What Does Climate Change Mean for Winter Storms?

With a massive East Coast snowstorm forecast for Friday, you may be wondering if the extreme conditions are a sign of climate change.

The answer is complicated. As National Center for Weather Administration director Thomas Karl recently explained, scientists now have the ability to show that some specific weather events — such as temperature extremes — are linked to increases in greenhouse gas emissions linked to human activities. But he said that it’s been more difficult to zero in and link other specific weather events to climate change, and this week’s big snowfall would fit into that category.

However, climate scientists say the long-term trend is for climate change to alter weather patterns and cause more severe snowstorms, even as winters become milder overall.

According to a 2014 federal report on climate change impacts in the U.S., since 1950 there’s evidence of an increase in both frequency and intensity of winter storms, even as overall annual snowfall has decreased over much of the nation.

You may also be wondering exactly how global warming leads to heavy snowstorms. According to NOAA’s Climate.gov website, the explanation seems to be that rising surface temperatures are causing increased evaporation, which in turn puts more water in the atmosphere.

NOAA says the boost in moisture and increased precipitation can be especially significant for coastal winter storms such as Nor’easters. You might remember that one of those buried Boston under heavy snow in mid-February of 2015.

As this 2014 Slate article by meteorologist Eric Holthaus explains, global warming also puts heat into the atmosphere that weakens the polar vortex, the swirl of high-altitude winds around the north that confines cold Arctic air. That, in turn, can allow cold air masses to slip southward, creating brutal cold weather.

Read more at Discovery News

Some Plants Can Count

Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants have the ability to count, according to a new study.

The discovery adds to the growing body of evidence that certain plants possess many animal-like abilities, even though they do not have brains. In this case, it’s now known that meat-eating plants can count up to at least five.

As for why this would be useful, project leader Rainer Hedrich of Universität Würzburg explained: “The carnivorous plant Dionaea muscipula, also known as Venus flytrap, can count how often it has been touched by an insect visiting its capture organ in order to trap and consume the animal prey.”

For the study, published in the journal Current Biology, Hedrich and his team used a machine to simulate an insect touching Venus flytraps. The machine emitted electric pulses to fool the plants into thinking an insect had just landed.

The researchers found that each numbered pulse/touch was associated with a particular response:

One: The plant’s trap enters a “ready to go” mode, noting the stimulation.

Two: The trap begins to close around the source of the stimulation.

Three: The trap closes tightly.

Four: The plant produces a hormone associated with the feeding process.

Five: Glands on the inner surface of the trap produce digestive enzymes and transporters that help to take up nutrients. At this point, if the stimulation were a real insect or other victim, it would be dinner.

Hedrich describes the numbered steps as a “deadly spiral of capture and disintegration.” The more the insect or other prey feels trapped, the more the plant closes in on the victim.

Read more at Discovery News

Bad Habits Hard-Wired in the Brain

Three weeks into 2016 and many resolutions are as stale as a bottle of champagne left open after a New Year’s party. Everyone has some kind of self-destructive behavior we’d be better off without, be it smoking or an unhealthy diet. Bad habits are hard to break, but why is that?

According to new research by Duke University researchers, our vices are hard-wired in a region of brain responsible for compulsive behavior and addiction, leaving an enduring mark that pushes us to succumb to our cravings. The greater the change in the brain circuitry, the more difficult it is to kick a habit.

For their study, published today in the journal Neuron, the Duke scientists analyzed the brains of mice who developed a sugar dependency and compared those with otherwise healthy mice. The rodents developed the habit by pressing a small lever to receive a sugary treat. After the sweets were taken away, the sugar-addicted mice continued pressing the lever even without the reward.

Within the brain is an area known as the basal ganglia, which is responsible for motor action and compulsive behaviors. Two pathways in the basal ganglia carry separate, opposing messages, “stop” and “go.”

For the mice who formed a sugar dependency, the researchers were surprised to find both the “stop” and “go” signals ramped up in the brain compared with ordinary mice.

