For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence of microbial life that existed on Earth prior to the formation of oxygen – a 2.52 billion-year-old, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria discovered in two separate locations in South Africa by geologists from the University of Cincinnati.

UC assistant geology professor Andrew Czaja and his colleagues discovered the bacteria in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, describing them as smooth-walled, spherically-shaped structures that are far larger than most current bacteria but similar to some modern, single-celled organisms that live deep in oxygen-sparse, sulfur-rich ocean environments.

“These are the oldest reported fossil sulfur bacteria to date,” Czaja, lead author of a new study detailing his team’s find published in the December 2016 issue of Geology, told UC Magazine. “And this discovery is helping us reveal a diversity of life and ecosystems that existed just prior to the Great Oxidation Event, a time of major atmospheric evolution.”

While scientists had previously demonstrated that early life would have thrived during the period of time called the Neoarchean Eon (2.8-2.5 billion years ago), when oxygen levels were less than one-thousandth of one-percent their current levels, this marks the first time that they have located physical evidence that this was indeed the case.

Similarities to modern deep-water microbes identified

Czaja, recently graduated UC master’s student Jeffrey Osterhout and Nicolas Beukes from the University of Johannesburg reported that they discovered fossilized samples of bacteria dating back to the Neoarchean Eon preserved in a layer of hard, deep-water, silica-rich rock known as black chert in the Gamohaan Formation of the South Africa’s Kaapvaal craton.

Those fossils, he told UC Magazine, “represent the oldest known organisms that lived in a very dark, deep-water environment.” They existed two billion years before the evolution of plants and trees, and provide the first direct evidence confirming that there were some organisms which did not require oxygen or sunlight to survive living in deep water mud during the early Earth.

Based on his team’s radiometric dating and geochemical isotope analysis of the samples, Czaja believes that they likely formed in the early Vaalbara supercontinent (a landmass that included South Africa and Western Australia before splitting due to the shifting of tectonic plates) within an ancient seabed that was rich in sulfate due to continental rock. It likely lived just before other shallow-water microbes began producing more oxygen through photosynthesis.

According to United Press International (UPI), the study authors believe that the ancient bacteria behaved similarly to modern-day bacteria, recycling volcanic hydrogen sulfide and converting it into sulfate. While Czaja said that he and his colleagues “can’t claim that these early bacteria are the same ones we have today,” he noted that they “may have been doing the same thing.”

“These early bacteria likely consumed the molecules dissolved from sulfur-rich minerals that came from land rocks that had eroded and washed out to sea, or from the volcanic remains on the ocean’s floor,” he added. While scientists are uncertain exactly how and why sulfur-oxidizing bacteria first evolved, “these fossils tell us that [they] were there 2.52 billion years ago, and they were doing something remarkable,” Czaja concluded.

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Image credit: Andrew Czaja, UC assistant professor of geology

Warming sea temperatures during the months of March and April has caused in the worst coral bleaching event ever recorded at the Great Barrier Reef, with two-thirds of a 435 mile (700 km) stretch of coral dying off over the last several months, scientists announced on Tuesday.

According to Reuters and AFP, the northern third of the 1,400 mile (2,300 km) World Heritage site was the most affected in what experts are calling the worst die-off in the reef’s history, and most likely the largest such event ever recorded, due to the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

“Most of the losses in 2016 have occurred in the northern, most-pristine part of the Great Barrier Reef,” Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University and one of the researchers behind the new study, said in a statement.

“This region escaped with minor damage in two earlier bleaching events in 1998 and 2002, but this time around it has been badly affected,” added Hughes, who along with a team of colleagues conducted a series of aerial surveys of the reef throughout the course of the bleaching event.

A scientist assessing the state of the reef.

News isn’t all bad, however, according to researchers

The worst affected area, the researchers found, had lost an average of 67% of its shallow-water corals over the past eight or nine months. Further to the south, the news was better, as the central and southern portions of the Great Barrier Reef experienced significantly less coral death.

“The good news is the southern two-thirds of the Reef has escaped with minor damage,” said the ARC Centre’s Professor Andrew Baird, who lead a team of divers that surveyed the reefs during the months of October and November. An average of 6% of bleached corals died off in the center of the reef, and just 1% in the south, he added. “These reefs are in good condition.”

Craig Stephen, the manager of one of the Great Barrier Reef’s largest live-aboard tourist operations, called the findings “welcome news for our tourism industry.” According to the ARC Centre, the Great Barrier Reef’s tourism industry employs approximately 70,000 people, and brings in about $3.9 billion US ($5.2 billion Australian) in income annually, Reuters added.

At 134,400 square miles (348,000 square km), the Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef on Earth, and when the water surrounding it becomes too warm, the coral is forced to release living algae – causing it to turn white and become “bleached.” Bleaching occurs naturally, and in most cases, coral that is mildly affected can recover, but conservationists are concerned that rising sea temperatures caused by global warming are amplifying the damage caused by bleaching.

