Good morning! Here are some of this week’s most interesting science stories to read while you curl up on the couch with a cup of General Foods International French Vanilla Cafe.

Object hastily

As part of the citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, volunteers are looking for patterns in the vast sea of ​​data accumulated during NASA’s 14-year Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission. They mark moving objects in the data files, and when multiple volunteers mark the same object, astronomers study the find.

Be that as it may, this group of volunteers recently discovered a faint red star hurtling through the Milky Way at about 1.3 million miles per hour, or 600 kilometers per second. This represents the discovery of the first low-mass high-velocity star and the closest high-velocity object to the Sun.

This raises the obvious question: why is this thing so fast? Researchers speculate that the object, designated CWISE J124909+362116.0, may have been a subdwarf of a white dwarf binary system, catapulted into its current trajectory when the white dwarf exploded in a supernova. There’s also a cooler theory that involves a closely-connected pair of black holes hurling J1249+36 out of a globular cluster.

At 0.1% of the speed of light, J1249+36 is fast enough to likely exit the Milky Way at some point.

Pests rage

New York City is famous for its bright lights, its high-flying, precise dance routines, and its chewy pizza crusts. Where else in the world can you eat falafel on the street while an accordion player dressed as Boba Fett serenades passing junk bond brokers? Hey, I’m walking here! New York is also famous for its rats, a distinction it definitely deserves and wears less as a badge of honor than as a depressed resignation.

For decades, the city has controlled the rat population with poison bait programs, which has had a significant impact on other urban wildlife, including poor Flaco the owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo and delighted New Yorkers for months before fatally crashing into a building. A subsequent autopsy revealed high levels of rat poison in her system. The mayor’s office announced this year that the city will conduct a trial of a contraceptive bait program to evaluate its effectiveness compared to poison campaigns.

But researchers say birth control programs may not be an effective way to control the rat population. They cite several reasons, including the likelihood that many rats will not eat the bait and give birth to offspring that will also avoid it. But they suggest that contraceptive baits could contribute to a number of approaches to controlling the problem.

Water plastic-like

Since the third season of Game of Thrones, a flock of Jon Snow Funko Pops the size of Rhode Island has been migrating with the tides through the Sargasso Sea. I made that up, but there’s a true story about 30,000 plastic ducks washing up on the coast of Alaska in 1992. And the ocean is indeed saturated with plastic waste and nanoplastics, as are freshwater pathways, ecosystems, and the bodies of organisms, including humans.

If you think nanoplastics are a new, exploding problem that is exacerbating many others, including climate change, you’re not wrong. Consider that large-scale plastic production only began in 1950, and half of all plastic products ever produced were made after 2000. Nanoplastic pollution is a truly new, scary problem, and as it becomes a threat to human health, researchers are looking for ways to remove nanoplastics from water.

Scientists at the University of Missouri are now reporting on a method that uses a small amount of a water-repellent solvent to remove 98% of nanoplastic particles from large volumes of water. The solvent, made from natural products, is added to the water’s surface and floats there like oil. When mixed with the water, the solvent separates and then floats back to the surface, carrying nanoplastic particles with it in its molecular structure.

In the lab, the scientists removed the plastic from the water surface using a pipette. In future experiments, however, they plan to scale up the process to remove nanoplastics from large bodies of water.

© 2024 Science X Network