peterjang73

While they have no backbone, sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) mean business–especailly when faced with spiny sea urchins. These 24-armed, roughly 3-feet-wide sea stars can move 40 inches per minute when on the prowl for crabs, snails, sea urchins, and other ocean creatures to eat.

Sea urchins appear to sense the sea star’s presence–desipte not having a brain–and avoid these predators, according to a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Since multiple species of sea urchins can wreak havoc on ecologically important kelp forests, understanding how natural predator-prey relationships like this one between urchins and sea stars could be used to protect kelp.

Why kelp rocks

Kelp forests are critical to the ocean–and planet’s–health. They live along most of North America’s western coast. These large, brown algae grow in cool, relatively shallow coastal waters. Kelp forests contribute roughly $500 billion to the global economy every year, as kelp is a key ingredient in everything from salad dressings to certain vitamins.

Similar to forests on land, they grow in dense groups that provide food and shelter to numerous animal species, including fish (abalone, rockfish, and kelp bass), invertebrates (sea stars, urchins, and bristle worms), and marine mammal species (sea lions and otters). Many of these organisms can use the thick blades to shelter their young from predators or even storms.

About 10 years ago, sunflower sea stars went locally extinct in large parts of California and Oregon due an outbreak of wasting disease in 2013. The region’s kelp forests were lost right along with the sea stars. In the years since, neither the sea stars or kelp have fully recovered and the urchins that eat the kelp have pressed on.

Natural kelp forest guardians

Previous research has found that increased sea otter populations have helped curb urchin populations around kelp forests. A group of ecologists and undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz were curious to learn more about how sunflower sea stars could deter the urchins from eating kelp. To find out, they placed pairs of cages on the sea floor a few miles east of Sitka, Alaska, where resident urchins have turned once-thriving kelp beds into more barren zones. Both cages were made of plastic pipe and covered with fine mesh and kelp blades were tied to all of the cages as bait. A sunflower sea star was placed in one cage, while the other was sea star free. The two pairs of cages were about 60 to 100 feet apart.

A diver inspects an experimental cage along the sea floor in Alaska — A diver inspects one of the experimental arrays in Sitka, Alaska, in 2023 for the study. *CREDIT: Photo by Rae Mancuso.*

After one day, they observed that red urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) remained an average of about six feet away from the kelp tethered to the cages with sea stars inside. However, the green urchins (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis) were not so easily deterred. Even with the mixed results, they study found that the sea stars clearly deterred one type of urchin. According to the team, an increase in the presence of sunflower sea stars, either natural or artificial, may help kelp forests by deterring urchins, without requiring divers manually remove urchins.

“We show that the sea stars create a ‘landscape of fear’ among red sea urchins in degraded urchins barrens that reduces grazing on kelp,” study co-author and ecologist Kristy Kroeker, said in a statement. “These are very hungry urchins that are dissuaded enough by the scent of a sea star to deter grazing on kelp forests, which is promising for thinking about their role in kelp-forest recovery.”

[ Related: What’s killing sea stars? ]

Prowling for purple predators?

Additional research is needed to test whether the presence of the sea stars would have a similar effect on the most destructive kelp eater in the region–the purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus). While a natural part of the ecosystem, if the population of purple sea urchins gets too high, the urchins can eat the kelp faster than they can reproduce.

“My educated guess is that they will deter purple urchin grazing as well, but it’s a question of how much and for how long,” Kroeker said. “There are many unknowns that need to be addressed and many steps that need to be taken between our results and the reintroduction of Pycnopodia for kelp-forest recovery.”

The study also highlights how undergraduate students can be a real asset in scientific research at universities.

“I feel very grateful to have had the privilege of working on this study alongside my peers. Participating in the entire process, from diving to scientific writing, was exciting and impactful as an undergraduate student,” added study co-author Rae Mancuso. “I hope the findings from this field experiment contribute in some way to the restoration of our all-important kelp forests.”

