Team finds ‘alien’ microbe that feeds on cosmic rays
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Nearly all organisms on Earth require carbon, oxygen, and sunlight to survive, but the discovery of an unusual microbe that thrives deep within a South African gold mine has experts wondering if living organisms might have adapted to survive on seemingly uninhabitable planets.
In research published this week in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Dimitra Atri, an astrobiologist and computational physicist at the Seattle, Washington-based Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, proposes that rogue planets located too far away from a host star to benefit from their life could potentially be home to life that feeds off of cosmic radiation.
According to Science Magazine and Popular Science, Atri’s hypothesis is based on the existence of the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator, the so-called “gold mine bug” that live at depths of nearly three kilometers in an environment devoid of light and oxygen. Instead of using energy from the sun to survive, the microbe feeds off radioactive uranium found in the depths of the mines calls home, indicating that such adaptations are possible.
Audaxviator “really grabbed my attention because it’s completely powered by radioactive substances,” Atri explained to Science. “Who’s to say life on other worlds doesn’t do the same thing?” He added that it “can’t be ruled out that life like this could exist” in other corners of the universe, and that somewhere, organisms are using cosmic rays to thrive.
Mars deemed the most likely candidate to support such life
Here on Earth, living organisms typically gather the energy they need through photosynthesis (the process of collecting energy from sunlight and using it to convert water and carbon dioxide into food, common in plants and some bacteria) or by feeding off of plants or animals to acquire the energy that those organisms have already converted and stored.
In D. audaxviator’s case, however, it draws energy from the radioactivity of rocks located deep in the mines where it lives, according to Science. As the element decays, radiation from its nuclei break down sulfur and water molecules, producing molecular fragments like hydrogen peroxide that are excited with internal energy.
The bacteria gathers those molecules, drains the energy that they contain, then releases them, using most of the energy to power its internal and reproductive processes and the rest to repair damage caused by the radiation itself. In his new study, Atri argues that an extraterrestrial life form could use a similar system, but instead of harnessing energy from uranium, it would take radiation from energetic particles known as galactic cosmic rays (GCRs).
GCRs are everywhere – including here on Earth. However, our atmosphere and magnetic field prevent most of them from affecting us on the surface. That’s not necessarily the case on planets such as Mars, which are more susceptible to GCRs due to their thin atmospheres and the lack of magnetic fields. Atri believes that these rays could reach the surface of some worlds with enough energy to power small, simple organisms similar to the “gold mine bug.”
As part of his research, he conducted a series of simulations that confirmed that even a small but steady shower of GCRs would be sufficient to provide enough energy to keep a microbe alive on most planets in the solar system (Earth excluded). He went on to suggest that Mars would be the best candidate to support such life, due to its rocky Earth-like composition and the likelihood that it contains at least trace amounts of water.
Hubble spots dying star ejecting massive ‘space cannonballs’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Space pirates may not be a real thing (yet) but apparently space cannonballs are, according to new research published in a recent edition of The Astrophysical Journal which describes volleys of superhot plasma blobs a dying star has been shooting off for centuries.
As researchers from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California explain in a statement, these fireballs originate from the star known as V Hydrae, a red giant about 1,200 light-years from Earth that has lost at least half of its mass to space during its final days.
Using Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), the JPL researchers observed the V Hydrae system for an 11-year period from 2002 to 2004, and from 2011 to 2013. They found a series of enormous blobs with temperatures exceeding 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit (9,400 Celsius) or nearly twice that of the sun. They went on to create a detailed map of their locations.
However, the gas blobs, each of which are said to be twice as massive as Mars traveling through space at speeds that would allow them to go from Earth to the moon in just half an hour, could not have actually come from the star itself. In fact, some of them originated from as far as 37 billion miles (60 million km) away from V Hydrae.
This graphic shows how the binary-star system launches balls of plasma into space. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI))
So where did these so-called ‘space cannonballs’ come from?
Rather, the JPL researchers believe that an unseen companion star is responsible for the plasma volleys, which have come once every 8.5 years for at least the last 400 years, according to their estimates. Said companion would have to be traveling in an elliptical orbit that brings it close to V Hydrae on a regular basis, where it consumes material that settles into its disk.
As the companion star continues along its orbit, it tends to fire off these plasma blobs at speeds of up to 500,000 mph. These gas balls expand and cool as they move further away, and although they cannot be detected in visible light, observations collected in sub-millimeter wavelengths in 2004 reveal that they have been launched since at least 1986 and perhaps even as far back as 400 years ago.
“We knew this object had a high-speed outflow from previous data, but this is the first time we are seeing this process in action,” explained Raghvendra Sahai, a researcher at JPL and the lead author of the August paper. “We suggest that these gaseous blobs produced during this late phase of a star’s life help make the structures seen in planetary nebulae.”
“The observations show the blobs moving over time,” Sahai said. Using the data they collected, the JPL team was able to develop a model of a companion star with an accretion disk to explain the ejection of these superhot gas balls. “This model provides the most plausible explanation,” he continued, “because we know that the engines that produce jets are accretion disks.”
“Red giants don’t have accretion disks, but many most likely have companion stars, which presumably have lower masses because they are evolving more slowly,” Shai concluded. “The model we propose can help explain the presence of bipolar planetary nebulae, the presence of knotty jet-like structures in many of these objects, and even multipolar planetary nebulae. We think this model has very wide applicability.”
Humans aren’t the only great apes capable of guessing what others are thinking – chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans have also demonstrated the predict another’s beliefs, even in instances when they know that said belief is mistaken, according to researchpublished on Friday.
As Science explained in a separate report, the study authors conducted a classic experiment to see if non-human primates had a trait known as the “theory of mind”, or the ability to attribute desires, knowledge, or intentions to others.
In such experiments, children see someone hide a chocolate bar and then leave the room. Once they exit, a second individual sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, then guesses where the first person will look for the bar. If they predict that the first individual will look in the original hiding place, they pass the test and demonstrate an ability to understand a person’s thought processes.
This ability, which involves predicting another person’s beliefs even when they are false and do not match reality, has long been believed to be a distinctly human characteristic. However, in the new study, researchers from Duke University and an international team of colleagues show how three other species of great apes also appear to grasp the concept of “false belief.”
More than half passed the experiment, according to the researchers
Lead author Christopher Krupenye, who works as an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke, and his colleagues filmed a scene featuring a man in a generic apelike costume stealing a rock from a man, then hiding it in one of two boxes and scaring off his victim. Once the victim left, the costumed man first moves it to the other box, then leaves with it. Check it out here:
Normally, people involved in such experiments would predict that when the victim returned, he would search for the rock in the first box, which is where it was when he originally left, Science explained. To determine whether or not other species of primates would do likewise, the authors showed them the footage while using high-tech eye-tracking technology to follow their gazes.
A total of 30 animals (14 chimpanzees, nine bonobos, and seven orangutans) were shown the video, and 22 of them looked directly at the two boxes when the victim came back to the scene after being chased off. More than half (17) of the subjects stared directly at the first box, where the costumed man had originally hidden the rock. These eye movements revealed that the apes correctly guessed that the man would open the box where he had last seen the rocks, even when they knew that it was no longer there, Krupenye’s team told the journal.
Similar results were obtained when the researchers had another group of 40 apes view a second, slightly different film. The apes “reliably look in anticipation of an agent acting on a location where he falsely believes an object to be, even though the apes themselves know that the object is no longer there,” the authors wrote. “Our results suggest that great apes also operate, at least on an implicit level, with an understanding of false beliefs.”
However, as Krupenye told Science, while he and his fellow researchers have demonstrated that nonhuman primates “can predict others’ behaviors, which is a sophisticated ability” that had not been attributed to their species before, there is still work to do before they can definitively claim that apes are capable of understanding the concept of false beliefs. The researchers said that they plan to devise a behavioral scenario that calls upon the apes to put this knowledge to the test.
Study shows that tiny Tarsiers are our evolutionary cousins
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
The size of a mouse, with massive eyes and a taste for meat, tarsiers are unusual animals. They are also our remote cousins, according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications.
In the study, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis sequenced and reviewed the tarsier genome. The team concluded that tarsiers are on an essential branch of the primate evolutionary tree – on the same branch as monkeys, great apes, and humans.
“We sequenced the tarsier not only to determine where they fit in primate evolution, but because their physiology, anatomy, and feeding behavior are very unique,” study author Wesley Warren, an associate professor of genetics at the school, said in a news release.
Tarsiers are very unusual animals, but they aren’t that far removed from humans, geneticially speaking.
The place of tarsiers among primates has been a source of contention. Their teeth and jaws are more like that of “wet-nosed” primates such as lemurs, but their eyes and noses are like those of “dry-nosed” primates, including monkeys and humans.
By sequencing the entire genome of a tarsier, the study team put tarsiers squarely in the dry-nosed category.
The scientists reviewed genetic sequences referred to as transposons, or “jumping genes,” which can leap from one section of the genome to a different section, often replicating themselves in the process. Over time, transposons lose the capacity to jump. Newer transposons can leap into older transposons, but not the other way around. By examining which transposons were set into others, the scientists could figure out when certain families of transposons lost the capability to jump and thus date the various groups of transposons.
The scientists examined the transposon families of tarsiers, wet-nosed primates and dry-nosed primates, including humans. Tarsiers shared newer transposon families with humans, and just the oldest ones with wet-nosed primates, suggesting that tarsiers belong with us.
Finding Shifting Genes
By contrasting gene sequences from tarsiers with those found in other primates, the scientists discovered 192 genes that are shifting quicker or slower than what is taking place in other primates. These genes probably are associated with the tarsiers’ strange traits, the researchers said.
