An ice sheet in West Antarctica previously found to be capable of increasing the sea level by as much as 10 feet underwent unexpectedly significant melting last year, and an unexpected rainfall is at least partially to blame, according to a newly-published Nature Communications paper.

In fact, the study authors found that a Texas-sized area of the Ross Ice Shelf – the largest chunk of floating ice on Earth – experienced an unusual degree of thawing in 2016, with pools of water remaining on the surface for up to 15 days at a time, The Verge reported on Thursday.

The melting is being blamed on a particularly strong El Niño event which, over the course of the past two years brought unexpectedly warm and moist air into the region. The heat, along with the unexpected rainfall, causes meltwater to pool and persist – which is problematic because it could cause thawing to accelerate, the website explained.

“It provides us with a possible glimpse of the future,” study author David Bromwich, a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center and Polar Meteorology Group at Ohio State University, explained during an interview with the Washington Post.

“You probably have read these analyses of West Antarctica,” he added. “Many people think it’s slowly disintegrating right now, and it’s mostly thought to be from the warm water eating away at the bottom of critical ice shelves. Well, that’s today. In the future, we could see action at the surface of these ice shelves as well from surface melting. So that makes them potentially much more unstable.”

Event could demonstrate how future melting will occur

As The Verge pointed out, this is not the first time that an El Niño event has caused melting on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, but this time, Bromwich and his colleagues noted that it lasted far longer. That, in turn, could cause surface snow to melt, and combined with the unanticipated rainfall, the phenomenon could increase the risk of the ice shelf fracturing.

The study authors tracked the melting event from afar using a monitoring station they had set up in West Antarctica, according to the Post. That station detected a marked increase in atmospheric temperatures, as well as the presence of clouds containing large amounts of moisture. Bromwich then used satellite and microwave data to determine the event’s impact on the ice shelf.

They determined that liquid water had mixed into snow covering the landscape, creating slush. For now, the additional rainfall and moisture does not appear to have had any adverse effect on the Ross Ice Shelf, which has since become fully frozen again, the researchers noted. However, the event has caused some concern, as it fits with a previously published study which suggested that major ice loss in the region could increase the sea level by four feet this century.

In that study, Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and David Pollard of Penn State University indicated that while melting in West Antarctica is currently caused mostly by warming waters from below, the phenomenon could speed up due to liquid water from above seeping downward into the ice shelves and causing them to break apart.

“These big melting events that we were studying in this paper is in exactly one of the critical areas that the DeConto and Pollard paper modeled big retreat in the Antarctic ice sheet,” noted Bromwich. “So that’s a big significance here. It kind of shows how these big events could take place in the real world, not just the modeled world… I would say this shows in perhaps a more realistic way, how melting could proceed in the future.”

—–

Image credit: Getty

A study published online this week in the Journal of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam details the first ever documented sighting of a two-headed porpoise, but much to the chagrin of the scientifically-minded, the paper’s authors were unable to directly examine the creature.

Why, you ask? Because, as National Geographic reported on Wednesday, the fishermen who accidentally caught the deceased specimen in their beamtrawl net feared that it would be illegal to keep it, so they quickly took a few pictures of it and threw it back into the ocean.

Fortunately, they did get in touch with researchers at the National History Museum Rotterdam, who carefully studied photos of the two-headed harbor porpoise in the hope that they could gain new insight about partial twinning (parapagus dicephalus) in marine life, the Telegraph said.

As study author Erwin Kompanje, curator of mammals at the museum, told the Washington Post, parapagus dicephalus is extremely rare among cetaceans. In fact, only nine confirmed cases have been documented in dolphin, whales and porpoises over the last 20 years, he said. “Even normal twinning is rare; there’s no room in the womb of the mother for harboring more than one baby.”

Specimen was lost to science, likely for good, author said

Despite the fact that they were unable to directly examine the porpoise, they were able to discern from the photographs that the creature was male and a newborn, because it still had tiny hairs on its upper lip that typically fall out after birth, its tail had not yet become still enough to allow it to swim, according to Nat Geo and the Telegraph.

The creature also still contained an umbilical opening and its dorsal fins were not yet erect, the researchers said – further evidence that the creature likely died shortly after birth. In most cases, conjoined twin cetaceans tend to be undeveloped fetuses (as was the case of a specimen caught in a dolphin’s womb in Japan in the 1970s), the Post noted.

However, Kompanje is fairly convinced that this latest specimen was born alive, and that it had died soon thereafter, possibly due to the heart’s inability to pump enough blood to keep both of the heads alive. Unfortunately, any chance to gain additional information through a CT or MRI scan was lost when the fishermen who captured the creature panicked and returned it to the sea.

“The crew of the fishing vessel thought it would be illegal to keep the dead porpoise and they threw the specimen back into the sea. Fortunately, first a series of photographs was taken,” he and his colleagues wrote. “The specimen, however, is lost for science and natural history.”

“They thought it was illegal to collect it. They made four photographs and threw it back into the sea. Back into oblivion,” Kompanje lamented to the Post, adding that he did not expect that there would ever be another chance to study this specimen – or any others like it. “For a cetologist, this a real horror,” he told the newspaper.

—–

Image credit:

The American people are “under siege” from an “active disinformation campaign” in regards to climate science – a campaign perpetuated by fossil fuel companies and others “who have a profit motive,” former NASA chief scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan told a British newspaper on Thursday.

Speaking with The Guardian prior to an appearance at the Cheltenham Science Festival late last week, Dr. Stofan, who left the US space agency last December, said that the spread of fake news on the issue had left many Americans oblivious to the real, growing threat of climate change.

“We are under siege by fake information that’s being put forward by people who have a profit motive,” she told Hannah Devlin, a science correspondent with the UK publication. “Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it’s very hard to dislodge it.”

The spread of false information, primarily by oil and coal companies that have a vested interest in preventing regulations limiting carbon emissions, has been increasing countered by scientists who have launched a grassroots effort to spread climate research, she noted. However, she said, experts still face an uphill battle in making sure that the public has the facts on the issue.

“I’m always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward. When they say ‘It could be volcanoes’ or ‘the climate always changes’… to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry,” Dr. Stofan said. She said that much of the problem is due to an “erosion of people’s ability to scrutinize information.”

Don’t count on an interplanetary migration to bail us out

Dr. Stofan’s resignation in December had nothing to do directly with the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent ascension of Donald Trump – a noted climate science skeptic – to the office of chief executive. Even so, she told The Guardian, “I’m glad I’m not there now.”

Despite any issues she might have with the current administration’s handling of climate change, the former NASA scientist said that she was pleased with the continued commitment to the Mars program in the most recent national budget. She also expressed relief that cuts to NASA’s Earth science programs were relatively small ($167 million from a $1.75 billion budget).

She also dismissed the notion put forth by many – including the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk – that humanity should begin searching for a way to colonize another world, should we screw up the planet we’re living on beyond repair. “I don’t see a mass transfer of humanity to Mars, ever,” she cautioned, telling The Guardian, “Job one is to keep this planet habitable. I’d hate us to lose focus on that.”

Dr. Stofan was appointed chief scientist of NASA on August 25, 2013 after working as the vice president of Maryland-based Proxemy Research and as an honorary professor in the department of Earth sciences at University College London. Her research focused on the geology of Earth, Mars, Venus and Saturn’s moon Titan, the agency said. She also worked on the Cassini mission, the Mars Express Mission’s MARSIS sounder and the proposed Titan Mare Explorer.

—–

Image credit: Unsplash

In research that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the current political climate in the US, a new study discovered that supporters of either candidate in the last Presidential election were more likely to accept new data if it agreed with their desired outcome.

Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, corresponding author Ben Tappin, a postgraduate researcher in the Royal Holloway, University of London psychology department, and his colleagues examined how supporters of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton changed their predictions regarding the election when presented with new information.

They recruited more than 800 individuals and had each indicate who they wanted to see win the 2016 Presidential election, as well as who they believed would win. Afterwards, each participant was presented with new information that was either consistent or inconsistent with their desired outcome, and again asked which candidate they believed would ultimately win the election.

What they found, the authors explained, is that the participants were more likely to update their predictions if the information was consistent with their desired outcome, and were less likely to change their beliefs if the data was inconsistent with their preferred result.

“The mechanisms by which people revise their beliefs about political matters are nuanced and complex,” Tappin said during an interview with PsyPost. “Our study provides evidence for this complexity: specifically, by showing that biases related to our prior beliefs and our desires are dissociable, and this may have implications for political belief revision.”

Desirability bias stronger than confirmation bias, study finds

At the heart of the research is the conflict between the two primary theories used to explain the revision of human beliefs: desirability bias (the tendency to place greater value on information he/she wants to believe) and confirmation bias (the tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs and to be more dismissive of information that counters said beliefs).