The post Meet the 24-armed sea star, a kelp forest’s bodyguard appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

July 30, 2025 at 09:31AM

July 31, 2025

How the tomato created the potato

https://www.popsci.com/environment/potato-evolved-from-tomato/

What came first, the potato or the tomato? A new genetics study says the answer is that juicy, fragrant tomatoes were the first to arrive on planet Earth, and eventually helped starchy spuds do the same.

About 9 million years ago, a natural inbreeding in the wild between tomato plants and a potato-like plant species in present-day South America gave way to what we know as the potato. This new (and nutritious) plant arose from an evolutionary event that triggered the formation of the tuber–the underground structure that plants like potatoes, yams, and taros use to store food. The findings are detailed in a study published July 31 in the journal Cell.

“Our findings show how a hybridization event between species can spark the evolution of new traits, allowing even more species to emerge,” Sanwen Huang, a study co-author and agricultural genomicist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said in a statement. “We’ve finally solved the mystery of where potatoes came from.”

A puzzling plant

Potatoes are one of humanity’s most important crops. Spuds provide basic nutrients including carbohydrates, dietary fiber (found in their skin), and vitamins and minerals like potassium, magnesium, and iron. They are also considered a climate-friendly crop by the United Nations, due to their low greenhouse gas emissions compared to other crops. They can also grow in areas where some natural resources are limited and expensive. Potatoes are versatile and can grow in a wide variety of conditions, making them a good crop choice for several regions.

Despite being such a staple crop, the origin of this starchy staple has puzzled scientists. Modern potato plants physically look almost identical to three potato-like species from Chile called Etuberosums. However, Etuberosums do not have the signature tubers that allow potatoes to store nutrients and easily reproduce. This is part of why Etuberosums are considered “potato-like” and not full spuds. Phylogenetic analysis also shows that potato plants are actually more closely related to tomatoes than Etuberosums.

two plants with their root systems visible on a black background. the plant on the left does not have tubers, and instead has wispy roots. the one on the right has circular tubers — Non-tuber-bearing and tuber-bearing species of the potato plant. *CREDIT: Yuxin Jia and Pei Wang*.

To look closer, the research team from this new paper studied 450 genomes from cultivated potatoes common on farms and 56 wild potato species.

“Wild potatoes are very difficult to sample, so this dataset represents the most comprehensive collection of wild potato genomic data ever analyzed,” added Zhiyang Zhang, a study co-author and biologist at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, part of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Every potato species contained a mix of genetic material from both Etuberosum and tomato plants. According to the team, this suggests that modern potatoes originated from a hybridization event–when individuals from two different species successfully reproduce–between these plants millions of years ago. While Etuberosums and tomatoes are distinct species, they do share a common ancestor that lived about 14 million years ago. Even after diverging for about 5 million years, both could interbreed. This interbreeding is what gave rise to the earliest potato plants with tubers roughly 9 million years ago.

A model of survival

The researchers also traced the origins of the key tuber-forming genes within the potato. The gene that tells the plant when to start making tubers (called SP6A) came from the tomato side of the family and not the potato-like plants. A separate important gene which helps control growth of the underground stems that form tubers (called IT1) came from the Etuberosum side. Without either of these genetic pieces, it would be impossible for the resulting hybrid offspring to produce tubers.

Additionally, this evolutionary innovation overlapped with the rapid uplift of the Andes mountains. New ecological environments were emerging with all of this upheaval. Early potatoes were able to respond with a tuber that stores nutrients underground–a very helpful trait for surviving harsh mountain weather conditions. Tubers also allow potato plants to reproduce without pollination or seeds. Buds sprout right from the tuber to grow new plants, so this trait helped potatoes rapidly spread. They eventually filled diverse ecological niches from the mild lower-lying grasslands up to high and cold meadows in Central and South America.

“Evolving a tuber gave potatoes a huge advantage in harsh environments, fueling an explosion of new species and contributing to the rich diversity of potatoes we see and rely on today,” Huang said.