“Climate change is killing the Great Barrier Reef,”  Charlie Wood, director of  anti-fossil fuels movement 350.org, told Reuters via email. “The continued mining and burning of coal, oil and gas is irreparably damaging the climate. If we want our kids to enjoy the Great Barrier Reef for generations to come, we must act now to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

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Image credit: Greg Torda, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

The first of four advanced weather satellites designed to give meteorologists a better-than-ever look at storm fronts and other severe climatological phenomena launched this weekend from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, NASA officials have announced.

Known as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R), the satellite is being managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and is set to radically change weather forecasting by providing constant high-definition views of hurricanes and other storms throughout the Western Hemisphere, according to Reuters reports.

Launched at 6:42pm EST on Saturday night, the new probe is one of four satellites collectively called GOES-R that NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services division assistant administrator Stephen Volz told Space.com will “revolutionize weather forecasting as we know it.”

“For weather forecasters, GOES-R will be similar to going from a black-and-white TV to super-high-definition TV,” Volz said during a pre-launch press conference. “For the… public, that will mean faster, more accurate weather forecasts and warnings. That also will mean more lives saved and better environmental intelligence for state and local officials and all decision makers.”

Probe includes first-ever functional lightning mapper in orbit

While the liftoff was delayed by about one hour due to quickly-resolved issues with the rocket and launch range, NASA said that the satellite is on route to its final designated orbit. Once the probe reaches its destination, it will be renamed GOES-16 and will become fully operational in less than one year, following evaluation and validation of each of its six instruments.

Those instruments, the US space agency said, include the first-ever operational lightning mapper in geostationary orbit, which meteorologists will use to closely analyze storms they believe pose the greatest threats to the populace. In addition, GOES-R will utilize its Advanced Baseline Imager to capture pictures of Earth’s weather, oceans and environment in two channels of visible light, four in near-infrared bands, and 10 different infrared spectral channels.

GOES-R also includes enhanced space weather sensors which it will use to monitor solar activity and relay essential data to forecasters, who will they issue alerts and warnings as needed. GOES-R will feature almost three-dozen new or improved meteorological or space-weather instruments in all, according to NASA. It is expected to remain operational for at least a 10 year period.

While this is the 17th satellite to be launched at part of the GOES series, it is the first to be sent into orbit in six years and is a “quantum leap” over its predecessors, NASA Deputy Director of Earth Sciences Sandra Cauffman said during a Thursday press conference, according to Reuters. “It will truly revolutionize weather forecasting.”

In a statement, NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan hailed it as “next generation of weather satellites,” and Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator at the Washington-based NASA Science Mission Directorate, added that GOES-R’s launch “represents a major step forward in terms of our ability to provide more timely and accurate information that is critical for life-saving weather forecasts and warnings.”

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Image credit: NASA

The sight of two powerful bull moose locking horns in combat is something that metaphorically can become frozen in time for those lucky enough to experience such an event, but for a pair of Alaskan hikers, they were lucky enough  to see such a battle literally frozen in time.

As National Geographic explained on Friday, Brad Webster, a science and social studies teacher working at a Bible camp near the city of Unalakleet, was hiking along the Bering Sea earlier this month when he found the duo entombed together in a layer of ice thick enough to walk on.

The two were apparently having it out either over territory or a potential mate when their antlers become locked together and they fell into the water, which would have quickly become frozen as temperatures fell. Powerless to escape, the moose froze to death, their conflict unresolved.

The 33-year-old Webster, who was hiking along with a friend at the time, told the Washington Post that they were “both kind of in awe. I’ve heard of other animals this had happened to, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” They showed it to another friend, 57-year-old Jeff Erickson, posted photos of the phenomenon to social media, where they quickly went viral.

So what exactly happened to these ill-fated combatants?

In an email to the Post, Kris Hundertmark, chair of the biology and wildlife department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, explained that male moose often lock antlers and push against each other while competing over females during their annual fall breeding season.

The antlers of adult moose tend to be extremely strong, but also have “complex” shapes which can become so entangled that it becomes difficult for the combatants to separate. In this case, he said, the moose likely fell into the water while locked in combat and drowned – which, he noted, is “quicker… than by getting locked together in some forest and slowly starving to death.”

The entangled moose ended up being frozen under eight inches worth of ice, according to Nat Geo, but have since been freed. The plan, Erickson said, “is to remove [their heads] intact for a very unique head mount,” adding that finding them was “[a] once in a lifetime experience.”

The Post noted that it took several hours of work using both a chainsaw and an ice pick to get through the thick layer of ice, which was located underneath about two feet of water. Webster, Erickson and their friends plan to leave the carcasses for the residents of Unalakleet, who will likely use the moose meet to feed their sled dog teams, according to the newspaper.

Based on an examination of the two moose heads, the hikers said that it appears as though one moose might have actually pierced the other’s skull, wounding and possibly killing it before the pair would have fallen into the water. “It’s kind of like you won the battle but you lose the war,” Webster quipped, “because you’ve got a whole other moose attached to your head right now.”

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Image credit: Jeff Erickson

After months of speculation and leaked reports, the NASA Eagleworks Laboratory team has finally published a peer-reviewed paper detailing the highly-anticipated EM Drive propulsion system, and by all accounts, the so-called lawbreaking engine actually appears to work.

