Great white sharks may have contributed to megalodon extinction

Tooth size comparison between the extinct Early Pliocene Otodus megalodon tooth and a modern great white shark. 
Credit: MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology

The diet of fossil extinct animals can hold clues to their lifestyle, behavior, evolution and ultimately extinction. However, studying an animal’s diet after millions of years is difficult due to the poor preservation of chemical dietary indicators in organic material on these timescales. An international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, applied a new method to investigate the diet of the largest shark to have ever existed, the iconic Otodus megalodon. This new method investigates the zinc isotope composition of the highly mineralized part of teeth and proves to be particularly helpful to decipher the diet of these extinct animals.

Megatooth sharks like Otodus megalodon, more commonly known as megalodon, lived between 23 and 3.6 million years ago in oceans around the globe and possibly reached as large as 20 meters in length. For comparison, the largest great white sharks today reach a total length of only six meters. Many factors have been discussed to explain the gigantism and extinction of megalodon, with its diet and dietary competition often being thought of as key factors.

Asteroid Institute Uses Revolutionary Cloud-Based Astrodynamics Platform to Discover and Track Asteroids

The Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation, today announced it is using a groundbreaking computational technique running on its Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) cloud-based astrodynamics platform to discover and track asteroids. The Minor Planet Center has confirmed and added the first 104 of these newly discovered asteroids to its registry, thus opening the door for Asteroid Institute-supported researchers to submit thousands of additional new discoveries.

The ADAM platform is an open-source computational system that runs astrodynamics algorithms using the scalable computational and storage capabilities in Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Kubernetes Engine. The novel algorithm used to discover these new asteroids is called THOR (Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery), and it links points of light in different sky images that are consistent with asteroid orbits. Unlike current state-of-the-art algorithms, THOR does not require the telescope to observe the sky in a particular pattern for asteroids to be discoverable. Researchers can now begin systematic explorations of large datasets that were previously not usable for discovering asteroids. THOR recognizes asteroids, and most importantly, calculates their orbits well enough to be recognized by the Minor Planet Center as tracked asteroids.

For its initial demonstration, Joachim Moeyens, THOR co-creator and the Asteroid Institute Graduate Student Fellow at the University of Washington, searched a 30-day window of images from the NOIRLab Source Catalog (NSC), a collection of nearly 68 billion observations taken by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory telescopes between 2012 and 2019. From this Moeyens submitted a small, initial subset of discoveries to the Minor Planet Center for official recognition and validation. Now that the computational discovery technique has been validated, thousands of new discoveries from NSC and other datasets are expected to follow.

The grass may be greener on old mine sites

Researchers at WVU’s Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design will use $817,000 in grant funding from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study the resiliency of miscanthus, a bioenergy crop that grows well on reclaimed mine land.
Credit: photo/Jenni Kane

West Virginia University researchers are working to better understand how climate change may make an impact on a bioenergy crop that flourishes on reclaimed mining lands.

Previously living materials, including perennial grasses like Miscanthus x giganteus, produce bioenergy. Ember Morrissey, associate professor of environmental microbiology in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, is examining the symbiotic relationship between microbes and this type of tall grass to prepare for climate change and decreasing fossil fuel usage.

The research group includes Jeff Skousen, professor of soil science, Louis McDonald, professor of environmental soil chemistry and soil fertility, and Jenni Kane, a doctoral student in plant and soil sciences.

Skousen, an expert in soil reclamation, helped Morrissey establish miscanthus stands on marginal soil for research over the next five years funded with a more than $817,000 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The goal is to determine if fertilization will weaken the relationship between the plant and its microbes and then determine the best way to manage the plant in unpredictable climates.

Making colors out of gold and DNA

In this experiment, the gel is being activated by a red LED before the researchers measure the light it transmits.
Photo: Joonas Ryssy

Folk belief says there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but a new technology is turning that idea on its head – using particles of gold to make colors. With further work, the method developed at Aalto University could herald a new display technology.

The technique uses gold nanocylinders suspended in a gel. The gel only transmits certain colors when lit by polarized light, and the color depends on the orientation of the gold nanocylinders. In a clever twist, a collaboration led by Anton Kuzyk’s and Juho Pokki’s research groups used DNA molecules to control the orientation of gold nanocylinders in the gel.

‘DNA isn’t just an information carrier – it can also be a building block. We designed the DNA molecules to have a certain melting temperature, so we could basically program the material,’ says Aalto doctoral candidate Joonas Ryssy, the study’s lead author. When the gel heats past the melting temperature, the DNA molecules loosen their grip and the gold nanocylinders change orientation. When the temperature drops, they tighten up again, and the nanoparticles go back to their original position.

Palms at the Poles: Fossil Plants Reveal Lush Southern Hemisphere Forests in Ancient Hothouse Climate

For decades, paleobotanist David Greenwood has collected fossil plants from Australia – some so well preserved it’s hard to believe they’re millions of years old. These fossils hold details about the ancient world in which they thrived, and Greenwood and a team of researchers including climate modeler and research David Hutchinson, from the University of New South Wales, and UConn Department of Geosciences paleobotanist Tammo Reichgelt, have begun the process of piecing together the evidence to see what more they could learn from the collection. Their findings are published in Paleoceanography & Paleoclimatology.

The fossils date back 55 to 40 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch. At that time, the world was much warmer and wetter, and these hothouse conditions meant there were palms at the North and South Pole and predominantly arid landmasses like Australia were lush and green. Reichgelt and co-authors looked for evidence of differences in precipitation and plant productivity between then and now.

Since different plants thrive under specific conditions, plant fossils can indicate what kinds of environments those plants lived in.

