Tag Archives: the-researchers

Mexico Is Getting So Hot That Even Young People Are Dropping Dead

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Scientists have found that not just older adults are succumbing to dangerous temperatures driven by climate change.

Killer Heat

Scientists have found that it's not just older adults succumbing to dangerous temperatures driven by climate change — even younger people may be more susceptible to extreme heat as well.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers found that three-fourths of heat-related deaths in Mexico between 1998 and 2019 were people under the age of 35.

It's a fascinating — and perhaps foreboding — new finding that suggests it's not just the elderly who are at the highest risk of dying from heat.

"These age groups are also quite vulnerable to heat in ways that we don’t expect even at temperatures that we don’t think of as particularly warm," first author and Stanford University environmental social scientist Andrew Wilson told the New York Times.

Wet Bulb Blues

Since getting an accurate picture of how many people die due to heat exhaustion is difficult — death certificates often don't list heat as a cause — the team turned to data relating to changes in "wet bulb" temperatures, which take both humidity and air temperatures into account to gauge how well human bodies can adapt to heat.

"While multiple metrics exist to measure humid heat stress, wet-bulb temperature has been identified as an important metric for understanding the impact of heat on human health because it accounts for the critical role of sweat evaporation — the primary mechanism by which the human body cools itself — in maintaining homeostasis under heat exposure," the paper reads.

Around a wet bulb temperature of just 95 degrees Fahrenheit, "humans can no longer dissipate heat into the environment and are thus physically incapable of survival when exposed for a sufficient length of time," the researchers wrote.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that even at much lower wet bulb temperatures of around 75 degrees Fahrenheit — or 88 degrees Fahrenheit with 50 percent humidity — adults between the ages of 18 to 34 were dying from heat.

That's in contrast to adults older than 70 being vulnerable to much higher wet bulb temperatures.

It's a concerning finding, considering the number of extreme heat waves is only expected to rise as climate change continues to push up temperatures around the globe. The team projects that the number of deaths among young adults will increase by 32 percent by the year 2100.

"You’re going to increase the number of moderately warm days much more than you’re going to increase the number of extremely hot days," Wilson told the NYT.

Worse yet, those between the ages of 18 to 34 are also far more likely to engage in strenuous activities outdoors, including sports or work-related tasks, leaving them more at risk.

"It’s not just about your physiological vulnerability," coauthor and Columbia University graduate student Daniel Bressler told the newspaper. "It’s about the economic and the social factors that make it so that you’re more exposed."

More on death heat: Dozens of Americans Die in Brutal Heat Wave

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Mexico Is Getting So Hot That Even Young People Are Dropping Dead

There’s Something Very Strange About Our Galaxy

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Researchers have found that there's something highly unusual about the Milky Way, setting it apart from other galaxies.

Galactic Outlier

Researchers have found that there's something highly unusual about the Milky Way that sets it apart from galaxies which, on a surface level, appear similar.

As detailed in three recent papers published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers examined a mountain of data as part of the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) survey, which was dedicated to comparing the Milky Way to 101 other galaxies that are similar in mass.

The distinction is technical but significant, the researchers say: they found that the Milky Way has surprisingly few smaller satellite galaxies compared to its peers — and some of them have mysteriously stopped forming new stars.

"Now we have a puzzle," said Stanford astrophysics professor Risa Wechsler, who cofounded SAGA and coauthored all three papers, in a statement. "What in the Milky Way caused these small, lower-mass satellites to have their star formation quenched?"

Satellite Activity

The findings suggest our galaxy's evolutionary history is strikingly different, setting it apart from all the others — research that could also force scientists to reexamine how we understand the formation of galaxies.

"Our results show that we cannot constrain models of galaxy formation just to the Milky Way," said Wechsler. "We have to look at that full distribution of similar galaxies across the universe."

At the core of the researchers' findings is dark matter, the mysterious substance that scientists believe makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, but has yet to be directly observed. Researchers have previously found that massive halos of dark matter allow galaxies to form within them, creating gravitational forces strong enough for ordinary matter to clump together.

"Perhaps, unlike a typical host galaxy, the Milky Way has a unique combination of older satellites that have ceased star formation and newer, active ones... that only recently fell into the Milky Way's dark matter halo," Wechsler suggested.

When Wechsler and her colleagues examined 378 small satellite galaxies that orbit the 101 much larger galaxies like the Milky Way, they found that half the Milky Way's satellites were no longer forming stars, unlike most other galaxies, whose satellites were still active stellar factories.

It all raises an intriguing question: why is our galactic home different?

"To me, the frontier is figuring out what dark matter is doing on scales smaller than the Milky Way, like with the smaller dark matter halos that surround these little satellites," Wechsler said.

More on galaxy formation: This Ancient "Rebel" Galaxy Closely Mirroring the Milky Way Has Astronomers Freaked Out

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There's Something Very Strange About Our Galaxy

Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim

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Electric discharges underground cause gold atoms to accumulate, which eventually forms gold nuggets, the researchers suggest.

Spark of Gold

Electric currents in the Earth may be responsible for the formation of gold nuggets, new research suggests.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the theory could explain why large chunks of gold — sometimes weighing more than a hundred pounds — appear in quartz veins when there's seemingly little traces of the metal in the surrounding earth.

"The standard explanation is that gold precipitates from hot, water-rich fluids as they flow through cracks in the earth's crust. As these fluids cool or undergo chemical changes, gold separates out and becomes trapped in quartz veins," study lead author Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia, told Forbes. "While this theory is widely accepted, it doesn't fully explain the formation of large gold nuggets, especially considering that the concentration of gold in these fluids is extremely low."

Main Squeeze

The answer lies in the unremarkable but ubiquitous mineral that gold nuggets are found in: quartz.

Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, which means they can generate an electric charge when put under mechanical stress, like getting squeezed. Being underground, they're potentially subjected to these forces from every direction.

The most formidable stress inducers, though, would be earthquakes, of which hundreds occur each day.

The researchers hypothesized that the regular application of such tectonic forces could generate electricity in quartz veins strong enough to pull gold out of the fluids in the earth's crust. Over time, this accumulates to form full-blown nuggets.

"Quartz is the only abundant piezoelectric mineral on Earth, and the cyclical nature of earthquake activity that drives orogenic gold deposit formation means that quartz crystals in veins will experience thousands of episodes of deviatoric stress," the researchers wrote in the study.

Pay Dirt

To test the theory, the researchers placed quartz crystals in a water solution containing dissolved gold, which they subjected to earthquake-like stresses. As they predicted, the quartz generated enough voltage that gold nanoparticles accumulated on top of the crystals.

"In essence, the quartz acts like a natural battery, with gold as the electrode, slowly accumulating more gold with each seismic event," Voisey told Forbes. "Our discovery provides a plausible explanation for the formation of large gold nuggets in quartz veins."

Other scientists in the field have been intrigued by these findings.

"The piezoelectric theory is interesting because it would help to further concentrate any nanoparticles, but also explain why early quartz veins in fault zones are typically barren: you need the quartz veins to be there before you can induce the piezoelectrical effect," Taija Torvela, a geologist at the Univeristy of Leeds, UK, who wasn't involved in the study, told The Guardian.

Taija suggests that understanding this effect could be used to target gold deposits — though to be practical, "we would need to know if there are any markers, detectable on Earth’s surface, that this process would leave behind."

More on current events: Scientists Say They've Detected a Strange Source of Electricity at the Bottom of the Ocean

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Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim