Daily briefing: Invasive species contribute to most extinctions

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India has launched its first spacecraft to study the Sun, hot on the heels of landing a spacecraft on the Moon last month. The Aditya-L1 spacecraft will address outstanding problems in solar physics, namely how stars such as the Sun sustain their super-hot outer layer, how variations in the Sun’s magnetic field affect Earth’s atmosphere and how the Sun’s magnetic fields create violent solar storms. The mission “will be an asset to heliophysicists of the country and even the global scientific fraternity”, says Nigar Shaji, Aditya-L1’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Nature | 4 mins

An exhaustive report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reveals that invasive species play a key part in most extinctions and cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars. “Invasive alien species have been a major factor in 60% and the only driver in 16% of global animal and plant extinctions that we have recorded,” says forest ecologist Aníbal Pauchard, the co-chair of the assessment group. Introduced animals and plants can spread disease, hobble agriculture and make ecosystems more fire-prone. Once established, invaders are hard to remove, so the report recommends investing in better border biosecurity to stop them before they arrive.

The New York Times | 5 min read

Reference: IPBES report

Many black holes that consume a star seem to ‘burp up’ energy long after the fact. When the star is ripped apart, some the stellar material forms a swirling accretion disk that orbits the hole. Sometimes, material is flung out from this disk, which is detectable as a wash of radio waves. Astronomers observed 24 star-destroying black holes and were surprised to find radio signals indicating that 10 of them emitted these outflows years after the initial event — although we don’t yet know why. “If you look years later, a very, very large fraction of these black holes that don’t have radio emission at these early times will actually suddenly ‘turn on’ in radio waves,” says astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, who led the research. “I call it a ‘burp’ because we’re having some sort of delay where this material is not coming out of the accretion disk until much later than people were anticipating.”

LiveScience | 5 min read or try Cendes’s very readable summary of the paper on Reddit

Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Image of the week

Eighteen flightless South Island takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri) have been released on their old stomping ground, land belonging to the Indigenous Ngāi Tahu tribe in New Zealand, in a bid to create the country’s third wild population. Takahē were once thought to be extinct — they were not spotted for 50 years before being rediscovered in 1948. After decades of conservation work, there are now around 500 of these birds. “There are few things more beautiful than to watch these large birds galloping back into tussock lands where they haven’t walked for over a century,” says Tā Tipene O’Regan, a Ngāi Tahu rangatira, or elder. (The Guardian | 6 min read) (Douglas Thorne Photography @douglasthornephotography)

Features & opinion

“After almost nine years working in a university research office, shepherding approximately 1,000 applications through to submission, I have witnessed many researchers make the same mistakes, time and time again,” writes research-funding adviser Mireille Consalvey. She presents a 13-step checklist for success — and some comforting advice if you fail.

Nature | 6 min read

Snow hydrologist McKenzie Skiles gathers data on the dust — from wind-blown desert soils to forest-fire soot — that settles on the mountains that provide much of the water in the western United States. “I usually have to ski several kilometres, carrying a 27-kilogramme pack with a shovel to dig a snow pit, tools to cut snow wedges and measure their density, and containers to collect snow samples for analyses,” she says. “In areas with heavy dust deposition, such as the southern Rocky Mountains, dust accelerates melt by one or two months.” (Nature | 3 min read) (Sasha Liedman)