By focusing on the morphology and taxonomic features of 12 different floras, the researchers developed a more detailed view of what the climate and productivity was like in the ancient hothouse world of the Eocene epoch.

Reichgelt explains the morphological method relies on the fact that the leaves of angiosperms — flowering plants — in general have a strategy for responding to climate.

New Artificial Enzyme Breaks Down Tough, Woody Lignin

Researchers Xiao Zhang (L) and Chun-long Chen (R) examine the products of lignin digestion by their novel biomimetic peptoid catalyst.
Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

A new artificial enzyme has shown it can chew through lignin, the tough polymer that helps woody plants hold their shape. Lignin also stores tremendous potential for renewable energy and materials.

Reporting in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers from Washington State University and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory showed that their artificial enzyme succeeded in digesting lignin, which has stubbornly resisted previous attempts to develop it into an economically useful energy source.

Lignin, which is the second most abundant renewable carbon source on Earth, mostly goes to waste as a fuel source. When wood is burned for cooking, lignin byproducts help impart that smoky flavor to foods. But burning releases all that carbon to the atmosphere instead of capturing it for other uses.

“Our bio-mimicking enzyme showed promise in degrading real lignin, which is considered to be a breakthrough,” said Xiao Zhang, a corresponding author on the paper and associate professor in WSU’s Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. Zhang also holds a joint appointment at PNNL. “We think there is an opportunity to develop a new class of catalysts and to really address the limitations of biological and chemical catalysts.”

Drought, megafires, and flood – citizen scientists reveal impact on river water quality

Upper Macleay River
Source: Southern Cross University

In a few short years Australia’s east coast has experienced drought, blazing bushfires and unprecedented floods, driving discussion about the impacts of climate change. What is less discussed, and also less well understood, are the implications of such extremes for the quality of water in our rivers.

Researchers from Southern Cross University led a unique study published in Water Research with collaboration from dedicated team of citizen scientists to help monitor how these climate extremes impact river water quality.

Professor Scott Johnston, a Landscape Hydrogeochemist from the University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering has overseen this water quality monitoring project in the Macleay River since 2016. The Macleay is a large coastal catchment in Northern New South Wales that stretches across the Great Dividing Range from the tablelands near Armidale to the coast at Kempsey and South West Rocks.

“We collaborated with a trained group of local citizen scientist volunteers who were able to regularly collect river water samples, capturing what took place at a level of detail that is really quite unique,” he said. ‘’Without their hard work on the ground, this study would not have happened and it is a great example of a university and community working closely together to help understand a locally relevant issue.’

Alzheimer’s disease causes cells to overheat and ‘fry like eggs’

Mammalian cell stained with fluorescence polymeric thermometers and falsely-colored based on temperature gradients. 
Credit: Chyi Wei Chung

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used sensors small and sensitive enough to detect temperature changes inside individual cells, and found that as amyloid-beta misfolds and clumps together, it causes cells to overheat.

In an experiment using human cell lines, the researchers found the heat released by amyloid-beta aggregation could potentially cause other, healthy amyloid-beta to aggregate, causing more and more aggregates to form.

In the same series of experiments, the researchers also showed that amyloid-beta aggregation can be stopped, and the cell temperature lowered, with the addition of a drug compound. The experiments also suggest that the compound has potential as a therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease, although extensive tests and clinical trials would first be required.

The researchers say their assay could be used as a diagnostic tool for Alzheimer’s disease, or to screen potential drug candidates. The results are reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The Sun is spinning round again

The model developed by the scientists includes the history of the rotation of the sun but also the magnetic instabilities that it generates.
Credit: Sylvia Ekström / UNIGE

All was amiss with the Sun! In the early 2000s, a new set of data brought down the chemical abundances at the surface of the Sun, contradicting the values predicted by the standard models used by astrophysicists. Often challenged, these new abundances made it through several new analyses. As they seemed to prove correct, it was thus up to the solar models to adapt, especially since they serve as a reference for the study of stars in general. A team of astronomers from the University of Geneva, Switzerland (UNIGE) in collaboration with the Université de Liège, has developed a new theoretical model that solves part of the problem: considering the Sun’s rotation, that varied through time, and the magnetic fields it generates, they have been able to explain the chemical structure of the Sun. The results of this study are published in Nature Astronomy.

“The Sun is the star that we can best characterize, so it constitutes a fundamental test for our understanding of stellar physics. We have abundance measurements of its chemical elements, but also measurements of its internal structure, like in the case of Earth thanks to seismology”, explains Patrick Eggenberger, a researcher at the Department of astronomy of the UNIGE and first author of the study.

These observations should fall in line with the results predicted by the theoretical models which aim at explaining the Sun’s evolution. How does the Sun burn its hydrogen in the core? How is energy produced there and then transported towards the surface? How do chemical elements drift within the Sun, influenced both by rotation and magnetic fields?

Research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste

Engineers prepare to test an advanced prototype of a small modular reactor developed by the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
Image credit: Idaho National Laboratory

Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants, according to research from Stanford and the University of British Columbia.

Nuclear reactors generate reliable supplies of electricity with limited greenhouse gas emissions. But a nuclear power plant that generates 1,000 megawatts of electric power also produces radioactive waste that must be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Furthermore, the cost of building a large nuclear power plant can be tens of billions of dollars.

Engineers prepare to test an advanced prototype of a small modular reactor developed by the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. (Image credit: Courtesy Idaho National Laboratory)

To address these challenges, the nuclear industry is developing small modular reactors that generate less than 300 megawatts of electric power and can be assembled in factories. Industry analysts say these advanced modular designs will be cheaper and produce fewer radioactive byproducts than conventional large-scale reactors.

But a May 30 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has reached the opposite conclusion.