Study finds reduced microbial diversity in guts of wild bears that eat human food

by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University

Credit: Tom Gillman

A recent study suggests that eating human food has a pronounced effect on the microbiome of black bears. Specifically, researchers from North Carolina State University and Northern Michigan University found that wild bears who consumed a lot of processed foods had far less diversity in the microbial ecosystems of their guts.

"We know a 'western' diet can reduce microbial diversity in the guts of humans, mice and other species, which can have an adverse effect on their health," says Erin McKenney, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of applied ecology at NC State. "We want to know if the same is true for wildlife, particularly given the increasing overlap between where people live and where wildlife lives. One possibility our work here raises is that if wildlife begin consuming human foods, it may affect their ability to derive as much nutrition from their traditional, wild diet if they stop eating human foods."

"One step toward seeing if the same is true for wildlife is to assess the impact that human foods have on the gut microbiome of wild mammals," says Sierra Gillman, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. "In this particular study, we wanted to know how human foods influence the gut microbiome of black bears." Gillman did the work while a grad student at NMU.

The researchers focused the study on Michigan, which allows hunters to "bait" bears by leaving out large quantities of human food, such as sugary cereals and candy. Hunters will bait specific sites for weeks or months to lure bears to a specific area on a regular basis. As a result, some bears have a diet that is rich in human junk food for an extended period of time.

To collect samples from the wild bear population, the researchers worked with guides who lead scheduled trips with hunters in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The guides collected samples from bears that were harvested when the guides went on their regularly scheduled trips with hunters. Specifically, the guides followed a detailed protocol for retrieving hair samples and two gut samples. The gut samples were from the jejunum, which is the middle section of the small intestine, and the colon, which is also called the large intestine. Ultimately, the researchers were able to retrieve samples from 35 legally-harvested bears.

The researchers processed the gut samples to identify both what kinds of microbes were present in each bear's microbiome as well as how many of each type of microbe was present.

The researchers also conducted a carbon isotope analysis of the bear's hair, which gave them an assessment of each bear's long-term diet. More specifically, the analysis told researchers the extent to which each bear was consuming sugar and corn, which are more likely to be found in processed foods.

When analyzing the data, the researchers looked at two measures of gut biodiversity. First they look at the total number of different species present. Second, they looked at a measure called Faith's phylogenetic diversity, which looks at how many different types of species are present.

"Basically, Faith's phylogenetic diversity assesses how many branches of the bacterial family tree are represented," Gillman says.

Both measures of gut biodiversity were substantially lower in bears that had been eating more processed foods.

"Essentially, we found that the more human food black bears eat, and the longer they eat it, the less diverse their gut microbiomes," Gillman says

"Sugar is very easy to digest," McKenney says. "Lots of bacteria can consume it. In practical terms, that means processed human foods actually have less food available for bacteria that specialize in breaking down fiber or other microaccessible carbohydrates. Those bacterial specialists have trouble competing with the other bacteria for sugar, and their niche in the food web isn't sustainable if bears don't eat enough of their traditional diet. We think that's one of the mechanisms for reducing gut microdiversity.

"And if the gut biodiversity suffers when bears begin consuming more human food, that raises the possibility that it would be more difficult for bears to derive as much nutritional value from non-human foods if they return to a 'wild' diet," McKenney says. "Basically, it's not clear how quickly microbial species that break down fiber, etc., would return."

"Now that we've identified this association between eating human food and microbial biodiversity, we need to do additional work to determine what this means for the health of these animals—and potentially other animals," Gillman says.

"Many hunters use camera traps to monitor their bait sites, and people we've worked with have told us that they see a wide variety of species—raccoons, fishers, martens, deer, hares—eating the bear bait," says Diana Lafferty, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of wildlife ecology at NMU.

"It's not clear how baiting might be affecting the microbiomes or health of other wildlife that is taking advantage of the free food. As we think about conservation, assessing the impact of our activities on diversity may need to extend to protecting microbial diversity. Because the evidence increasingly suggests that many of these microbial organisms are critical to the health of wildlife species. How does baiting fit into that? Those are issues I think we'll need to explore."

The paper, "Human-provisioned foods reduce gut microbiome diversity in American black bears (Ursus americanus)," is published in the Journal of Mammalogy.

Black bear gut biome surprisingly simple, scientists say

More information: Sierra J Gillman et al, Human-provisioned foods reduce gut microbiome diversity in American black bears (Ursus americanus), Journal of Mammalogy (2021). DOI: 10.1093/jmammal/gyab154

Journal information: Journal of Mammalogy 

Provided by North Carolina State University 

Predator interactions chiefly determine where Prochlorococcus microbes thrive

by Jennifer Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Prochlorococcus are the smallest and most abundant photosynthesizing organisms on the planet. A single Prochlorococcus cell is dwarfed by a human red blood cell, yet globally the microbes number in the octillions and are responsible for a large fraction of the world's oxygen production as they turn sunlight into energy.

