Provided by Andrew Gordon, Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists have used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the first glimpse of the transition state where two atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to becoming a molecule.

This fundamental advance, reported Feb. 12 in Science Express and long thought impossible, will have a profound impact on the understanding of how chemical reactions take place and on efforts to design reactions that generate energy, create new products and fertilize crops more efficiently.

“This is the very core of all chemistry. It’s what we consider a Holy Grail, because it controls chemical reactivity,” said Anders Nilsson, a professor at the SLAC/Stanford SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis and at Stockholm University who led the research. “But because so few molecules inhabit this transition state at any given moment, no one thought we’d ever be able to see it.”

Bright, Fast Laser Pulses Achieve the Impossible

The experiments took place at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Its brilliant, strobe-like X-ray laser pulses are short enough to illuminate atoms and molecules and fast enough to watch chemical reactions unfold in a way never possible before.

Researchers used LCLS to study the same reaction that neutralizes carbon monoxide (CO) from car exhaust in a catalytic converter. The reaction takes place on the surface of a catalyst, which grabs CO and oxygen atoms and holds them next to each other so they pair up more easily to form carbon dioxide.

In the SLAC experiments, researchers attached CO and oxygen atoms to the surface of a ruthenium catalyst and got reactions going with a pulse from an optical laser. The pulse heated the catalyst to 2,000 kelvins – more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit – and set the attached chemicals vibrating, greatly increasing the chance that they would knock into each other and connect.

The team was able to observe this process with X-ray laser pulses from LCLS, which detected changes in the arrangement of the atoms’ electrons – subtle signs of bond formation – that occurred in mere femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second.

“First the oxygen atoms get activated, and a little later the carbon monoxide gets activated,” Nilsson said. “They start to vibrate, move around a little bit. Then, after about a trillionth of a second, they start to collide and form these transition states.”

‘Rolling Marbles Uphill’

The researchers were surprised to see so many of the reactants enter the transition state – and equally surprised to discover that only a small fraction of them go on to form stable carbon dioxide. The rest break apart again.

“It’s as if you are rolling marbles up a hill, and most of the marbles that make it to the top roll back down again,” Nilsson said. “What we are seeing is that many attempts are made, but very few reactions continue to the final product. We have a lot to do to understand in detail what we have seen here.”

Theory played a key role in the experiments, allowing the team to predict what would happen and get a good idea of what to look for. “This is a super-interesting avenue for theoretical chemists. It’s going to open up a completely new field,” said report co-author Frank Abild-Pedersen of SLAC and SUNCAT.

A team led by Associate Professor Henrik Öström at Stockholm University did initial studies of how to trigger the reactions with the optical laser. Theoretical spectra were computed under the leadership of Stockholm Professor Lars G.M. Pettersson, a longtime collaborator with Nilsson.

Preliminary experiments at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), another DOE Office of Science User Facility, also proved crucial. Led by SSRL’s Hirohito Ogasawara and SUNCAT’s Jerry LaRue, they measured the characteristics of the chemical reactants with an intense X-ray beam so researchers would be sure to identify everything correctly at the LCLS, where beam time is much more scarce. “Without SSRL this would not have worked,” Nilsson said.

The team is already starting to measure transition states in other catalytic reactions that generate chemicals important to industry.

“This is extremely important, as it provides insight into the scientific basis for rules that allow us to design new catalysts,” said SUNCAT Director and co-author Jens Nostrokerskov.

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Researchers from Canada and Russia have discovered the oldest ever confirmed set of human twin remains, as well as one of the first documented cases of death during childbirth, according to research published earlier this month in the journal Antiquity.

According to Discovery News, the body of a young woman was found in an early Neolithic hunter-gatherer burial ground in southeast Siberia in 1997. At the time, her remains were photographed and labeled. However, they were not further investigated by anthropologists.

Now, however, University of Saskatchewan bioarchaeologist Angela Lieverse and colleagues from the University of Alberta and Irkutsk University in Russia have examined the skeleton and found remains of twin fetuses nestled between her pelvis and upper legs. The twins, believed to be 36 to 40 weeks old, likely suffocated during childbirth, the researchers explained.

Radiocarbon dating on samples of bones from both the mother and the twins confirmed that the remains are approximately 7,700 years old. While death from childbirth was common during the prehistoric and pre-modern eras, it has rarely been documented, likely because the infant remains were too fragile to survive or the women and children were not buried together.

“This is not only one of the oldest archaeologically documented cases of death during childbirth, but also the earliest confirmed set of human twins in the world,” Lieverse explained to Discovery News, adding that twins “are basically invisible from the archaeological record.”

The bioarchaeologist went on to note that there is only one other case of confirmed human twins in the historical record: 400-year-old remains of twins, fetuses that were near the 24 week gestation point, that had been excavated from a burial site in South Dakota. However, the death of those twins and their mother appeared not to be the result of premature childbirth.

The delivery hypothesized

Lieverse estimates that the Siberian woman would have been in her early twenties when she went into labor, and most likely did not know that she was carrying twins. The location of the fetal remains suggest that the first baby was breech (coming out feet first instead of head first), and that the presence of the twin was most likely the cause of this dangerous scenario.

As the first child was partially delivered, labor became obstructed at some point due to head entrapment, interlocked twins, or some other type of condition. With the other members of her community unable to do anything to help, the woman ultimately would have either died due to an infection, bleeding or exhaustion. Her twins would have died alongside her.

“Inside the tragedy is a compelling story and very personal window into life and death almost 8,000 years ago. It’s a remarkable find,” Lieverse said in a statement, according to the Toronto Sun. “Obstructed labor accounted for as many as 70 percent of maternal deaths, even in the late 20th century. Without the skills, experience and technology of modern medical practitioners, it would have been a virtual death sentence for all three individuals.”

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The discovery of the oldest known fur seal, a tiny creature slightly larger than a sea otter, has helped close a five million year old gap in the evolutionary history of these semi-aquatic marine mammals, according to research published in the latest edition of Biology Letters.

Robert Boessenecker, a PhD student in geology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and Morgan Churchill from the University of Wyoming identified the new genus and species of fur seal (Eotaria crypta) from a fossilized partial jaw and several teeth recovered from a 15 to 17 million year old rock formation in Southern California in the early 1980s.

While the remains were first discovered decades ago, they had previously been misidentified as belonging to a species of small walrus. Boessenecker found the specimen while looking through the collections at the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in California and said he could tell almost instantly that they belonged to a tiny, early fur seal.

“This was very exciting as fur seals and sea lions – the family Otariidae – have a limited fossil record that, up until now, extended back to about 10-12 million years ago,” Boessenecker said in a statement. “Yet we know that their fossil record must go back to around 16-17 million years ago or so, because walruses – the closest modern relative of the otariids – have a record reaching back that far.”

In paleontology terms, this type of gap is known as a “ghost lineage,” meaning that there is an inferred relationship between two different groups of organisms, but no fossil record to support the existence of said relationship. Previously, there was no evidence of the first five million years of fur seal and sea lion evolution, the authors said, but the new discovery fixes that problem.

To determine the phylogenetic placement of E. crypta, Bossenecker and Churchill analyzed 115 morphological characters (including three novel ones) coded for 23 different modern types of the creatures from across all families. They focused on characteristics most useful for resolving the phylogenetic relationships of stem otariids and early pinnipeds, and coding efforts focused on the male specimens in order to minimize the impact of sexual dimorphism, the authors said.

Boessenecker explained that E. crypta’s status as a critical transitional fossil is proven by its teeth, which essentially bridge the gap between the complex bear-like teeth of the earliest known pinnipeds and the most simplified teeth of modern-day sea lions.

However, the find also raises an important question: why, despite extensive excavations of similarly aged rocks in California, has only one specimen of this new fur seal species ever been discovered? Japanese paleontologist Dr. Naoki Kohno previously hypothesized that early fur seals lived in the open ocean and only rarely ventured into continental shelf areas.

If Dr. Kohno’s proposal is true, it means that the creatures would not have frequented regions where they would be more likely to be preserved as fossils. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the newly discovered fossil was collected from sedimentary rocks that had been formed by deposits in what was once a continental shelf instead of at an inland fossil site.

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Not really, but they are one of the most contaminated avian species on the planet, according to researchers from the University of Michigan in a recent edition of the Journal of Great Lakes Research.

Nil Basu, an associate professor at McGill University who conducted his research while at the Ann Arbor-based university, and his colleagues analyzed hepatic polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) levels in Wisconsin river otters and Michigan bald eagles from 2009 to 2011.

According to PlanetExperts.com, the researchers examined 33 eagles, and found that all but two of them tested positive for at least four common types of PBDE, a type of flame retardant which were commonly used from 1970 through 2004, when they were banned and/or phased out.

In fact, one of the bald eagles tested measured at 1,538 parts per billion PBDEs in its liver, the website explained. In comparison, the median concentration in humans in the US is about 30 ppb, making it one of the highest concentration rates in the world.

Previous studies have linked exposure to the substance to liver, thyroid and brain damage in humans, and in birds, it has been associated with hormone disruption, reproductive issues and behavioral and developmental problems. While the population is stable, the eagles had PBDE concentrations that were “among the highest…in liver tissues of any wildlife.”

“While the sensitivity of eagles to PBDEs has yet to be determined, there is a possibility that the exposures reported here may be associated with sub-clinical effects,” Basu explained Monday in an interview with Scientific American. While the flame retardant is no longer used, it can still be found in air, dirt and residents all over the world, including in and around Michigan,

The chemicals “are everywhere. They build up in the food chains so that top predators – such as bald eagles – accumulate high levels,” Basu added. The compound seeps out of the products they were used in, he noted, and once it gets into the environment it can stay there a long time. Basu believes that the birds were exposed to the flame retardant by eating contaminated fish, but noted that they may also have inhaled it or licked tainted dust off of their feathers.