The post How the tomato created the potato appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

July 31, 2025 at 10:06AM

July 31, 2025

Some guy saved a PNG file to a bird’s brain

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2861959/birds-arent-robots-but-their-brains-are-flash-drives.html

With apologies for contradicting the weird stickers and meme-obsessed teenagers you’ve been seeing for the last few years, birds are actually quite real. They aren’t robots built by the government to spy on you. But, at the risk of contradicting myself, their brains are computers. Let me explain—or rather, let me sum up since there is too much.

You probably know that birds are smarter than we give them credit for. Corvids like crows and ravens can be as smart as human children, with a shocking capacity to retain information. YouTuber and audio scientist Benn Jordan knows this, and he knows that the sounds birds make to communicate between themselves can be incredibly complex. But is it complex enough to retain and transmit digital information? The digital information of an image made and encoded by humans, perhaps?

Turns out, yes! Over a few months, Jordan studied several species of birds to find complex birdsong, settling on the European starling for its intelligence and impressive ability to mimic sounds with the specific structure of its lungs and larynx. Specifically, he visited The Mouth, a semi-domesticated rescued starling owned by Sarah Tidwell, who has been around humans his whole life.

Almost as a goof, Jordan drew a simple photo of a bird in a spectral synthesizer. (This is an extremely basic way of representing audible sounds as a 2D image.) Jordan then played the sounds corresponding to the image to The Mouth (the starling). While Jordan didn’t immediately hear the bird repeat the sequence of sounds corresponding to the image during his visit to Tidwell’s home, after analyzing the recordings of his visit, he spotted something strange in the visual graph of the recordings.

Benn Jordan

There was the bird drawing. The one that Jordan had drawn in the synthesizer days or weeks previously, reproduced in the starling’s song, and showing up in a completely different visualization of the data. While the reproduction isn’t digitally perfect, Jordan estimates that The Mouth effectively retained and re-transmitted 176 kilobytes of data in audio format. Not enough to replace your SSD, perhaps, but more than enough to transmit, say, a large text file.

Oh crap, maybe the birds are spying on us after all.

Bird mimicry isn’t anything new, of course. And again, we’ve known for a while that birds can be much more intelligent than we previously assumed, especially when you expand the definition of “intelligence” beyond a human standard. But the ability of The Mouth to so accurately retain and then transmit data is incredible, and Jordan’s video is such a vivid, literal illustration of that ability.

via PCWorld https://www.pcworld.com

July 29, 2025 at 09:52AM

July 31, 2025

Hurricane forecasters are losing 3 key satellites ahead of peak storm season ? a meteorologist explains why it matters

https://www.space.com/astronomy/earth/hurricane-forecasters-are-losing-3-key-satellites-ahead-of-peak-storm-season-a-meteorologist-explains-why-it-matters

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

About 600 miles off the west coast of Africa, large clusters of thunderstorms begin organizing into tropical storms every hurricane season. They aren’t yet in range of Hurricane Hunter flights, so forecasters at the National Hurricane Center rely on weather satellites to peer down on these storms and beam back information about their location, structure and intensity.

The satellite data helps meteorologists create weather forecasts that keep planes and ships safe and prepare countries for a potential hurricane landfall.

Now, meteorologists are about to lose access to three of those satellites.

On June 25, 2025, the Trump administration issued a service change notice announcing that the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, DMSP, and the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center would terminate data collection, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30. The data termination was postponed until July 31 following a request from the head of NASA’s Earth Science Division.

I am a meteorologist who studies lightning in hurricanes and helps train other meteorologists to monitor and forecast tropical cyclones. Here is how meteorologists use the DMSP data and why they are concerned about it going dark.

Looking inside the clouds

At its most basic, a weather satellite is a high-resolution digital camera in space that takes pictures of clouds in the atmosphere.