Prochlorococcus can be found in the ocean's warm surface waters, and their population drops off dramatically in regions closer to the poles. Scientists have assumed that as with many marine species, Prochlorococcus's range is set by temperature: The colder the waters, the less likely the microbes are to live there.

But MIT scientists have found that where the microbe lives is not determined primarily by temperature. While Prochlorococcus populations do drop off in colder waters, it's a relationship with a shared predator, and not temperature, that sets the microbe's range. These findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help scientists predict how the microbes' populations will shift with climate change.

"People assume that if the ocean warms up, Prochlorococcus will move poleward. And that may be true, but not for the reason they're predicting," says study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). "So, temperature is a bit of a red herring."

Dutkiewicz's co-authors on the study are lead author and EAPS Research Scientist Christopher Follett, EAPS Professor Mick Follows, François Ribalet and Virginia Armbrust of the University of Washington, and Emily Zakem and David Caron of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles.

Temperature's collapse

While temperature is thought to set the range of Prochloroccus and other phytoplankton in the ocean, Follett, Dutkiewicz, and their colleagues noticed a curious dissonance in data.

The team examined observations from several research cruises that sailed through the northeast Pacific Ocean in 2003, 2016, and 2017. Each vessel traversed different latitudes, sampling waters continuously and measuring concentrations of various species of bacteria and phytoplankton, including Prochlorococcus.

The MIT team used the publicly archived cruise data to map out the locations where Prochlorococcus noticeably decreased or collapsed, along with each location's ocean temperature. Surprisingly, they found that Prochlorococcus's collapse occurred in regions of widely varying temperatures, ranging from around 13 to 18 degrees Celsius. Curiously, the upper end of this range has been shown in lab experiments to be suitable conditions for Prochlorococcus to grow and thrive.

"Temperature itself was not able to explain where we saw these drop-offs," Follett says.

Follett was also working out an alternate idea related to Prochlorococcus and nutrient supply. As a byproduct of its photosynthesis, the microbe produces carbohydrate—an essential nutrient for heterotrophic bacteria, which are single-celled organisms that do not photosynthesize but live off the organic matter produced by phytoplankton.

"Somewhere along the way, I wondered, what would happen if this food source Prochlorococcus was producing increased? What if we took that knob and spun it?" Follett says.

In other words, how would the balance of Prochlorococcus and bacteria shift if the bacteria's food increased as a result of, say, an increase in other carbohydrate-producing phytoplankton? The team also wondered: If the bacteria in question were about the same size as Prochlorococcus, the two would likely share a common grazer, or predator. How would the grazer's population also shift with a change in carbohydrate supply?

"Then we went to the whiteboard and started writing down equations and solving them for various cases, and realized that as soon as you reach an environment where other species add carbohydrates to the mix, bacteria and grazers grow up and annihilate Prochlorococcus," Dutkiewicz says.

Nutrient shift

To test this idea, the researchers employed simulations of ocean circulation and marine ecosystem interactions. The team ran the MITgcm, a general circulation model that simulates, in this case, the ocean currents and regions of upwelling waters around the world. They overlaid a biogeochemistry model that simulates how nutrients are redistributed in the ocean. To all of this, they linked a complex ecosystem model that simulates the interactions between many different species of bacteria and phytoplankton, including Prochlorococcus.

When they ran the simulations without incorporating a representation of bacteria, they found that Prochlorococcus persisted all the way to the poles, contrary to theory and observations. When they added in the equations outlining the relationship between the microbe, bacteria, and a shared predator, Prochlorococcus's range shifted away from the poles, matching the observations of the original research cruises.

In particular, the team observed that Prochlorococcus thrived in waters with very low nutrient levels, and where it is the dominant source of food for bacteria. These waters also happen to be warm, and Prochlorococcus and bacteria live in balance, along with their shared predator. But in more nutrient-rich environments, such as polar regions, where cold water and nutrients are upwelled from the deep ocean, many more species of phytoplankton can thrive. Bacteria can then feast and grow on more food sources, and in turn feed and grow more of its shared predator. Prochlorococcus, unable to keep up, is quickly decimated.

The results show that a relationship with a shared predator, and not temperature, sets Prochlorococcus's range. Incorporating this mechanism into models will be crucial in predicting how the microbe—and possibly other marine species—will shift with climate change.