The team also looked at scientific literature to identify human diseases linked with those genes and discovered 47 diseases. Approximately a quarter were associated with vision and a different 25 percent were linked to musculoskeletal complications.
“The tarsier genes that display unique alterations can give us a clue into human diseases involving the same genes,” Warren said. “If an amino acid has been uniquely changed and it is putatively associated with the tarsier’s novel musculature, maybe it’s an important part of the protein and worthy of a closer look when linked to human disease.”
The researchers said they’d like to get DNA from various tarsier species and populations to assess the health of the tarsier population and conduct other studies.
“If we can sequence the genome of other tarsiers, we can measure the population diversity. A population with a greater amount of diversity should be more capable of surviving changes in its environment,” Warren said. “It will help us determine how endangered they really are so we can implement measures to better protect them.”
The ‘cap’ for human life is 115 years of age, study finds
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Advancements in science and medicine have helped people live longer and longer over the last several hundred years, but new research published this week in the journal Naturesuggests that no matter what we do, it is unlikely that most people will make it past the age of 115.
According to CBS News, medical breakthroughs have not only vastly improved our life expectancy, but records of the oldest people have also steadily increased over that time, leading to speculation that humans don’t have a “maximum age”. Could we live to 150, 200, 300 years old or longer?
Unfortunately not, say Dr. Jan Vijg, a professor and chair of genetics of at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and his colleagues. By analyzing demographic data from around the world, they found that “improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100” and that “the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.”
To support their argument, they note that the age of the oldest person to ever live has not risen since 1997, when a French woman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122. Based on the results of the new study, her record will likely not be broken anytime soon, Live Science noted. In fact, the study authors told BBC News that the odds of finding one person who reached the age of 125 were so poor you’d have to search on 10,000 planet Earths just to find one.
‘Almost impossible’ that most people will make it past 115
Vijg and his colleagues analyzed data from the Human Mortality Database, which includes age-related information from countries all over the world. They found that in at least 40 nations and territories, the number of people living to the age of 70 has increased since 1900, indicating that the overall life expectancy of the average person has gone up over the past 100-plus years.
That being said, the researchers speculated that if there was no maximum age, then most of the increases in survival rate should have involved men and women who were the oldest, Live Science explained. The data showed otherwise, however. In fact, survival rates among those in the oldest age groups have remained stagnant since 1980, suggesting that there may be a natural limit to how long a person can live.
The study authors also examined how old the longest-lived people were when they died, with a focus on deaths occurring in the US, UK, France, and Japan between 1968 and 2006. Those four nations, Live Science explained, contained the largest number of people who lived to the age of 110. They found that since Calment’s death in 1997, the maximum reported age of death has not increased, and has, in fact, slightly decreased over the decades since then.
“In people over 105 we make very little progress, that tells you we are most likely approaching the limit to human life,” Vijg told BBC News. “For the first time in history we’ve been able to see this, it looks like the maximum life span – this ceiling, this barrier – is about 115. It’s almost impossible you’ll get beyond it.”
“Based on the data we have now, the chance that you will ever see a person of 125 [years] in a given year is about 1 in 10,000,” he added in an interview with The Guardian. In light of the new findings, Vijg said that people should focus not on trying to live longer, but on enjoying the time they have and staying healthy. “That’s where we have to invest our money,” he concluded.
It’s official: Boeing’s CEO just started a ‘Private Space Race’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Boeing, the company that created the most powerful US rocket ever built and helped the country win the race to the moon, is now turning its gaze to Mars, as its CEO unveiled an ambitious plan to reach the Red Planet before rival SpaceXduring a Tuesday conference in Chicago.
Speaking at an event on innovation, Boeing executive Dennis Muilenberg told Bloombergand other media outlets that he was “convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket.” While his company is working with NASA on its Space Launch System, Muilenburg said that they are also focused on commercial space-travel development.
Boeing is developing the SLS rocket for NASA’s journey to Mars. (Credit: NASA)
The comments come roughly a week after SpaceX head Elon Musk outlined his plan to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars, and to sent people there using a fleet of ships that could carry a thousand people or more. Like Musk, Muilenburg said that he envisions a future where people could quickly travel from Earth to Mars or other planets on hyper-sonic ships.
“Over the last 100 years, it is remarkable to think that men and women went from walking on the Earth to walking on the moon, we went from riding horses to flying on airplanes,” the CEO noted during the event, according to ABC News. He added that he envisioned “even greater” and “even bolder” technological advances over the next century.
Next-generation Space Race set to take place in the private sector
Muilenburg went on to tell reporters that he believed the future would bring breakthroughs in the field of “supersonic, hyper-sonic travel” as well as “the ability to connect anywhere in the world in a couple of hours.” He added that space tourism would be “blossoming over the next couple of decades into a viable commercial market,” according to Bloomberg and ABC News.
Furthermore, the Boeing CEO stated that he believed the International Space Station (ISS) could be joined in orbit by space hotels and micro-gravity research and manufacturing facilities. Such a future is “fascinating” to his company, Muilenburg said. When laying out his company’s plans in September, Musk compared establishing a space transport system to “building the Union Pacific railroad.” Using that metaphor, Boeing seems confident it can lay down its tracks first. (Hopefully without the related horrible working conditions– maybe not the best comparison.)
Of course, Boeing and SpaceX are not the only aerospace companies competing for a slice of the space travel pie: Blue Origin, the firm established by billionaire Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, passed an in-flight escape test earlier this week after having previously landed a reusable booster rocket after liftoff. SpaceX has successfully completed the latter feat on multiple occasions as well.
Unlike Musk and Muilenburg, Bezos has kept his ultimate space-travel plans “close to the vest,” according to the Los Angeles Times. He has, however, teased a new rocket, the New Armstrong, which the newspaper said is capable of sending a launch vehicle to the moon. While the future remains uncertain for all three companies, one thing is certain – as ABC news put it, “the race to the red planet is on,” only this time the Space Race will be waged in the private sector.
Cannabis ‘burial shroud’ discovered at ancient Chinese tomb
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Archaeologists working in northwestern China discovered what they call an “extraordinary cache” of “ancient, well preserved” cannabis plants serving as part of the burial shroud for a man believed to be approximately 35 years of age at his time of death.
The discovery was made by Hongen Jiang of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues and occurred at a tomb in the Jiayi cemetery of Turpan, a prefecture-level city located in the east Xinjiang region.
Writing in the journal Economic Botany, Jiang’s team reveals that the tomb features 13 cannabis plants that were nearly in perfect condition, and which appeared to have been grown specifically in the area and arranged purposefully as a burial shroud for the male corpse. The discovery, they explained, could shed new light on the plant’s ritual use in ancient Central Eurasia.
Detail from one of the plants. (Credit: Hongen Jiang)
Radiocarbon dating places the age of the cannabis plants to between 2,400 and 2,800 years old, and according to National Geographic, some of them were up to three feet long. The corpse was laid out on a wooden bed with a reed pillow under his head, and the cannabis was placed across his chest diagonally, reaching from his chin to beneath his pelvis, the publication added.
The discovery of this cannabis, along with similar remains recovered from other tombs in the Turpan cemetery, reveals that the plant “was used by the local Central Eurasian people for ritual and/or medicinal purposes in the first millennium before the Christian era,” the authors wrote.
Evidence suggests that the plant had been grown locally
The newfound burial site is one of 240 graves excavated at the Jiayi cemetery, Nat Geo noted, and the discovery of cannabis plants there adds to the mounting evidence suggesting that it was commonly used and “very popular” in Eurasia several thousand years ago, Jiang added.
Previously, cannabis seeds dating back to first millennium BC have been found at burial sites located to the west of Turpan, including at the tomb of a woman believed to have died of breast cancer and who may have been using cannabis to treat her illness. However, this is the first time archaeologists have recovered complete cannabis plants, the researchers told Nat Geo.
It also marks the first confirmed usage of the plant as a “shroud” or covering for a human body, Jiang added. The fact that the plants were lying flat on the man’s corpse leads his team to believe that it was fresh and must have been grown locally before being harvested for the funeral.
Furthermore, while most of the flowering heads of the plants were cut off prior to their use on the body, those that remained were said to be nearly ripe and contained immature fruit. Based on this discovery, it is likely that the plants had been collected (and the burial took place) during the late summer. The plants were identified based on their morphological and anatomical features.
Scientists discover second major fault line near San Andreas
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A newfound fault running parallel to the San Andreas Fault could help explain the nearly 200 small earthquakes experienced by southern California residents last week, according to a study appearing in the Oct. 16 edition of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
First detected by scientists from the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno, the fault lies along the eastern edge of the Salton Sea, a shallow salt-water lake located directly over the San Andreas Fault and predominantly in California’s Imperial and Coachella Valleys.
The discovery of what has been dubbed the Salton Trough Fault raises some concerns that a larger earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault could be forthcoming, and could drastically impact current seismic hazard models in the quake-prone region that includes Los Angeles and the surrounding area, the researchers said Tuesday in a statement.
The “potentially significant” new fault was discovered using a number of different instruments, including multi-channel seismic data, ocean-bottom seismometers, and LIDAR (light detection and ranging) equipment, the study authors added. Using this technology, the study authors were able to map deformations in sediment layers in and around the seafloor. The newfound fault is a strike-slip fault located just to the west of the San Andreas one, they explained.
Will California See Another Huge Earthquake?
Mapping earthquakes can play a key role in preventing fatalities and limiting damage during a seismic event, the research team explained. As lead author Valerie Sahakian noted, “To aid in accurately assessing seismic hazard and reducing risk in a tectonically active region, it is crucial to correctly identify and locate faults before earthquakes happen.”