First proposed by British scientist Roger Shawyer in 1999, the EM Drive (the ‘EM’ stands for ‘electromagnetic’) has been called an “impossible” fuel-free propulsion system which converts electricity into microwaves, then shoots it inside of a closed, cone-shaped chamber, exerting a greater amount of force on the cone’s flat end and ultimately generating thrust.

Since the microwaves would be powered by solar energy, the EM Drive would not require the use of a propellant, meaning that spacecraft and satellites could be far smaller and lighter than in the past (since they would not need to carry large amounts of fuel into space. It would also allow manned space flights to be completed far more quickly than ever before, at least in theory.

Critics had dismissed the idea as highly implausible, claiming that Shawyer’s hypothesis would violate the laws of physics, because in order for a thruster to gain momentum in one direction, a propellant had to be expelled in the opposite direction. Because the EM Drive is a closed system that uses no fuel, they argued, its function may violate the law of the conservation of momentum by generating a forward thrust with no accompanying equal and opposite force.

Now, with the publication of the peer-reviewed study, the propulsion system “really does appear to work,” according to ScienceAlert’s Fiona MacDonald. Furthermore, the Eagleworks team has “even put forward a hypothesis for how the EM Drive could produce thrust,” she added, pointing out that the EM Drive concept somehow “continues to work” in “test after test.”

Controversial pilot-wave theory may explain how it operates

The newly-released paper, which will be published next month in the Journal of Propulsion and Power, concluded that the EM Drive was capable of generating a consistent 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt of thrust (plus or minus 0.1 mN/kW) in a vacuum, “which was very close to the average impulsive performance measured in air,” according to the ScienceAlert report.

Comparatively, 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt of thrust isn’t much. As MacDonald explained, the Hall thruster generates more than 50 times that amount. However, since the Hall thruster requires the use of fuel, which would add additional weight as cargo during a spaceflight, the authors said that those higher thrust levels might not be as beneficial as they might appear.

When compared to solar sails, which like the EM Drive would use solar panels to produce all of the microwaves needed for thrust without using propellant, the so-called impossible engine fairs much better. Solar sails, MacDonald said, generate a force of 6.67 micronewtons per kilowatt – or two orders of magnitude less than what the EM Drive is capable of, according to the study.

The Eagleworks team also said that they were not looking to optimize the performance of the EM Drive during their tests, only to prove that it actually worked. What that means is that the engine could actually be even more efficient than the initial tests indicate. What the new study doesn’t reveal, however, is just how the device works without breaking the laws of physics.

The authors did offer one hypothesis, though: “The supporting physics model used to derive a force based on operating conditions in the test article can be categorized as a nonlocal hidden-variable theory, or pilot-wave theory for short,” they wrote. Essentially, pilot-wave theory says that particles do not have precise positions at all times, and while it is controversial, it has been accepted by more and more physicists in recent years, MacDonald wrote.

“If a medium is capable of supporting acoustic oscillations,” the authors said, “this means that the internal constituents were capable of interacting and exchanging momentum. If the vacuum is indeed mutable and degradable as was explored, then it might be possible to do/extract work on/from the vacuum, and thereby be possible to push off of the quantum vacuum and preserve the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum.”

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Image credit: NASA Eagleworks

Video of thousands of dead fish clogging the waterways at Shinnecock Canal in Hampton Bays, New York, went viral earlier this week as people wondered just what did in the aquatic creatures. Now, officials have revealed that their investigation cites suffocation as the likely culprit.

According to Gizmodo and The Verge, the videos show thousands of silver bunker fish (which are also known as menhaden fish) as they struggle for survival in the canal, each one desperately trying to take one final breath in what has been called a “gruesome fishpocalypse.”

Naturally, there was some concern that the fish were done in by exposure to industrial waste, or toxic algae, or perhaps even some yet-known phenomenon linked to climate change. Fortunately, none of those were to blame, so people living nearby have no reason to fear for their health.

So why did the fish die? As the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation told CBS News and Newsday, the fish died of suffocation after they were chased into the canal waters by a school of bluefish (their natural predators) and became trapped there. The overabundance of fish in the canal waters depleted the oxygen in the water, causing them to die off.

Officials monitoring the situation, report no additional deaths

Despite the relatively mundane cause, even locals were stunned by what they saw, according to CBS News. As Valley Stream native Dennis Demarco is said in his video of the event, “even the locals have not seen anything like this before,” adding that it was an “unbelievable scene.”

Conservation Department personnel said that they were continuing to monitor the situation, but noted that “no additional fish kills” were reported after the initial incident. “Some dead bunker are floating in the Shinnecock Bay,” Erica Ringewald, the department’s media relations director, told CBS News, “but most are believed to have sunk to the bottom.”

She added that officials were working to clean up any dead fish that wash up on nearby beaches and that they were working to monitor their movement from the air. The town of Southampton and the County Department of Public Works “worked… to open and close the canal to keep the oxygen levels up while allowing some fish to escape,” Ringewald explained on Tuesday.

As Popular Science noted, this is hardly the first time a mass die-off like this has occurred. In 2014, a similar event took place in Marina de Rey, California, as thousands of anchovies died in the harbor after purportedly attempting to escape predators. Likewise, in August, roughly 4,000 dead whitefish were found floating on Montana’s Yellowstone River, Smithsonian.com said.