"Prochlorococcus is a big harbinger of changes in the global ocean," Dutkiewicz says. "If its range expands, that's a canary—a sign that things have changed in the ocean by a great deal."

"There are reasons to believe its range will expand with a warming world," Follett adds." But we have to understand the physical mechanisms that set these ranges. And predictions just based on temperature will not be correct."By 2100, climate change could alter key microbial interactions in the ocean

More information: Trophic interactions with heterotrophic bacteria limit the range of Prochlorococcus, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110993118.

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

The significant roles of anthropogenic aerosols on surface temperature under carbon neutrality

by Li Yuan, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study finds that in the near future, the warming effect of anthropogenic aerosol reduction will superimpose on the cooling effect caused by the CO2 reduction, leading to greater surface temperature increase, delayed start of temperature reduction, and a decelerated cooling rate.

This aerosol effect will not only extend the time required to achieve Paris Agreement targets, but also trigger a long-term cooling trend in the subpolar North Atlantic that is distinct from other regions.

The study was published in Science Bulletin. It was completed by Dr. Ma Xiaofan, Prof. Huang Gang, and Prof. Cao Junji from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Though atmospheric CO2 makes an impact on surface temperature, the role of aerosols on the spatiotemporal changes of temperature cannot be ignored.

A large reduction in anthropogenic emissions is needed to achieve carbon neutrality and the low-warming target, which means that the concentration of CO2 and aerosols in the atmosphere will jointly show a downward trend in the future.

However, the same trends in aerosols and CO2 will cause opposite radiative effects. The warming effect produced by reduced aerosols works simultaneously with the cooling effect caused by reduced CO2. In addition, aerosols can also affect the dynamic processes from the surface to the deep layer in the ocean, thereby altering regional features of ocean temperature.

To explore the impact of future reductions in anthropogenic aerosols on surface temperature, the researchers used the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to perform fixed-aerosol experiments over the 21st century under a low-emission scenario (RCP2.6) and compared the results with those in all-forcing simulations under the same scenario.

They found that the additional warming effect caused by the continued decline of aerosols in the 21st century will make the global mean surface temperature increase for a longer period of time, rather than a decrease following the reduction of CO2 (after ~2050).

They also found that under the low-emission scenario, when other regions have long-term warming trends in surface temperature, the subpolar North Atlantic (south of Greenland) shows long-term cooling trends. This phenomenon is dominated by aerosols while CO2 plays a secondary role. The regional inconsistency of temperature changes is mainly due to the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Under the reduction of anthropogenic aerosols, the AMOC continues to weaken since the beginning of the 21st century, which causes the northward heat transport in the Atlantic continue to weaken. The anomalous cold signals gradually accumulate in the subpolar North Atlantic, leading to significant cooling trends in sea surface temperatures over this region in the second half of the century. The cooling of the sea surface further induces the local ocean to absorb more heat from the atmosphere through air-sea heat flux.

"Our study indicates that when planning a specific path to achieve carbon neutrality and low-warming targets, it is necessary to consider the important role of anthropogenic aerosols on the climate system," said Prof. Huang, the corresponding author of the study.Cutting emissions makes North Atlantic focus of ocean heat uptake under global warming

More information: Xiaofan Ma et al, The significant roles of anthropogenic aerosols on surface temperature under carbon neutrality, Science Bulletin (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2021.10.022

Provided by Chinese Academy of Sciences 

Are Black Holes and Dark Matter the Same? Astrophysicists Upend Textbook Explanations

By UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI JANUARY 3, 2022

This animation shows an artist’s rendition of the cloudy structure revealed by a study of data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite. Credit: Wolfgang Steffen, UNAM

Upending textbook explanations, astrophysicists from the University of Miami, Yale University, and the European Space Agency suggest that primordial black holes account for all dark matter in the universe.

Proposing an alternative model for how the universe came to be, a team of astrophysicists suggests that all black holes—from those as tiny as a pinhead to those covering billions of miles—were created instantly after the Big Bang and account for all dark matter.

That’s the implication of a study by astrophysicists at the University of Miami, Yale University, and the European Space Agency that suggests that black holes have existed since the beginning of the universe ­­and that these primordial black holes could be as-of-yet unexplained dark matter. If proven true with data collected from this month’s launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery may transform scientific understanding of the origins and nature of two cosmic mysteries: dark matter and black holes.