Tappin and his colleagues explained that his team’s study revealed “a robust desirability bias” among supporters of both candidates, indicating that they were more likely to update what they believed would happen if the new information they received was consistent with their desired outcome – regardless of whether or not that information was consistent with their prior beliefs.

Conversely, they said, evidence of an independent confirmation bias was “limited.” Most Trump supporters who believed that their candidate would lose the election did not assign greater value to polls that seemed to confirm that belief, PsyPost explained. Likewise, Clinton supporters who believed that she would lose did not assign more weight to polls that seemed to prove them right, apparently suggesting that political polarization in the US is mainly due to desirability bias.

“Given the well-known polarization and disagreement that exist over certain issues in the realm of politics, we were interested in what factors cause people to revise their beliefs in the political domain,” Tappin told the website. “The aim of our study was to try and tease these two biases apart to get a clearer picture of what may be driving belief revision in the political domain.”

“Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se,” he and his co-authors added in a story published last month by the New York Times. “This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.”

—–

Image credit: Unsplash

Remains of an ancient type of baby birth recently found encased in nearly 100-million-year-old amber is the most complete specimen of its kind discovered to date, according to the authors of a new study published online earlier this week in the journal Gondwana Research.

According to National Geographic, the hatchling was discovered by a team of US, Canadian and Chinese researchers and belonged to a group of birds known as the enantiornithes, which died off approximately 65 million years ago. Not only is it the most complete fossil of a bird from the age of the dinosaurs, it is the most complete fossil ever discovered in Burmese amber, they said.

Co-lead researchers Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences and Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and their colleagues, said that the head, neck, wing, tail and feet of the hatchling were preserved in the fossil, which was originally discovered in northern Myanmar. The bird was likely just a few days old when it fell into a pool of sap from a conifer tree, where it wound up being preserved until the amber encasing it was found, New Scientist noted.

Roughly half of the bird’s body was preserved in the fossil, which is 99-million-years-old. Skin and a clawed foot of the creature can easily be seen without assistance, Nat Geo said, and white, brown and dark grey-colored feathers were also preserved in the amber.

Xing, McKellar and their colleagues have nicknamed the young enantiornithine “Belone” after the Burmese name given to the amber-hued Oriental skylark, the publication added. The authors believe that the discovery will help shed new light on the differences between modern birds and ancient ones, which had clawed wings, jaws and teeth, according to New Scientist.

No usable DNA preserved by the amber, authors said

The authors of the new study did not actually find the fossil themselves – the amber encasing it was actually collected by a museum in China several years ago. Once that museum realized what they had, they contacted Xing, who assembled a team to study the specimen, the website said.

Their analysis revealed that the enantiornithine hatchling already possessed a complete set of flight feathers on its wings, but little plumage on the rest of its body. The discovery, the authors said, is new evidence to support the believe that these ancient birds were born with the ability to fly and were, in turn, less dependent on their parents than most modern birds, said Nat Geo.

Initially, Xing said that her team only saw the creature’s foot and some feathers, but additional CT imaging revealed the rest of the remains, which he called “a big, big, big surprise.” McKellar added that “the most complete and detailed view we’ve ever had,” telling New Scientist, “seeing something this complete is amazing. It’s just stunning.”

“Belone” is currently on display at the Hupoge Amber Museum, Nat Geo said, and later on this month it will be transferred to the Shanghai Museum of Natural History, where it will be part of a special exhibit that will run through the end of July. Despite the well-preserved nature, there is no usable enantiornithine encased in the amber, meaning that there’s zero change of this ancient bird species making a comeback, Xing told New Scientist.

—–

Image credit:  (Lida Xing)

Newly discovered fossils belonging to “early… anatomically modern humans” discovered at a site in Morocco are 100,000 years older than the previously known Homo sapiens remains, new research published online earlier this week in the journal Nature have revealed.

According to the Washington Post, the earliest known Homo sapiens remains had dated back to approximately 200,000 years ago, but analysis of fossils found alongside stone tools at the Jebel Irhoud archaeological site have been dated to between 300,000 and 350,000 years old.

Credit: Jean-Jacques Hublin, MPI-EVA Leipzig

The newfound bones feature a combination of primitive and modern traits, and indicate that by around 300,000 years ago, key changes to our species’ morphology had already taken place, lead researcher Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and his colleagues reported in one of two papers published Wednesday.

While the Jebel Irhoud site was originally discovered back in the 1960s, the fossils described in the latest studies were found as part of a new expedition at the Moroccan location that started in 2004 and increased the number of fossils discovered there from six to 22, the authors noted.

