Tag: Science

ARCTIC: Giant Sponge Gardens Discovered Beneath Sea On Top Of Extinct Volcanoes

Post author By ace101
Post date 11/02/2022

#AceNewsReport – Feb.10: Researchers have discovered the secret to survival of “massive” sponge gardens thriving on top of a ridge of extinct volcanoes beneath the ocean, 350 kilometres from the North Pole.

#AceNewsDesk says giant sponge gardens discovered on the peaks of extinct volcanoes under Arctic sea ice: It’s a region permanently covered in sea ice in one of the most oligotrophic seas on the planet. An oligotrophic sea is one generally devoid of plant life and very high in dissolved oxygen according to ABC (Science) News

The sponge gardens are the most northerly found yet and cover an area more than 35 kilometres long.(Supplied: Alfred Wegener Institute)

But in a paper published today in Nature Communications, they reveal that the sponges survive by getting nutrients from dead sea life that once inhabited the seamounts, according to lead author Teresa Morganti from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology.

Though the scientists found the sponges a few years ago, they weren’t able to figure out how they were living in such a hostile environment.

“The extinct community was mostly composed of tubeworms and other polychaetes [bristle worms],” Dr Morganti said.

So how was there a community of animals living there before, and what happened to them?

The researchers concluded that there was an underwater seep of gases like sulfide and methane from the volcanoes, until around 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

“The previous community … relied on the chemical compounds from the seepage as energy and food sources,” Dr Morganti said.

“Once the volcanoes’ activity ceased, [they] died out.”

But the sponges inhabiting the area today have a microbial symbiont — a micro-organism that can extract carbon and nitrogen from the bodies of the animals that once lived there.

In doing so, these microbial symbionts provide nutrients to the sponges, and the sponges in turn provide structure, and also further nutrients to their symbionts as they filter the passing water.

“Both benefit from each other,” Dr Morganti said.

The find is the most northerly sponge garden ever discovered, the scientists said.

It’s also the “densest sponge community found in the Boreal-Arctic regions”, according to Dr Morganti.

The sponges were discovered more than 500 metres below the frozen surface.(Supplied: Alfred Wegener Institute)

The seamounts consist of three extinct volcanic peaks, known collectively as the Langseth Ridge.

The ridge is about 125 kilometres long with the largest peak rising 2,500 metres off the seafloor to about 570 metres below the ocean surface.

The first sponge from the area was “casually” collected back in 2011, and a proper expedition of the seamount was launched in 2016.

That expedition discovered sponge gardens covering an area more than 35 kilometres long and nearly 10 kilometres across at their widest point.

Solving the food supply mystery

But scientists then had to answer the question of how an area that should be virtually devoid of life was supporting such a rich diversity.

“Our study here was focused on solving the mystery around the food source,” Dr Morganti said.

“It took quite a while because we tested so many different hypotheses and used very novel methods in dating and identifying the food web structure, and the symbionts and their functions.”

Along with the sponges, the researchers identified shrimp, starfish, and soft corals. They estimated around 60 species are inhabiting the seamounts in all.

But the physical conditions that have led to the formation of this unique environment are going to change quite dramatically.

The IPCC predicts that at 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the Arctic will experience ice-free summers around once every 10 years.

More sunlight penetrating the ocean could lead to an increase in the amount of food reaching the sponge gardens, Dr Morganti said.

“Such change might not harm these sponges themselves but rather favour the settlement of other species,” she said.

The researchers are calling for increased marine protection zones for the Arctic to be put in place before receding sea ice opens it up for further exploitation.

“The sea ice naturally protects environments from overfishing.”

“But when it recedes, it’s important to know which biodiversity hotspots are to be protected, especially from [bottom] trawling that is destructive for such [immobile] forms of life,” Dr Morganti said.