The timing of the activation of these pathways differed in the two groups as well. For the mice that formed the habit, the go pathway lit up before stop. The opposite pattern emerged in the other test group. The head start given to the go pathway could explain difficulties in self control for those working to correct compulsive behaviors.

Encouraged by the researchers, some mice were able to break the habit when the scientists rewarded only the rodents who stopped pressing the lever, though the mice most able to do this were the ones with the weaker go pathways.

Knowing the influence of addictive, self-destructive behaviors on brain circuitry could lead to treatments to break them, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, or using harmless magnetic pulses to stimulate the brain, an avenue some researchers have already begun exploring.

Read more at Discovery News

New Carnivorous Dinosaur 'Draco' Found

A very early carnivorous dinosaur has just been found within rocks of a cliff in the south of Wales.

The dinosaur, named Dracoraptor hanigani or Draco for short, represents the first dinosaur from the Jurassic of Wales, according to a study, published in the journal PLOS ONE. The over 200-million-year-old dino is believed to be the earliest known Jurassic dinosaur from the U.K.

Lead author David Martill of the University of Portsmouth and his team wrote that "the remains of dinosaurs in Wales are exceedingly rare." This makes the discovery all the more important.

Wales might have once been a hotbed of dino activity, however, as the researchers suspect that "lack of preservation" is the primary reason why Jurassic dinosaurs have not been found there before.

Dracoraptor means "dragon robber." A dragon is the national symbol of Wales, so the dino's name reflects local pride over the new find.

Based on the dinosaur's fossils and the location of its remains — a site called Lavernock Point — the researchers believe Draco was an agile hunter that lived along a shoreline. South Wales during the early Jurassic was a coastal region like it is now, but the climate during the dinosaur's lifetime would have been much warmer.

Draco was just over two feet tall and about 6.5 feet wide, which is small for a meat-eating dinosaur. Martill and his colleagues therefore think the individual might have died as a juvenile. Further evidence is that its bones were not yet fully formed or fused.

Even at this young age Draco sported a distinctive long tail, which the researchers think helped with balance.

Read more at Discovery News

Extinct Crustacean Dollocaris Was All Eyes

A tiny but scary-looking marine critter that died out with the dinosaurs, caught prey with the aid of two monstrous eyes — each a quarter of its body length, scientists said Tuesday.

The giant peepers were composed of 18,000 lenses each — a record only ever surpassed by modern-day dragonflies, a team wrote in the science journal Nature Communications.

The sophisticated organs belonged to Dollocaris ingens, an extinct arthropod which lived about 160 million years ago, during the Jurassic geological period better known for the rise and fall of the dinosaurs.

An arthropod is an animal with an exoskeleton and segmented body — including groups like today’s insects, spiders and crustaceans.

D. ingens, a swimmer, would have had a crab-like shell, with three pairs of clawed, segmented legs with which to catch tiny shrimps, and eight pairs of stubby swimming appendages.

It would have been about five to 20 centimetres (two to eight inches) long, and each eye about a quarter of that.

For the study, experts used special microscopes and scans to examine fossilised D. ingens eyes dug up in southeast France.

It is extremely rare to find well-preserved samples of internal eye structure.

The first compound eyes, made up of many individual units like those of ants, are thought to have appeared in the Cambrian period some 500 million years ago — revolutionising animal development, according to study co-author Jean Vannier from France’s University of Lyon.

“To see and be seen changed everything — with eyes you could become a more effective hunter, while prey became more easily detectable,” he explained.

“All this led to a new dynamic — for some to better protect themselves, for others to become better at detection, and new evolutionary pressures.”

Their examinations confirmed that C. ingens was a “visual hunter,” said Vannier.

Read more at Discovery News

Fairy Tales Predate Bible and Greek Myths

Many well known fairy tales predate the existence of modern European languages and major world religions, finds new research.

The findings, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, open up the possibility that popular folktales influenced writings in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible and other religious works. They also negate the claims of some scholars who have held that most traditional fairy tales originated much more recently.