The August incident, however, was not the result of would-be prey swimming for their lives, the website said. Rather, it was caused by a highly-contagious parasite, Tetracalsula bryosalmonae, that can cause kidney disease in affected fish. In addition to the whitefish, the parasite killed off a large number of rainbow trout and Yellowstone cutthroat trout, the website added.

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Image credit: JustineAiko

A team of scientists is asking for your help in building a new telescope capable of capturing an image of Alpha Centauri in the hopes that they will be able to replicate the iconic “pale blue dot” of Earth, but with another planet orbiting one of the sun-like stars closest to our solar system.

According to the Washington Post, the initiative is known as Project Blue, and the driving force behind is to find a companion for Earth, which was photographed at a distance of more than 3.5 million miles by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it was exiting the solar system on Feb. 14, 1990.

In the picture, our home planet appears to be little more than a tiny speck lost amongst the vast darkness that is space, and now Jon Morse, the former director of NASA’s astrophysics division and current chief executive of the BoldlyGo Institute, told the Post that he and his colleagues are hoping “to take another pale blue-dot image. This is the holy grail of exoplanet research.”

To make this dream a reality, they have turned to a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, hoping that they can raise $1 million by Dec. 20 in order to get the project off the ground. After that, the team hopes to acquire additional funding through foundations and individual donors, ultimately building and launching the telescope into low Earth orbit by the end of 2019.

Scientists seeking $50m in funding for ‘high-risk, high-reward’ project

Morse and Brett Marty, executive director of Mission Centaur, told the Post that they believe that they will be able to build their dishwasher-sized satellite, which would include a mirror that is less than one meter in size and equally small hardware, for no more than $50 million.

“The project is the kind of high-risk, high-reward mission that NASA is typically unwilling to pursue,” the newspaper reported. “There’s no guarantee that the system contains planets, let alone rocky bodies in the habitable zone. There is a chance that scientists will spend millions of dollars lofting the telescope into space, only to find it has nothing to look at.”

“It’s pretty ambitious, but that’s okay. We should do ambitious things,” Steve Howell, a member of NASA’s Kepler science team who is not a member of Project Blue, told Popular Science after the initiative was initially announced in October. “If you build something that is very specific for a single goal, then it’s a lot easier than building something that has a larger goal of doing general science, or looking at many stars. In principle, I think this could be easily done.”

Earlier this year, astronomers announced that they had discovered of a small, rocky planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, a star in the Alpha Centauri system that is located 4.22 light years from Earth. While the Project Blue telescope would not be able to capture an image of this particular world, as it is too close to its star, it does provide hope for the mission’s success.

“It’s an old saying that if you can do it once, you can do it more than once… Where there’s one there’s usually others because the process for forming these planets is common,” Marty told the Post. If he, Morse and their colleagues are successful, then their telescope would spend a period of two years in orbit, imaging Alpha Centauri and tracking any planets it finds, all with the hopes that they will be able to duplicate the “pale blue dot” photo within the next five years.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

US President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory caused a large amount of unrest for many Americans, including scientists who are uncertain what this outcome means for the future of their research, according to recent media reports.

As previously reported by RedOrbit, there was concern among climate experts prior to Tuesday’s election as to what a Trump victory would mean for the US’s continued involvement in the Paris accord, the international agreement ratified by more than 100 nations that would seek to limit the planet’s increasing temperatures. Trump says that he wants to pull out of the Paris agreement.

Prior to the election, the non-profit organization Science Debate asked Trump (as well as the rest of the Presidential candidates) their stances on various topics, including climate change. The now President-elect responded by saying that there was “still much that needs to be investigated in the field of ‘climate change’” and adding that “our limited financial resources” would be better spent on things such as developing renewable energy and increasing food production.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

That approach was echoed in a recent op-ed written by Robert S. Walker, a likely member of the Trump NASA transition team, and a public policy expert Peter Navarro, in which they wrote that they felt that the US space agency “should be focused primarily on deep space activities” and not “Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies,” including global warming.

NASA’s primary goal, the duo wrote, should be “human exploration of our entire Solar System by the end of this century.” That would appear to indicate that the Trump administration may be planning to drastically alter the agency’s climate research. In fact, Walker has said that he hoped much of that work would be shifted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in the hopes that NASA would be able to focus primarily on projects related to space travel.

Trump’s anti-science messages scare scientists

Science Debate also asked Trump about his views on biodiversity, to which the now President-Elect said that “laws that tilt the scales toward special interests must be modified to balance the needs of society with the preservation of our valuable living resources” and that he would bring “all stakeholders to the table to determine the best approach” to reach that “balance.”

When asked about innovation, he called it “one of the great by-products of free market systems,” adding, “the federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia… We must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.”

Those comments have done little to reassure concerned scientists who are worried about what the next four years will mean for their funding, according to BBC News. Specifically, they are afraid that applied research (research which focuses on practical applications of science, including that done with commercial purposes in mind) will take money from fundamental research which aims to simply improve our understanding of natural phenomena, the UK news agency said.