#AceNewsDesk report ……….Published: Feb.10: 2022:

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Tags Creation, News, Science, Telegram, Twitter

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CREATION: A Cosmic Water Cloud Shadow Has Revealed The Temperature of The Early Universe #AceNewsDesk report

Post author By ace101
Post date 05/02/2022

#AceNewsReport – Feb.05: Sometimes astronomers and astrophysicists are working at such gigantic, mind-bending scales – in terms of both distance and time – that you can’t help but be awestruck at the new discoveries they keep coming out with.

#AceNewsDesk says according to Science Alert the in point: a temperature check of the Universe in its youngest phase, just 880 million years after the Big Bang, made possible by observing the shadow cast by a cloud of cold water gas some 13.8 billion light-years away from Earth: The research has been published in Nature.

It’s our earliest look so far at the temperature of the Universe, which scientists think is cooling over time as it expands and spreads, and it’s another really useful data point in the hunt for that most mysterious of forces behind the expansion: dark energy.

“This important milestone not only confirms the expected cooling trend for a much earlier epoch than has previously been possible to measure, but could also have direct implications for the nature of the elusive dark energy,” says astronomer Axel Weiss, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Germany.

The key to how this was done centers on a contrast of temperatures. Using the NOEMA (Northern Extended Millimeter Array) telescope in France, astronomers focused in on the HFLS3 galaxy – known as a starburst galaxy because of the unusually high number of new stars that it’s producing.

Light is taking so long to reach us from HFLS3 that we’re seeing it as it was less than a billion years after the Universe came into existence. What we’re also seeing is a large cloud of water vapor between us and the galaxy, a cloud that’s cooler than the cosmic microwave backgroundradiation (CMB) that indicates the Universe’s temperature.

The temperature difference between the cooler gas and the CMB creates what are called absorption lines, and by studying these lines it’s possible to determine the temperature of the CMB. It’s a fairly complicated bit of astrophysics made possible by the infrared light emitted by the newborn stars in HFLS3.

The researchers calculate a CMB of between 16.4 and 30.2 Kelvin (-256.8 to -243 °C) at the time period represented by HFLS3, which fits with previous cosmological model predictions of 20 Kelvin. That’s an important confirmation of our modeling.

“Besides proof of cooling, this discovery also shows us that the Universe in its infancy had some quite specific physical characteristics that no longer exist today,” says astrophysicist Dominik Riechers, from the University of Cologne in Germany.

“Quite early, about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background was already too cold for this effect to be observable. We have therefore a unique observing window that opens up to a very young Universe only.”

The findings show that previous estimates of the rate of temperature decrease as it corresponds to expansion are in the right area. Trying to take this sort of reading now wouldn’t work – the CMB is too cool to produce the same temperature contrast.

When it comes to dark energy, this is thought to be driving the expansion of the Universe, but being able to directly observe it remains outside the scope of our current instruments. However, we can learn more about it by observing its effects – including the rate of Universe expansion and drop in CMB temperature.

As usual, one piece of research begets many others. The research team is now looking for other cold water clouds that the same technique can be applied to, with the aim to get another reading within the first 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

“Our team is already following this up with NOEMA by studying the surroundings of other galaxies,” says astronomer Roberto Neri, from the Institute Radio Astronomie Millimétrique (IRAM) in France.

“With the expected improvements in precision from studies of larger samples of water clouds, it remains to be seen if our current, basic understanding of the expansion of the Universe holds.”

#AceNewsDesk report ………..Published: Feb.05: 2022:

Tags Creation, News, Research, Science, Telegram, Twitter

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(BALTIMORE) John Hopkins Research Report: Using Night Vision and A.I., Scientists Recorded Spiders’ Entire Choreography for Web Building #AceNewsDesk report

Post author By ace101
Post date 30/11/2021

#AceNewsReport – Nov.30: Study coauthor Andrew Gordus, a behavioral biologist at Johns Hopkins University, was out birding with his son when they stumbled upon a beautiful spider web.

#AceDailyNews says a team of scientists at Johns Hopkins University used night vision and artificial intelligence (A.I.) tools to track spiders’ movements—down to the precise placement of their legs—as they wove their webs. The analysis revealed that spiders have their own “choreography,” reports Jennifer Ouellette for Ars Technica.

Rasha AridiNovember 24, 2021An arena consisting of a plexiglass box, infrared lights and cameras captured the spiders’ delicate movements. Gordus Lab

Spider webs are one of nature’s most impressive marvels; even the tiniest of spiders—with equally tiny brains—can spin intricate, geometric webs. These arachnid architects have both astounded and puzzled scientists for ages, but a new study published last month in the journal Current Biology unravels the spiders’ secrets.

“I thought, ‘If you went to a zoo and saw a chimpanzee building this, you’d think that’s one amazing and impressive chimpanzee,'” he says in a press release. “Well, this is even more amazing because a spider’s brain is so tiny, and I was frustrated that we didn’t know more about how this remarkable behavior occurs.

To investigate, Gordus and his team studied six hackled orb weaver spiders, a species belonging to a group that creates spiral wheel–shaped webs. This species is nocturnal and was chosen because they’re active throughout the year and small in size, reports Ars Technica.

Each night, the spiders were placed in a plexiglass box to build their webs. Using an infrared light to see at night, a camera captured all their movements as they wisped around the enclosure constructing their webs. But manually combing through hours’ worth of camera frames looking at each spider’s legs wasn’t going to be an easy feat, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell reports for BBC’s Science Focus.

“It’s just too much to go through every frame and annotate the leg points by hand so we trained machine vision software to detect the posture of the spider, frame by frame, so we could document everything the legs do to build an entire web,” says lead author Abel Corver, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins.

The software’s analysis revealed that spiders build in well-organized stages. First, they explore the space and build a prototype. Then they build the frame and radii, or the strands that stretch from the center to the edge. After that, they’ll start weaving the spiral, which likely stabilizes the web. After hours of weaving, the spider hunkers down in the center of the web, waiting for an unassuming snack to get trapped, reports Ars Technica.

“We’ve defined the entire choreography for web building, which has never been done for any animal architecture at this fine of a resolution,” Gordus says in the press release.

The team also discovered that the spiders exhibited very similar movements to the point that the team could predict what part of the web a spider was building solely based off of its legs’ positions, reports Daniel Maslowski for WUTR in Utica, New York.

“Even if the final structure is a little different, the rules they use to build the web are the same,” Gordus says in the press release. “They’re all using the same rules, which confirms the rules are encoded in their brains. Now we want to know how those rules are encoded at the level of neurons.”

This research has led the team to wonder what parts of the spiders’ brains are responsible for the different phases of web weaving, which they plan to test out using mind-altering drugs, according to the press release. Corver also hopes that this research could shed some light on how the circuits in our own brains work since animal brains are built out of the “same fundamental building blocks,” he says.

#AceNewsDesk report …………Published: Nov.30: 2021:

Boss 😅

Tags Research, Science, U.S News

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(AUSTRALIA) Scientists Discover Two New ‘Very Loud’ Frog Species That Scream And Sound Louder When They WOO Their Mate ….#AceNewsDesk report

Post author By ace101
Post date 26/11/2021

#AceNewsReport – Nov.26: Our examination revealed that their calls differ slightly in how long, how high-pitched and how rapid-fire they are. The Slender Bleating Tree Frog has the shortest, most rapid-fire and highest-pitched calls,” Dr Rowley said.

#AceDailyNews Science News Report: The ‘Screaming Tree Frog’ and the ‘Slender Bleating Tree Frog’ are two new species, although they were originally considered part of a different species: the ‘Robust Bleating Tree Frog’. As it would turn out, these are three separate kinds of frogs — although they all love a good scream, they’re all different!New frogs just dropped in Australia. Scientists from UNSW have discovered two new species of frogs and they are LOUD.

🐸 Frogs rule…OK 👍

From left to right: The Screaming Tree Frog, the Robust Bleating Tree Frog and the Slender Bleating Tree Frog. Image: Jodi Rowley, UNSW.

“These noisy frog bachelors are super loud when they are trying to woo their mates,” said Dr Jodi Rowley, a herpetologist from UNSW and at the Australian Museum. She’s also a lead scientist on the FrogID project, which verifies frogs and species of frogs across Australia (246 have been found!). It’s like Pokémon for frogs.

SOUND UP! Check out the ???? to see why scientists – including @UNSW Science’s @jodirowley, a herpetologist from @unswbees & @austmus
– have long thought that the Bleating Tree frog (Litoria dentata) & the Screaming Tree frog (Litoria quiritatus) were the same ????.
???? @jodirowley pic.twitter.com/WHMl1zRsnv
— UNSW Science (@UNSWScience) November 23, 2021

So what makes these new Aussie frogs so different from each other? Firstly, their appearance. As the name would suggest, the Slender Bleating Tree Frog is a skinny queen and has a white line down its side. Males also have a black vocal sack.

The Screaming Tree Frog isn’t so slender, with males having a bright yellow vocal sack. During breeding season, males have a habit of turning lemon yellow.

When it comes to the Robust Bleating Tree Frog, males tend to have a brownish vocal sack, which can turn yellow or yellowish-brown when inflated.

“Although similar in appearance, and in their piercing calls, the frogs are genetically very different. I’m still amazed that it’s taken us so long to discover that the loudest frog in Australia is not one but three species,” said Professor Donnellan, the chief research scientist at the South Australian Museum.

So, where can you find these loud froggies? Turns out they can appear in backyards and paddocks across the east coast of Australia, along with more natural habitats. The Slender Tree Frog is a Queensland native, whereas the Screaming Tree Frog can be found from Taree in New South Wales down to the Victorian border. The Bleating Tree Frog can be found between south-eastern Queensland and Eden in NSW.

If you’re interested in figuring out what frogs live in your backyard or what frog is making all that racket, you can use the FrogID app to help.

#AceNewsDesk report …………Published: Nov.26: 2021:

Tags Australian News, News, Science

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(MOSCOW) Origin of the Horse Report: One lineage in southwestern Russia gave rise to all modern domestic horses, from sleek thoroughbreds to heavy-built Clydesdales #AceNewsDesk report

Post author By ace101
Post date 24/10/2021

#AceNewsReport – Oct.24: People have relied on the modern horse to plow fields, charge into battle and traverse long distances for millennia. Horses have transformed human societies with every stride. But scientists have struggled to answer the seemingly simple of question of when and where these animals were domesticated.

#AceDailyNews says ‘They Help Us Plough The Fields & Scatter’ and now according to latest report ‘Genetic Sequencing Pinpoints the Origins of the Domestic Horse’ and it took an international team of more than 160 scientists to pinpoint the origins of the modern horse’s domestication: between 4,200 and 4,700 years ago near the Volga and Don Rivers in southwestern Russia: The team reported their findings this week in the journal Nature.

Smithsonian Mag: Rasha AridiOctober 22, 2021 2:09 p.m.The modern horse overtook other equine lineages as it spread across Europe and Asia thousands of years ago. catnap72/Getty Images

The researchers collected samples from 273 ancient horses that once lived across Europe and Asia between 50,000 and 200 B.C.E. Using DNA sequencing, the team created a genetic map that allowed them to trace the horses’ lineages. They found four separate lineages, but the one most closely related to modern horses originated in the Volga-Don region, reports Genelle Weule for ABC in Australia.

Their genetic map also revealed that up until about 2,000 B.C.E., horse populations across Europe and Asia were genetically diverse. But within just a few centuries thereafter, the level of variation plummeted, and all domestic horses could be traced back to the population in the Volga-Don region, reports Jonathan Lambert for Science News.

