‘’Your weekly informant’’
7th April-13th April
1. Ozone is heating the planet more than we notice
According to new research, ozone may be weakening one of the planet’s most critical cooling systems, making it a more significant greenhouse gas than previously thought. Changes in ozone levels in the upper and lower atmosphere were shown to be responsible for over a third of the warming recorded in ocean waters bordering Antarctica in the second half of the twentieth century, according to a recent study. The Southern Ocean’s deep and rapid warming has an impact on its role as one of the primary locations for absorbing surplus heat as the earth heats. The majority of this warming was caused by higher levels of ozone in the lower atmosphere. Ozone, one of the main components of smog, is already a dangerous pollutant, but a new study suggests it may also play a key role in climate change in the coming years.
2. A new study emerges, which says that fishes can calculate
Every day comes a new and mind-shaking discovery in the world of science and here is another amazing study that stated that cichlids and stingrays can execute simple addition and subtraction in the one to five-digit range. It’s unclear why the animals require their mathematical talents. Cichlids and stingrays are very comparable to humans: they can detect minute amounts exactly — and probably without counting. They can be taught to reliably discriminate quantities of three from amounts of four, for example. This is something that has been known for a long time. However, a study team led by Prof. Dr. Vera Schluessel of the University of Bonn’s Institute of Zoology has recently demonstrated that both species can compute. Schluessel notes, “We educated the animals to execute simple sums and subtractions.” “They had to increase or reduce a starting value by one in order to do so.”
3. Perseverance captures the first sounds ever heard from Mars
The first sounds from Mars were recorded by Perseverance on February 19, 2021, the day after it arrived. Between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, these sounds come inside the human auditory spectrum. First and foremost, they demonstrate that Mars is quiet, so quiet that scientists mistook the microphone for broken on multiple occasions. Natural sound sources, aside from the wind, are obviously scarce. In addition to this, the scientists investigated the sounds produced by the rover itself, such as shock waves caused by the SuperCam laser’s impact on rocks and flights by the Ingenuity helicopter. They were able to precisely characterize the acoustic features of the Martian atmosphere by investigating the propagation on Mars of these sounds, whose behavior is well understood on Earth.
4. Researchers have created the first entire, gap-free human genome sequence
Two decades after the Human Genome Project delivered the first draught human genome sequence, scientists have published the first full, gapless sequence of a human genome. According to researchers, knowing the whole spectrum of human genomic variation and the genetic contributions to specific disorders requires obtaining a complete, gap-free sequence of the roughly 3 billion bases (or ‘letters’) in our DNA. Analyses of the entire genome sequence will considerably improve our understanding of chromosomes, including more precise maps for five chromosome arms, opening up new research avenues. This contributes to the understanding of how chromosomes properly segregate and divide in basic biology. The T2T consortium used the now-complete genome sequence as a starting point to find over 2 million new variants in the human genome. These findings add to our understanding of the genetic variations found in 622 medically important genes.