Cutting back immigration could “bring scientific infrastructure to its knees”

For instance, Robin Bell, the incoming president of the American Geophysical Union, told the Washington Post, “There’s a fear that the scientific infrastructure in the US is going to be on its knees,” and Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society, called Trump “the first anti-science president we have ever had” in an interview with Nature.

It isn’t just his science-specific policies that have researchers concerned either, Nature added. In fact, some of the hallmarks of his candidacy, including his proposed ban on Muslims entering the US, have many worried that it would prevent talented international scientists from traveling here to work with their American colleagues or to study at institutions in the States. Likewise, at least some who are already here are at least considering returning to their country of origin.

“This is terrifying for science, research, education, and the future of our planet. I guess it’s time for me to go back to Europe,” María Escudero Escribano, a postdoc studying sustainable energy conversation and electrochemistry at Stanford University, tweeted, according to Nature. Breast cancer researcher Sarah Hengel from the University of Iowa added that she was “scared not only for my future but for the future of research” as a whole, due largely to possible cuts in funding.

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Image credit: George Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

An estimated nine out of ten seabirds have consumed plastic, and scientists wondering exactly why they consume something that could kill them have found that the answer has been right under their noses the entire time – it’s because of its smell.

As BBC News and the Christian Science Monitor explained, scientists from the University of California-Davis have discovered that marine plastic debris gives off the same odor as seaweed that is rotting – a scent that marine birds have long relied upon to help them find food.

“It’s important to consider the organism’s point of view in questions like this,” Matthew Savoca, lead author of a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, said in a statement. “Animals usually have a reason for the decisions they make. If we want to truly understand why animals are eating plastic in the ocean, we have to think about how animals find food.”

The odor given off by the plastic is caused by the breakdown of plankton adhering to the plastic debris, Savoca and his colleagues explained. It essentially fools the birds into thinking they have found a meal when what they are actually consuming could result in serious injury or death.

“When you think about an animal doing something that’s ‘stupid,’ it might actually make a lot of sense when you consider that organism’s perspective,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. “They have evolved over tens of millions of years to use this cue to find food and so they’re not making a stupid decision, they’re making an incredibly intelligent and very precise decision.”

Plastic’s odor fools birds into thinking krill are nearby

As part of their experiments, Savoca’s team filled mesh bags with microbeads and placed them into the ocean, according to BBC News. After three weeks in the water, they analyzed the plastic beads for chemical signatures, and while they did not find anything out of the ordinary, they did discover that the beads had acquired a sulfur-like chemical odor.

Specifically, the plastic had started to smell like dimethyl sulfide, a smell that is often associated with decaying seaweed or rotting cabbage, the UK news outlet noted. Since seabirds tend to have a good sense of smell, and associate this odor with food, they detect and mistakenly consume the plastic waste. The discovery could result in new ways to prevent accidental plastic ingestion.

In previous research, study co-author Gabrielle Nevitt, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, found that the smell of dimethyl sulfide causes some seabirds to forage. That’s because its odor resembles that given off by algae being consumed by krill, small crustaceans which are a favorite meal of many types of seabird.

“This study shows that species that don’t receive lot of attention, like petrels and some species of shearwaters, are likely to be impacted by plastic ingestion,” Nevitt explained. “These species nest in underground burrows, which are hard to study, so they are often overlooked. Yet, based on their foraging strategy, this study shows they’re actually consuming a lot of plastic and are particularly vulnerable to marine debris.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Although the Neanderthals went extinct 30,000 years ago, their genes live on in human beings. A new study at the University of California, Davis, has found, however, that those strands of DNA are systematically being erased through natural selection.

“On average, there has been weak but widespread selection against Neanderthal genes,” said Graham Coop, professor at the universities’ department of Evolution and Ecology. The selection may have come about as a consequence of a small number of Neanderthals interacting with a substantially larger modern human population.

Before disappearing, Neanderthals chiefly lived in Europe and Central Asia until after a break away from our African ancestors around half a million years ago.

Discoveries by archaeologists suggest they had adopted a relatively sophisticated culture, according to Coop, who is also senior author on a paper describing the work, published in the journal PLOS Genetics. Due to DNA sampling from Neanderthal fossils, scientists have enough genetic information to locate their genes among our own.

As modern humans left Africa, they spread to Europe and Asia, interbreeding with Neanderthals around 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. These hybrid offspring would be equal parts Homosapien and Neanderthal, capable of breeding with Homosapiens, Neanderthals and other hybrids.

This begs the question: what happened to the Neanderthal DNA? The modern genes of people of European lineage contain roughly 2-3 percent. It’s slightly more in East Asians, while being largely absent in those of African ancestry.

Weak but widespread genes

Coop’s team came up with a system to assess the level of natural selection which acts upon Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. They Neanderthals may have become genetically incompatible with Homosapiens. Due to this incompatibility, the hybrid offspring were unable to thrive or were not actively fertile – they were in evolutionary terms not ‘fit’ enough.

What the researchers discovered, though, was something else. There wasn’t a strong selection against a small number of their genes but rather they weak and widespread selection opposing Neanderthal DNA and gradually bringing about its removal from the modern human genome.

