously hostile area for humans and shipssouthern elephant seals have gathered much of the basic data we have on the waters temperature and salinity.

Researchers harness algae to grow construction cement

The massive worldwide pouring of concrete as developers densify cities could be transformed, eliminating heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere, by switching to a new kind of cement created in Colorado cement that is grown by harnessing tiny sea organisms.Urban concrete jungles also would look less gray because the new cement is lighter in color and more reflective.

The U.S. Department of Energy this month embraced University of Colorado research that developed this cement, investing $3.2 million for scaling up cultivation of an algae species called coccolithophores. CUs innovation appealed to the DOEs Advanced Research Projects Agency because cement production causes 7% of the global heat-trapping pollution that accelerates climate warming. Thats a significant share, exceeding emissions from airplane travel.

This is a carbon dioxide removal project, said CU Boulder materials scientist Wil Srubar, leader of the work and director of CUs Living Materials Laboratory, who got got the idea while snorkeling in Thailand on his honeymoon in 2017. He saw magnificent natural limestone structures in coral reefs and wondered whether humans could replicate natural processes to make enough limestone for cement instead of excavating limestone from quarries.

Y chromosome loss through aging can lead to an increased risk of heart failure and death from cardiovascular disease, new research finds

The Y chromosome can be lost through the process of aging, and this can lead to an increased risk of heart failure and cardiovascular disease, according to a recent study my colleaguesand Ipublished in the journalScience.

While most women have two X chromosomes, most men have one X and one Y. And many people with Y chromosomes start to lose them in a fraction of the cells in their body as they age.

While loss of the Y chromosome wasfirst observed in 1963, it was notuntil 2014that researchers found an association between loss of the Y chromosome and shorter life span. Y chromosome loss has since been linked to a number ofage-related diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimers disease. However, it has been unknown whether this loss is just another benign indicator of aging, like gray hair or skin wrinkles, or whether it has a direct role in promoting disease. []

We found that while loss of the Y chromosome did not have immediate effects on the young mice, they ended up aging poorly, dying at an earlier age than mice that still had Y chromosomes. They also had more buildup of scar tissue in the heart, a condition calledfibrosis, as well as a stronger decline in heart function after induced heart failure. Treating the mice with a drug that blocks heart scarring, however, was able to restore lost heart function.

Genetic testing could help match people with the right antidepressant, new VA study finds

Understanding patient genetics could help to minimize the trial-and-error approach to prescribing antidepressants, a national study led by researchers at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia has found.

Finding the right antidepressant can take time. Its not uncommon for patients to try a few before finding an effective medication without too many side effects. Each round can mean losing weeks while waiting for the medication to start working, a frustrating reality for patients who seek relief and prescribers who often have little to guide them toward the optimal prescription.

Often with medications you might start with one, a patient might have side effects for that or it might not work, said David Oslin, a psychiatrist at the Philadelphia-based VA Medical Center. You end up with a second or third trial before finding something thats effective.

The oldest, brightest black holes in the universe were born from violent gas attacks, new study suggests

Twinkling like cosmic lighthouses on a shore 13 billion light-years from Earth, quasars are some of the oldest, brightest relics of the early universe that astronomers can detect today.

Short for "quasi-stellar radio sources," quasars are gargantuanblack holesthat glow as brightly as galaxies and are millions to billions of times as massive asEarth's sun. Today, quasars exist at the centers of many large galaxies. But thanks to their exceptional luminosity, quasars have been tracked far acrossspace-time, with roughly 200 of them identified as forming within the first billion years of our universe's history.

How could such massive objects form so early, when galaxies were sparse and large stars were exceptionally rare? The question has bedeviled researchers for more than two decades, since the first quasars were identified and now, a new study published July 6 in the journalNature

Researchers Have Found The First Example of Another Mammal 'Farming' Its Food

It was thought that humans were unique amongst mammals when it came to farming but depending on how strict we are with definitions, it turns out we might not be alone when comes to tending the land to grow food.

Scientists have discovered thatpocket gophers(Geomys pinetis) also practice a form of agriculture.

Measurements on a field containing burrows built by the little critters suggest they don't just harvest the longleaf pine roots that grow into their homes they cultivate them. []

"Southeastern pocket gophers are the first non-human mammalian farmers,"says biologist Francis Putz, from the University of Florida. "Farming is known among species of ants, beetles, and termites, but not other mammals."

Geologists reveal trends in mineral diversity

By classifying minerals by how they were made, scientists could better study the complex chemistry on other worlds.

Geology reference texts define mineral species based on chemical composition and crystal structure. But mineral samples collected in the field often contain trace elements and structural defects that distinguish most specimens from a textbook example. If youre interested in comparing Earth with other planets, both within our solar system and beyond, then you really need to think beyond those very simple, idealized structures, saysRobert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. So Hazen and his colleagues devised a new way to categorize minerals using the imperfections that tell stories about each minerals geologic past.

Because minerals acquire defects as they form, the isotopic ratios and foreign inclusions trapped within their crystal lattices can help researchers understand the context in which they were made. After combing the literature, Hazen and his team identified approximately 60 processes, such as lightning and oxidation events, that contribute to the formation of the more than 5,000 minerals known on Earth.

If Youre Owned by a Cat, Scientists Want to Hear From You

Scientists in California are asking for U.S. volunteers who live with cats to participate in a new research project. The study will survey owners about their pets behaviours and their knowledge of training methods. The teams larger goal is to help cats especially kittens and humans better form healthy relationships with one another.

The work is being conducted by scientists from the Animal Welfare Epidemiology Lab at the University of California Davis. Last fall, the teamrecruitedvolunteers who owned exactly two cats to look at cat videos on the internet, as part of a project to study how well owners could read feline body language. They were especially interested in knowing whether owners could tell when cats were about to lash out at their furry roommates.

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Overnight News Digest: We humans really are connected to the universe. - Daily Kos

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