Those fossils, which included skulls, teeth and long bones belonging to at least five individuals, were dated using a technique known as thermoluminescence, which involved heating flints found in the same mineral deposits. The age of those flints was determined to be roughly 300,000 years old, suggesting that our species emerged 100,000 years earlier than previously believed.

Modern facial morphology likely emerged early in our history

As part of their research, Hublin’s team set out to reconstruct a skull using various fossils from different specimens found at the site, the Post explained. They used a face and braincase found in 1961, a second brain case found in 1962, and a partial face discovered in 2007. The result was described as a skull with a small face shaped similar to those found in modern humans.

“Our findings suggest that modern human facial morphology was established early on in the history of our species, and that brain shape, and possibly brain function, evolved within the Homo sapiens lineage,” study co-author Philipp Gunz, also from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said in a statement.

Frank Brown, a University of Utah geologist and author of the Kibish reanalysis who was not involved in the new research, said that the conclusion of the new study makes sense in light of the “near-but-not-quite modernity” of the Jebel Irhoud remains. “They’re not Homo neanderthalensis. They’re not Homo erectus. They’re not Homo anybody else,” he told the Post, adding that they are not quite modern humans either. “The authors were careful to say that the remains are on their way to being anatomically modern.”

Furthermore, the fossils were discovered with stone tools and animal bones that appear to have been hunted, the researchers said in a statement. The stone tools linked to those remains appear to belong to the Middle Stone Age, and many of them were created from high-quality flint that appeared to have been brought to the site from other locations. Such tools likely helped nearly-modern humans spread throughout the continent of Africa, the authors noted.

“The stone artifacts from Jebel Irhoud look very similar to ones from deposits of similar age in east Africa and in southern Africa” Max Planck Institute archaeologist Shannon McPherron said. “It is likely that the technological innovations of the Middle Stone Age in Africa are linked to the emergence of Homo sapiens.”

—–

Image credit:

Although its ancestors probably did have feathers, as recent research has suggested, a new study published this week in the journal Biology Letters has concluded that the Tyrannosaurus rex did not, and was in fact covered in scales similar to those found on modern-day lizards.

In the new study, Phil R. Bell, a paleontologist from the University of New England in Australia, and his colleagues analyzed skin impressions from a T.rex skeleton found in Montana, as well as from four related species (Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Tarbosaurus) late in the tyrannosaur’s history, according to BBC News and the Washington Post.

While recent studies had found that two tyrannosauroids that preceded the T. rex by around 50 million years (Dilong and Yutyrannus) were covered in feathers, the new analysis of the T. rex itself revealed that the creature’s abdomen, chest, pelvis, neck, and tail were covered exclusively in scales. If it had feathers, they were limited to its back or spines, the authors said.

“With all the hype about feathered theropods, it’s easy to forget that actually, most dinosaurs had scaly, reptilian-like skin,” Bell told the Post via email. However, he noted, the new study “shows without question that T. rex had scaly skin.” The reasons for this trait remain a mystery, although size may have played a role.

“Big animals have trouble shedding excess heat, so being covered in feathers is not a good idea unless you live somewhere cold,” he explained. However, while Dilong was much smaller than the T. rex, Yutyrannus was closer to the size of the larger dinosaur, lived in similar climates and still had feathers. “So what’s the reason for this difference? We really don’t know.”

Some researchers dispute the research’s conclusion, however

The debate over whether T. rex was covered in scales or feathers can be traced back to a lack of fossil evidence, according to BBC News. One of the reason tyrannosaur skin is rare, Bell told the Post, is that paleontologists long preferred to break through it to get to the creature’s bones.

Bell and his colleagues reported that skin patches from the neck, pelvis, and tail of the Montana-based T. rex, along with similar findings on its relatives, indicate that their outer covering (fossil integument) “possessed scaly reptilian-like skin.” Not all researchers are convinced, however.

University of London paleontologist David Hone, who was not involved in the research, told the Post that the research “doesn’t rule out feathers on… tyrannosaurs, but does suggest they lacked a full coat of feathers.” University of Edinburgh paleontologist Dr. Steve Brusatte agreed.

“I don’t think we can assume that T. rex lacked feathers just because some fossil skeletons have skin impressions that are scaly,” Dr. Brusatte told BBC News. “It takes inconceivable good luck to preserve feathers in fossils. Just because we don’t see them doesn’t mean they weren’t there. So I don’t think we need to throw out the image of a big fluffy T. rex quite yet.”

—–

Image credit: Peter Larson, Black Hills Institute

Sad news for those of us hoping to one-day roam around a real Jurassic Park: scientists at the University of Manchester have demonstrated that collagen discovered approximately a decade ago in Tyrannosaurus rex fossils was a modern contaminant, not a prehistoric protein.

Writing in the May 31 edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,  Dr. Michael Buckley from the university’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and his colleagues explained that they re-analyzed protein sequences (peptides) discovered ten years ago in a 68-million-year-old T. rex fossil and found that they belonged to more modern creatures.

Initially, the purported discovery of dinosaur collagen “sent a shockwave around the world, both among scientists and the public. It appeared that fiction was now being converted to fact through the application of new techniques,” Dr. Buckley said in a statement. Furthermore, those findings appeared to be corroborated by the same team in fossils belonging to a Brachylophosaurus.

However, as the Manchester researchers pointed out, the research was not universally accepted, as some experts believed that the specimens could have been contaminated while being analyzed in the laboratory. So Dr. Buckley’s team launched an investigation to determine if the supposed dinosaur peptides may have actually belonged to more modern animals.

Collagen survival still not proven beyond 3.5 million years

Specifically, they knew that the laboratories where the original collagen discoveries were made also used ostriches and alligators in their research, so they analyzed bone samples from a trio of different ostriches and found that they strongly matched peptides detected in both the T. rex and the Brachylophosaurus specimens.

“Our work set out to identify the collagen fingerprints for both ostrich and alligator and was not intending to debunk the previous studies,” Dr. Buckley explained. “However, we soon realized that our results were pulling the rug from beneath the paradigm that collagen might survive the ravages of deep time.”

The findings establish that cross-contamination could not be eliminated as a possible source for the protein peptides, and emphasize the need for enhanced authentication criteria when trying to identify biomolecular sequence information from fossilized material, the researchers noted. Thus far, they said, the survival of collagen beyond 3.5 million years has yet to be verified.

“We must never forget that when results show us something that we really want to see, that we make sure of our interpretation,” said co-author Phil Manning, a professor of natural history at the University of Manchester. “The alleged discovery of protein sequences in dinosaur bones has led many unsuccessful attempts to repeat these remarkable claims. It seems we were trying to reproduce something that was beyond the current detection limits of our science.”

People who have a general appreciation for artistic endeavors, adventure, curiosity, imagination and emotion tend to see things different than those who tend to be less creative, according to new research published in the June 2017 edition of the Journal of Research in Personality.

While it comes as no surprise that people who score highly in the personality trait known as openness to experience (or simply openness) bring a different perspective to the world, study authors Luke Smillie and Anna Antinori from the University of Melbourne reported that their findings literally see things different than the average man or woman.

Openness, they explained, is the ability to see new possibilities in even familiar environments, and is characterized by a cognitive flexibility that allows an individual to find new and novel uses for mundane objects. Those who score his in the category in personality tests are typically more creative and willing to examine things from multiple angles, the researchers noted.

Yet, as they wrote in an article published by The Conversation, those who tend to be open don’t merely have a different perspective – they literally see things differently, according to the results of a visual perception test conducted by Smillie, Antinori and co-author Olivia Carter.

Similarity suggests that common neural processes may be involved

Specifically, Smillie, Antinori and Carter investigated whether or not openness was associated with a visual perception phenomenon known as binocular rivalry, which occurs when a pair of different images are presented to each eye simultaneously. To the observer, the images seem to periodically change from one to the other, and then back again, the authors explained.

However, at times the observer will see a combination of both images – a phenomenon called “rivalry suppression” where both images are consciously visible at the same time. Rivalry suppression, the researchers noted, is “almost like a ‘creative’ solution to the problem presented by the two incompatible stimuli.”

They conducted a series of experiments, and found that open people tended to see the combined or fused images for longer periods of time than the average individual. Furthermore, they learned that open people reported seeing the “rivalry suppression” version of the images for even longer periods of time while they reporting being in a positive frame of mind (which previous research has shown can boost creativity).

“We [have] provided the first evidence that individuals reporting greater openness to experience may also have characteristically different low-level visual perceptual experiences,” the authors wrote in their study. In light of the “apparent similarity” between the “higher cognitive features” associated with openness and the “lower-level” visual features described in the new paper, they believe that future studies should investigate if the same neural processes are involved in both.

—–

Image credit: Unsplash/JJ Ying