A history of PBDE

The four major PBDE compounds found in the bald eagles were components of a flame retardant that was sold commercially as penta-PBDE mixture, which was used in cars, wire insulation and plastics. In 2009, penta was added to the UN Stockholm Convention as a persistent pollutant that was to be phased out internationally. Yet, it has remain present in the environment.

PBDEs are “very persistent” once they get into the environment, explained Indiana University assistant scientist Marta Venier. “We can expect to see PBDEs in wildlife for a long time.” The new study also found PBDEs in the liver tissue of 100 percent of 35 dead river otters collected throughout Wisconsin in 2009 and 2010, Scientific American added.

Exposure to the flame retardants have also been linked to lower nest temperatures, smaller eggs with thinner shells, delayed egg laying, a reduced number of mating calls and loss of appetite in birds, the website added. However, the chemicals affect different species in different ways, so it is possible that the PBDE compounds impact the bald eagles in different ways.

“If there were health problems, it would be kind of under the radar and we wouldn’t necessarily notice in the [dead] birds we got in here,” Tom Cooley, a wildlife pathologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, told Scientific American.

Furthermore, the eagles could have more flame-retardants on them that the research indicates, since Basu and his colleagues only looked for four specific types. While the lead author said that the PBDE levels of the eagles should eventually decrease, that could take “years or decades.”

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If you’ve ever watched to watch an avian embryo slowly form into a baby bird, researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing have a breakthrough for you – artificial, see-through eggs that let them look through the shell and monitor every aspect of the offspring’s development.

The authors of that study, Professor Liu Jing and graduate student Lai Yiyu from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tsinghua University’s School of Medicine, devised what is known as the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) “soft” process method that allows them to craft a see-through shell that matches the shape of an actual eggshell.

The method is safer than alternative processes that poke holes in eggs, and it gives scientists a more complete look at embryonic development, according to Engadget. The artificial eggs are near-perfect copies of the real deal.

While the website notes that the see-through shells “are more than a little eerie,” they do show the developing bird “a relatively natural environment” that is easier for researchers to study in a lab. Since the shell is transparent, scientists can monitor the embryo’s development, better understanding life processes and the effects of rare genes.

According to the Washington Post, no living birds were hatched from this so-called “egg-on-a-chip” technology. However, they did manage to grow the embryos for over 17 days, publishing their results last month in the journal Science China: Technological Sciences.

They conducted experiments over the course of approximately two years, fabricating a series of transparent PDMS eggshells that allowed them to culture embryos for up to 17.5 days. The shells were used to successfully initiate X-stage embryos, and the combination of the high level of transparency helped provide them with a new platform to study functional embryo development.

The egg-on-a-chip has practical applications as well, the study authors point out in a statement. Blood or other bodily fluids could be injected into the egg to help with early diagnosis, as these eggs could potentially serve as amplification systems that could allow scientists to discover and verify rare genetic variations with greater reliability than other biological systems.

The researchers claim that their see-through eggs could become a biologically-based diagnostic tool that surpasses most other, similar types of technology currently in use. They added that rare variations cultured in the eggs could replace more difficult and expensive laboratory procedures currently in use, which would be the primary practical use of the egg-on-a-chip technology.

“With both high optical transparency and engineering subtlety fully integrated together, the present method not only provides an ideal transparent imaging platform for studying functional embryo development including life mystery, but also promises a future strategy for ‘lab-on-an-egg’ technology which may be important in a wide variety of either fundamental or practical areas,” wrote Jing and Yiyu.

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An unusual ash-like substance that has been described as white, dusty and/or milky rain has been falling on parts of Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and its origin has yet to be scientifically confirmed, various media outlets are reporting.

More than 15 cities in the area has reported receiving the dirty precipitation, those reports said, and the light-gray colored dirt contained in that rainfall coated homes, windows and automobiles in the area as a storm system of Pacific origin moved into the region.

According to CNN.com, emergency officials in Washington’s Walla Walla Country said that the ash was “more than likely from the Volcano Shiveluch” on the Kamchatka peninsula in northeast Russia. That volcano, they explained, “spewed an ash plume… in late January.”

However, they later posted an update that admitted that the substance may be the result of one of a number of different factors, and that experts have yet to confirm its origins. Derek Van Dam, a CNN meteorologist, said that it could be volcanic ash, but it was not necessarily from Russia.

“The strong southerly flow from the jet stream could have brought it from an active volcano in southwest Colima, Mexico,” Van Dam said. That volcano, which erupted Wednesday, is located near Guadalajara. The US National Weather Service also said that it could have come from dust picked up from strong winds, or ash left over from wildfires in the region last year.

“We still don’t have a definitive answer,” the agency said, with Van Dam adding that the only way to determine for certain would be to analyze the chemical makeup of the substance. The NWS office in Spokane, Washington has collected water samples, according to USA Today, and those samples will be sent to a laboratory for testing.

