Yesterday, the Key West City Commission unanimously voted to ban the sale of sunscreens that contain two ingredients -- oxybenzone and octinoxate -- that a growing body of scientific evidence says harm coral reefs. The measure must now be reviewed again by the commission before it becomes law. The second vote is scheduled for February 5th. Miami Herald reports: Environmental researchers have published studies showing how these two ingredients, which accumulate in the water from bathers or from wastewater discharges, can damage coral reefs through bleaching and harming the corals' DNA. In some instances, the corals can die. A Feburary 2016 study in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology examining the impact of oxybenzone in corals in Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands concluded that the sunscreen ingredient "poses a hazard to coral reef conservation and threatens the resiliency of coral reefs to climate change.''

Last year, Hawaii banned the sale or distribution of any sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate, a measure that will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2021. It was the first state in the nation to implement such a ban. In Florida, the website for the South Florida Reef Ambassador Initiative, which falls under the state's Department of Environmental Protection, tells divers to "Avoid sunscreens with Oxybenzone and Avobenzone. The benzones are compounds that are lethal to coral reproduction in very small amounts." Experts who have studied the issue say sunscreens with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, which are minerals, also block ultraviolet rays. They create a barrier on the skin that deflect the sun's rays .

"Researchers from the University of Houston have reported a new theory in physics called stress localization, which they used to tune and predict the properties of new materials," reports Phys.Org. "Based on those predictions, the researchers reported in Materials Horizons that they have created a durable silicone polymer coating capable of repelling ice from any surface." The new research has huge implications for aircraft, power transmission lines, and more. From the report: Hadi Ghasemi, Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering at UH and corresponding author for the work, said the findings suggest a way to take trial and error out of the search for new materials, in keeping with the movement of materials science toward a physics-driven approach. "You put in the properties you want, and the principle will tell you what material you need to synthesize," he said, noting that the concept can also be used to predict materials with superb antibacterial or other desirable properties.

The new material uses elastic energy localization where ice meets the material, triggering cracks at the interface that slough off the ice. Ghasemi said it requires minimal force to cause the cracks; the flow of air over the surface of an airplane acts as a trigger, for example. The material, which is applied as a spray, can be used on any surface, and Ghasemi said testing showed it is not only mechanically durable and unaffected by ultraviolet rays -- important for aircraft which face constant sun exposure -- but also does not change the aircraft's aerodynamic performance. Testing indicates it will last for more than 10 years, with no need to reapply, he said.

schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Despite recent issues with one of its instruments, the Hubble Space Telescope is expected to last at least another five years. A new report suggests that the iconic spacecraft has a strong chance of enduring through the mid-2020s. [...] One reason the spacecraft has lasted so long is that astronauts have provided aid. Servicing missions continued to update the telescope until 2009, when the space shuttle was retired. The final update to Hubble included the installation of two brand-new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and WFC3. The astronauts on Servicing Mission 4 also performed on-site repairs for the telescope's two other instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), both of which had stopped working. The astronauts additionally replaced Hubble's 18-year-old batteries with new ones; installed six new gyroscopes, whose job is turning the telescope; and added a brand-new Fine Guidance System to point the instrument. Astronauts also covered Hubble's equipment bays with insulating panels and installed a device that will help to guide the observatory down when its mission comes to an end.

hackingbear writes: "China exchanged data with NASA on its recent mission to land a Chinese spacecraft on the far side of the moon, the Chinese space agency said Monday, in what was reportedly the first such collaboration since a Cold-War-era-like American law banned joint space projects with China that do not have prior congressional approval," reports New York Post. "The Chinese space agency's deputy director, Wu Yanhua, said NASA shared information about its lunar orbiter satellite in hopes of monitoring the landing of the Chang'e 4 spacecraft. China, in turn, shared the time and coordinates of Chang'e 4s scheduled landing. He added that while NASA's satellite did not catch the precise moment of landing, it took photographs of the area afterward."

In response to the question about why would China allow this exchange given that the U.S. has put technological obstacles to China's lunar exploration program and refused to issue visas to Chinese experts, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, "China could have chosen not to offer the relevant information to the U.S., but as a major country, we should act with the posture and bearing of a major country. I believe what Mr. Wu said has shown the confidence, openness, and broadmindedness of Chinese aerospace engineers as well as scientists and researchers and China's confident and open posture as a major country."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished. His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming. "It was just astonishing," Lister said. "Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You'd be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all."

