Astronomers find ‘gold standard’ star in Milky Way

The star HD 222925 is a ninth-magnitude star located toward the southern constellation Tucana.
Image credit: The STScI Digitized Sky Survey

In our sun’s neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy is a relatively bright star, and in it, astronomers have been able to identify the widest range of elements in a star beyond our solar system yet.

The study, led by University of Michigan astronomer Ian Roederer, has identified 65 elements in the star, HD 222925. Forty-two of the elements identified are heavy elements that are listed along the bottom of the periodic table of elements.

Identifying these elements in a single star will help astronomers understand what’s called the “rapid neutron capture process,” or one of the major ways by which heavy elements in the universe were created. Their results are posted on arXiv and have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

“To the best of my knowledge, that’s a record for any object beyond our solar system. And what makes this star so unique is that it has a very high relative proportion of the elements listed along the bottom two-thirds of the periodic table. We even detected gold,” Roederer said. “These elements were made by the rapid neutron capture process. That’s really the thing we’re trying to study: the physics in understanding how, where and when those elements were made.”

Ice-capped volcanoes slower to erupt, study finds

Undergraduate researcher Lilian Lucas, left, and geology professor Patricia Gregg found that additional pressure from thick overlying glacial ice can make volcanic systems more stable and slower to erupt than volcanoes without ice. 
Photo by Fred Zwicky

The Westdahl Peak volcano in Alaska last erupted in 1992, and continued expansion hints at another eruption soon. Experts previously forecasted the next blast to occur by 2010, but the volcano – located under about 1 kilometer of glacial ice – has yet to erupt again. Using the Westdahl Peak volcano as inspiration, a new volcanic modeling study examined how glaciers affect the stability and short-term eruption cycles of high-latitude volcanic systems – some of which exist along major air transportation routes.

The study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign undergraduate researcher Lilian Lucas, with graduate student Jack Albright, former graduate student Yan Zhan and geology professor Patricia Gregg, used finite element numerical modeling to study the stability of the rock that surrounds volcanic systems – but with a new twist. The team accounted for the additional pressure from glacial ice volcanoes when forecasting the timing of eruptions.

“Volcanic forecasting involves a lot of variables, including the depth and size of a volcano’s magma chamber, the rate at which magma fills that chamber and the strength of the rocks that contain the chamber, to name a few,” Lucas said. “Accounting for overlying pressure from polar ice caps is another critical, yet poorly understood, variable.”

Research breakthrough means warp speed ‘Unruh effect’ can finally be tested in lab settings

SFLORG Stock image

A major hurdle for work at the forefront of fundamental physics is the inability to test cutting-edge theories in a laboratory setting. But a recent discovery opens the door for scientists to see ideas in action that were previously only understood in theory or represented in science fiction.

One such theory is on the Unruh effect. When astronauts in a spacecraft undergo super strong acceleration and see the light of stars stream by, then the Unruh effect is an additional warm glow on top of the streaming light. First predicted by Canadian physicist Bill Unruh, this effect is closely related to the glow from black holes predicted by Stephen Hawking. This is because black holes strongly accelerate everything towards them.

“Black holes are believed to be not entirely black,” says Barbara Šoda, a PhD student in physics at the University of Waterloo. “Instead, as Stephen Hawking discovered, black holes should emit radiation. This is because, while nothing else can escape a black hole, quantum fluctuations of radiation can.”

Similar to how the Hawking effect needs a black hole, the Unruh effect requires enormous accelerations to produce a significant glow. The Unruh effect was therefore thought to be so weak that it would be impossible to measure with the acceleration that can be achieved in experiments with current technology.

Soil Microbes Use Different Pathways to Metabolize Carbon

Credit: Victor O. Leshyk/Northern Arizona University

Much of what scientists think about soil metabolism may be wrong. New evidence from Northern Arizona University suggests that microbes in different soils use different biochemical pathways to process nutrients, respire and grow. The study, published in Plant and Soil, upends long-held assumptions in the field of soil ecology and calls for more investigation and higher-resolution methods to be applied to what has been a black box for the field.

“As ecologists, we generally don’t think about soil metabolism in terms of pathways,” said Paul Dijkstra, research professor of biology in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at NAU and lead author of the study. “But we now have evidence that metabolism differs from soil to soil. We’re the first to see that.”

“We’ve learned that biochemistry—more specifically, the metabolic pathways the soil microbiota chooses—matters, and it matters a lot,” said co-author Michaela Dippold, a professor of bio-geosphere interactions at University of Tübingen in Germany. “Our field urgently needs to develop experimental approaches that quantify maintenance energy demand and underlying respiration in a robust way. It’s a challenge to which future soil ecology research will have to respond.”

Study finds cells take out the trash before they divide

MIT researchers have discovered that before cells start to divide, they toss waste products. In this image, the magenta represents DNA, and the green represents a lysosomal marker on the surface of the cells, which is an indicator of lysosomal exocytosis.
Credits: Courtesy of the researchers / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT researchers have discovered that before cells start to divide, they do a little cleanup, tossing out molecules that they appear not to need anymore.

Using a new method, they developed for measuring the dry mass of cells, the researchers found that cells lose about 4 percent of their mass as they enter cell division. The researchers believe that this emptying of trash helps cells to give their offspring a “fresh start,” without the accumulated junk of the parent cell.