Third volcano possible

Local media reports confirmed that experts were investigating several possible explanations, including the volcanic eruptions, but meteorologists warned that it could take some time to find answers because nothing was appearing on their satellite equipment – a phenomenon that is not all that unusual for systems which these types of thick clouds and moisture.

A third volcano could also be the source of the ash, which has not even been confirmed to be volcanic in nature at this point, according to the Daily Mail. Experts told the UK newspaper that ash from Sakurajima, Japan, which is currently experiencing a period of activity that includes up to four eruptions per day, could have blown over an infected the weather system.

“The truth is that we really don’t know where it came from!” NWS Spokane officials said in a statement, according to the Daily Mail. “We are continuing to investigate and have reached out to other offices for assistance in recreating atmospheric flows from the past several days. We’ve also reached out to other agencies that may have collected samples appropriate for testing.”

“Keen on knowing what the substance is, residents in affected areas have also been filling up glasses of the strange substance,” added Tech Times. “The NWS said that reports of the milky rain have been received from over 15 cities and that it has already collected water samples that will be sent for laboratory testing.”

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As we saw in Jurassic Park, fossilized tree sap, or amber, has a way of capturing and preserving all kinds of ancient things. According to a new report, though, a recently discovered specimen contains both evidence of the earliest grass specimen ever discovered and ergot, the fungus used to make LSD.

This fungus-covered grass was around during the reign of the dinosaurs, and raises the question of  whether or not they were tripping balls while grazing.

The study, published in the journal Palaeodiversity, also noted that the discovery provides evidence that grasses and ergot evolved together and played a major role in society as we know it along the way.

“It seems like ergot has been involved with animals and humans almost forever, and now we know that this fungus literally dates back to the earliest evolution of grasses,” said George Poinar, Jr., a paleontologist at Oregon State University.

“This is an important discovery that helps us understand the timeline of grass development, which now forms the basis of the human food supply in such crops as corn, rice or wheat,” Poinar continued. “But it also shows that this parasitic fungus may have been around almost as long as the grasses themselves, as both a toxin and natural hallucinogen.”

Far out, man

Ergot has been linked to both the development of certain drugs and the Salem witch trials, but it’s probably best known for the psychedelic effects found in LSD. Its effects aren’t limited to humans either as animals that consume the fungus have been seen staggering, hallucinating, delirious, convulsing, and even developing gangrene.

Imagine a giant like Brachiosaurus whacked out of its brain, stumbling around and leaving a trail of destruction behind it.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have been eaten by sauropod dinosaurs, although we can’t know what exact effect it had on them,” Poinar said.

According to the study, the amber fossil holds a grass floret topped by a dark fungus named Palaeoclaviceps parasiticus, a relative of ergot. The specimen was pulled from amber mines in Myanmar and dates to between 97 and 110 million years ago. During this time, dinosaurs and conifers dominated and the very first flowering plants, grasses and small mammals were just starting to evolve.

Millennia later, grasses would turn into a robust life form on Earth, producing vast prairies, feeding herds of animals, and ultimately making way for the domestication of early livestock and the farming of crops, altering the entire progression of the human race. Current estimates state that grasses produce approximately 20 percent of global vegetation.

Defense mechanism?

The study team said that a few grasses have normal defense mechanisms, and theorized that ergot could be among them, assisting in the repulsion of herbivores. The fungus is bitter and a problem in cereal and grass seed creation, along with providing complications in pastures and grazing land.

However, ergot has been utilized as a medicine to cause abortion or accelerate labor in pregnant women. According to one controversial study, it may have also played a part in the Salem witch trials. In the middle of the 20^th century, the fungus was used to make the psychedelic compound known as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

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Federal officials are proposing a radical plan to help save Columbia River salmon: killing over 11,000 double-crested cormorants that have been eating too many of the young fish.

According to a report published Sunday by Tech Times, the US Army Corps of Engineers’ plan revealed Friday would also involve spraying vegetable oil on the birds’ eggs to keep them from hatching. The plan would reduce the size of the large black seabirds over the next four years.

The cormorants have been consuming a greater-than-expected amount of salmon and steelhead trout in the Oregon area, the engineers explained. The plan, which comes in the form of a final Environmental Impact Statement, was selected over a similar plan that would result in the killing of 18,000 of the birds by 2018, the website added.

Federal studies indicate that the cormorants consume 11 million juvenile salmon and steelhead each year, according to the Associated Press. Both species are protected under the Endangered Species Act. In 1989, only 100 nesting pairs of cormorants were on the island, but that number has exploded. Currently, more than 15,000 breeding pairs of cormorants live there.

US Army Corps spokeswoman Diana Fredlund called it “a difficult situation,” telling Reuters, “We are trying to balance the salmon and steelhead vs. the birds. It’s very difficult to find the right answer and so it’s taken us a long time. We’ve had a lot of experts working on it.”