“Our study predicts how the early universe would look if, instead of unknown particles, dark matter was made by black holes formed during the Big Bang—as Stephen Hawking suggested in the 1970s,” said Nico Cappelluti, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Miami and first author of the study slated for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

“This would have several important implications,” continued Cappelluti, who this year expanded the research he began at Yale as the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics Prize Postdoctoral Fellow. “First, we would not need ‘new physics’ to explain dark matter. Moreover, this would help us to answer one of the most compelling questions of modern astrophysics: How could supermassive black holes in the early universe have grown so big so fast? Given the mechanisms we observe today in the modern universe, they would not have had enough time to form. This would also solve the long-standing mystery of why the mass of a galaxy is always proportional to the mass of the supermassive black hole in its center.”

Dark matter, which has never been directly observed, is thought to be most of the matter in the universe and act as the scaffolding upon which galaxies form and develop. On the other hand, black holes, which can be found at the centers of most galaxies, have been observed. A point in space where matter is so tightly compacted, they create intense gravity.

Co-authored by Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale, and Günther Hasinger, director of science at the European Space Agency (ESA), the new study suggests that so-called primordial black holes of all sizes account for all black matter in the universe.

How did supermassive black holes form? What is dark matter? In an alternative model for how the Universe came to be, as compared to the ‘textbook’ history of the Universe, a team of astronomers propose that both of these cosmic mysteries could be explained by so-called ‘primordial black holes’. In the graphic, the focus is on comparing the timing of the appearance of the first black holes and stars, and is not meant to imply there are no black holes considered in the standard model. Credit: ESA

“Black holes of different sizes are still a mystery,” Hasinger explained. “We don’t understand how supermassive black holes could have grown so huge in the relatively short time available since the universe existed.”

Their model tweaks the theory first proposed by Hawking and fellow physicist Bernard Carr, who argued that in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, tiny fluctuations in the density of the universe may have created an undulating landscape with “lumpy” regions that had extra mass. These lumpy areas would collapse into black holes.

That theory did not gain scientific traction, but Cappelluti, Natarajan, and Hasinger suggest it could be valid with some slight modifications. Their model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. They also propose that primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes.

“Primordial black holes, if they do exist, could well be the seeds from which all the supermassive black holes form, including the one at the center of the Milky Way,” Natarajan said. “What I find personally super exciting about this idea is how it elegantly unifies the two really challenging problems that I work on—that of probing the nature of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes—and resolves them in one fell swoop.”

Primordial black holes also may resolve another cosmological puzzle: the excess of infrared radiation, synced with X-ray radiation, that has been detected from distant, dim sources scattered around the universe. The study authors said growing primordial black holes would present “exactly” the same radiation signature.

And, best of all, the existence of primordial black holes may be proven—or disproven—in the near future, courtesy of the Webb telescope scheduled to launch from French Guiana before the end of the year and the ESA-led Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission planned for the 2030s.

Developed by NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb can look back more than 13 billion years. If dark matter is comprised of primordial black holes, more stars and galaxies would have formed around them in the early universe, which is precisely what the cosmic time machine will be able to see.

“If the first stars and galaxies already formed in the so-called ‘dark ages,’ Webb should be able to see evidence of them,” Hasinger said.

LISA, meanwhile, will be able to pick up gravitational wave signals from early mergers of primordial black holes.

For more on this research, see Black Holes Could Be Dark Matter – And May Have Existed Since the Beginning of the Universe.

Reference: “Exploring the high-redshift PBH-ΛCDM Universe: early black hole seeding, the first stars and cosmic radiation backgrounds” by N. Cappelluti, G. Hasinger and P. Natarajan, Accepted, The Astrophysical Journal.
arXiv:2109.08701

Astronomers detect magnetic star flashing in an instant with the energy produced by the sun in 100,000 years

Astronomers have called it a "cosmic monster".

 by Tibi Puiu
January 3, 2022
in News, Space

Artist impression of the GRB 2001415 magnetar.

 Credit: Universitat de València.

Sure we might have enormous gas giants and menacing asteroids, but compared to other corners of the universe, our solar system is pretty vanilla. There are black holes whose mass exceeds billions of solar masses, generating a gravitational pull so intense that they shape the formation and evolution of entire galaxies. Then there are magnetars, much less famous than black holes but incredibly powerful in their own right. Case in point, astronomers in Spain have witnessed such an object erupt with as much energy as the sun produces in 100,000 years, concentrating it in just 0.1 seconds.

When truly massive stars die, they do so with a bang, triggering a supernova explosion. In the aftermath, some collapse under their own weight, forming into black holes. Those that don’t make the cut, often become neutron stars, second only to black holes in their stupendous density. A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh around a billion tons, for instance.

There are multiple types of neutron stars, including magnetars. These objects have extremely powerful magnetic fields, a thousand trillion times stronger than the Earth’s, and between 100 and 1,000 times stronger than that of a radio pulsar. They’re essentially the most powerful magnets in the universe.