Coop asserted that that is in keeping with the understanding that a minor Neanderthal population mixed with a much greater human one. Whereas inbreeding within small populations causes genetic variants to be relatively common, even if harmful, when mixed with a significantly larger population, the process of natural selection goes against the variants – rooting them out.

“The human population size has historically been much larger, and this is important since selection is more efficient at removing deleterious variants in large populations,” Juric said. “Weakly deleterious variants that could persist in Neanderthals could not persist in humans. We think that this simple explanation can account for the pattern of Neanderthal ancestry that we see today along the genome of modern humans.”

The conclusions are in keeping with similar work that has been recently published. Juric notes that if the Neanderthal population had been greater when first coming into contact with modern humans, the genetic mix could be different.

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Image credit: Michael Himbeault via Flickr

Researchers have discovered a large underground lake of water and molten rock under a dormant volcano that could reveal new details about volcanic eruptions, according to a new study in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Discovery of the liquid body, determined to have a temperature of nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees F), has led researchers to wonder if very similar bodies of water could be ‘hiding’ under other volcanoes. The study team said it could also help clarify why and how volcanoes erupt.

“The Bolivian Altiplano has been the site of extensive volcanism over past 10 million years, although there are no currently active volcanoes there,” study author Jon Blundy, an earth scientist from the University of Bristol, said in a news release. “This anomaly has a volume of 1.5 million cubic kilometers (360,000 cubic miles) or more and is characterized by reduced seismic wave speeds and increased electrical conductivity.”

Finding a Strange Lake

The study team said the properties they observed indicated the presence of molten rock, along with liquid water.

“The rock is not fully molten, but partially molten,” Blundy said. “Only about 10 to 20 percent of the rock is actually liquid; the rest is solid. The rock at these depths is at a temperature of about 970 degrees Celsius (1778 degrees F).”

The study team used high temperature and pressure tests to assess the electrical conductivity of the molten rock in the underground lake and determined that there must be approximately 8 to 10 percent of water blended in the silicate melt.

“This is a large value,” Blundy said. “It agrees with estimates made for the volcanic rocks of Uturuncu using high temperature and pressure experiments to match the chemical composition of crystals.

The researchers noted that silicate melt is only capable of dissolving water at high pressure. At lower pressures, water comes out of the solution and forms bubbles that can drive volcanic eruptions.

“The 8 to 10 percent of water dissolved in the massive anomaly region amounts to a total mass of water equivalent to what is found in some of the giant freshwater lakes of North America,” Blundy said.

“This is an extraordinarily large fraction of water, helping to explain why these silicate liquids are so electrically conductive,” said study author Fabrice Gaillard, from the University of Orléans in France.

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Image credit: Jon Blundy

Newly released video captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in late October shows a series of methane clouds moving across the northernmost regions of Saturn’s largest and most planet-like moon, Titan, the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has revealed.

As JPL officials explained in a statement, multiple sets of clouds are shown developing over an 11-hour period on Oct. 29 and 30. The clouds, which resemble long streaks in appearance, travel across the surface between 49 and 55 degrees north latitude before fading away, they noted.

For the most part, cloud activity remains persistent throughout the course of the observations, but some individual streaks appear to develop and fade over time. Those particular clouds traveled at speeds of between 14 to 22 miles per hour (7 to 10 meters per second). Furthermore, a handful of smaller clouds also appear over a group of small lakes further to the north, according to JPL.

Those clouds, which include one particularly bright group that appeared between the areas called Neagh Lacus and Punga Mare, were seen moving at a velocity of nearly 0.7 to 1.4 miles per hour (1 to 2 meters per second) by the Cassini orbiter’s two onboard cameras, the agency added.

New observations provide best chance to study cloud dynamics

While this new video does not mark the first time that Cassini has observed clouds moving over the northern mid-latitudes of Titan, as it has done so multiple times earlier this year, NASA said that it provides the best opportunity so far to study the dynamics of these short-term clouds.

Prior to these observations, most of the cloud sightings were short images captured days or even weeks apart, they noted. This time-lapse video, on the other hand, will allow scientists to observe the dynamics of the clouds while also allowing them to distinguish between noise in images (for instance, cosmic rays hitting the orbiter’s instruments) and faint clouds of methane.

“Models of Titan’s climate have predicted more cloud activity during early northern summer than what Cassini has observed so far,” scientists at the California-based lab said, “suggesting that the current understanding of the giant moon’s changing seasons is incomplete.” Cassini will continue to monitor Titan’s weather throughout the moon’s its 2017 summer solstice, they added.

Cassini, a cooperative project operated by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency, was the fourth spacecraft to visit the Saturn system, as well as the first to enter the planet’s orbit. It arrived at Saturn in 2004 and will end its mission in September 2017, when it takes one final dive between the planet and its rings, according to NASA.

“No other mission has ever explored this unique region so close to the planet. What we learn from these activities will help to improve our understanding of how giant planets – and families of planets everywhere – form and evolve,” the agency added. “It’s inspiring, adventurous and romantic – a fitting end to this thrilling story of discovery.”