Fredlund added that the corps also considered hazing the cormorants in order to shoo them off the island, but that would only shift the problem somewhere else and make it “somebody else’s problem.” The goal is to reduce the bird population to about 6,000 breeding pairs by 2018.

However, officials at the Audubon Society of Portland told Reuters that the real threat to the salmon and trout is not the birds, but the loss of their habitat combined with dams and fish hatcheries. Killing the cormorants will not solve the problem, they argue.

“We feel the birds are being scapegoated while the primary causes of salmon decline are not being adequately addressed,” Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the local Audubon Society, explained. He added that the group plans to fight the decision, which could be finalized by mid-March, and would even pursue legal action to stop it if necessary.

However, Blaine Parker of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission told Oregon Live that he was disappointed that the corps chose to scale back their original plan, which would have called for the shooting of 16,000 birds to reduce the cormorant population. He wondered if the revised plan would adequately reduce the amount of juvenile fish consumed annually.

“There’s been a lot of work done to get fish passage projects at the dams,” he explained. “To have all that work done, and then have those fish run into yet another obstacle once they reach saltwater, is a tremendous loss.”

The plan is still several months from being enacted. Once the proposal receives final approval, it must be published in the federal registry for 30 days. Afterwards, the Fish and Wildlife Service must award permits, and workers must be hired to carry out the duties. Fredlund said that, if all goes according to plan, culling could begin as the birds return to the island this spring.

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Typically viewed as nothing more than wood-eating pests that need to be exterminated, termites can actually help prevent desertification in semi-arid drylands and other ecosystems, researchers from Princeton University reported Friday in the journal Science.

In their study, the authors found that the insect’s large dirt mounds can halt the spread of deserts into semi-arid ecosystems and agricultural lands, suggesting that termites could help prevent the impact of climate change in those regions and change the way that experts the potential effects of global warming on different ecosystems all over the world.

According to UPI reports, the Princeton researchers found that the structured patterns of plant life growth that was encouraged by termite mounds was similar to the design of vegetation that had been organized by diminishing rain fall totals. Both types of patterns feature round, polka-dot style circles of greenery that are backed by dry soil, according to the news agency.

Furthermore, the analysis revealed that both mechanisms could be active at the same time in these patterns. While small circles of organized plant life in otherwise dry areas could indicate that the ecosystem is at risk of desertification within the next few years, it could also indicate that termite mounds have helped fight off the drying effects associated with global warming.

Tiny critters, big impact

Termite mounds store nutrients and moisture, and their internal tunnels can help water better penetrate the soil in the parched savannas and grasslands of Africa, South America, and Asia, the study authors explained. This allows vegetation to grow on or around the mounts in parts of the world that would otherwise be in danger of collapsing into desert-like conditions.

“The rain is the same everywhere, but because termites allow water to penetrate the soil better, the plants grow on or near the mounds as if there were more rain,” corresponding author Corina Tarnita, a Princeton assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology, explained.

“The vegetation on and around termite mounds persists longer and declines slower,” she added. “Even when you get to such harsh conditions where vegetation disappears from the mounds, re-vegetation is still easier. As long as the mounds are there the ecosystem has a better chance to recover.”

Their research revealed that termite mounds can help preserve seeds and plant life, which in turn helps surrounding areas rebound faster once rainfall resumes. The findings indicate that recently proposed early-warning signs for the desertification of arid ecosystems could be too simple to adequately explain the complex system at work, added Jef Huisman, an aquatic microbiology professor and theoretical ecologist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Huisman, who was familiar with the Princeton study but was not directly involved in it, added that, “the coexistence of multiple patterns at these scales makes ecosystems more robust and less prone to collapse, and that is the significance of this study. In that sense, we have to adjust our models for drylands because these ecosystems are much more resistant to desertification than we previously believed.”

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Provided by Diana Lutz, Washington University in St. Louis

We’re so used to murder mysteries that we don’t even notice how mystery authors play with time. Typically the murder occurs well before the midpoint of the book, but there is an information blackout at that point and the reader learns what happened then only on the last page.

If the last page were ripped out of the book, physicist Kater Murch, PhD, said, would the reader be better off guessing what happened by reading only up to the fatal incident or by reading the entire book?

The answer, so obvious in the case of the murder mystery, is less so in world of quantum mechanics, where indeterminacy is fundamental rather than contrived for our reading pleasure.

Even if you know everything quantum mechanics can tell you about a quantum particle, said Murch, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, you cannot predict with certainty the outcome of a simple experiment to measure its state. All quantum mechanics can offer are statistical probabilities for the possible results.

The orthodox view is that this indeterminacy is not a defect of the theory, but rather a fact of nature. The particle’s state is not merely unknown, but truly undefined before it is measured. The act of measurement itself that forces the particle to collapse to a definite state.

In the Feb. 13 issue of Physical Review Letters, Kater Murch describes a way to narrow the odds. By combining information about a quantum system’s evolution after a target time with information about its evolution up to that time, his lab was able to narrow the odds of correctly guessing the state of the two-state system from 50-50 to 90-10.