"Versions of 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Rumplestiltskin' and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' have probably been around since before the existence of many modern European languages, like English, German, Russian and French, and would have originally been told in a now extinct ancestral language from which those tongues evolved," co-author Jamshid Tehrani of Durham University told Discovery News.

Tehrani added, “It is difficult to put precise dates on such things, but we're looking in the region of 4–6,000 years old.”

Tehrani and co-author Sara Graça da Silva of the New University of Lisbon investigated whether 275 Indo-European fairy tales were more likely to be shared by closely related populations than more distantly related ones. They tested whether the sharing of the tales could be predicted by how close populations were geographically, or by how related their languages are.

The process enabled the researchers to separate the effects of tales traveling between neighboring groups (such as through trade or migrations) from tales that had been inherited from common ancestral groups. This narrowed the number of tales down to 76 whose distributions could be primarily explained by common heritage.

The researchers next mapped the 76 tales on a "family tree" of Indo-European languages to see how far the stories could be traced back, using the same techniques that biologists utilize to reconstruct the evolution of genetically inherited traits.

One of the oldest tales of the bunch was determined to be "The Smith and the Devil," in which a blacksmith sells his soul to a devil/evil spirit in return for the power to weld any materials together. The blacksmith then uses that power to attach the devil to a stool or tree, and only releases the devil on the condition that he may keep his soul.

"We trace this tale back to the Bronze Age ancestors of the Indo-European language family," Tehrani said.

The age of the tale and its subject help to resolve a long-standing issue among historians. Previously it was thought that Indo-European languages originated prior to metallurgy, but the researchers now think that is highly unlikely.

"Potentially we could use the information preserved in folktales to extrapolate other features of ancestral societies, such as their religious beliefs, moral ideas, gender norms and more," Tehrani said.

Graça da Silva added that many of the early folk tales included animals in the stories. She described an influential one, called "The Grateful Animals," whose plot concerns a group of grateful animals that helps a hero after he rescues them. Usually the animals assist the hero in winning the affections of a princess.

Many of the tales in Grimms’ collection were actually told by women and were often shared by word of mouth. So it's not surprising that themes such as marriage, childbirth, sex and children abound. Later, however, some of these stories underwent various adaptations as they were collected (very often by men), "becoming manuals of proper behavior and a reflection of cultural and social expectations," Graça da Silva said. "Bad girls are usually portrayed as ugly and greedy, for example."

Jack Zipes, a professor emeritus from the University of Minnesota, is a renowned expert on the origin and evolution of fairytales.

He told Discovery News, "Tehrani and Graça da Silva have clearly and scientifically demonstrated that the origins of folk and fairy tales can indeed be traced back to ancient societies by using phylogenetic methods. Their work can serve as the ground work for studies that investigate why certain tale types originated, how they were disseminated and spread throughout the world, and why we keep telling the same tales though different modalities in the present."

Read more at Discovery News

Earth's 2015 Temperatures Warmest on Record

Earth’s surface temperatures in 2015 were the warmest since modern-day record keeping began in 1880, two U.S. government agencies reported Wednesday.

Even without naturally occurring warming trends, such as El Nino, 2015 would have been hotter than 2014, also a record-setter, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told reporters during a conference call.

Most of the heating is due to the combined effects of deforestation with the burning of fossil fuels, leaving more heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, said Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

“Even without El Nino, this would have been the warmest year on record,” Schmidt said.

El Nino, a tropical Pacific Ocean warming system that kicked in during the last three months of 2015 and remains strong, portends an even warmer 2016.

“If you’re going to be betting, you’d bet that it’s going to be warmer than 2015,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina.

The independent studies by NASA and NOAA align with previously announced research by British and Japanese scientists, all showing Earth heating up to record levels in 2015.

"Clearly, the 2015 data continues the pattern we've seen over the last four to five decades," Karl said.

The warmer temperatures may impact the frequency, intensity and locations of extreme weather events, such as flooding and hurricanes. Global warming also is tied to Arctic ice melt and rising seas.

"This trend will continue ... because the factors that are causing this long-term trend are continuing to accelerate," Schmidt said.