Magnetars are quite rare, with only a couple dozen such objects having been identified so far. One of them, located in the Sculptor Galaxy about 13 million light-years away, was under observation by astronomers using the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) aboard the International Space Station when a giant flare was detected.

The flare, known as the GRB 2001415 event, released roughly the energy the sun radiates in about 100,000 years in just two short quasi-periodic pulsations that lasted approximately 160 milliseconds.

“Even in an inactive state, magnetars can be one hundred thousand times more luminous than our Sun, but in the case of GRB 2001415, the energy that was released is equivalent to that which our Sun radiates in 100,000 years,” said Dr. Alberto Castro-Tirado, an astrophysicist with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IAA-CSIC) and the Universidad de Málaga. “It’s a true cosmic monster,” added Professor Víctor Reglero, an astrophysicist at the Universitat de València and co-author of the new study.

The magnetar explosion was detected on April 15, 2020 thanks to an artificial intelligence system integrated with ASIM. If this kind of system wasn’t in place, the astronomers would have been oblivious to the event, whose signal decayed into background noise within a fraction of a second.

No one’s really sure what triggered the eruption, but the researchers believe it could have been due to instabilities in the magnetosphere or ‘earthquakes’ produced in their crust. Further research could help scientists reveal the mechanisms that trigger these frightening but, at the same time, fascinating cosmic burps.

“Although these eruptions had already been detected in two of the thirty known magnetars in our Galaxy and in some other nearby galaxies, GRB 2001415 would be the most distant magnetar eruption captured to date, being in the Sculptor group of galaxies about 11 million light-years,” said Professor Reglero.

“Seen in perspective, it has been as if the magnetar wanted to indicate its existence to us from its cosmic solitude, singing in the kHz with the force of a Pavarotti of a billion suns.”

The findings appeared in the journal Nature.


Tibi Puiu is a science journalist and co-founder of ZME Science. He writes mainly about emerging tech, physics, climate, and space. In his spare time, Tibi likes to make weird music on his computer and groom felines.

MIT Scientists Are Building Flying Saucers To Study The Moon More Closely


Bharat SharmaUpdated on Jan 02, 2022, 07:10 IST

Highlights

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working on a new concept for flight

In theory, the flying saucer could eventually hover above the moon one day and help out in exploration

Scientists are aiming to use the flying saucer mainly on the moon by using its natural charge to facilitate levitation. Asteroids, too, could be studied safely if no landing is required

Who isn't fascinated by flying saucers? Turns out, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working on a new concept for flight.

In theory, the flying saucer could eventually hover above the moon one day and help out in exploration. Scientists are aiming to use the flying saucer mainly on the moon by using its natural charge to facilitate levitation. Asteroids, too, could be studied safely if no landing is required.

MIT / Slashgear

Why flying saucers have potential

In terms of moon and other airless bodies, MIT's flying saucer would benefit greatly from lack of atmosphere. In the absence of protective atmosphere, moon as well as asteroids that are exposed directly to the sun build up an electric field. This field would essentially keep the flying saucer hovering.

On the moon, surface charge is powerful enough to keep dust levitating 1 metre above the ground. It could open a treasure trove of information regarding different airless planets and objects in our solar system and hopefully beyond.

Also read: NASA Shares Stunning Moon Pic Clicked By Galileo Spacecraft On Its Way To Jupiter

NASA has also toyed with this concept of a hovering flying saucer in the past. The approach was slightly different from MIT scientists.


The US space agency wanted to use a "levitating glider with Mylar wings", SlashGear reported. The only problem with this design was that it would have worked only on small asteroids. The Mylar glider would have been useless on large planets that have a stronger gravitational pull.

iStock

With MIT's flying saucer, a 2 pound vehicle could levitate on the moon and large asteroids. In addition, MIT's "ionic-liquid ion sources" would help the vehicle gain more levitation on airless surfaces.

The research team included MIT engineers Oliver Jia-Richards, Paulo Lozano, and Sebastian Hampl who simulated the concept in a lab-setting.

NASA

What do you think about flying saucers that could reveal more about the universe to us? Share with us in the comments below. For more in the world of technology and science, keep reading Indiatimes.com.

References

White, M. (2021, December 31). This “flying saucer” could give future Moon missions a birds-eye view. SlashGear.

Toxic gas released by ancient microbes may have worsened Earth's largest mass extinction


By Doris Elin Urrutia 

published 1 day ago

Hydrogen sulfide is both stinky and incredibly dangerous.