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These are the satellite images you see on most TV weather broadcasts. They let meteorologists see the location and some details of a hurricane’s structure, but only during daylight hours.

Meteorologists can use infrared satellite data, similar to a thermal imaging camera, at all hours of the day to find the coldest cloud-top temperatures, highlighting areas where the highest wind speeds and rainfall rates are found.

But while visible and infrared satellite imagery are valuable tools for hurricane forecasters, they provide only a basic picture of the storm. It’s like a doctor diagnosing a patient after a visual exam and checking their temperature.

An infographic showing all the weather satellites orbiting Earth in 2016. (Image credit: NOAASatellites via Wikimedia Commons)

For more accurate diagnoses, meteorologists rely on the DMSP satellites.

The three satellites orbit Earth 14 times per day with special sensor microwave imager/sounder instruments, or SSMIS. These let meteorologists look inside the clouds, similar to how an MRI in a hospital looks inside a human body. With these instruments, meteorologists can pinpoint the storm’s low-pressure center and identify signs of intensification.

Precisely locating the center of a hurricane improves forecasts of the storm’s future track. This lets meteorologists produce more accurate hurricane watches, warnings and evacuations.

Hurricane track forecasts have improved by up to 75% since 1990. However, forecasting rapid intensification is still difficult, so the ability of DMPS data to identify signs of intensification is important.

About 80% of major hurricanes – those with wind speeds of at least 111 mph (179 kilometers per hour) –rapidly intensify at some point, ramping up the risks they pose to people and property on land. Finding out when storms are about to undergo intensification allows meteorologists to warn the public about these dangerous hurricanes.

Where are the defense satellites going?

NOAA’s Office of Satellite and Product Operations described the reason for turning off the flow of data as a need to mitigate “a significant cybersecurity risk.”

The three satellites have already operated for longer than planned.

The DMSP satellites were launched between 1999 and 2009 and were designed to last for five years. They have now been operating for more than 15 years. The United States Space Force recently concluded that the DMSP satellites would reach the end of their lives between 2023 and 2026, so the data would likely have gone dark soon.

A graphic of the GOES-I, the first US weather satellite in space. Originally called GOES-8 until its successful launch on April 13, 1994 when it became operational. (Image credit: NOAA Photo Library via Wikimedia Commons)

Are there replacements for the DMSP satellites?

Three other satellites in orbit – NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP – have a microwave instrument known as the advanced technology microwave sounder.

The advanced technology microwave sounder, or ATMS, can provide data similar to the special sensor microwave imager/sounder, or SSMIS, but at a lower resolution. It provides a more washed-out view that is less useful than the SSMIS for pinpointing a storm’s location or estimating its intensity.

The U.S. Space Force began using data from a new defense meteorology satellite, ML-1A, in late April 2025.

ML-1A is a microwave satellite that will help replace some of the DMSP satellites’ capabilities. However, the government hasn’t announced whether the ML-1A data will be available to forecasters, including those at the National Hurricane Center.

Why are satellite replacements last minute?

Satellite programs are planned over many years, even decades, and are very expensive. The current geostationary satellite program launched its first satellite in 2016 with plans to operate until 2038. Development of the planned successor for GOES-R began in 2019.

Similarly, plans for replacing the DMSP satellites have been underway since the early 2000s.

Delays in developing the satellite instruments and funding cuts caused the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System and Defense Weather Satellite System to be canceled in 2010 and 2012 before any of their satellites could be launched.

The 2026 NOAA budget request includes an increase in funding for the next-generation geostationary satellite program, so it can be restructured to reuse spare parts from existing geostationary satellites. The budget also terminates contracts for ocean color, atmospheric composition and advanced lightning mapper instruments.

A photo of a severe storm over Chicago taken by the GOES East NOAA satellite. (Image credit: NOAA)

A busy season remains

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, is forecast to be above average, with six to 10 hurricanes. The most active part of the season runs from the middle of August to the middle of October, after the DMSP satellite data is set to be turned off.

