science news 13.8.2019

Today's selection of science news. Links are normally to press releases on EurekAlert (at the bottom end I may also add a couple of newspaper stories). I include quotes from the summary (using quotation marks) in cases where the title alone doesn't reveal what the story is about. My own thoughts appear without quotation marks, if I have any.


astrobiology

Methane not released by wind on Mars, experts find
"New study rules out wind erosion as the source of methane gas on Mars and moves a step closer to answering the question of whether life exists on other planets."


evolution

Ancient pigs endured a complete genomic turnover after they arrived in Europe
"New research led by Oxford University and Queen Mary University of London has resolved a pig paradox. Archaeological evidence has shown that pigs were domesticated in the Near East and as such, modern pigs should resemble Near Eastern wild boar. They do not. Instead, the genetic signatures of modern European domestic pigs resemble European wild boar."


birds

Scent brings all the songbirds to the yard
"Lehigh University scientists found that not only can chickadees smell, but the males and females prefer the smell of their own species over the smell of the opposite species. These preferences could be impacting hybridization. Their results have been published in an article entitled: 'Conspecific olfactory preferences and interspecific divergence in odor cues in a chickadee hybrid zone' in Ecology and Evolution."



"The sense of smell has been very understudied in birds, particularly songbirds, because they frequently have such impressive plumage and song variation," says Amber Rice, an evolutionary biologist at Lehigh University. "Some other recent work has documented that species of songbird can smell and prefer their species' odors, but this is the first example in currently hybridizing species that we know of."
Credit: Lehigh University


Scientists identify brain region that enables young songbirds to change their tune


environment

New study shows impact of largescale tree death on carbon storage

Wildlife trafficking and more hinder nations' sustainable development
"Transnational environmental crime, or TEC, has become the largest financial driver of social conflicts in the world,"

Diet change needed to save vast areas of tropics, study warns


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From the news media:

I admired the conversion of industrial land around Kings Cross station to a very chic urban landscape last Tuesday (I came to visit Word on the Water - a bookshop in a narrowboat, and the rest came as bonus discoveries), but now the Guardian tells me I have been a guinea pig in surveillance using facial recognition. I did notice on the day that the site was surprisingly free of the grittier parts of London life, so maybe that could be related?