Dominik Hülse, an Earth system modeler based at University of California Riverside, worked on a November 2021 study that explored how ancient microbes may have prolonged the Permian extinction by producing a toxic gas. Here, Hülse poses with a finger to his nose to highlight the toxic "rotten egg" scent of hydrogen sulfide. 

(Image credit: Dominik Hülse/UCR)

Algal blooms in coastal waters and toxic chemical exposures at oil facilities are modern problems. Their root causes, however, have a lot in common with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history 250 million years ago.

298.9 million years ago the Permian period, the last period of the Paleozoic era, began. This period of time had plenty of aquatic animals and archaic land creatures like dimetrodons. Scientists think that towards the end of the Permian period, volcanoes in Siberia went into overdrive and dramatically warmed the planet, triggering the Permian extinction, the most devastating decimation of life on Earth when about 95% of all marine species, as well as about 70% of terrestrial species, disappeared.

But scientists are still puzzled about how exactly the volcanic eruptions caused this mass extinction, often referred to as "the Great Dying." Researchers at the University of California Riverside tried to get to the bottom of this mystery in a new study, published in the November 2021 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

A toxic cyanobacterial bloom in Lake Taihu, China.  

(Image credit: Hans W. Paerl, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

The problem with hydrogen sulfide

According to this study, during this period of time, the warming planet raised ocean temperatures which led to certain aquatic microbes revving up their metabolisms, causing the microscopic critters to release a toxic gas called hydrogen sulfide that subsequently killed off so many of Earth's animals.

Oxygen levels in the oceans heavily decreased at the end of the Permian period. This pushed microbes to start ingesting sulfate, a substance that can be found in today's drinking water but which at high doses can lead to adverse medical symptoms like diarrhea )or worse), according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

By ingesting this sulfate, t ancient microbes then "produced hydrogen sulfide, a gas that smells like rotten eggs and is poisonous to animals," Dominik Hülse, UC Riverside Earth system modeler, said in a statement about this study.

Hydrogen sulfide is both stinky and incredibly dangerous. In 2019, two people died at an oil facility in Odessa, Texas, due to poor protocol that exposed them to toxic gas. The hydrogen sulfide was pumped up from the ground along with oil; both came from a Permian layer of rock.

During the Permian extinction, the world's oceans began experiencing what is known as euxinia, a phenomenon caused by a combination of high hydrogen sulfide levels and low oxygen levels.

"Our research shows the entire ocean wasn’t euxinic. These conditions began in the deeper parts of the water column," Hülse said. "As temperatures increased, the euxinic zones got larger, more toxic, and moved up the water column into the shelf environment where most marine animals lived, poisoning them."


In October 2009, dead fish washed onto a beach at Padre Island, Texas, following a harmful algal bloom. (Image credit: Terry Ross/Flickr)

The past and the present day

This research may help scientists to find answers to an ancient mystery, but it is also a timely reminder about the ocean's sensitivity to climate change.

Currently, climate change is causing sea levels to rise, one of many consequences that progressively threaten life on Earth. But climate change can also disrupt the oceans in another dangerous way.

Earth's carbon cycle is heavily tied up with its oceans, beginning with little creatures called phytoplankton. These microscopic beings breathe in carbon dioxide, release oxygen and munch on organic material. They are the foundation of the aquatic food chain and are responsible for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere to the ocean.

When they die, these photosynthesizers fall to the depths of the ocean as "marine snow," becoming food for microbes. It is there that the microbes transform that material into inorganic matter in a process called remineralization. The depths at which this occurs in the oceans play a huge role in how life is supported throughout the planet, especially marine life.

The microbial disaster that may have triggered the largest extinction in Earth's history also echoes in modern algal bloom events. This is a major issue for coastal waters around the world as run-off from modern human activity enriches the water near land and causes certain microbes to flourish. If they promote euxinia, animals die from lack of oxygen or toxic hydrogen sulfide. Close exposure by land is dangerous, too.

According to the statement describing the new study, euxinic waters can be found in places like Los Angeles County’s 16-mile-long Dominguez Channel. Just a few months ago, a warehouse fire released ethanol, which then killed vegetation in the channel. When microbes consumed this decay, they produced hydrogen sulfide at toxic levels and caused thousands of people to experience symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, insomnia and headaches.

Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

The Isle of Wight’s dinosaur hunter: we’re going to need a bigger museum


Jeremy Lockwood spent lockdown identifying two specimens – and is a ‘bit obsessed’ in his search for more

Jeremy Lockwood has made two big dinosaur discoveries on the Isle of Wight this year. Photograph: University of Portsmouth/PA



Hannah Devlin
THE GUARDIAN
Mon 3 Jan 2022 

Some of us binged on box sets, others grappled with the challenges of home school and zoned out of Zoom meetings: for many, life under lockdown felt glum. But for Jeremy Lockwood, a retired GP turned palaeontologist, 2021 was a standout year featuring two big dinosaur discoveries and laying plans to make the Isle of Wight famous for its prehistoric inhabitants once more. “It was an absolutely thrilling time for me,” Lockwood said.