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Image credit: NASA JPL

The overwhelming majority of ivory seized in recent years came from elephants that were killed by poachers less than three years prior to the attempted sale, according to new research published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to Thure Cerling, a professor of geology, geophysics and biology at the University of Utah, and his colleagues, radiocarbon dating found that approximately 90% of the more than 230 elephant ivory specimens seized as part of 14 different operations from 2002 through 2014 came from animals that had died less than three years before the ivory was confiscated.

“This indicates that the assumption of recent elephant death for mortality estimates of African elephants is correct: Very little “old” ivory is included in large ivory shipments from Africa,” the authors wrote. In fact, only one of the samples tested was found to be more than six years of age, based the results of Carbon-14 measurements conducted by Cerling and his fellow researchers.

The study shows that poaching is a continuing issue.

In most cases, between six and 35 months passed between when the elephants were killed and the confiscation of the ivory, with specimens from east Africa tending to make it into shipments more quickly, according to CBC reports. The study contradicts suggestions that the ivory being traded may not have come from new elephants, but from old stockpiles, the Los Angeles Times added, noting that the poaching industry appears to be “alive and well.”

“There’s been a staggering rate of elephant loss every year,” Cerling told the Times, adding that some elephant populations are declining significantly. Central African forest elephants, he noted, have experienced a reported 62% population reduction between 2002 and 2014, and the savanna elephant population at Tanzania’s Selous Wildlife Reserve has fallen by about two-thirds.

Findings shows that poaching, not stockpile theft, top threat

While carbon-14 testing has been around for decades, scientists had never previous applied the technique to the ivory trade, according to Smithsonian Magazine. That’s because the approach is rather expensive and the tests can only be conducted at a handful of labs around the world.

Cerling’s team collected and dated 231 ivory specimens that had been collected from seizures in Asia and Africa between 2002 and 2014. They discovered that while nine-tenths of their samples were less than three years old, one came from an elephant killed 19 years before being seized and another had come from a creature that had been slain just months before its ivory was found.

The findings come on the heels of a 2015 study in which scientists analyzed DNA of ivory found during 28 large-scale seizures from 1996 to 2004, and matched it to 1,350 samples gathered from dung samples at 71 locations in 29 different countries, the Times noted. That allowed scientists to map ivory sources and track poaching patterns. However, some suggested that the specimens had not come from newly-killed animals, but from government stockpiles of older ivory.

“Some people were saying, well, we don’t need to worry so much because there’s big stockpiles of ivory, so we’re getting legacy ivory into the market… and other people were saying, no, no, no, these are all recent deaths,” Cerling told the newspaper. Thanks to his team’s work, however, he can now definitively say that “the ivory that’s being seized by customs is [from] very recently killed elephants. So indeed, the crisis is severe if we’re going to preserve this species.”

While that isn’t good news by any stretch of the imagination, the Utah professor did say that the study confirms that older ivory is not finding its way out of government stockpiles, as many had been fearing. As he explained to the Times, “that’s a very positive finding, that we’re not finding government officials selling old ivory or allowing that to happen.” Furthermore, he said, it shows that poaching remains an ongoing threat to elephants that needs to be dealt with.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Even though the Paris climate accord went into effect recently after being ratified by more than 100 nations, the annual two-week United Nations meeting to discuss how to limit the impact of global warming opens Monday with concern over the upcoming US presidential election.

While about 20,000 officials will meet in Marrakech, Morocco looking to agree on new rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other human activities most experts believe are causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise significantly, BBC News and other media outlets have reported that some participants that much of the progress they have already made could soon be undone.

If Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has previously called climate change a “hoax,” is able to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, he has vowed to pull out of the Paris accord while also increasing coal production – the “dirtiest fossil fuel,” according to Bloomberg – in the US. That has some representatives concerned that a Trump victory may throw the process into “turmoil.”

“If you’ve got Donald Trump, we can say whatever we like and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference at all,” Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment in London, explained to Bloomberg. “If he gets in, then a side-effect might be that the USA will pull out of the climate negotiations. It’s a very worrying situation.”

“Electing a climate science conspiracy theorist like Trump would make America a global laughing stock and embarrassment, all the while relinquishing our leadership role in the world… Trump’s moral failure to acknowledge the climate crisis might very well mean planetary disaster if he is elected,” added Khalid Potts of the Sierra Club, in an interview with BBC News.

How much impact could a Trump presidency have?

The Paris accord was signed by 193 countries last December and recently became international law after it was ratified by at least 55 countries representing more than 55% of global emissions, BBC News noted. The agreement came after several years of failed negotiations and will seek to limit the global rise in temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Furthermore, the climate deal hopes to find a way to limit warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius and work toward net zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to Bloomberg. The two-week conference that begins on Monday is supposed to lay the groundwork for how to achieve those goals, but the looming threat of the possible post-election withdrawal of the US is causing many to fear that their efforts could be all for naught.

Earlier this year, Trump said that he would “cancel” the US’s participation in the agreement if elected, calling the accord “bad for US business,” according to BBC News. However, as French environment minister Segolene Royal told the UK media outlet, that is easier said than done, as the agreement itself prohibits any participating country from withdrawing for at least three years, followed by an additional 12-month notice period, meaning “there will be four stable years.”