It’s as if what we did today, changed what we did yesterday. And as this analogy suggests, the experimental results have spooky implications for time and causality—at least in microscopic world to which quantum mechanics applies.

Measuring a phantom

Until recently physicists could explore the quantum mechanical properties of single particles only through thought experiments, because any attempt to observe them directly caused them to shed their mysterious quantum properties.

But in the 1980s and 1990s physicists invented devices that allowed them to measure these fragile quantum systems so gently that they don’t immediately collapse to a definite state.

The device Murch uses to explore quantum space is a simple superconducting circuit that enters quantum space when it is cooled to near absolute zero. Murch’s team uses the bottom two energy levels of this qubit, the ground state and an excited state, as their model quantum system. Between these two states, there are an infinite number of quantum states that are superpositions, or combinations, of the ground and excited states.

The quantum state of the circuit is detected by putting it inside a microwave box. A few microwave photons are sent into the box, where their quantum fields interact with the superconducting circuit. So when the photons exit the box they bear information about the quantum system.

Crucially, these “weak,” off-resonance measurements do not disturb the qubit, unlike “strong” measurements with photons that are resonant with the energy difference between the two states, which knock the circuit into one or the other state.

A quantum guessing game

In Physical Review Letters, Murch describes a quantum guessing game played with the qubit.

“We start each run by putting the qubit in a superposition of the two states,” he said. “Then we do a strong measurement but hide the result, continuing to follow the system with weak measurements.”

They then try to guess the hidden result, which is their version of the missing page of the murder mystery.

“Calculating forward, using the Born equation that expresses the probability of finding the system in a particular state, your odds of guessing right are only 50-50,” Murch said. “But you can also calculate backward using something called an effect matrix. Just take all the equations and flip them around. They still work and you can just run the trajectory backward.

“So there’s a backward-going trajectory and a forward-going trajectory and if we look at them both together and weight the information in both equally, we get something we call a hindsight prediction, or “retrodiction.”

The shattering thing about the retrodiction is that it is 90 percent accurate. When the physicists check it against the stored measurement of the system’s earlier state it is right nine times out of 10.

Down the rabbit hole

The quantum guessing game suggests ways to make both quantum computing and the quantum control of open systems, such as chemical reactions, more robust. But it also has implications for much deeper problems in physics.

For one thing, it suggests that in the quantum world time runs both backward and forward whereas in the classical world it only runs forward.

“I always thought the measurement would resolve the time symmetry in quantum mechanics,” Murch said. “If we measure a particle in a superposition of states and it collapses into one of two states, well, that sounds like a process that goes forward in time.”

But in the quantum guessing experiment, time symmetry has returned. The improved odds imply the measured quantum state somehow incorporates information from the future as well as the past. And that implies that time, notoriously an arrow in the classical world, is a double-headed arrow in the quantum world.

“It’s not clear why in the real world, the world made up of many particles, time only goes forward and entropy always increases,” Murch said. “But many people are working on that problem and I expect it will be solved in a few years,” he said.

In a world where time is symmetric, however, is there such a thing as cause and effect? To find out, Murch proposes to run a qubit experiment that would set up feedback loops (which are chains of cause and effect) and try to run them both forward and backward.

“It takes 20 or 30 minutes to run one of these experiments,” Murch said, “several weeks to process it, and a year to scratch our heads to see if we’re crazy or not.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, “I take solace in the fact that we have a real experiment and real data that we plot on real curves.”

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

An ancient, bison-sized rodent likely used its massive incisors like elephant tusks, experts from the University of York and The Hull York Medical School (HYMS) claim in a new study.

As the researchers report in Wednesday’s online edition of the Journal of Anatomy, the creature, Josephoartigasia monesi, was a rodent that is a close cousin of the guinea pig and lived in South America approximately three million years ago.

It is the largest fossil rodent ever discovered, with an estimated body mass of 1000 kilograms (2200 pounds). Affectionately dubbed “Ratzilla” by freelance journalist Sid Perkins in an article published by Science, the creature is believed to be the largest rodent to have ever lived.

It also had gigantic and extremely powerful front teeth, according to Dr. Philip Cox.

Dr. Cox, a member of the Centre for Anatomical and Human Sciences (a joint research center run by the York Department of Archaeology and HYMS) used computer simulations to see just how powerful the bite of Josephoartigasia might have been.

While the bite forces would have been tremendous (approximately 1400 newtons, similar to that of a tiger), the researchers found that the incisors would have been robust enough to withstand nearly three times that force – an indication that the teeth may have been used for other purposes.

Perkins said that it is possible that this “megarodent” used its front teeth to dig up roots, to protect itself against predators, or as a weapon during battles over potential mates or territory, just as modern elephants do. A future analysis of microwear patterns on Josephoartigasia’s teeth may provide more information about the creature’s dietary habits, he added.

The research was conducted using CT scans of the specimen’s 53-centimeter-long skull, which was first described less than 10 years ago. Dr. Cox and his colleagues used that data to create a virtual reconstruction of the skull, then subjected it to finite element analysis, an technique used to predict stress and strain in a complex geometric object.

The software used in the process is the same used to analyze stress in airplane parts, Perkins said, and they modeled the lower jaw based on a close modern-day relative, the chinchilla. Based on the simulations, the researchers measured the overall bite force of the Josephoartigasia at 4,165 newtons, three times that of a crocodile, but just 1,400 at the tips of its front teeth.

“Predicted stresses across the skull were only minimally affected by changes to muscle forces and orientations, but revealed a reasonable safety factor in the strength of the skull,” the study authors wrote. “These results, combined with previous work, lead us to speculate that J. monesi was behaving in an elephant-like manner, using its incisors like tusks, and processing tough vegetation with large bite forces at the cheek teeth.”

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A team of researchers from the US and Argentina have discovered the first evidence that South American monkeys originated in Africa and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach their new home, according to research published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Scientists have long hypothesized that the origin story of the South American monkeys involved something to that effect, but such a suggestion was difficult to support without fossil data to back up those claims. The discovery of three new extinct monkeys from eastern Peru seems to indicate that primates now living in that region can trace their roots back to African ancestors.

Scientists weren’t monkeying around

Those fossils, which were first discovered by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County curator and study co-author Dr. Ken Campbell in 2010, were found in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. However, since they were so unusual to South America, it took two years of research to determine that they were actually the remains of a primitive monkey.

South America was an island continent for millions of years, and became isolated from Africa due to plate tectonics over 65 million years ago. Yet it somehow managed to become home to unfamiliar types of plants and animals, including monkeys and rodents whose remains appeared suddenly and mysteriously in the continent’s fossil record.

“The earliest phases of the evolutionary history of monkeys in South America have remained cloaked in mystery,” the museum explained. While experts have long believed that the creatures managed to survive a transatlantic journey from Africa, there had been little evidence to support these claims until recently.

Dr. Campbell has spent the past several years working alongside Argentinean paleontologists in eastern Peru, hoping to solve the mystery of the South American monkeys. He explained that fossils in the Amazon Basin are rare and hard to find, as work is limited to the dry season.

The proof is in the teeth

Previously, the oldest fossil records of South or Central American monkeys dated back 26 million years, but the new fossils indicate that monkeys actually arrived in the New World at least 10 million years earlier. Furthermore, the characteristics of these early monkey’s teeth are the first solid evidence that they somehow crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa.

According to the Daily Mail, the teeth of those creatures more closely resemble African primates of the era than other species found in South America. The new species of monkey, which has been named Perupithecus ucayaliensis, would have been a small creature that would have been about the same size as tamarins, with body no more than 10 inches long.

The researchers believe that Perupithecus would have most closely related to an extinct primate called Talahpithecus, which lived around 38-39 million years ago in what is now Libya. One complete upper molar and two incomplete teeth were found in a riverbed during a dry period in Santa Rosa in eastern Peru, according to the UK newspaper.

“’Numerous studies have focused on the possibility of primates crossing the Atlantic to reach South America from Africa,” the study authors wrote. “A similar means of arrival in South America has often been proposed for the hystricognath rodents, the dispersal of amphisbaenian and gekkotan lizards.”

“The discovery of these new primates brings the first appearance datum of caviomorph rodents and primates in South America back into close correspondence, but raises new questions about the timing and means of arrival of these two mammalian groups,” they added.

Now they’re just trying to figure out how they crossed the ocean. Did monkeys once sail the high seas? The world may never know.

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Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Police in Mongolia have a very strange case on their hands. They have in their possession the mummified body of monk which may be 200 years old, but which some people (other Buddhist monks) claim is not actually dead. This gives the Mongolian corpse cops something of a dilemma as the monk’s remains had been stolen and recovered. Do they treat the case as “necrotheft” if he is truly dead? Or as kidnap, if he really is alive?

Perhaps they should turn to Monty Python for the answer.

The police said the lama was discovered sitting in the full lotus position and was stolen to sell on the black market. They are carrying out forensic examinations on the remains, which have been been preserved in animal skin, probably cattle, camel, or horse.

Some Buddhist experts believe the monk is in a state of very deep meditation and a kind of post mortem suspended animation known as “tukdam”. If so, he may well be just one step away from becoming a true Buddha. Tukdam is normally said to lasts for hours, days, or even longer. The body is said to have no breath or heartbeat, but stays fresh and without rigor mortis.

Dr Barry Kerzin, a famous Buddhist monk and a physician to the Dalai Lama, told The Siberian Times, “I had the privilege to take care of some meditators who were in a tukdam state. If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks – which rarely happens – his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a ‘rainbow body’. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha.”

It all has something to do with the position he was in

The fact that the lama is sitting in the lotus position “vajra”, with the left hand open, and the right hand symbolizing the preaching of the Sutra, has led to the claims of him still being alive. Ganhugiyn Purevbata, from the Mongolian Institute of Buddhist Art at Ulaanbaatar Buddhist University, said “This is a sign that the Lama is not dead, but is in a very deep meditation according to the ancient tradition of Buddhist lamas.”