Lockwood, 64, who retired as a family doctor in the Midlands seven years ago, was behind the widely publicised discovery of a new species of iguanadontian dinosaur with a distinctively large nose and a second species, nicknamed “the horned crocodile-faced Hell Heron”.

At the start of the pandemic, Lockwood re-registered with the General Medical Council and volunteered to work. However, his daughter, also a doctor, pointed out that before vaccines were available, hospitals would not want people in their 60s walking around wards.

So for the past two years, Lockwood has immersed himself in fossil hunting on the beach and sifting through boxes of bones from museum archives.

In palaeontology, like astronomy, amateurs often work alongside academics and their scientific contributions are frequently recognised. On retirement, Lockwood decided to put his lifelong interest in dinosaurs on a formal footing and persuaded his wife to move to the Isle of Wight, where a steady stream of dinosaur fossils emerge from the cliffs as they are eroded. He contacted Prof David Martill, of the University of Portsmouth, about doing a PhD and was quickly accepted.

“I felt I had to do something to keep me active,” he said. “I don’t think I could’ve just played golf or grown roses.”

Lockwood is revisiting a golden era for dinosaur discovery with a focus on iguanodons, the first specimen of which was unearthed by Gideon Mantell, also a doctor turned palaeontologist, in Sussex in 1825. Some have assumed that the long timeline of discovery means that the understanding of British dinosaurs is essentially “done and dusted”.

On the contrary, Lockwood said, certain dogmas have remained unchallenged. And modern methods, such as using software to cluster specimens into a most likely family tree, have not always been applied to earlier finds.

Most dinosaurs found on the Isle of Wight had been traditionally assigned to just one of two species: the plant-eating Iguanodon bernissartensis and Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis. After sifting through many hundreds of bones that had been sitting in boxes in the Natural History Museum and the Dinosaur Isle museum, Lockwood identified a clear outlier with an enormous bulbous nose. The finding suggests there were far more iguanadontian dinosaurs in the Early Cretaceous of the UK than previously thought and raises the prospect of tracing the evolution of different traits through time.

“You can almost liken this huge collection of iguanadontian bones to several jigsaw puzzles that are all mixed up,” said Lockwood. “I’m trying to put together something that is meaningful.”

Officially, Lockwood is doing his doctorate part-time, but acknowledges that he has become “a bit obsessed”. “Sometimes I’ll work for 16 hours a day for a few weeks,” he said. “You struggle to find time to cut the lawn and decorate your house, and friends and family have to put up with you talking about dinosaurs all the time.”

Alongside his work on archive specimens, Lockwood also makes daily surveys of the beach to spot any dinosaur bones emerging from the cliffs. Winter is peak collecting season. “Certainly with winter storms eroding things, that’s when the big finds come in,” said Lockwood.

He is also coordinating a bid to redevelop the Dinosaur Isle museum, by a charitable group that Lockwood chairs together with a German company, Dinosaurier-Park International, after the local council launched a tender process.

“I’m trying to take over the museum,” Lockwood said. “The Isle of Wight undersells its dinosaurs. Most people are unaware that we’re Europe’s hotspot for dinosaurs and early mammals. We need a much bigger museum.”

Lockwood said he has “great sympathy” for former medical colleagues still working on the frontline during the pandemic and is particularly annoyed by the “lazy GP stereotype” sometimes aired in media coverage. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “You can see burnout happening all over the place.”

Several doctors have got in touch to congratulate him on his recent successes. “Some of the nice tweets were from other doctors approaching retirement,” he said. “It’s really good to see that there’s a life after medicine.”

200-million-year-old dinosaur footprints discovered on beach

Li Cohen

Mon, January 3, 2022

Scientists say that 1.6-foot-long impressions discovered on a beach in Wales may actually be footprints of dinosaurs. The "rare" tracks, they said, are 200 million years old, indicating that dinosaurs from the late Triassic period once roamed the area.

The footprints were found by a member of the public near the shoreline on a beach at Penarth in 2020 and reported to London's Natural History Museum. Paul Barrett, a palaeobiology researcher at the museum, helped lead a study of the tracks, which was published in Geological Magazine on December 29.