“Our hypothesis is that cells might be throwing out things that are building up, toxic components or just things that don’t function properly that you don’t want to have there. It could allow the newborn cells to be born with more functional contents,” says Teemu Miettinen, an MIT research scientist and the lead author of the new study.

Scott Manalis, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the departments of Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in eLife. MIT biological engineering undergraduates Kevin Ly and Alice Lam are also authors of the paper.

Fossils reveal tropically hot North America 95 million years ago

Cretaceous oysters of the genus Pycnodonte investigated in the new study. These specimens were collected in San Miguel County, Colorado (top left), Kane County, Utah (top right), Big Horn County, Wyoming (bottom left), and Natrona County, Wyoming (bottom right), with a penny for scale.
Image credit: Matt Jones

A new University of Michigan study that used fossil oyster shells as paleothermometers found the shallow sea that covered much of western North America 95 million years ago was as warm as today’s tropics.

The study provides the first direct temperature data from that vast mid-latitude sea during the height of the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, one of the planet’s hottest climate intervals of the past several hundred million years.

The findings, published online May 9 in the journal Geology, also hint at what may be in store for future generations unless emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are reined in.

“These data indicate that the North American interior during the peak of the Cretaceous greenhouse was as warm as the hottest conditions in the modern-day tropics—imagine the climate of Bali, Indonesia, in places like Utah or Wyoming,” said study lead author Matt Jones, a former University of Michigan postdoctoral researcher now at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Hidden Distortions Trigger Promising Thermoelectric Property

Brookhaven Lab members of the research team: Simon Billinge, Milinda Abeykoon, and Emil Bozin adjust instruments for data collection at the Pair Distribution Function beamline of the National Synchrotron Light Source II. In this setup, a stream of hot air heats samples with degree-by-degree precision as x-rays collect data on how the material changes.
Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

In a world of materials that normally expand upon heating, one that shrinks along one 3D axis while expanding along another stands out. That’s especially true when the unusual shrinkage is linked to a property important for thermoelectric devices, which convert heat to electricity or electricity to heat.

In a paper just published in the journal Advanced Materials, a team of scientists from Northwestern University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory describe the previously hidden sub-nanoscale origins of both the unusual shrinkage and the exceptional thermoelectric properties in this material, silver gallium telluride (AgGaTe2). The discovery reveals a quantum mechanical twist on what drives the emergence of these properties—and opens up a completely new direction for searching for new high-performance thermoelectrics.

Newly Discovered Lake May Hold Secret to Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Rise and Fall

The coast of Antarctica is near where the East Antarctic Ice Sheet meets the sea.
Credit: Shuai Yan/UT Jackson School of Geosciences

Scientists investigating the underside of the world’s largest ice sheet in East Antarctica have discovered a city-size lake whose sediments might contain a history of the ice sheet since its earliest beginnings. That would answer questions about what Antarctica was like before it froze, how climate change has affected it over its history, and how the ice sheet might behave as the world warms.

Revealed by heavily instrumented polar research aircraft, Lake Snow Eagle is covered by 2 miles of ice and lies in a mile-deep canyon in the highlands of Antarctica’s Princess Elizabeth Land, a few hundred miles from the coast.

“This lake is likely to have a record of the entire history of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, its initiation over 34 million years ago, as well as its growth and evolution across glacial cycles since then,” said polar expert Don Blankenship, one of the paper’s authors and a senior research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics (UTIG). “Our observations also suggest that the ice sheet changed significantly about 10,000 years ago, although we have no idea why.”

Bat urine reveals extended range for new Hendra virus variant

Source/Credit: Griffith University

Griffith University researchers have discovered a new Hendra virus variant that may pass to horses and humans much more widely across Australia than previously known.

Published in Emerging Infectious Disease, the variant was detected in the urine of black and grey-headed flying foxes across an extended geographical distribution from mid-north coast NSW to southeast Queensland.

The new Hendra virus variant (HeV-g2) was recently discovered in samples from a horse that died in 2015 with acute illness and was previously detected in flying fox organs.

“Detection of the novel Hendra variant in urine is important, as contact with infected flying fox urine is how horses can become infected,” said lead researcher Dr Alison Peel, from the Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security.

“Our study, by revealing associations with particular flying fox species, helps to identify the variant’s distribution in these animals and the risk of spill-over into horses and subsequently humans.

Sale of donkey skins linked to trade in illegal wildlife products

A working donkey pulling a farmer's cart
Credit: Katja/Pixabay

Newly published research raises important concerns about whether the trade in donkey skins is being used as a cover for smuggling elephant tusks, pangolin scales and other illegal wildlife products.

Research published in Conservation Science and Practice has revealed novel links between the global trade in donkey skins and the wildlife trade. The study by an interdisciplinary team from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) and supported by The Donkey Sanctuary suggests that these trades operate in parallel, creating new avenues and transportation pathways for wildlife trade.

The trade of donkey skins is largely driven by demand for E-Jiao, a traditional Chinese medicine, which uses gelatin from donkey skins. As increasing demand has outstripped the Chinese domestic supply of donkeys, E-Jiao producers have looked to international markets for skins.

Using network analysis of online markets, the research team examined seven large international b2b eCommerce platforms, which all hosted vendors selling donkey skins. Nearly one-fifth of the vendors selling donkey skins also offered some other form of wildlife product – in some cases even species protected by CITES, the international treaty on the trade of endangered species.