So just who is this ancient monk?

Best guesses seem to indicate that he was a teacher of Lama Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, Buddhist Lama of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

The mummified remains were found on January 27 in the Songinokhairkhan province of Mongolia. Aside from him possibly still being alive, the other explanation for his body’s state of preservation is the extreme cold. Mongolian winters can bring temperatures as low as minus 40 and, as the monk was found in a cave, it may have had some kind of cryogenic effect.

Han Solo gets it.

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Provided by Kim Ward, Michigan State University

Evolutionary researchers have determined that settling for “Mr. Okay” is a better evolutionary strategy than waiting for “Mr. Perfect.”

When studying the evolution of risk aversion, Michigan State University researchers found that it is in our nature – traced back to the earliest humans – to take the safe bet when stakes are high, such as whether or not we will mate.

“Primitive humans were likely forced to bet on whether or not they could find a better mate,” said Chris Adami, MSU professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and co-author of the paper.

“They could either choose to mate with the first, potentially inferior, companion and risk inferior offspring, or they could wait for Mr. or Ms. Perfect to come around,” he said. “If they chose to wait, they risk never mating.”

Adami and his co-author Arend Hintze, MSU research associate, used a computational model to trace risk-taking behaviors through thousands of generations of evolution with digital organisms. These organisms were programmed to make bets in high-payoff gambles, which reflect the life-altering decisions that natural organisms must make, as for example choosing a mate.

“An individual might hold out to find the perfect mate but run the risk of coming up empty and leaving no progeny,” Adami said. “Settling early for the sure bet gives you an evolutionary advantage, if living in a small group.”

Adami and his team tested many variables that influence risk-taking behavior and concluded that certain conditions influence our decision-making process. The decision must be a rare, once-in-a-lifetime event and also have a high payoff for the individual’s future – such as the odds of producing offspring.

How risk averse we are correlates to the size of the group in which we were raised. If reared in a small group – fewer than 150 people – we tend to be much more risk averse than those who were part of a larger community.

It turns out that primitive humans lived in smaller groups, about 150 individuals. Because resources tend to be more scarce in smaller communities, this environment helps promote risk aversion.

“We found that it is really the group size, not the total population size, which matters in the evolution of risk aversion,” Hintze said.

However, not everyone develops the same level of aversion to risk. The study also found that evolution doesn’t prefer one single, optimal way of dealing with risk, but instead allows for a range of less, and sometimes more-risky, behaviors to evolve.

“We do not all evolve to be the same,” Adami said. “Evolution creates a diversity in our acceptance of risk, so you see some people who are more likely to take bigger risks than others. We see the same phenomenon in our simulations.”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Possibly the latest evidence of climate change, a new report from researchers at the University of Hawaii has found that heavy rainfall events are becoming more common on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The new study, published in the International Journal of Climatology, examined extreme precipitation events and the regularity with which they take place on three islands in Hawaii – Oahu, Maui and Hawaii Island.

While heavy rainfall incidents have become more regular throughout the last 50 years on the Big Island, the reverse is detected for Oahu and Maui to the west, according to study data taken from 24 weather stations on the three islands. On Maui, rainfall extremes have become more uncommon in the last 50 years. This study also showed an east-to-west difference in how precipitation patterns are affected by a shifting climate.

“In the past, the frequency of heavy rainfall events was assumed to be fairly constant,” said Pao-Shin Chu, professor of atmospheric sciences at UHM. “However, because climate is changing, the assumption of stable precipitation climatology is questionable and needs to be reconsidered.”

“Changes in the frequency of heavy rain events have repercussions on ecological systems, property, transportation, flood hazards, and engineering design – including sewage systems, reservoirs and buildings,” Chu added.

This study also gave clues on why and how the regularity of precipitation extremes has evolved over the last five decades. Chu and Chen discovered a greater amount of extreme rain events during La Nina years and the contrary was true during El Nino years.

A study published in 2013 revealed that climate change caused El Nino to be highly active during the 20^th century.

Using records of tropical tree rings, the study team found that El Nino was unusually active in the late 20th century compared to all other times over the past seven centuries. Previous research has shown that tree rings can act as a fairly reliable record of past climate events. The study included more than 2,200 tree-ring chronologies representing 700 years of data.

“In the year after a large tropical volcanic eruption, our record shows that the east-central tropical Pacific is unusually cool, followed by unusual warming one year later. Like greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols perturb the Earth’s radiation balance. This supports the idea that the unusually high (El Nino) activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming” said study author Jinbao Li, a scientist working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“Many climate models do not reflect the strong (El Nino) response to global warming that we found,” added co-author Shang-Ping Xie, an oceanography professor at University of California at San Diego. “This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases. Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future (EL NINO) activity. If this trend of increasing (El Nino) activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts.”

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