Individual tracks of course were much nicer models. Also, all the photos and models are freely available as supplemental info! And the Paper and data are #openaccess pic.twitter.com/JH8Y0FyDH9

— Peter Falkingham (@peterfalkingham) December 30, 2021

The tracks discovered are within a roughly 164-foot long area, with each measuring up to roughly 1.6 feet long, scientists said. The impressions, though "poorly preserved," have marked displacement rims and are regularly spaced apart, indicating that they are footprints rather than rock structures.

The number of prints also indicates it might have been a "trample ground" for dinosaurs, researchers said in their study.

"There are hints of trackways being made by individual animals, but because there are so many prints of slightly different sizes, we believe there is more than one trackmaker involved," Barrett said in a museum press release. "These types of tracks are not particularly common worldwide, so we believe this is an interesting addition to our knowledge of Triassic life in the UK. Our record of Triassic dinosaurs in this country is fairly small, so anything we can find from the period adds to our picture of what was going on at that time."

A series of tracks on a public beach point to the presence of large, long-necked dinosaurs in Wales over 200 million years ago. The Penarth footprints are believed to have been left by sauropodomorphs, a group which includes the iconic Diplodocus 🦕 https://t.co/i4ef9WM8jk

— Natural History Museum (@NHM_London) December 31, 2021

The researchers said they can't say with certainty what kind of dinosaur created the tracks, but that they believe it may have been a kind of a biped sauropodomorph, a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur known to be among the largest that roamed the Earth.

The museum said the specific dinosaur could have been similar to the Camelotia, whose fossils have been discovered in Southwest England from rocks dating back to a similar period.

Detail images of individual tracks believed to belong to dinosaurs. / Credit: Cambridge University Press

Photos of the tracks appear to show digit impressions, but the tracks are "highly weathered," researchers said, making it "difficult, or even impossible, to determine if they were all made by the same taxon, or by several species."

What they did find, however, is that the tracks were formed in the late Triassic period between 237 and 201 million years ago.

"We think the tracks are an example of Eosauropus, which is not the name of a particular dinosaur species but for shape of a type of track thought to have been made by a very early sauropod or a prosauropod," Barrett said. 'We know these kinds of dinosaur were living in Britain at the time, as bones of the sauropod Camelotia have been found in Somerset in rocks dated to the same age."

The tracks analyzed have been exposed several times over the past decade, the researchers said, and have been noted by multiple members of the public. Some of the researchers started to formally document the tracks in 2009, creating models and mapping the site, but their work went unpublished and was not further disseminated until now.

Dinosaur footprints found on beach in Wales may be 200 million years old, researchers say

 NEWS

Indians investigate Apple’s business practices

by NICK FARRELLon03 JANUARY 2022

Going down a black hole of despair

The Tame Apple press is doing its best to spin a story about India’s antitrust watchdog ordering an investigation into Apple’s business practices.

Apparently, Job’s Mob’s ordering iPhone app developers to use a proprietary payments system is an abuse of practice – who would have thunk it?  Well, other than every other government in the world which is also taking on the outfit for the same reason.

But the Tame Apple Press has called a foul and is repeating Apple’s view that it cannot be a monopoly in India because only two per cent of the Indian smartphone market comprises of Apple fanboys. In other words, India is too intelligent and poor for Apple to succeed as a monopoly. 

The Competition Commission of India, which ordered the Director General to conduct the probe within 60 days, said it is of the prima facie view that the mandatory use of Apple’s in-app payments system for paid apps and in-app purchases “restrict[s] the choice available to the app developers to select a payment processing system of their choice especially considering when it charges a commission of up to 30% for app purchases and in-app purchases.”

The watchdog began reviewing the case after a complaint filed by Together We Fight Society, a non-profit based in India’s western state of Rajasthan. The organisation said Apple’s move, which prevents app developers from using a third-party or their own payments system, makes a significant dent in the revenues they generate.

The Indians are also gunning for Google, having opened an inquiry into that company’s antics last year. Earlier this year, South Korea approved a measure that makes it illegal for Apple and Google to make a commission by forcing developers to use their proprietary payments systems.

A bipartisan bill introduced this year in the US Senate seeks to restrict how the Apple and Google app stores operate and what rules can be imposed on app developers.

The European Union last year proposed the Digital Markets Act, which is meant to prevent technology platforms from abusing their gatekeeper position.

“At this stage, it appears that the lack of competitive constraint in the distribution of mobile apps is likely to affect the terms on which Apple provide[s] access to its App Store to the app developers, including the commission rates and terms that thwart certain app developers from using other in-app payment systems,” the CCI wrote Friday in a 20-page order.

The CCI said it is also worth probing whether Apple uses data it collects from the users of its competitors to “improve its own services.”