"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," Lister said. "It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this." Lister calls these impacts a "bottom-up trophic cascade", in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. "I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world," he said. "But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect." To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. "More data, that is my mantra," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There have long been anecdotal reports that the eyes of the Mona Lisa -- Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting -- sometimes seem to follow viewers as they move around the artwork. The phenomenon is even called the "Mona Lisa effect" because of it. But a new study published in the journal i-Perception found that she's really "looking" to the right-hand side of her audience. "There is no doubt about the existence of the Mona Lisa effect," the authors wrote. "It just does not occur with the Mona Lisa herself."

This was a small study, with just 24 subjects. All were asked to look at a high-resolution recreation of the Mona Lisa on a computer monitor, with a folding ruler placed between them and the screen to track viewing distance. Subjects would signal where they perceived Mona Lisa's gaze met the ruler. The researchers sampled 15 sections of the famous portrait, ranging from the Mona Lisa's full head to just her eyes and nose, and they showed subjects each image three times in random order. They also changed the ruler's distance from the monitor halfway through the sessions. Based on the more than 2,000 individual assessments, they found no evidence of the Mona Lisa effect with Leonardo's masterpiece. "We demonstrated that Mona Lisa gazes to her left-hand side [the viewer's right] from about 35.5 cm inside pictorial space, and 14.4 degrees to the viewer's right-hand side in real space," the authors wrote. "Thus, Mona Lisa does not fulfill the premise of the Mona Lisa effect. She does not gaze at the viewer."

If built, the Future Circular Collider will be 10 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and could discover new types of particles. From a report: The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history. It validated a half-century of research about the basic building blocks of matter, and remains the crowning achievement of modern particle physics. Now, CERN wants to follow up on the LHC's smashing success with a super-sized structure called the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.

H. Peter Soyer, Professor of Dermatology, and Katie Lee, Research assistant at The University of Queensland, write: There's a lot to be said for sunshine -- both good and bad. It's our main source of vitamin D, which is essential for bone and muscle health. Populations with higher levels of sun exposure also have better blood pressure and mood levels, and fewer autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. On the other hand, excess UV exposure is estimated to contribute to 95% of melanomas and 99% of non-melanoma skin cancers. These skin cancers account for a whopping 80% of all new cancers each year in Australia.

Like any medicine, the dose counts. And in Australia, particularly in the summer, our dose of UV is so high that even short incidental exposures -- like while you hang out the washing or walk from your carpark into the shops -- adds up to huge lifetime doses. Fortunately, when it comes to tanning, the advice is clear: don't. A UV dose that's high enough to induce a tan is already much higher than the dose needed for vitamin D production. A four-year-long study of 1,113 people in Nambour, Queensland, found no difference in vitamin D levels between sunscreen users and sunscreen avoiders. Further reading: Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?

A small green shoot is growing on the moon after a cotton seed germinated onboard a Chinese lunar lander, scientists said. From a report: The sprout has emerged from a lattice-like structure inside a canister after the Chang'e 4 lander touched down earlier this month, according to a series of photos released by the Advanced Technology Research Institute at Chongqing University. "This is the first time humans have done biological growth experiments on the lunar surface," said Xie Gengxin, who led the design of the experiment, on Tuesday. Plants have been grown previously on the International Space Station, but this is the first time a seed has sprouted on the moon. The ability to grow plants in space is seen as crucial for long-term space missions and establishing human outposts elsewhere in the solar system, such as Mars.

Researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland have discovered that they can prevent the formation of metastases by fooling breast cancer cells into fat cells. The proof-of-concept study was published in the journal Cancer Cell. Technology Networks reports: Malignant cells can rapidly respond and adapt to changing microenvironmental conditions, by reactivating a cellular process called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), enabling them to alter their molecular properties and transdifferentiate into a different type of cell (cellular plasticity). Cancer cells can exploit EMT -- a process that is usually associated with the development of organs during embryogenesis -- in order to migrate away from the primary tumor and form secondary metastases. Cellular plasticity is linked to cancer survival, invasion, tumor heterogeneity and resistance to both chemo and targeted therapies. In addition, EMT and the inverse process termed mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) both play a role in a cancer cell's ability to metastasize.

Using mouse models of both murine and human breast cancer the team investigated whether they could therapeutically target cancer cells during the process of EMT -- whilst the cells are in a highly plastic state. When the mice were administered Rosiglitazone in combination with MEK inhibitors it provoked the transformation of the cancer cells into post-mitotic and functional adipocytes (fat cells). In addition, primary tumor growth was suppressed and metastasis was prevented. Since both drugs used in the preclinical study were FDA-approved the team are hopeful that it may be possible to translate this therapeutic approach to the clinic.