Even so, Reuters noted that the Paris accord allows each country to decide for themselves how to combat climate change and contains no sanctions for non-compliance, meaning that it is possible to ignore the Obama administration’s vows to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26 percent of 2005 level by the year 2025, without formally pulling out of the agreement.

In a phone interview with Bloomberg, Alain St. Ange, the minister for tourism and culture at the Seychelles, an island in the Indian Ocean currently dealing with rising sea levels, said “We hope the USA will continue down the path of ensuring the leadership they’ve shown” so that the world can see that “if America can do it, we should also be able to do it.” Likewise, Moroccan Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar told reporters there was “no… turning back” on the accords. “We can only advance.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

The warmest global temperatures on record for 2015 might be just an average year by 2025 if greenhouse gas emissions carry on rising at their current pace, according to new study published in the Bulletin of American Meteorological Society.

Regardless of any preventative actions, we are already stuck in a “new normal” for global average temperatures that would kick in no later than 2040, the study said.

However, while average global average temperatures were locked in, quick and strong action on carbon emissions could keep record breaking heat in summers and winters from becoming average at local levels.

“If we continue with business-as-usual emissions, extreme seasons will inevitably become the norm within decades and Australia will be the canary in the coal mine that will experience this change first,” Sophie Lewis, from the Australian National University (ANU), said in a news release. “That means the record hot summer of 2013 in Australia – when we saw temperatures approaching 50°C (122 degrees F) in parts of Australia, bushfires striking the Blue Mountains in October, major impacts to our health and infrastructure and a summer that was so hot it became known as the ‘angry summer’ – could be just another average summer season by 2035.”

Have we reached a “new normal”?

The study team said the primary goal of their research was to define ‘new normal’ – a term thrown around a lot when talking about climate change. The researchers said this term isn’t well defined, and the study aimed to put a scientific foundation underneath it.

“Based on a specific starting point, we determined a new normal occurred when at least half of the years following a record year were cooler and half warmer. Only then can a new normal state be declared,” Lewis said.

Using climate models, the scientists investigated when new normal states would crop up under the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s four emissions scenarios. The study team then evaluated seasonal temperatures from December to February for Australia, Europe, Asia and North America.

The outcomes showed that while global average temperatures would undoubtedly switch over to a new normal under all four scenarios, this wasn’t the situation at seasonal and local amounts.

“It gives us hope to know that if we act quickly to reduce greenhouse gasses, seasonal extremes might never enter a new normal state in the 21st Century at regional levels for the Southern Hemisphere summer and Northern Hemisphere winter,” Lewis said. “But if we don’t act quickly Australia’s “angry summer” of 2013 may soon be regarded as mild.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Canadian military officials are currently investigating an unusual pinging sound that appears to be emanating from the sea floor in a remote region of the Arctic, and which is being blamed for frightening off aquatic animals, the CBC and BBC News reported earlier this week.

The mysterious noises, which have been described as a “ping,” a “hum” and a “beep,” have been heard in the Fury and Hecla Strait regions in Nunavut, roughly 120 km (75 miles) away from the hamlet of Iglook, throughout the summer, local lawmakers explained to the news agencies.

Paul Quassa, a member of the Nunavant legislative assembly, told his colleagues in October that the sound appears to be “emanating from the sea floor,” and that whatever the cause may be, it is frightening off animals in “one of the major hunting areas” in that part of the world.

The affected area, he told reporters, is “a polynya,” or an area of open water which is surrounded by ice and is typically home to large quantities of sea mammals. This past summer, though, there were very few, Quassa said, “and this became a suspicious thing” that warranted investigation.

According to BBC News, military aircraft flew over the affected waters  conducting an array of multi-sensor searches, but they “did not detect any surface or sub-surface contacts,” they said in a statement sent to the UK media outlet. For now, the “acoustic anomalies,” which reports claim can even be heard through the hulls of boats, remain unexplained.

So what is causing these so-called acoustic anomalies?

What the military did find during their recent fly-over were two pods of whales and six walruses in the affected area – which is problematic, as one official told the CBC, the region is typically a migratory route for bowhead whales and various species of seals, yet few if any were found.

While the actual cause of the noises remains a mystery, that has not stopped some residents from formulating theories of their own. One such theory claims that the noises are being caused by the Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation, a local mining company which previously conducted a sonar survey in nearby Steensby Inlet. However, the company told CBC reporters that they do not have any equipment in the affect waters and are not currently conducting any surveys there.

Furthermore, Quassa said that no permits for constructing, blasting or hydrography work in the affected waters have been issued. He told the CBC that some of his constituents believe that the noises are being intentionally created by Greenpeace officials in order to frighten off and protect animals that would normally travel through the hunting grounds.

Greenpeace denies those claims, telling the CBC that they “would we not do anything to harm marine life” and “very much respect the right of Inuit to hunt and would definitely not want to impact that in any way.” The Canadian news outlet also said that they had obtained an internal document suggesting that military submarines were investigated as a potential source, but were not considered to be a likely source of the anomalies.

With answers in short supply, local legislator George Qulaut told reporters that he is concerned about the impact that the sound will have on creatures which have fed in the region for centuries. “As of today, we’re still working on it,” he said. “We don’t have a single clue.”

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Image credit: Getty Images