Hurricane forecasters will continue to use all available tools, including satellite, radar, weather balloon and dropsonde data, to monitor the tropics and issue hurricane forecasts. But the loss of satellite data, along with other cuts to data, funding and staffing, could ultimately put more lives at risk.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

via Latest from Space.com https://www.space.com

July 27, 2025 at 07:04AM

July 31, 2025

Sam Altman Is Right: AI-Powered Crypto Scams Are Exploding

https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-is-right-ai-powered-crypto-scams-are-exploding-2000635802

Finally, a profession that has managed to successfully integrate artificial intelligence into its workflow: Crypto scammers. According to a report from blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, crypto scams are up 456% over the last year, due in large part to the ability to produce deepfake audio and video clips with artificial intelligence tools—making good on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent prediction/warning that a fraud crisis is just around the corner.

There’s no doubt the fraud situation is getting bad. The FBI said it received about 150,000 fraud complaints related to cryptocurrency scams in 2024, with people reporting having lost over $3.9 billion in total. Globally, that figure skyrockets to $10.7 billion according to TRM Labs data. You can go ahead and round those figures way up, too. Speaking to the New York Post, Ari Redbord, the Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, said that only about 15% of victims actually report these crimes.

These scams are a leveling up of the so-called pig butchering attacks that have become popular in recent years because they don’t just take advantage of people via text. AI now allows scammers to create realistic-looking and sounding audio and video that can trick a person into thinking they are talking to someone real—potentially even a loved one or familiar face. TRM Labs warned that as AI models gain agentic abilities that allow them to interface with things like email and other apps, the process of scamming is going to get automated and a lot more prevalent.

Last week, Sam Altman started ringing the alarm bells on the same problem—though he’s not just worried about scammers taking advantage, but rather the entirety of our existing security apparatus getting defeated. While speaking at a banking regulatory conference, Altman said that AI has already “fully defeated” most authentication services that humans rely on to verify their identity and access their sensitive accounts.

“Society has to deal with this problem more generally,” Altman said, presumably while dressed in a hot dog suit and shouting, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” To that end, Altman’s own company announced earlier this month that it was releasing a ChatGPT Agent that could effectively interact with a computer the same way a human can, switching between apps and completing multi-step tasks that require doing things like logging into different accounts and making decisions.

Altman’s warning of a scam apocalypse seems to have shades of the general warnings that AI execs have been offering about the potential risk of artificial general intelligence, ie, “This could be really bad, but we are absolutely not going to stop.”

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/

July 28, 2025 at 03:42PM

July 31, 2025

Google adds Video Overviews to NotebookLM

https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-adds-video-overviews-to-notebooklm-181524866.html?src=rss

NotebookLM, the Google research tool that gained notoriety for its AI-generated podcasts, is introducing a feature called Video Overviews. As the name suggests, this tool automatically creates videos on requested topics and pulls data from a user’s uploaded images, diagrams, quotes and documents.

It’s rolling out right now, but there are some caveats. These overviews are only available in English, though Google says more languages are on the way. Also, the tool doesn’t make videos in a conventional sense. It creates slideshows with narration.

Despite this limitation, the company says the feature is "uniquely effective for explaining data, demonstrating processes and making abstract concepts more tangible." Google also says it’ll be expanding the toolset in the future, so it won’t always be just a slideshow machine.

Video Overviews do currently offer some handy playback options. There’s the ability to skip back and forth by 10 seconds and adjust the playback speed. The company is also updating NotebookLM’s Studio tab. It’s getting a visual refresh, which rolls out "over the next few weeks" to all users.

Google has certainly been busy iterating on the platform these past few months. It released an official NotebookLM app back in May and began offering curated "featured notebooks" earlier this month. This lets users experiment with the platform with pre-approved topics like William Shakespeare, so newbies won’t have to actually upload anything. Audio-only overviews are also now available in over 50 languages.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/N14RWaK

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

July 29, 2025 at 01:24PM

July 31, 2025

Dental Floss Has Potential to Deliver Vaccines, Replacing Needles or Nasal Sprays

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/dental-floss-has-potential-to-deliver-vaccines-replacing-needles-or-nasal

A new vaccine administration method doesn’t rely on needles or sprays to deliver the vaccine, but on dental floss.

Publishing their findings in Nature Biomedical Engineering, a research team tested the vaccine-coated dental floss on animals, introducing the vaccine through the gums and other tissue in the mouth. The study results indicated that this helped produce antibodies in the mucosal surfaces of the lungs and nose.

“[It] would be easy to administer, and it addresses concerns many people have about being vaccinated with needles,” said Harvinder Singh Gill, corresponding author of a paper on the work in a press release. “And we think this technique should be comparable in price to other vaccine delivery techniques."

Introducing Vaccines to the Body

For this study, the researchers knew they needed to focus on junctional epithelium. This refers to the tissues that line our organs and other body parts, such as the stomach, lungs, and intestines. Most of these epithelia are designed to keep foreign invaders, like viruses, bacteria, and even dirt, from entering the bloodstream. However, that’s not the case for junctional epithelium.

The deep tissues between your tooth and gums lack the same protection that other epithelia have. Because of this, junctional epithelium can release immune cells that fight bacteria.

“Because the junctional epithelium is more permeable than other epithelial tissues — and is a mucosal layer — it presents a unique opportunity for introducing vaccines to the body in a way that will stimulate enhanced antibody production across the body’s mucosal layers,” said Gill in the press release.

Testing Vaccinated Dental Floss

In the lab, researchers added a peptide flu vaccine to unwaxed dental floss and used it to floss mice’s teeth. They compared the antibody production in mice that received the vaccine via nasal spray and drops under the tongue.

“We found that applying vaccine via the junctional epithelium produces far superior antibody response on mucosal surfaces than the current gold standard for vaccinating via the oral cavity, which involves placing vaccine under the tongue,” said Rohan Ingrole, first author of the paper and Ph.D. student under Gill at Texas Tech University, in a press release. “The flossing technique also provides comparable protection against flu virus as compared to the vaccine being given via the nasal epithelium.”

Delivering a vaccine in this manner could be revolutionary, potentially improving vaccine safety.

“This is extremely promising, because most vaccine formulations cannot be given via the nasal epithelium — the barrier features in that mucosal surface prevent efficient uptake of the vaccine,” Gill said in a press release. “Intranasal delivery also has the potential to cause the vaccine to reach the brain, which can pose safety concerns. However, vaccination via the junctional epithelium offers no such risk.”

Delivery via Floss Pick

Though the dental floss method proved effective, the research team knew that asking patients to hold vaccine-coated floss wasn’t practical. Instead, the team shifted towards floss picks — small, pronged applicators with a short piece of floss strung between the prongs.

To test the effectiveness of the floss pick, the team added a fluorescent dye to it and asked 27 study participants to administer the vaccine to the junctional epithelium between the gums.

“We found that approximately 60 percent of the dye was deposited in the gum pocket, which suggests that floss picks may be a practical vaccine delivery method to the epithelial junction,” Ingrole said in a press release.

Gill and the research team believe that these results could soon lead to the method being moved into clinical trials, although many questions remain unanswered. Overall though, the team thinks this could be an improved vaccine delivery method.

"In addition, we would need to know more about how or whether this approach would work for people who have gum disease or other oral infections,” Gill said in the press release.

There’s still more to learn about this method, but it could change the way we see vaccines and dental floss.

This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

A graduate of UW-Whitewater, Monica Cull wrote for several organizations, including one that focused on bees and the natural world, before coming to Discover Magazine. Her current work also appears on her travel blog and Common State Magazine. Her love of science came from watching PBS shows as a kid with her mom and spending too much time binging Doctor Who.

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July 29, 2025 at 04:46PM