“The location of the fault in the eastern Salton Sea has made imaging it difficult and there is no associated small seismic events, which is why the fault was not detected earlier,” added Scripps geologist and study co-author Neal Driscoll. “We employed marine seismic equipment to define the deformation patterns beneath the sea that constrained the location of the fault.”
The new report comes in the wake of other recent studies which discovered the region had experienced magnitude-7 earthquakes at least once every 200 years over the past 1,000 years, the researchers said. No major ruptures have occurred in the southern part of the San Andreas Fault in more than three centuries, however. Further analysis of the new fault could help explain why this has been the case by determining how it interacts with its infamous counterpart.
The San Andreas Fault. (Credit: US Geological Survey)
“The extended nature of time since the most recent earthquake on the Southern San Andreas has been puzzling to the earth sciences community,” said Nevada seismologist Graham Kent. “Based on the deformation patterns, this new fault has accommodated some of the strain from the larger San Andreas system, so without having a record of past earthquakes from this new fault, it’s really difficult to determine whether this fault interacts with the southern San Andreas Fault at depth or in time.”
“We need further studies to better determine the location and character of this fault, as well as the hazard posed by this structure,” added Sahakian. “The patterns of deformation beneath the sea suggest that the newly identified fault has been long-lived and it is important to understand its relationship to the other fault systems in this geologically complicated region.”
Researchers discover giant ancestor to modern sharks
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Fossilized shark teeth discovered in Japan, Peru, and parts of the US has led to the identification of a new, now-extinct species that was the ancestor to modern-day great white and mako sharks, researchers from DePaul University and their international colleagues have discovered.
According to the Daily Mail and United Press International (UPI), the newfound species known as Megalolamna paradoxodon lived approximately 20 million years ago and grew to sizes of up to 12 feet (3.6 meters) in length. It was part of the Otodontidae family, a group of extinct sharks that included the megalodon, but was considerably smaller than its legendary cousin.
The distribution of the ancient shark’s teeth (Credit: Kenshu Shimada)
The new species, which was identified in research published this week in the journal Historical Biology, had unique teeth that required the researchers to create a new genus (Megalolamna) to categorize it. While some of its dental features are similar to other otodontids, others are similar to those of the modern salmon shark, a member of the genus Lamna. The latter part of its name, paradoxodon, means “paradoxical teeth” and further illustrates this dental oddity.
Megalolamna paradoxodon’s discovery came as a bit of a shock to lead author Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul. In a statement, he called it “remarkable that such a large lamniform shark with such a global distribution had evaded recognition until now, especially because there are numerous Miocene localities where fossil shark teeth are well sampled.”
Discovery also leads to reclassification for megatoothed sharks
The largest of the new shark species’ teeth measure approximately 1.8 inches (4.5 cm) in length, which allowed Shimada’s team to determine that the creature was nearly 13 feet (4 meters) long, or roughly the same size as a modern great white shark. The teeth in the front of its mouth would have been ideal for grasping, they said, while the rear teeth were designed for slicing.
The unusual appearance of the new species leaves a currently unresolved 45-million-year gap in the fossil record from when Megalolamna likely split from its closest relative Otodus, the study authors explained. Furthermore, its discovery led the team to determine that the megalodon and other members of its lineage should be classified into this genus, not the genus Carcharocles.
“The idea that megalodon and its close allies should be placed in Otodus is not new,” Shimada said, “but our study is the first of its kind that logically demonstrates the taxonomic proposition.” The inclusion of these megatoothed sharks into the genus Otodus makes it a more complete line, a “monophyletic group” considered to be closely relate to Megalolamna, the researchers added.
“Carcharocles megalodon has been the typical expression for the fossil shark,” he added in an interview with LiveScience. “However, our new study clearly supports the idea suggested by a few previous workers that ‘megalodon’ should be placed within the genus Otodus, and thus it should be referred to as Otodus megalodon from now on.”
Japanese researcher brings home Nobel Prize with ‘Cell Recycling’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A 71-year-old old Japanese biologist has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his pioneering work studying the processes used by cells to consume damaged proteins and organelles and recycle their contents to provide nutrients to other cellular structures.
According to the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, Yoshinori Ohsumi, a biologist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, began his research into the field known as autophagy back in the late 1980s, and over the course of his career, he identified 15 genes that oversee the process.
In experiments conducted during the 1990s and first published in the Journal of Cell Biology, Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify those genes, then went on to discovered the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in the yeast. Those mechanisms, he learned, were similar to the ones used by human cells to relocate and break down worn-out cellular contents.
“Ohsumi’s discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content,” the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet explained Monday in a statement. “His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection.”
“Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease,” they added. Ohsumi is the 107th recipient of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine since 1905, and he will also take home a prize of 8 million kronor ($930,000) for his efforts, according to the AP.
Processes discovered by Ohsumi linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease
While autophagy (which literally means “self-eating” in Greek) has been known for more than five decades, it wasn’t until Ohsumi’s research that its “fundamental importance” to the field of medicine was fully recognized, the Nobel Assembly explained as part of their statement.
The autophagy process provides the cell with nutrients and building blocks for renewal. (Credit: Nobel Prize)
His “brilliant” work resulted in the identification of the first genes required for the process, they noted, and he ultimately revealed that the processes are “controlled by a cascade of proteins and protein complexes, each regulating a distinct stage of autophagosome initiation and formation.” Disturbances in the autophagy processes, the Times reported, have been linked to cancer, Type-2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related conditions.
In 1988, Ohsumi opened his own lab and began studying protein degradation in the vacuole, an organelle similar to the lysosome in our cells. Specifically, he cultured mutated yeast cells which lacked vacuolar degradation enzymes and starved them to stimulate autophagy so that they would accumulate autophagosomes, with the ultimate goal of monitoring them using a microscope.
The vaculoes were filled with small, non-degraded vesicles within a matter of hours, proving that autophagy existed in yeast cells while also finding a way to identify the genes involved, the prize committee explained. After publishing this breakthrough in 1992, Ohsumi then used his modified yeast in experiments that induced autophagy, allowing him to identify the first genes essential for the process and to characterize the proteins encoded by those genes. Thanks to his efforts, as well as the work of those following him, scientists now know that similar processes are at work in our cells as well, and they now have the tools to investigate those mechanisms.
Ohsumi told the AP that he never thought he would win a Nobel Prize for his research, calling it “a dream” of his as a child. “I don’t feel comfortable competing with many people, and instead I find it more enjoyable doing something nobody else is doing,” the biologist explained. “In a way, that’s what science is all about, and the joy of finding something inspires me.”
Fibromyalgia myths are about as ubiquitous as fibromyalgia symptoms themselves. There are so many unknowns in fibromyalgia, how can one tell “fibromyalgia facts” from fiction? Here’s a simple list of fibromyalgia myths, with the facts to distinguish between what is true, and what’s false.
1. Fibromyalgia is a fake condition that doesn’t really exist.
This is a common notion that stems from the historical roots of fibromyalgia. Many individuals were originally told that their pain was “in their head.” It wasn’t until the late 1980’s that the term fibromyalgia was coined. In 1990, the American College of Rheumatology developed a research model for Fibromyalgia that used the term to describe pain in the soft muscle tissue. Even today, people are told that much of the pain from fibromyalgia is “mental” however, the condition has come a long way in the sense that it is officially recognized as a chronic disease.
Fibromyalgia is included in the World Health Organization Tenth Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems published in 1992.
The truth is that fibromyalgia has existed ever since man has been walking upright. As long as there are faulty foot bio-mechanics, resulting from people’s genetics or lifestyle, there will always be a susceptibility to fibromyalgia.
2. Fibromyalgia patients can’t have a normal relationship.
Fibromyalgia pain has the power to be so devastating, it can makes human interaction almost impossible. You lose interest in your surroundings, including the people who are closest to you. However, it only makes it more imperative that the patient recognize the importance of their significant other. Once a partner or family member begins to understand what is happening to his/her loved one, he/she is better able to assist with their treatment. As in any illness, family support is very important. This is equally true for fibromyalgia patients. Oftentimes, it can actually bring people closer together as they face this phenomenon together and the patient starts to feel better. It is a commitment but the outcome can be very rewarding.
3. Fibromyalgia patients should not have sex.
As with relationships, fibromyalgia patients may not be “in the mood” when their pain is so severe. If you have a loving, understanding partner who is willing to listen to you and treat you respectfully and gently, there is no reason why you cannot engage in a sexual relationship. Once you start feeling better, you may notice your interest in sex increases, as well. Partners who participate in the treatment of this disease together do very well in the sex department. And that is all I am saying on that subject!
4. Fibromyalgia patients need to be very careful about their diet.
This couldn’t be any more true. Simple carbohydrates and additives are especially toxic to people who suffer from fibromyalgia. There are wonderful sugar substitutes, including stevia, xylitol and, even better, whey low. Read labels on all foods. It has been said that we should all avoid the middle aisles in the grocery store. This is especially true for fibromyalgia sufferers. Processed foods, including foods with MSG, can throw you into a relapse just as quickly as simple sugar and refined wheat.
5. Fibromyalgia patients fake their pain.
Back to the myths again, this one is very prominent but is ably the biggest myth of them all (I don’t have to tell anyone who is a fibromyalgia patient this…)
The resultant blockage of energy fields that causes fibromyalgia makes it virtually impossible to see the disability in the individual. The patient will have pain that would usually entail a physical impairment; ie, soreness, aches, or shooting pain, but doctors do not find physical abnormalities in the painful area.
Doctors become confused because the patient has so many symptoms. They don’t know where to turn so they just start targeting the symptoms, trying to get those to go away. The focus on correcting a wide range of symptoms has led many to believe that the symptoms may be real and that fibromyalgia as an overall condition doesn’t exist.