Read more at Discovery News

9th Planet May Lurk in the Outer Solar System

The astronomer who helped kick Pluto out of the planet club believes a much larger body may be lurking in the outskirts of the solar system.

If it exists, the solar system’s ninth planet is estimated to be a gas world about 10 times bigger than Earth, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown wrote in this week’s Astronomical Journal.

Brown and colleague Konstantin Batygin, also at Caltech, used mathematical models and computer simulations to deduce the planet’s existence, but they also have some observational evidence to support their claim. Several small icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Neptune have quirks in their orbits that may be explained by the gravitational influence of a larger, more distant planetary cousin.

Scientists then realized that  six of those bodies follow elliptical paths pointing toward the same direction in space.

“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” Brown said in a press release, adding that the odds of that happening are about one-in-100.

The orbits also are tilted in the same direction, roughly 30 degrees downward relative to the orbital plane of the solar system’s other eight planets.

“We thought something else must be shaping these orbits,” Brown said.

After checking if a batch of other Kuiper Belt objects might be responsible, the scientists started doing computer simulations that included a distant outer planet in various orbits.

They found an unusual match:  a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit, which is an orbit in which the planet’s closest approach to the sun is 180 degrees across from the closest approach of the objects and known planets in the solar system.

“I was very skeptical,” Batygin said in the release.  “I had never seen anything like this in celestial mechanics.”

Besides accounting for peculiarities in some Kuiper Belt objects’ orbits, the predicted rogue planet, located about 20 times farther away from the sun than Earth, also would pin other Kuiper Belt bodies into orbits perpendicular to the plane of the rest of the planets.

Read more at Discovery News

Extreme turbulence roiling 'most luminous galaxy' in the universe

The most luminous galaxy in the Universe -- a so-called obscured quasar 12.4 billion light-years away -- is so violently turbulent that it may eventually jettison its entire supply of star-forming gas, according to new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

A team of researchers used ALMA to trace, for the first time, the actual motion of the galaxy's interstellar medium -- the gas and dust between the stars. What they found, according to Tanio Díaz-Santos of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, is a galaxy "so chaotic that it is ripping itself apart."

Previous studies with NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft revealed that the galaxy, dubbed W2246-0526, is glowing in infrared light as intensely as approximately 350 trillion suns.

Evidence strongly suggests that this galaxy is an obscured quasar, a very distant galaxy with a voraciously feeding supermassive black hole at its center that is completely obscured behind a thick blanket of dust.

This galaxy's startling brightness is powered by a tiny, yet incredibly energetic disk of gas that is being superheated as it spirals in on the supermassive black hole. The light from this blazingly bright accretion disk is then absorbed by the surrounding dust, which re-emits the energy as infrared light.

"These properties make this object a beast in the infrared," said Roberto Assef, an astronomer with the Universidad Diego Portales and leader of the ALMA observing team. "The powerful infrared energy emitted by the dust then has a direct and violent impact on the entire galaxy, producing extreme turbulence throughout the interstellar medium."

The astronomers compare this turbulent action to a pot of boiling water. If these conditions continue, they say, the galaxy's intense infrared radiation will boil away all of its interstellar gas.

This galaxy belongs to a very unusual type of quasar known as Hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxies or Hot DOGs. These objects are very rare; only 1 out of every 3,000 quasars observed by WISE belongs to this class.

The astronomers used ALMA to precisely map the motion of ionized carbon atoms throughout the entire galaxy. These atoms, which are tracers for interstellar gas, naturally emit infrared light, which becomes shifted to millimeter wavelengths as it travels the vast cosmic distances to Earth due to the expansion of the Universe.

"Large amounts of ionized carbon were found in an extremely turbulent dynamic state throughout the galaxy," Díaz-Santos describes. The data reveal that this interstellar material is careening anywhere from 500 to 600 kilometers per second throughout the entire galaxy.

The astronomers believe that this turbulence is primarily due to the fact that the region around the black hole is at least 100 times more luminous than the rest of the galaxy combined; in other quasars, the proportion is much more modest. This intense yet localized radiation exerts tremendous pressure on the entire galaxy, to potentially devastating effect.

