science news 6.8.2019

I took a couple of weeks off from the arduous task of filter-feeding the daily science news. Did I miss anything important?
No? Good, back to business:

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

A new lens for life-searching space telescopes


evolution

Intense look at La Brea Tar Pits explains why we have coyotes, not saber-toothed cats

It would take 50 million years to recover New Zealand's lost bird species
"Half of New Zealand's birds have gone extinct since humans arrived on the islands. Many more are threatened. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 5 estimate that it would take approximately 50 million years to recover the number of bird species lost since humans first colonized New Zealand."



This image shows a Kakapo bird.
Credit: Andrew Digby / Current Biology


ecology

Road verges provide refuge for pollinators
"... but they must be managed better, new research shows."

Seaweed sinks deep, taking carbon with it

Restoring forests means less fuel for wildfire and more storage for carbon
See also my feature on reforestation, out this week.


catalysis

Stanford scientists create artificial catalysts inspired by living enzymes


energy

Improving the magnetic bottle that controls fusion power on Earth
"The exhaustive detection method that discovered the error field in the initial run of the NSTX-U tokamak could serve as a model for error-field detection in future tokamaks."


humans

Recursive language and modern imagination were acquired simultaneously 70,000 years ago
"A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and modern imagination 70,000 years ago. This new Romulus and Remus hypothesis, coined by Dr. Vyshedskiy, a neuroscientist from Boston University, might be able to solve the long-standing mystery of language evolution."


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in other news ...

It's Hiroshima day today.