Fibromyalgia patients go through a trigger point test examining 18 locations on the body. Eleven of these points must be painful upon the simple touch of a finger. If a patient reports chronic pain for longer than three months in conjunction with symptoms of sleep disorder, fatigue, and/or irritable bowel syndrome, this trigger point test is administered in order to rule out fibromyalgia.
6. Fibromyalgia can cause Lupus.
Lupus is an autoimmune disease with symptoms similar to fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia and Lupus are often confused with one another because of their similar symptoms, but they are separate conditions. Lupus is much more rare, and can be verified using a blood test. Lupus is often a precursor to fibromyalgia-it’s estimated that 30 percent of lupus patients develop fibromyalgia.
It is extremely rare for fibromyalgia to lead to Lupus, however. Fibromyalgia has a complex set of symptoms that range from immune dysfunction to depression-due to the complexities of the symptoms, it becomes very easy to assume that fibromyalgia leads to another condition with a similar group of symptoms. Much is still unknown about the connection between the conditions, but it is almost certain that fibromyalgia is not a direct cause of lupus.
7. Don’t exercise if you have fibromyalgia
With fibromyalgia pain, it might be difficult to get out of bed some days, let alone exercise. Still, one of the best medicines for fibromyalgia is a daily exercise routine. No, you don’t have to go to the gym and do squats for 5 hours or run on the treadmill backwards, but something as simple as walking 20 to 30 minutes a day can be extremely beneficial. If that’s too much, start slowly at five minutes and work your way up. Swimming, jogging, and low resistance weight training are other options to keep your body active.
The pain might get so bad that the individual doesn’t want to get out of bed. In this case, try a less cumbersome activity, even if it’s as simple as walking to the end of the driveway and getting the mail.
Staying active will keep your blood pressure low and will increase cardiovascular health. Do not feel the need to over-do it, especially on days when the pain is less severe. Try and build towards a consistent routine.
8. Fibromyalgia can be fatal.
While fibromyalgia doesn’t cause direct physical harm, it can cause insurmountable damage to a patient’s lifestyle. The symptoms can flare up sporadically or can cause constant, severe discomfort. Much of the damage brought on by fibromyalgia is due to depression and chronic fatigue. Fibromyalgia can make your life very difficult, but there isn’t a direct link to fibromyalgia being fatal.
We are seeing support groups coming together across the world to debunk the myths; telling their stories of fact and denying the fiction being spewed out by people needing to see “scientific evidence.” To them, fibromyalgia may be a myth. But, ask the millions of individuals in the fibromyalgia community about what they think, and they’ll provide for you a much different answer.
The decision comes following several years of study by conservationists, including scientists at the Xerces Society, which found that the pollinators are at risk due to habitat loss, wildfires, and the introduction of invasive insects and plants into their islands, the media outlets explained.
While the yellow-faced bees (which belong to the genus Hylaeus) can be found in other parts of the country, the species now receiving protection are native to Hawaii and are important because they pollinate indigenous plants that could themselves die off should the insects become extinct, said Xerces Society Director of Endangered Species and Aquatic Programs Sarina Jepson.
Land development in coastal areas, and the presence of feral pigs and invasive ants are some of the main reason for the bees’ dwindling numbers, she added. They are among 10 new species of animals, including the band-rumped storm-petrel and the orangeblack Hawaiian damselfly, and 39 new types of plants added to the list, the AP noted.
Officials stopped short of designating ‘critical habitat’ areas
Researchers, including Hawaii-based entomologist Karl Magnacca, worked long and hard in an attempt to secure the bees’ listing, according to BBC News. Magnacca had been working with Xerces for nearly a decade to convince the government to extend endangered species protections to the pollinators. “It’s good to see it to finally come to fruition,” he said.
In a Friday blog post, Xerces Communications Director Matthew Shepherd called the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to list the species “excellent news,” but added that there would still be “much work that needs to be done to ensure that Hawaii’s bees thrive… Unfortunately, the USFWS has not designated any ‘critical habitat,’ areas of land of particular importance for the endangered bees.”
Despite the lack of designated habitat, the listing will enable officials to establish new recovery programs and secure funding for conservation efforts, according to CNN. The new rules will go into effect on October 31, and come just days after the USFWS revealed that a different species of bee, the rusty-patched bumble bee, was also being considered for protection.
“Pollinators play such an important role” in maintaining the health of plants and other animals throughout the Hawaiian islands, USFWS spokesman Brent Lawrence told the AP. “Listing these species as endangered will certainly help draw attention to the threats that have brought them close to extinction and it also allows us to begin the process of bringing about recovery.”
Dione could be Saturn’s third moon with a subsurface ocean
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Three years ago, researchers found evidence that Saturn’s moon Dione was home to an ocean located deep beneath its surface when it originally formed, and now, a new study appearing in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that said body of water might still be there.
Research published in the journal Icarus in March 2013 used images collected from the NASA Cassini spacecraft to hypothesize that the moon’s topography suggested that a subsurface ocean caused Dione’s crust to become cracked and stressed early on during the satellite’s lifespan.
Now, researchers from the Royal Observatory of Belgium and their colleagues used computer modeling techniques to demonstrate that gravitational data observed during Cassini’s flybys of the moon can be explained if its crust is floating above an ocean located roughly 62 miles (100 km) below its surface, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) explained in a blog post.
If confirmed, this would make Dione the third of Saturn’s moons found to harbor oceans under their surface, joining Titan and Enceladus in that increasingly less-exclusive group. It would also suggest that the subsurface waters have likely persisted throughout the moon’s history, meaning that Dione may be home to a long-term habitable zone for microbial life.
Computer model also sheds new light on Enceladus
In a statement, the authors explain that this newfound ocean is likely “tens of kilometers” deep and surrounds “a large rocky core” in the heart of the moon. From within, they explained, Dione is similar to but smaller than Enceladus, suggesting that both of the satellites have icy shells that are made up of global icebergs immersed in water and supported by deep keels.
Similar models have been used by scientists in the past, but that research suggested that Dione lacked an ocean and Enceladus was home to an extremely thick crust. According to lead author Mikael Beuthe, the researchers “assumed that the icy crust can stand only the minimum amount of tension or compression necessary to maintain surface landforms,” as additional stress “would break the crust down to pieces.”
Based on this model, Beuthe’s team determined that Enceladus’ ocean is closer to the surface than Dione’s, especially near the moon’s south pole, where geysers have been spotted erupting through a thin layer of crust. The findings support the discovery made by Cassini last year that the moon undergoes extensive back-and-forth oscillations or libration during its orbit.
Dione, on the other hand, is home to a much deeper ocean located between its crust and core, according to the new study. It too undergoes libration, co-author Antony Trinh explained, but it does so at levels that the Cassini probe is unable to detect. Of course, this is only a prediction, Trinh noted, and will need to be confirmed or disproven by sending a future orbiter to analyze Saturn’s moons – one with more sensitive instruments than Cassini.
The study provides “the first clear evidence for a present-day ocean within Dione,” the authors wrote. With this discovery, there are now three “ocean worlds” orbiting Saturn, along with three orbiting around Jupiter and at least one believed to be in the Pluto system based on observations made recently by the New Horizons spacecraft. In light of these observations, Beuthe said that he believes future missions should be sent to explore the Uranus and Neptune systems.
—– Image credit: NASA/JPL
A newly-developed influenza vaccine could provide protection for as much as 88% of all known strains of the virus with a single dose, the international team of researchers behind the breakthrough reported in a recent edition of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Bioinformatics.
Dr. Derek Gatherer of Lancaster University and colleagues from Spain and the UK said that the universal vaccine would be effective against 88% of known flu strains globally. In addition, they said that a second, US-specific vaccine could cover 95% of that country’s known flu strains.
“Every year we have a round of flu vaccination, where we choose a recent strain of flu as the vaccine, hoping that it will protect against next year’s strains. We know this method is safe, and that it works reasonably well most of the time,” Dr. Gatherer explained in a statement.“However, sometimes it doesn’t work – as in the H3N2 vaccine failure in winter 2014-2015.”
Even when they do work, such vaccines are often “immensely expensive and labor-intensive,” he said. They often provide “no protection at all against potential future pandemic flu” similar to the so-called “Spanish flu” of 1918 and as well as the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, which ultimately led to the deaths of millions of people.
Success ‘within reach’ as scientists look to start proof of concept tests
In fact, according to the World Health Organization, annual modern flu epidemics resulted in as much as an estimated 500,000 deaths worldwide each year, the researchers said. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Dr. Gatherer said. He and his colleagues set out to design a vaccine which would be able to provide “much broader and longer-lasting protection,” he added.
Using their knowledge of the influenza virus and the human immune system, Dr. Gatherer and a team of colleagues from Aston University in Birmingham, UK and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University of Madrid) in Spain used computers to help design a new type of vaccine made of components that would give near-universal protection against the flu.
They set out to provide protection against both influenza A (avian flu) and influenza B (a strain known to affect only humans and seals) by activating immune cells known as the CD8+ and CD4+ T cells against specific regions of the influenza genome. The result was a pair of new vaccines, one of which provided population protection coverage (PPC) of over 96 in the US and the other which had a PPC rating of 97 against all global forms of the disease.
What this essentially means, co-author Dr. Pedro Reche of Complutense University explained in a statement, is that “a universal flu vaccine is potentially within reach. The components of this vaccine would be short flu virus fragments – called epitopes – that are already known to be recognized by the immune system. Our collaboration has found a way to select epitopes reaching full population coverage.”
“Epitope-based vaccines aren’t new, but most reports have no experimental validation. We have turned the problem on its head and only use previously-tested epitopes. This allows us to get the best of both worlds, designing a vaccine with a very high likelihood of success,” said Dr. Darren Flower of Aston University. The researchers are now hoping to recruit a pharmaceutical industry partner to help them synthesize the vaccine for a lab-based proof-of-concept experiment.
Ancient reptile featured a crazy forelimb claw, study finds
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A prehistoric reptile described as a cross between an anteater and a chameleon sported an odd, enlarged claw on its forelimb that likely helped it break into insect nests for food, according to new research published in the September 29 edition of the journal Current Biology.
The over 200-million-year-old creature known as Drepanosaurus featured the massive claw on the second digit of its forelimb, Adam Pritchard of the Yale University Department of Geology & Geophysics in New Haven, Connecticut and his colleagues explained in their new study.
“This animal stretches the bounds of what we think can evolve in the limbs of four-footed animals,” Pritchard, a postdoctoral researcher, said in a statement. “Ecologically, Drepanosaurus seems to be a sort of chameleon-anteater hybrid, which is really bizarre for the time. It possesses a totally unique forelimb.”
This unusual adaptation was confirmed following detailed analysis of Drepanosaurus arm fossils discovered at Hayden Quarry in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, the authors noted. These new fossils are just the second known set of Drepanosaurus remains ever discovered, with the only other set described as a “badly crushed skeleton” found in northern Italy three decades ago.
Bone structure of creature’s arm completely different than relatives
Drepanosaurus, which is officially considered neither a dinosaur nor a lizard, shares a common ancestry with dinosaurs, lizards and crocodiles. It was between 1-2 feet long and was a member of the four-limbed, backboned creatures called tetrapods – but it wasn’t like other tetrapods.
As Pritchard and his colleagues explained, most tetrapods have a forearm comprised of a pair of bones, the radius and the ulna, which are elongated, run parallel to each other, and are connected to a series of shorter bones in the wrist. Drepanosaurus, however, has radius and ulna bones that are not parallel to one another and wrist bones that are actually longer than the radius.
“The bone contacts suggest that the enlarged claw of Drepanosaurus could have been hooked into insect nests,” the Yale researcher explained in a statement. “The entire arm could then have been powerfully retracted to tear open the nest. This motion is very similar to the hook-and-pull digging of living anteaters, which also eat insects.”
In addition, the reptile was said to have grasping feet and a claw-like structure located at the tip of its tail. According to the study authors, the discovery suggests that tetrapods had developed a series of specialized ecological roles dating as far back as the Triassic period roughly 200 million years ago.
Mission ends: Rosetta orbiter crashes into Comet 67P
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Having reached the end of its functional lifespan, the Rosetta probe is set to make an impact one last time on Friday morning as it prepares to crash into the very comet which it has been studying for the past two-plus years, according to BBC News and New York Times reports.
Rosetta, which was built by the European Space Agency (ESA), launched on March 2, 2004. The probe and its lander module, Philae, then spent the next 12 years travelling towards their ultimate destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). They arrived on August 6, 2014, and in November of that year, Philae became the first module to successfully land on a comet.
The orbiter had lost contact with its lander for much of the mission, but was able to collect a vast array of scientific data on its own, providing new insights into the structure and chemistry of this comet. Since comets are believed to be made from materials left behind after the formation of the Solar System, the data could reveal what the Universe was like some 4.5 billion years ago.
On Friday morning, however, Rosetta’s mission will come to an end, as the orbiter is expected to make a hard landing on the surface of the comet’s head near a location known as Deir el-Medina. While the crash is not expected to occur at high-speed (BBC News said that the estimated impact will come at close to walking speed), it is nonetheless likely to destroy the probe.
Historic mission coming to an end in true ‘rock’n’roll’ style
Over the past few days, ESA controllers have adjusted Rosetta’s path to line it up for the probe’s final journey, and on Thursday, they officially placed it on a collision course. Its instruments will continue to function during its decent, but pre-loaded software will switch them off on impact.
According to the Times, impact was expected to occur at 6:40am Eastern Time, plus or minus 20 minutes. Once it lands on the comet, it will send out a radio signal confirming its fate, which was expected to arrive on Earth about 40 minutes later, or at approximately 7:20am Eastern Time.
An artist’s impression of Rosetta just before it impacts the comet. (Credit: ESA/ATG medial)
In addition to the thrilling and historic Philae landing, the Rosetta mission led to the discovery of 16 organic compounds on 67P, including four that CNN said had never been detected on a comet before. It also found that the water contained in the comet’s ice is not the same as the H2O found in Earth’s oceans, and that its surface is relatively dry and highly porous, CBS News added.
Now, however, 67P is moving away from the sun. The comet is already 573 million kilometers away, meaning that there is little sunlight for the spacecraft’s solar arrays to convert into energy. Furthermore, transmission speeds have slowed to 40kbps, equal to dial-up internet speeds, BBC News noted. ESA officials briefly considered placing Rosetta into hibernation until 67P returned to the sun, but ultimately decided to bring the mission to a spectacular end.
“We’ve taken the world on a thrilling scientific journey to the heart of a comet,” ESA senior science adviser Mark McCaughrean told BBC News, “and, in turn, we’ve seen the world take Rosetta and Philae’s amazing adventure into their hearts.” His colleague Matt Taylor added, “It’s like one of those 60s rock bands; we don’t want to have a rubbish comeback tour. We’d rather go out now in true rock’n’roll style.”
New artificial 3D-printed bone could change bone implants forever
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A new type of flexible artificial bone developed by researchers at Northwestern University can be 3D printed, shaped, and sutured to tissues and appears to act like natural bone when inside the human body, according to a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine.
Adam Jakus, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of materials science and engineering, and his colleagues told reporters via a telephone briefing that the material, which they call “hyperelastic bone,” could be used to create customized implants. It could also be useful when repairing bones that are injured or deformed, according to NBC News and the Los Angeles Times.
The researchers tested the material in a monkey and reported that it not only successfully fused to the creature’s skull, but that it became fully integrated and had new blood vessels grow into it. Furthermore, Jakus said that there was “actually evidence of new bone formation.”
The material is inexpensive and could be used for a wide range of different injuries, including those to the jaw, skull, and spine. They added that it is easy for doctors to manipulate and that it could drastically speed up recovery time following these types of procedures. Jakus and his colleagues hope they will be able to test the artificial bone in humans before 2022.
The material seen under an electron microscope. (Credit: Adam E. Jakus, PhD)
Material could help patients with birth defects, those in developing countries
According to the Times, surgeons typically repair damaged bone using either ceramic fillers or scaffolds made out of a calcium- and phosphate-rich mineral known as hydroxyapatite, which is similar to the material that most human bone is comprised of. However, while these substances mesh well with natural tissue, they can be stiff and difficult to modify.
More malleable options are often packed with tiny particles that are washed away by blood flow during the operation, and some are not porous enough for blood cells to become integrated with the bone graft. Jakus, biomaterials engineer Ramille Shah, and their associates set out to create a new type of 3D printed material that would be biocompatible, porous and easy to reshape.
They came up with a combination of hydroxyapatite and either polycaprolactone or polylactic-co-glycolic acid that can be compressed more than 50% of its original height without suffering any damage and can be can be 3D-printed quickly (producing up to 275 cm3/hour). When they placed the hyperelastic bone into the monkey, it became fully integrated in just four weeks.
“Despite the fact that it is majority ceramic, which is usually very brittle, it possesses very unique nano and micro-structural properties that makes it highly elastic,” Shah told reporters with NBC News and other media outlets. “The first time that we actually 3-D printed this material, we were very surprised to find that when we squeezed or deformed it, it bounced right back to its original shape.”
The material can also be “easily cut, rolled, folded, and sutured to tissue,” she added. “And since it is elastic, it can be pressed, fit into a defect, and expand to mechanically fix itself into a space without glue or sutures.” Shah and her colleagues believe that the hyperelastic bone could greatly help those born with craniofacial birth defects, and would be useful in developing nations, where it could be sent ahead of time and safely kept on-hand until needed.
For more than three decades, scientists have hypothesized that the origins of life on Earth can be traced back to a series of chemical reactions that gave rise to self-replicating RNA, and that RNA then went on to evolve to create proteins and DNA separately at a later point in history.
However, a new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and published in the journal Angewandte Chemie challenged this so-called “RNA World hypothesis,” using newly discovered evidence suggesting that RNA and DNA may have developed simultaneously.
“Even if you believe in a RNA-only world, you have to believe in something that existed with RNA to help it move forward,” Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, senior author of the new study and an associate professor of chemistry at TSRI, explained Wednesday in a statement. “Why not think of RNA and DNA rising together, rather than trying to convert RNA to DNA by means of some fantastic chemistry at a prebiotic stage?”
The RNA World hypothesis argues that self-replicating molecules of ribonucleic acid formed through a series of chemical reactions, which evolved to create both proteins and enzymes that eventually led to the production of DNA and, ultimately, the evolution of complex organisms. This, Krishnamurthy and his colleagues claim, may not necessarily have been the case.
RNA, DNA may have evolved at the same time, study authors claim
If the RNA World theory is accurate, they said, many experts believe that there would have been several instances in which RNA nucleotides and DNA backbones intermingled to form strands of “heterogeneous” molecules – stepping stones in the transition to actual, full-blown DNA.
The problem with this, according to the TSRI team, is that their research revealed a significant loss of stability when RNA and DNA shared a common backbone. Such molecules are not able to hold together as well as either pure RNA or pure DNA, which would mean that their ability to contain genetic information and to reproduce would likely have become comprised.
“We were surprised to see a very deep drop in what we would call the ‘thermal stability,’” said Krishnamurthy. The reason for this, he and his fellow authors reported, appeared to be associated with differences between the structures of DNA sugar molecules and RNA sugar molecules. The study supports previous work indicating that the mixing of RNA and DNA resulted in the loss of nucleotide-binding aptamers.
Their findings suggest that hybrid RNA-DNA molecules would likely have died off in the RNA World, leaving behind the more stable pure RNA molecules. Currently, when RNA nucleobases become joined to DNA strands in error, sophisticated enzymes enter the picture and correct their mistake, but the study authors believe that these enzymes would not have existed during the time RNA and DNA initially came to be, meaning that any transition from the former to the latter may have been too difficult without some mechanism to keep them separated.
Krishnamurthy’s team proposes instead that RNA and DNA may have arisen together. If this were the case, DNA could have established its own homogeneous system before encountering RNA. RNA may have still evolved to produce DNA, they noted, but only after first coming in contact with the molecules and learning about the raw materials that comprised it.
Do people with fibromyalgia have to be wary of GMOs?
Written By: Marcia Frost
admin
Fibromyalgia sufferers are sensitive to a lot more than pain. They can also be affected by the weather, stress, smells, and even the things they eat. Among the things which can be of concern when trying to plan your diet for the best health results when you have fibromyalgia is the use of GMOs. It is questionable as to whether or not GMOs can play a role in exacerbating FMS symptoms.
What are GMOs?
The term GMO refers to “genetically modified organisms.” Although it’s one term, it’s actually a reference to many different things as there is no set rule on how the organism is genetically modified. That is why GMOs could be a problem for those with fibromyalgia syndrome.
When it comes to crops, such as fruits and vegetables, GMOs are plants in which the actual gene has been altered. How they are modified is not usually explained. It could be through cross-breeding, cross-pollination, or by adding chemicals directly to the plants while the produce was growing.
If you consider that the beef, pork, and poultry you eat could come from animals be fed with the GMO plants, you may also say that the meat is also consider a GMO if it comes from an animal fed GMOs.
Why are there GMOs?
The first use of GMOs could be seen as a positive endeavor. Genetically modified plants were grown in areas which couldn’t produce food, such as flood ravaged states, areas of constant high or low temperatures, or drought ridden swamp land. With the use of GMOs, people who might have starved were able to have food.
The question has been raised as to whether the use of chemical engineering has gone too far. This has caused groups to encourage the purchase of organic food, which is GMO free, and have foods grown with GMOs labeled as such, so people with illnesses such as fibromyalgia can make the decision on whether or not they want GMOs in their diet.
Are GMOs bad for you?
It’s impossible to simply answer the question as to whether GMOs are bad for you because the term refers to so many different things. Has the food been genetically modified for it to adapt to a different land? Is it a hybrid of different plants brought together? Or, has it been grown with more than normal amounts of pesticides or herbicides?
The biggest factor in whether GMOs can affect the debilitating pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia is that we simply can’t define genetically modified organisms as following one specific plan of creation so we can’t pinpoint the health consequences.
Why would GMOs affect those with fibromyalgia?
Diet and chemical sensitives play a big role in those with fibromyalgia. It is possible that genetically modified organisms could be a problem in the health of someone with the syndrome. With GMOs, you don’t know exactly what you are eating and whether or not it may affect your FMS symptoms.
GMOs in consideration would be fruits, vegetables, and legumes grown to be consumed, as well as those given as feed to animals who lay eggs, produce milk, or being raised for consumption. This leads to a lot of possible sources of GMOs which may or may not contain substances that will affect the health of those with fibromyalgia.
Unfortunately, there is just no way to know for sure what substance is an issue without knowing the start to finish process of production of these foods, and that information is not available to the consumer.
Should people with fibromyalgia stay away from GMOs?
In the United States, it is currently not necessary for food containing GMOs to be labeled as such. Given this fact, we have all most likely consumed them at some point.
The only way to assure you do not have something containing a GMO that might make you ill is to completely stay away from anything that may possibly have them. You would have to eat dairy, produce, and meat labeled organic, and only purchase prepared and canned food specific labeled that it is 100% GMO free. (While this is not a legal requirement, some companies have chosen to put this on labels.)
If you are having trouble keeping your fibromyalgia symptoms, such as muscle pain, headaches, severe fatigue, and flu-like malaise under control, you might want to try purchasing only organic for a while and see if it eases any of your health issues.
WHO: ‘92% of Earth’s population breathes dangerous air’
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
According to new interactive maps released by the World Health Organization, 92 percent of the world’s population resides in areas where air quality is below the international organization’s standards.
“The new WHO model shows countries where the air pollution danger spots are, and provides a baseline for monitoring progress in combating it,” Flavia Bustreo, assistant director general at the organization, said in a news release.
The maps are founded on rural and urban information culled from satellite measurements, air transportation models, and ground station monitors at greater than 3000 locations. The WHO said the maps are the most comprehensive air pollution-related health data, by country, “ever reported by WHO.”
“Air pollution continues to take a toll on the health of the most vulnerable populations – women, children and the older adults,” Bustreo said. “For people to be healthy, they must breathe clean air from their first breath to their last.”
A Deadly Problem
According to WHO data, about 3 million fatalities a year are associated with chronic exposure to outdoor air contaminants. Indoor air pollution can be just as lethal. In 2012, approximately 6.5 million deaths were linked to indoor and outdoor air pollution together.
Almost 90 percent of air-pollution-related fatalities take place in low- and middle-income countries and 94% of deaths are caused by non-communicable diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (CPOD) and lung cancer. Air pollution also boosts the chances for acute respiratory infections.
To learn more about the global threat posed by air pollution, WHO researchers compared national air pollution exposures to population and air pollution levels at a resolution of about 10 kilometers x 10 kilometers (6.2 miles x 6.2 miles).
“This new model is a big step forward towards even more confident estimates of the huge global burden of more than 6 million deaths – 1 in 9 of total global deaths – from exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution,” said Maria Neira, WHO director of the Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “More and more cities are monitoring air pollution now, satellite data is more comprehensive, and we are getting better at refining the related health estimates.”
Doctors in New York have announced the first birth of a child conceived via a controversial fertility procedure involving genetic material from three different people.
The procedure to conceive the so-called “three-parent baby” was performed by American and British doctors in Mexico. The treatment has been approved for use in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States.
The decision to undertake the procedure was sparked by the revelation that the child’s mother was carrying the genetic recipe for Leigh syndrome, an incurable disease in which brain cells slowly die off. In the treatment, doctors used DNA from another woman to avoid passing on the disease.
Credit: Marcy Darnovsky
“She had four pregnancy losses and two deceased children at age 8 months and 6 years from Leigh syndrome,” doctors who performed the procedure wrote in a reportpublished by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.
One medical ethics group cited the decision to do the procedure Mexico as evidence the procedure has yet to be fully vetted.
“This fertility doctor openly acknowledged that he went to Mexico where `there are no rules’ in order to evade ongoing review processes and existing regulations in the United States,” Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, said in a news release. “No researcher or doctor has the right to flout agreed-upon rules and make up their own. This is an irresponsible and unethical act, and sets a dangerous precedent.”
The genes for Leigh syndrome reside in cell organelles known as mitochondria, so the controversial procedure involved extracting the DNA from an ovum of the mother and putting it inside an egg with good mitochondria from a healthy donor, after first taking out the donor egg’s nuclear DNA. Then that egg, with its good mitochondria and the mother’s DNA was then fertilized with sperm from the father, resulting in a “three-person embryo.”
The team produced four embryos using this method and one was deemed good enough to be implanted into the 36-year-old mother. It developed normally and a baby boy was born after 37 weeks of pregnancy.
“The baby is currently 3 months old and doing well,” the doctors wrote in their report.
Don’t miss the rare ‘Black Moon’ in the sky this friday
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Skywatching enthusiasts could have the opportunity to see a rare phenomenon Friday night, as the Western Hemisphere will see its second new moon of the month for the first time in at least two years, according to Space.com and other media reports published this week.
Commonly known as a “black moon,” this uncommon event occurs when the Earth-facing side of the moon is new (or fully engulfed in shadow) for the second time in a single calendar month, making it essentially the opposite of a “blue moon,” the second full moon of a single month.
In the western part of the world, the black moon of 2016 will take place on Friday, Sept. 30, but those in the Eastern Hemisphere will have to wait another month to experience this phenomenon. On the plus side, as ScienceAlert points out, that means that the spooky-looking dark moon will essentially coincide with Halloween in those regions.
“As with most new moons, the real sight, or lack of, is not the moon. Instead, it is the light-free star gazing that will be available due to the absence of the moon,” the Houston Chronicle noted. Nonetheless, astronomy fans should make sure they take advantage of this rare opportunity.
So what exactly is a black moon?
With so many different lunar events out there (blue moons, harvest moons, supermoons, blood moons, etc.), you might be wondering just what makes a black moon so special. The funny thing is, we really don’t know for sure because, as ScienceAlert explained, the term has only relatively recently come into use and experts are still trying to pin down its exact definition.
The website explains that some believe black moons only occur once every 19 years or so, when the month of February does not contain a full moon. Others use the term to describe a month that skips a new moon (the phase of the lunar cycle during which both the Sun and the Moon possess the same elliptical longitude). The most common definition, however, is that a black moon is the second new moon in a calendar month, which last happened in March 2014.
According to Space.com, Friday’s black moon is set to begin at 8:11 pm Eastern time (5:11 pm Pacific time) for those in the Western Hemisphere, which includes North and South America as well as some parts of Africa and Europe. The moon will not be visible until October 1 for those in the Eastern hemisphere, however, meaning their black moon will be delayed slightly.
Black moons occur approximately once every 32 months, the website added, and according to the Chronicle, the next one will not take place until July 2019 – which means that if you live in the Western Hemisphere and you want to see what all the fuss is about, you’d better make sure that you check out Friday’s black moon. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a while to get a glimpse of this unusual astronomical phenomenon.
Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s ambitious Mars colony plans
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
SpaceX chief Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to establish a human colony on Mars, but what had been lacking were details of how he hoped to make it happen – until Tuesday, that is, when he unveiled his grandiose plan for sending one million people to the Red Planet.
Just hours after the aerospace development company released a computer-animated video which showed concept footage of the rocket that would be used to launch from Earth, a station orbiting the planet that would be used for refueling and a solar-powered space transportation capsule, the SpaceX founder and CEO provided more details at an industry conference in Mexico.
Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Musk revealed what he referred to as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), a spacecraft which he claims will use the most powerful rocket ever constructed and a capsule capable of carrying at least 100 men and women at a time, according to Space.com and ABC News reports.
The ITS will be a 400-foot tall vehicle built out of carbon fiber, and will be refueled in mid-orbit by a reusable rocket before ultimately using a built-in solar array to compete the roughly three to four-month journey to Mars, the publications explained. Once it is ready to come back to Earth, it would use methane gas produced on the Red Planet as the power source for its return voyage.
Musk envisions a ‘fleet’ of ITS spacecraft, but at what cost?
The booster that the new spacecraft will use “will be more or less a scaled-up version” of the first stage rocket now being used to power SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, Musk told Space.com and other members of the media during Tuesday’s announcement. However, it will feature 42 of their more powerful Raptor engines, compared to the nine Merlin engines used for the Falcon 9.
If the ITS does indeed wind up being 400-feet tall, it would be the largest spacecraft system ever constructed, the 363-foot system used to launch Skylab and the Apollo lunar capsules during the 1960s and 1970s. The ultimate goal, Musk said, is to develop a fleet of at least 1,000 spaceships to help establish a self-sustaining colony in the Red Planet within the next 50 to 100 years.
His ambitious plan is to send at least one million people to Mars within a century of the original manned mission, which he believes could be launched as soon as 2024, according to ABC News. Musk has yet to reveal how much all of this will cost, but told reporters that funding this project is the primary reason that he is “personally accumulating assets,” and that he hoped that funding from the public would “snowball” once SpaceX makes progress towards their goal.
While building the spacecraft would be costly, it wouldn’t exactly be cheap to purchase a seat on the first trip to Mars either, according to CBS News. Musk said that it would cost upwards of $10 billion per ticket to complete such a voyage using the Apollo moon mission architecture, but that he hoped that his company’s new technology would reduce that cost to about $200,000/seat.
“There are really two fundamental paths. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and there will be some eventual extinction event,” Musk said at the IAC conference. “The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species. That’s what we want.”
Scientists discover riding roller coasters can help pass kidney stones
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Upon hearing several of his patients passed their kidney stones after riding a Disney World roller coaster, Michigan State University urologist David Wartinger had to check it out for himself.
The result of his investigation is a new paper published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association that says the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster could actually increase the odds of a stone being passed.
In the study, Wartinger and his team used a verified, artificial 3D simulation of a kidney with three actual kidney stones placed into it. The replica, in a backpack, was taken on the roller coaster 20 times.
Interesting results from an Unconventional Study
Initial outcomes confirmed reports from Wartinger’s patients– although the results were based on the artificial kidney brought on the ride.
In the pilot study, sitting in the last car of the roller coaster showed about a 64 percent passage rate, while sitting in the first few cars only had a 16 percent success rate,” Wartinger said in a news release.
The expansion on initial findings involved riding the same roller coaster with numerous kidney models coupled to the scientists. They found even better outcomes in the back of the coaster, with the stones passing almost 70 percent of the time. Furthermore, both reports showed a 100 percent passage rate if the stones were situated in the upper area of the kidney.
“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes, and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters,” Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.”
The MSU researcher added that other rides are too rapid and thrash about too much with a G-force that holds the stone in the kidney, not allowing it to pass.
“The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements,” he said.
Lithotripsy is a common treatment for kidney stones that uses ultrasonic waves to break up stones that are too big to pass. Wartinger said the treatment is typically used in instances where the kidney stone is bigger than 5 millimeters.
“The problem though is lithotripsy can leave remnants in the kidney which can result in another stone,” Wartinger said. “The best way to potentially eliminate this from happening is to try going on a roller coaster after a treatment when the remnants are still small.”
He added patients can even try taking a coaster ride annually as maintenance, decreasing the odds of potential issues and reducing health care expenses.
NASA discovers evidence of massive water jets on Jupiter’s moon Europa
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Images captured using the Hubble Space Telescope seem to confirm that the water plumes first discovered on Europa back in 2012 are real, NASA officials announcedon Monday – good news for the possibility of Europa harboring alien life.
These water vapor geysers are estimated to rise to heights of roughly 125 miles (200 kilometers) before raining their contents back down to the moon’s surface, the US space agency explained in a statement. They added that these plumes may provide an opportunity to collect samples from Europa’s extensive underground ocean without having to drill through surface ice.
As Geoff Yoder, the acting associate administrator at the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington, pointed out, “Europa’s ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could potentially harbor life in the solar system. These plumes, if they do indeed exist, may provide another way to sample Europa’s subsurface.”
“Today’s results increase our confidence that water and other materials from Europa’s ocean – Europa’s hidden ocean, hidden under miles of ice – might be on the surface of Europa and available for us to study, without landing and digging through those unknown miles of ice,” Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, told Space.com. The team’s findings will appear in the September 29 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
Activity could be analyzed by James West telescope, Europa mission
Hubble first detected what appeared to be the water vapor plumes approximately four years ago in the south polar region of the moon. The discovery was met by initial excitement, according to Space.com, because it indicated that scientists would be able to collect samples from the oceans located beneath Europa’s surface without needing to drill through its thick icy shell.
However, repeated follow-up attempts to confirm this possible discovery proved unsuccessful until William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his colleagues announced on Monday that they were able to successfully spot what appeared to be plume activity three times in 2014(first in January, then again in March and finally once more in April) using Hubble.
Data from Hubble showcasing the plumes.
On Monday, Sparks said that the detections “appear to be real. The statistical significance is pretty good, and I don’t know of any other natural alternative.” His team observed material from the water vapor geysers apparently blocking ultraviolet light emitted by Jupiter as Europa passed in front of the planet. However, he declined to call this a definitive confirmation of the plumes, telling reporters that he and his colleagues “remain cautious” about their findings.
One of the reasons for this caution, NASA explained, is that Sparks’ team and the group behind the initial discovery in 2012 have yet to detect the plumes at the same time using their individual techniques. The agency may turn to the infrared capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope to confirm the presence or absence of activity on Europa when it launches in 2018.
If confirmed, the moon would be just the second in the solar system known to have water vapor plumes, according to NASA. The discovery could also have a dramatic impact on the agency’s yet-unnamed mission to Europa, which is scheduled to launch sometime in the 2020s. Should the existence of these geysers be confirmed, the spacecraft used on that mission could be directed to fly through one of the plumes, Space.com noted.
A new NASA-funded study appearing in the October edition of the journal Nature Geoscience has found previously undiscovered cliff-like landforms on Mercury – a discovery which appears to indicate that the planet, like Earth, is currently a tectonically active world.
Using images obtained by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging spacecraft (MESSENGER), Tom Watters of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and his colleagues detected a series of features known as small thrust fault scarps.
These cliff-like landforms resemble stair steps, and are small enough that the researchers believe that they relatively young, geologically speaking. If true, this would indicate that Mercury is still contracting and that Earth is no longer the only planet in the solar system that is still tectonically active as experts have long assumed, the US space agency explained in a statement.
“The young age of the small scarps,” said Watters, who is a Smithsonian senior scientist at the Washington museum, “means that Mercury joins Earth as a tectonically active planet, with new faults likely forming today as Mercury’s interior continues to cool and the planet contracts.”
Small graben, or narrow linear troughs, have been found associated with small fault scarps (lower white arrows) on Mercury, and on Earth’s moon. (Credit: NASA)
Findings suggest that the planet experiences ‘Mercury-quakes’
Large fault scarps originally discovered during Mariner 10’s flybys of Mercury in the mid-1970s (and later confirmed by MESSENGER) found that the planet was shrinking, the agency said. The scarps formed as the planet’s interior cooled and began to contract. This, in turn, caused the crust to break and thrust upwards along faults, producing cliffs, some of which were quite large.
During the final 18 months of the MESSENGER mission, however, the spacecraft was travelling at a lower altitude, capturing higher-resolution images which revealed the presence of small fault scarps which researchers believe had to have been very young; otherwise, they would most likely have been destroyed when Mercury’s surface was bombarded by comets and meteorites.
These features, which NASA said are comparable to the young lunar scarps that act as evidence that the moon is also shrinking, suggest that the solar system’s smallest world undergoes seismic activity similar to earthquakes – “Mercury-quakes,” if you will. They added that the discovery is consistent with the fact that it has a recently-detected several-billion-year-old magnetic field and with the slow cooling process that its still-hot outer core is currently undergoing.
“This is why we explore,” said Jim Green, NASA Planetary Science Director Jim Green at the agency’s Washington DC-based headquarters. “For years, scientists believed that Mercury’s tectonic activity was in the distant past. It’s exciting to consider that this small planet – not much larger than Earth’s moon – is active even today.”
Big win for NASA: Congress mandates a mission to Mars
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
The US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee has passed a bipartisan bill that authorizes spending for a manned mission to Mars, but there’s a caveat: NASA must launch said mission within the next 25 years, the first time such a trip has been mandated by law.
According to USA Today and the Daily Mail, the budget allots $19.5 billion for the 2017 fiscal year to cover the costs of preparing for a crewed mission to the Red Planet, including continued development of Commercial Crew Program spacecraft designed to launch from US soil and the creation of an advanced space suit designed to better protect Mars mission personnel.