This likely happened when people living in the Volga-Don region began breeding wild horses for domestication and traveled with them to faraway places. Soon enough, this lineage took over Europe and Asia. It happened “almost overnight,” researcher Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, tells Rebecca Dzombak for National Geographic. “This was not something that built up over thousands of years.”

“As they expanded, they replaced all the previous lineages that were roaming around Eurasia,” he says. The horse we know today “is the winner, the one we see everywhere, and the other types are sort of the losers.”

Genetic sequencing also identified two key genes in the modern horse’s ancestors that are linked to greater docility and an improved weight-bearing ability, which could explain why they became so prolific, reports Sabrina Imbler for the New York Times.

Breeders likely selected for “two really good factors not [previously] present in any horse,” Orlando tells Science News. “That created an animal that was both easier to interact and move with.”

This study also throws a wrench in previous front-running theories. For example, it was thought that the Yamnaya people migrated westward into Europe around 5,000 years ago on horseback. It was a monumental migration that transformed European ancestry, Ann Gibbons reported for Science in 2017. But this study says otherwise—the Yamnaya must have migrated on oxen instead of horses, since horses weren’t domesticated until around 4,000 years ago, according to the Times.

The researchers offer an alternate theory: domestic horses made their way across Europe—and started replacing other lineages—during the expansion of the Sintashta culture. This happened around 3,800 years ago during the Bronze Age when horse-drawn chariots rolled in hordes of people, the Times reports.

“The history of humans is wrapped up in horse DNA,” Kate Kanne, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K., tells National Geographic. “It tells the story of both our species.”

#AceNewsDesk report ……………Published: Oct.24: 2021:

Tags Genetics, Horse, Nature, News, Russia, Science

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(EGYPT) Science Research Report: Scientists have discovered a 43-million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown amphibious four-legged whale species in Egypt #AceNewsDesk report

Post author By ace101
Post date 27/08/2021

#AceNewsReport – Aug.27: The newly discovered whale belongs to the Protocetidae, a group of extinct whales that falls in the middle of their transition from land to sea, the Egyptian-led team of researchers said in a statement….

#AceDailyNews says that Paleontologists have discovered a four-legged whale fossil, name it Phiomicetus anubis after Egypt’s ‘God Of Death’ the fossil was unearthed from middle Eocene rocks in the Fayum Depression in Egypt’s Western Desert — an area once covered by sea that has provided a rich seam of discoveries showing the evolution of whales — before being studied at Mansoura University Vertebrate Palaeontology Centre (MUVP).

Research Report:

The new whale, named Phiomicetus anubis, had an estimated body length of about 3 metres and a body mass of about 600kg, and was likely a top predator, the researchers said.

Its partial skeleton revealed it as the most primitive protocetid whale known from Africa.

“Phiomicetus anubis is a key new whale species, and a critical discovery for Egyptian and African paleontology,” said Abdullah Gohar of MUVP, lead author of a paper on the discovery published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“It was a successful, active predator,” Mr Gohar told Live Science. “I think it was the god of death for most animals that lived alongside it.”

The whale’s genus name honours the Fayum Depression, and its species name refers to Anubis, the ancient Egyptian canine-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife.

Despite recent fossil discoveries, the big picture of early whale evolution in Africa has largely remained a mystery, the researchers said.

Work in the region had the potential to reveal new details about the evolutionary transition of whales from being amphibious to fully aquatic.

With rocks covering about 12 million years, discoveries in the Fayum Depression “range from semi-aquatic crocodile-like whales to giant fully aquatic whales”, said Mohamed Sameh of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, a co-author.

The new whale has raised questions about ancient ecosystems and pointed research towards questions such as the origin and coexistence of ancient whales in Egypt, said Hesham Sellam, founder of the MUVP and another co-author.

Reuters

#AceNewsDesk report ……Published: Aug.27: 2021: