RenoVous

Nobel Prize 2026   Physics Francis Halzen "For decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin." Release Chemistry Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Saoi "For the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in assymetric organic synthesis." Release Physiology or Medicine Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "For their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics." Release Peace Navanethem Pillay "For her efforts to promote peace and international law." Release We miss Economics doing this on Friday, but I won't be in Monday and Tuesday - maybe I'll pop in and post here once it's announced though.

 Today is not fun. With the Cornell rapists in the news, women have been sharing their horrible stories, and I was reminded of how, as a young girl, I was taught to yell "Fire!" if I was being assaulted.  People won't respond to a rape. And then I was reminded of Kitty Genovese.  The story we were taught in Social Psychology about the Bystander effect, and what I assumed at the time, a "Not my problem" effect. Turns out, the 1964 story was distorted in the newspaper, but educators have continued to rely on it. Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane did independently prove the bystander effect, and it was worth learning - but I'm pretty pissed to find out that my reference point is wrong. Calls were made to police, people did shout out at the perpetrator, and one woman held Kitty in her arms as she died. So today is just about correcting a lesson. Podcast

  Francis Tully found this fossil in the Mazon Creek area of Illinois back in 1955. He took it to the Field Museum of Natural History, but paleontologists were stumped about what it was. It remains an ongoing debate to this day. A 2016 study determined it may be closely related to modern lampreys.  They referred to the presence of a primitive stiffened support rod, called a notochord, and concluded it must be a vertebrate. McCoy et al studied again in 2020 and found that samples from the body contain the decay products of chordate tissues, as opposed to the chitin found in arthropods. But Mikami et al, in 2023, found segmentation extending to the preoptic region, which is very different from vertebrates.  And so, the Tully monster is a genus of one.  Phylum: Incertae sedis, or problematica. An enigma.

  As I've mentioned here and there, we volunteered to do a Dark Sky Survey for Washoe County last weekend. We purchased the Save Starry Skies license plate to support Friends of Nevada Wilderness. Suffice to say, we believe in protecting the night skies. Not just for our view of the stars, but for the nocturnal species that rely on it. Light pollution impacts the well-being of all animals. Article Article The county wants to use the data from this citizen science project to update current lighting regulations.  The city of Flagstaff in Arizona was the nation's first International Dark Sky Place. In Nevada, we have the Massacre Rim Dark Sky Sanctuary. But from our assigned location in the desert you could still see the light dome of Reno.  The Milky Way could be seen from horizon to horizon, but without a lot of detail.  I used to be able to see that much from the North Valleys, but not anymore.  We scored our home at an 8. Details

  The Survivor Tree at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. A Callery pear tree that was planted in the 70's near WTC Building 5. On September 11, the tree had its root system snapped, its bark severely burned, and its trunk reduced to an 8 foot stump.  Tissues were crushed, starved of water, and exposed to extreme heat. It was found in October under debris, and placed in the care of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation for rehabilitation. The tree used what's called CODIT - compartmentalization of decay in trees - which walls off the dead wood from living, vascular tissue, channeling nutrients to surviving pathways. Hidden buds beneath the bark produced epicormic shoots, which helps the tree replace lost leaves and make food.  Smooth new limbs began to grow from the gnarled, charred trunk. In 2010, the tree had grown to 30 feet, and was returned to the WTC Plaza, where it became an emblem of resilience and hope.

A man bought what he thought was a poorly taxidermied fox head.  It was only 50 quid, and he thought it was funny.  When he later sold it at auction for 1,000 times what he paid, he realized he may have had something else entirely. In fact, it's a thylacine.  An extinct carnivorous marsupial, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger. As European settlers arrived, they were considered a pest to livestock, and the government offered bounties on them.  The last known individual died in a zoo in September 1936.  Scans confirm the skull is intact, and the forehead overstuffed.

  This weekend, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It is expected to be a 10 year mission to hunt for exoplanets, to map the Milky Way, and to help unravel mysteries such as dark matter. It is named for NASA's first chief astronomer, from 1960-1979. While the Webb telescope uses high-detail zoom for distant targets, Roman is a wide-angle cosmic surveyor, with a field of view 100 times larger than Webb. Roman will focus on visible light and infrared while Hubble continues to capture ultraviolet, (20 years after the mission parameters).

  The Singhbhum Craton in India is one of Earth's oldest surviving blocks of continental crust. Researchers came across a carbonaceous layer sandwiched in ancient chert - the mineral form of silicon dioxide - and there they found fossilized remnants of microbial mats. Some of these traces of life have been dated to 3.5 billion years ago. The silica entombed the dead microbes, preserving them as thin layers of carbon that can survive even as the surrounding rock is transformed by heat and pressure. First they had to establish that the carbon was indigenous to the rock, and not introduced by some later geological event, and then they had to prove a biological origin. They used Raman spectroscopy to determine its structure, which in turn reveals formation and alteration history.

  Scientists have discovered a hidden ecosystem deep beneath Michigan and the Great Lakes. Subsurface water samples contained 689 distinct fungal species, including 13 that have never been formally described.   "We propose in the paper that we may be meaningfully underestimating the biomass and diversity of fungi on the planet because we've never incorporated the subsurface into estimates of global fungi biodiversity," says doctoral candidate, Quinn Moon. This also means subsurface carbon could be more biologically active than previously thought, with these organisms transforming the ancient material into gas. The samples also included tardigrades, rotifers, and tiny segmented worms, which suggests an underground food web. The study focused on the Antrim Shale, an organic-rich rock formation buried beneath much of the Great Lakes region.  The water itself was evaluated and determined to be from ice sheets that melted across Michigan, "last in contact with the surface...

 This is the cotton bollworm - an agricultural pest, but a potential hero in biodegradation. Polyesterene is a huge problem in our landfills, and scientists have found plenty of insects capable of eating the plastic, but it was unclear how they were breaking it down. Biochemists have discovered four types of fungi in the guts of cotton bollworm larvae which appear to play the part. After testing each with a film of Styrofoam over 60 days, they were especially surprised by Taloromyces, which was able to grow on the film, meaning it used it as a carbon/food source. Researchers will be seeking to learn the chemical processes involved, including which enzymes, to determine if the fungi is actually digesting the plastic or just breaking it down into smaller pieces, and what the byproducts of those reactions might be.

  You may have seen some images or video of this last week, rare supercilium clouds in Santa Cruz. "Supercilium" means eyebrow in Latin, identifying the arc shapes. They develop in turbulent mountain air rushing downwind. But it's an unofficial classification, not formally listed in the International Cloud Atlas.  It is a more recent proposed supplementary feature of already established altocumulus, stratrocumulus, or cirrocumulus clouds.

 Researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have been studying yellow-bellied marmots since 1962. It is the second oldest continuous study of individually marked mammals in the world. "Long-term research like ours is both very valuable to understand how and why things change over time," says professor Daniel Blumstein. This type of study requires funding though, and that has recently been cut across the board. So the team turned to Only Fans  Marms. It is a subscription platform where users pay creators for content, such as exclusive photos and videos. They've had some engagement over the last month, not a lot of money, but they're also just hoping to raise public awareness. "I think this can be an amazing way to teach people more about animal social behavior, which can sometimes be hard to observe," says team member, Emily Renkey.

  The sugar in raspberries is called erythrulose, and it has been found near the center of our Milky Way. "It opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life," says co-author, Carlos Briones.  Erythrulose can change into the ingredients that create nucleic acids, which are essential to life. There were previous reports of a dust cloud, called Sagittarius B2, that radio telescopes determined smells like raspberries, (caused by ethyl formate), but this is the first time sugar has been found in the interstellar medium - the space between star systems in a galaxy.

  Diana's Punchbowl is a vase-shaped depression located along a small fault in the Nevada desert. It is also called the Devil's Cauldron. There is a geothermal pool about 30 feet down, and it runs around 180-200 degrees. Over thousands of years, mineral-rich groundwater rose out of the fault line, creating a travertine hill with this crater in the center. Nye County is one of the most seismically active regions in the state, situated in a geologically deforming zone known as Walker Lane.  It accommodates 25% of the shear motion between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.  

  Often called the "rainforests of the sea," coral reefs are just as important, supporting over 25% of marine life.  If an area of the Amazon turned white, we would be concerned. But scientists have been fighting for years to make us understand the global red flag of dying reefs. When they collapse, it's not just a loss of biodiversity, it's a loss of human food security and coastal safety. The  Allen Coral Atlas  is powered by Arizona State University, originally conceived by Paul Allen. Teams have mapped reefs across the globe, and continue to monitor for bleaching events.  All it takes is a 2 degree rise in water temperature for the corals to stress react by purging the algae that lives within it. The algae is what produces 90% of the coral's energy through photosynthesis.  Without the algae, the polyps turn clear, so all we see is the skeletal structure.  Without enough energy to eat, the coral will eventually die. Okay, so not fun-filled informati...

 In a three month period, archaeologists found two cannonballs from the famous Battle of Alamo, 1836. The one on the left is from the Mexican side, and is made of bronze. The one on the right is from the Texas side, made of iron. While many other pieces of ammunition and shrapnel have been found around the site, these are the first examples of "solid shots" they have ever found. The battle was part of the Texas Revolution, and it became a state 10 years later in 1846. It was the westernmost slave state, and today is Juneteenth. The day that the news of freedom finally reached Galveston in 1865. The Bolivar Archaeological Project has recovered artifacts belonging to pioneering Black entrepreneurs during Reconstruction.   Tom Cook

  Our counterclockwise bias has been proven yet again. A study back in 2013 looked specifically at mosh pits during heavy metal concerts.  And you can see the circle in motion. Then in 2020, an international team was studying social distancing, and found that we may not be moving as randomly as we think. So they set out to study this directly, and found a significant preference for turning left. This was mapped across a variety of age groups, cultural settings, and spaces. They also tested individual movement.  209 people were asked to walk freely within a hexagonal enclosure, and showed that without influence of a crowd, there is still a significant bias. Researchers aren't sure why we do this, but they did rule out something in the eyes - participants were also patched and blindfolded, and the results did not change. Understanding this can be important for building design and emergency planning.  If people are going to unconsciously want to go left....

 The Pillars of Creation. Hubble vs Webb

  Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded last night, and it's a contender for the largest explosion in American history. Cape Canaveral authorities have confirmed no injuries, no deaths. The Jeff Bezos company was recently selected for NASA moon missions, so this test run is a bit of a setback.... New Glenn is expected to deliver the first two rovers to the lunar surface in 2028.  Blue Origin has developed a cargo lunar lander, called Blue Moon Mark 1, which is designed to fly on top of the rocket. In April, a launch successfully reused the rocket's booster, but it dropped its satellite into a critically low orbit, rendering it useless.  The FAA then grounded New Glenn, an order that was lifted just four days ago.

  International Day of Biodiversity! This encompasses the vast array of animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms as well as the complex ecosystems they form. Biodiversity is what supports our food, water, clean air, medicine, and protection from natural disasters. This year's theme is "Acting locally for a global impact," focusing on halting and reversing nature loss. But instead, we're getting data centers. There is good news: Six species saved by ecosystem restoration. UN