"We suspected that this galaxy was in a transformative stage of its life because of the enormous amount of infrared energy discovered with WISE," said Peter Eisenhardt with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Now ALMA has shown us that the raging furnace in this galaxy is making the pot boil over."

Current models of galactic dynamics combined with the ALMA data indicate that this galaxy is unstable and its interstellar gas is being blown away in all directions. This suggests that the galaxy's Hot DOG days are numbered as it matures into a more traditional unobscured quasar.

"If this pattern continues, it is possible that in the future W2246 ends up shedding a large part of the gas and dust it contains," concludes Manuel Aravena also from the Universidad Diego Portales. "Only ALMA, with its unparalleled resolution, can allow us to see this object in high definition and fathom such an important episode in the life of this galaxy."

Notes:

"The Strikingly Uniform, Highly Turbulent Interstellar Medium of The Most Luminous Galaxy in the Universe," by T. Díaz-Santos et al., and will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

The team is composed of T. Díaz-Santos (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile), R. J. Assef (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile), A. W. Blain (University of Leicester, UK) , C.-W. Tsai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA) , M. Aravena (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile), P. Eisenhardt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA), J. Wu (University of California Los Angeles, California, USA), D. Stern (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA) and C. Bridge (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA).

Read more at Science Daily

'Green pea' galaxy provides insights to early universe evolution

Newly formed dwarf galaxies were likely the reason that the universe heated up about 13 billion years ago, according to new work by an international team of scientists that included a University of Virginia researcher. The finding opens an avenue for better understanding the early period of the universe's 14 billion year history.

In the period of several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and dense that matter was ionized instead of being in a neutral form. But 380,000 years later, the expansion of the universe had cooled it enough for matter to become neutral and for the first structures of the universe to form -- gas clouds of hydrogen and helium. Gravity then made these gas clouds grow in mass and collapse to form the first stars and galaxies. Then, about one billion years after the Big Bang, another important transformation occurred: the universe reheated, and hydrogen -- the most abundant element -- became ionized for a second time, as it had shortly after the Big Bang, an event which astronomers call "cosmic re-ionization." How this happened is still debated.

Astronomers have long thought that galaxies were responsible for this transformation.

An international team of scientists, organized by University of Virginia astronomer Trinh Thuan in the United States, has largely validated that hypothesis in a paper published Thursday in the journal Nature. Trinh's research colleagues on the paper are at institutions in Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France and Germany.

Using data from an ultraviolet spectrometer aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, the team discovered a nearby compact dwarf galaxy emitting a large number of ionizing photons into the intergalactic medium, or the space between galaxies. Scientists believe those photons are responsible for the universe's re-ionization.

"This galaxy appears to be an excellent local analog of the numerous dwarf galaxies thought to be responsible for the reionization of the early universe," Trinh said. "The finding is significant because it gives us a good place to look for probing the reionization phenomenon, which took place early in the formation of the universe that became the universe we have today."

Normal matter in the early universe consisted mostly of gas. Stars and star clusters are born from clouds of gas, forming the first galaxies. Ultraviolet radiation emitted by these stars contains numerous ionizing photons. For this reason, scientists have long suspected that galaxies were responsible for cosmic reionization. However, for reionization to occur, galaxies must eject these photons into the intergalactic medium; otherwise, they are easily absorbed by the gas and dust before they can escape. Despite 20 years of intensive searching, no galaxy emitting sufficient ionizing radiation had been found, and the mechanism by which the universe became re-ionized remained a mystery.

To solve this problem, the international research team proposed to observe "green pea" galaxies. Discovered in 2007, these galaxies represent a special and rare class in the nearby universe. They appear green to light sensors and are round and compact, like a pea. They are believed to host stellar explosions or winds strong enough to eject ionizing photons.

The team examined data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey -- a database of more than a million galaxies. From this survey, they identified approximately 5,000 galaxies that match their criteria: very compact galaxies emitting very intense UV radiation. Researchers selected five galaxies for observation with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Read more at Science Daily