The Wolverine Wake-Up Issue 80
3-24-23
'Terminator Zones' on Distant Planets Could Harbor Life
In a new study, astronomers describe how extraterrestrial life has the potential to exist on distant exoplanets inside a special area called the 'terminator zone,' which is a ring on planets that have one side that always faces its star and one side that is always dark. "These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side," said Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher in the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy who led the new work, which just published in The Astrophysical Journal. Lobo added that such planets are particularly common because they exist around stars that make up about 70 percent of the stars seen in the night sky -- so-called M-dwarf stars, which are relatively dimmer than our sun. The terminator is the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet. Terminator zones could exist in that "just right" temperature zone between too hot and too cold. "You want a planet that's in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water," said Lobo, because liquid water, as far as scientists know, is an essential ingredient for life. On the dark sides of terminator planets, perpetual night would yield plummeting temperatures that could cause any water to be frozen in ice. The side of the planet always facing its star could be too hot for water to remain in the open for long.
-Oliver Mckeon
Making Sense of Scents: Deciphering Our Sense of Smell
Breaking a longstanding impasse in our understanding of olfaction, scientists have created the first molecular-level, 3D picture of how an odor molecule activates a human odorant receptor, a crucial step in deciphering the sense of smell. The findings, appearing online March 15, 2023, in Nature, are poised to reignite interest in the science of smell with implications for fragrances, food science, and beyond. Odorant receptors -- proteins that bind odor molecules on the surface of olfactory cells -- make up half of the largest, most diverse family of receptors in our bodies; A deeper understanding of them paves the way for new insights about a range of biological processes. "This has been a huge goal in the field for some time," said Aashish Manglik, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and a senior author of the study. The dream, he said, is to map the interactions of thousands of scent molecules with hundreds of odorant receptors, so that a chemist could design a molecule and predict what it would smell like. "But we haven't been able to make this map because, without a picture, we don't know how odor molecules react with their corresponding odor receptors," Manglik said.
-Carson Ososki
Where did Earth's Water Come from? Not Melted Meteorites, According to Scientists
These results, which let researchers rule them out as the primary source of Earth's water, could have important implications for the search for water -- and life -- on other planets.
The team of researchers analyzed seven melted, or achondrite, meteorites that crashed into Earth billions of years after splintering from at least five planetesimals -- objects that collided to form the planets in our solar system. "The challenge of analyzing water in extremely dry materials is that any terrestrial water on the sample's surface or inside the measuring instrument can easily be detected, tainting the results," said study co-author Conel Alexander, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. While it was generally thought that water came to Earth from the outer solar system, it has yet to be determined what types of objects could have carried that water across the solar system. "We knew that plenty of outer solar system objects were differentiated, but it was sort of implicitly assumed that because they were from the outer solar system, they must also contain a lot of water," said Sune Nielsen, a study co-author and geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This means that the heating and melting of planetesimals leads to near-total water loss, regardless of where these planetesimals originated in the solar system and how much water they started out with.
-Nathan Dewald
Sleep Disorders Linked with More Severe Outcomes from COVID-19
A new Cleveland Clinic study found that people with certain sleep disorders have more severe outcomes from COVID-19, including a 31 percent higher rate of hospitalization and mortality. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, showed that while patients with sleep-disordered breathing and sleep-related hypoxia do not have increased risk of developing COVID-19, they have a worse clinical prognosis from the disease.As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and the disease remains highly variable from patient to patient, it is critical to improve our ability to predict who will have more severe illness so that we can appropriately allocate resources. Researchers used Cleveland Clinic's COVID-19 research registry, which includes data from nearly 360,000 patients tested for COVID-19 at Cleveland Clinic, of which 5,400 had an available sleep study record. Sleep study findings and COVID-19 positivity were assessed along with disease severity. The team also accounted for co-morbidities such as obesity, heart and lung disease, cancer and smoking.
-Leatta McKeon