According to local reports, the world's first remote surgery equipment using 5G networks was successfully tested in China. "The test involved a doctor in the southeastern province of Fujian removing the liver of a laboratory test animal at a remote location," reports Ubergizmo. "The doctor performed the surgery by controlling robotic surgical arms over a 5G connection." From the report: The lag time was said to be only 0.1 seconds between the control device of the doctor and the robot in the surgical room. The researchers said that this high speed can reduce the risk of potentially deadly medical mistakes. They hope that 5G enabled remote surgery will soon become reliable enough that it can be used safely on humans as well. This could end up saving countless lives as skilled surgeons will be able to operate on patients in remote locations in a safe manner. The South China Morning Post published a video that shows the doctor performing the surgery.

Arborists are cloning saplings from the stumps of the world's largest, strongest, and longest-lived trees -- felled for timber more than a century ago -- to create redwood "super groves" that can help fight climate change. "Using saplings made from the basal sprouts of these super trees to plant new groves in temperate countries around the world means the growths have a better chance than most to become giants themselves," reports Quartz. "Their ancestors grew up to 400 ft (122 m) tall and to 35 ft in diameter, after all, larger than the largest living redwood today, a giant sequoia in California's Sequoia National Park." From the report: Already, super saplings from the project are thriving in groves in Canada, England, Wales, France, New Zealand, and Australia. None of these locales are places where coastal redwoods grow naturally, but they all have cool temperatures and sufficient fog for the redwoods, which drink moisture from the air in summer rather than relying on rain. [David Milarch, founder of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a U.S. nonprofit that propagates the world's largest trees] calls this "assisted migration." Last month, his organization planted another such grove in the Presidio in San Francisco, California. The park lies along the U.S. west's redwood corridor, which runs from Oregon to California, home to the stumps the saplings were cloned from. But 95% of giant growths there were cut long ago. Many of the redwoods along the corridor now are young trees. Milarch notes that as the local climate is getting hotter and less foggy, it's no longer as conducive to producing the mega growths of yore. Now, 75 saplings created from the basal sprouts of the most rugged and massive ancient tree stumps of the coastal region will grow in the Presidio. They may eventually become the hardiest and tallest trees around, if their ancestors are any indication.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via The Atlantic: The latest experiments in this niche but increasingly vocal field come from Lilach Hadany and Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University. In one set, they showed that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by rapidly sweetening their nectar. In a second set, they found that other plants make high-pitched noises that lie beyond the scope of human hearing but can nonetheless be detected some distance away. After the team released early copies of two papers describing their work, not yet published in a scientific journal, I ran them past several independent researchers. Some of these researchers have argued that plants are surprisingly communicative; others have doubted the idea. Their views on the new studies, however, didn't fall along obvious partisan lines. Almost unanimously, they loved the paper asserting that plants can hear and were skeptical about the one reporting that plants make noise. Those opposite responses to work done by the same team underscore how controversial this line of research still is, and how hard it is to study the sensory worlds of organisms that are so different from us.

First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee's wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That's probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around. But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team's answer is surprising, yet tidy: It's the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose's petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee's wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!)

schwit1 quotes Nature: Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth's north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet's core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world's geomagnetism experts into a rare move. [T]hey are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet's magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 -- but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now.

"The error is increasing all the time," says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Information.... By early 2018, the World Magnetic Model was in trouble. Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth's magnetic field. They realized that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable limit for navigational errors.
Nature's article was updated on January 9th to inform readers that the release of the corrected World Magnetic Model, which should restore accuracy through the end of 2019, has now been postponed from January 15th to January 30th -- "due to the ongoing US government shutdown."

Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares this article about a newly-published study which counters previous theories that neurons stop developing after adolescence: Healthy men and women continue to produce new neurons throughout life, suggesting older people remain more cognitively and emotionally intact than previously believed, researchers found. For decades it was thought that adult brains were hard-wired and unable to form new cells. But a Columbia University study found older people continued to produce neurons in the hippocampus -- a part of the brain important for memory, emotion and cognition -- at a similar rate to young people....

However, the researchers also noted fewer blood vessels and connections between cells in the older brains, which Ms Boldrini said "may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience" in the elderly.
The article suggests these newest findings may be hotly debated.

"They come just a month after a University of California study suggested adults do not develop new neurons."

"One of the world's foremost mathematicians, Prof Sir Michael Atiyah, has died at the age of 89," reports the BBC.

"He has been described to me by more than one professor of mathematics as the best mathematician in this country since Sir Isaac Newton," his brother tells the BBC. Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen shared their report: Sir Michael was best known for his co-development of a branch of mathematics called topological K-theory and the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. His research also involved deep insights relating to mathematical concepts known as "vector bundles". His work in these areas has helped theoretical physicists to advance their understanding of quantum field theory and general relativity.
In September, Atiyah also claimed to have proved the 160-year-old Riemann hypothesis.

"If the hypothesis is proven to be correct," New Scientist reported, "mathematicians would be armed with a map to the location of all such prime numbers, a breakthrough with far-reaching repercussions in the field."

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: SpaceX is laying off 10% of its 6,000-person workforce as it tackles two hugely expensive projects. Elon Musk's rocket company said its finances are healthy, but that it needs to make cuts so its most ambitious plans can succeed. "To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company," the company said in a statement....

The company earns tens of millions of dollars per launch. SpaceX was recently valued at $30.5 billion after initiating a $500 million equity sale in December. The company also took on about $250 million in debt last year in its first loan sale, according to the Wall Street Journal. But SpaceX's new products are expected to cost billions to develop. In September, Musk estimated SpaceX would spend between $2 billion and $10 billion developing an ultra-powerful spaceship and rocket system, recently renamed Starship and Super Heavy.

SpaceX plans to use the technology to fly tourists to space and, potentially, one day send humans to Mars... SpaceX is also developing a constellation of satellites that could one day beam high-speed internet down to the Earth. SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said during a TED Talk last year that she expects the satellite constellation to cost about $10 billion to deploy. The company has already made headway on both projects.

RockDoctor writes: The NASA/SWRI/Lowell Observatory (and at least 3 universities) team managing the download of data from New Horizons has released a first look at the results downloaded so far. At the time of writing, about 4 days of about 600 days of downloading had been completed. The next milestone hinted at is for March 2019 when the LPSC (Lunar & Planetary Science Conference) will get another batch of data as the various science teams get more data out of the pipeline.

Results: Firstly the overall shape -- as hinted by the occultation results from nearly a year ago -- is a contact binary. There is a lot of work going on from that, about how it could have formed, its accretion history and thermal history. The rotation period is better known (and this will improve as more data is downloaded) at 15=/-1 hours. The mass remains unknown. The mass ratio of the two components (nicknamed "Ultima" and "Thule") is suspected to be the same as their volume ratio -- 2.6:1; to get an accurate mass, observation of a satellite is needed, but the trajectory change for the spacecraft is unlikely to be large enough to estimate the mass well. Very little data has come down yet about the mineralogy, but the color suggests there is less water ice on MU69 than on Nix, the satellite of Pluto similar in size to MU69. The reason for a bright region to mark the junction between the two lobes is not known.

That'll be the sum of the data for the next 10 weeks until the 50th LPSC on March 18th.

A comprehensive new high-resolution analysis of human modification of the planet finds that just 5% of the Earth's land surface is currently unaffected by humans, far lower than a previous estimate of 19%. 95% of the Earth's land surface has some indication of human modification, while 84% has multiple human impacts, the study found. New Atlas reports: The researchers from The Nature Conservancy and Conservation Science Partners used publicly available, high-resolution data from ground surveys and remotely sensed imagery on land use in 1 square kilometer grids to provide a spatial assessment of the impact of 13 human-caused stressors across all terrestrial lands, biomes and ecological regions, including: Agriculture; The physical extent of human settlement; Transportation, including railroads and minor roads; Mining, energy production; and Electrical infrastructure, including power lines.

52% of ecological regions and 49% of countries are considered moderately modified. These regions are highly fragmented, retain up to only 50% of low modified lands and fall within critical land use thresholds. Only 30% of terrestrial ecological regions and 18% of the world's countries have a low degree of land modification and retain most of their natural lands, which are distant from human settlements, agriculture and other modified environments. The study found the least modified biomes tend to be in high latitudes and include tundra, boreal forests, or taiga and temperate coniferous forests. On the other hand, the most modified biomes include more tropical landscapes, such as temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, as well as mangroves.

kbahey writes: Traditionally, large satellites are configured on the ground for specific tasks that cannot be changed after launch, even if market demands evolve. The new "Quantum" satellite scheduled to be launched soon, will change all that: its coverage, bandwidth, power and frequency can all be altered in orbit. The 3.5-ton spacecraft will be operated by Paris-based telecom operator Eutelsat, in a R&D partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), with manufacturer Airbus acting as the prime contractor. A company official stated that the satellite "will bring unprecedented flexibility to our customers, allowing for in-orbit payload re-configuration and taking customization to a new level, while also opening the way to a paradigm shift in the manufacture of telecommunications satellites." The BBC says "being able to totally reconfigure an in-orbit platform would allow an operator to adapt to any shifts in the business landscape -- without the need to build and launch another bespoke platform." All the operator would have to do is simply reprogram the existing satellite.