The bill also sets forth the goal of having an uncrewed SLS mission by 2018 and a crewed one by 2021. It would also support the full use of the International Space Station through 2024 (and possibly through 2028); require NASA to improve the monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment of adverse health effects related to space travel, and require the agency to provide regular updates on the progress of its asteroid relocation and sample collection mission.
“Fifty-five years after President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon, the Senate is challenging NASA to put humans on Mars,” said Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, the ranking Democrat on the Committee. “The priorities that we’ve laid out for NASA in this bill mark the beginning of a new era of American spaceflight.”
Spending bill seeking stability against shifting political winds
According to USA Today, the bill – which authorizes a total of $4.5 billion for exploration, $5 billion for space operations and $5.4 billion for science projects – is also viewed as a safeguard against any possible attempt by the next president to undo the planned projects, in much the way that President Obama canceled a planned return to the moon upon taking office.
The newspaper notes that some members of Congress were bothered that the President failed to consult with them before officially terminating the Constellation program, an initiative launched in 2005 that intended to send an astronaut back to the moon by 2020. The proposed mission was scrapped in 2011 due to the reported need for a substantial increase in funding.
“We have seen in the past the importance of stability and predictability in NASA and space exploration, (and) that whenever one has a change in administration, we have seen the chaos that can be caused by the cancellation of major programs,” explained Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the panel. “The impact in terms of jobs lost, the impact in terms of money wasted has been significant.”
The funding bill also looks to allow for better opportunities for aerospace companies to conduct business in Low Earth Orbit, according to the Daily Mail. A recent NASA report highlighting the projects in the work reveals that, in addition to the creation of spacecraft capsules, companies are developing new habitation modules for use in Low Earth Orbit, as well as around the moon.
China officially fires up world’s largest radio telescope
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
The largest radio telescope in the world, a $180 million dollar project that was started back in 2011, was completed and began operations this weekend at a location in southwestern Guizhou Province, China, the Xinhua News Agency and other media outlets have reported.
A ceremony to officially launch the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) was Sunday held in a karst valley region of Pingtang County, Xinhua said. FAST is 195 meters wider than the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (now the second largest telescope of its kind in the world) and cost a reported $180 million to complete, according to NPR.
While work on the observatory began just five years ago, Chinese astronomers first came up with the concept 17 years ago. FAST features a 4,450-panel reflector said to be as big as 30 soccer fields and required more than 8,000 people around the construction zone to leave their homes to ensure that there would be radio silence in a three-mile radius surrounding the array.
Princeton University astronomer Joseph Taylor, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993 for discovering indirect evidence of gravitational waves using the Arecibo Observatory, told Xinhua that he believed FAST would “generate enthusiasm, bring people into science, and make China important in the world of science.”
Scientists believe the array will result in ‘major breakthroughs’
One of the primary responsibilities of the new telescope will be to observe pulsars– imploded cores of stars slightly larger than our Sun. The radiation emitted by pulsars can be detected from Earth, provided sensitive enough equipment is used, and researchers believe that FAST might be capable of doubling the number of known pulsars detected to date.
In fact, Chinese researcher Qian Lei from the National Astronomical Observation (NAO) claims that, in a recent test observation, the array picked up high-quality electromagnetic waves emitted by a pulsar more than 1,350 light-years away. FAST will also be used to help researchers analyze interstellar molecules related to how galaxies evolve, according to Xinhua and NPR.
Scientists associated with the project have made some bold claims about the telescope. Deputy chief technologist Sun Caihong told Xinhua that it would very likely lead to major breakthroughs in the study of gravitational waves and general relativity theory, while chief technologist Wang Qiming predicted that it would remain Earth’s top radio telescope for the next 10 to 20 years.
“The ultimate goal of FAST is to discover the laws of the development of the universe,” Qian told state broadcaster CCTV, according to the Associated Press. Qian’s team believes that their new telescope has twice the sensitivity of the Arecibo Observatory, and as much as 10 times the surveying speed of the Puerto Rico telescope, the wire service noted.
SpaceX discovers the cause of their rocket’s explosion
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A “large breach” in the upper stage helium pressurization system caused a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster to explode earlier this month, destroying both the rocket and its $200 million satellite payload, the California-based aerospace firm has announced.
According to USA Today and Spaceflight Now, a preliminary internal investigation conducted with the assistance of US Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, and industry officials has determined that a breach of the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place. The cause of that breach remains unknown at this point, investigators said.
In an updateposted to the company’s website, SpaceX said that the even thought the timeline of the September 1 incident was “extremely short – from first signs of an anomaly to loss of data is about 93 milliseconds or less than 1/10th of a second,” the investigative team had reviewed more than 3,000 channels of engineering data along with audio, video and images of the blast.
A review of that data, along with debris that had been recovered an inspected, “suggests that a large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place,” the company said. “All plausible causes are being tracked… carefully investigated.”
Company could resume spaceflight as early as November
Earlier this month, SpaceX chief Elon Musk said that he would not rule out the possibility that something had struck the rocket, according to USA Today. The Falcon 9 was being fueled for a test-firing of its nine primary engines prior to the scheduled satellite launch, they added.
SpaceX officials have said that “safely and reliably” returning the Falcon 9 booster to regular use was the investigation’s top priority, Spaceflight Now said. Thus far, the investigation discovered “substantial” damage to some areas of the pad systems, but the Falcon Support Building adjacent to the pad and the liquid oxygen tanks and plumbing were unaffected, the company noted.
“The RP-1 (kerosene) fuel farm was also largely unaffected,” SpaceX said, and the pad’s control systems were also said to be “in relatively good condition.” Most of the firm’s other facilities are located several miles away, they noted, meaning that they were also unaffected.
At this point, no timetable has been set for when repairs at the launch pad will be complete, USA Today noted, so in the meantime, SpaceX plans to use facilities at nearby Kennedy Space Center. They hope to have that launch pad ready for use by the end of November, although it is currently unclear if the company plans to conduct their next launch in Florida or California.
“Our manufacturing and production is continuing in a methodical manner, with teams continuing to build engines, tanks, and other systems as they are exonerated from the investigation,” SpaceX explained. “We will work to resume our manifest as quickly as responsible once the cause of the anomaly has been identified,” they added. “Pending the results of the investigation, we anticipate returning to flight as early as the November timeframe.”
Goatman, underwear-wearing rats honored at Ig Nobel awards
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A biologist who created prosthetic limb extensions that allowed him to live as a goat and a late urologist who studied the effects of wearing wool, cotton, or polyester underpants on the sex lives of rats were among the researchers honored Thursday as part of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes.
The 26th edition of this annual event, which was held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, was organized by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, and according to the event’s official website, it was originally created “to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”
Taking home the honors in the reproductive science category was the late Ahmed Shafik of the Cairo University Department of Surgery and Experimental Research for his work involving rats and polyester underpants. As the Los Angeles Times explained, Shafik found that undergarments containing the synthetic fibers significantly reduced the reproductive success of male rodents.
Do pants on a rat inhibit mating? Only the important questions at the Ig Nobel prizes.
In fact, the newspaper reported that his experiments revealed that rats who were forced to wear polyester underwear for an entire year were 87% less likely to successfully complete an attempt at having sex than they were beforehand. Likewise, those wearing a cotton-poly blend were 71% less successful at reproducing, Shafik wrote in the journal European Urology.
Emissions-cheating automaker among other 2016 recipients
Also honored at the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes was Thomas Thwaites, who was named co-winner of the biology prize for developing special prosthetic extensions for his arms and legs so he would be able to spend three days living as a goat in the Swiss Alps, according to BBC News.
Thwaites, who shared the honor with Charles Foster (who also spent time living as a variety of different animals, including a badger, an otter and a fox), explained that he initially came up with the idea in an attempt to escape the stress of day-to-day life. He even used a special prosthesis to eat grass alongside his fellow goats, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“The point of the Ig Nobels,” the Washington Post explained, “is a total lack of gravitas. But the science, for the most part, is legitimate… Awards have been given in the past for discovering the way a vortex of body hair causes bellybutton lint to accumulate in the navel,” the paper added, as well as one study that led to the development of a cheese-baited trap for malaria mosquitoes.
Other recipients of this year’s awards included a project that found that looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body can relieve an itch on the left side (and vice versa); a study in which the authors asked 1,000 liars why they lied, and then decided whether or not to believe their answers, and one in which Japanese researchers investigated whether or not objects looked any different when people bent over and viewed them between their legs.
German automaker Volkswagen was also given tongue-in-cheek honors in chemistry for their efforts in “solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.” The firm, you may recall, was caught using special software that allowed its diesel vehicles to limit how much pollution they emitted during testing, only to exceed legal limits when on the road.
Hubble telescope finds exoplanet orbiting binary star system
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
For the first time, researchers have confirmed the existence of a three-body system, using the NASA Hubble Space Telescope to locate a planet orbiting two stars in a system located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of the galaxy, officials announcedon Thursday.
Using the telescope and a technique called gravitational microlensing (in which the gravity of a star in the foreground bends and amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it), astronomers were able to confirm the existence of the planet and the stars around which it orbits in OGLE-2007-BLG-349, a system located in the Scorpius constellation.
The objects were initially discovered by an international consortium in 2007, and the researchers have determined that the planet orbits around the stars at a distance of approximately 300 million miles, or roughly the same distance between the sun and our asteroid belt.
It completes one orbit around both stars about once every seven years, and the stars themselves are about 7 million miles apart or 14 times the diameter of the moon’s orbit around the Earth, the astronomers explained. A paper detailing the team’s findings has been submitted to and accepted by The Astronomical Journal, a publication of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Discovery demonstrates effectiveness of microlensing as planet-hunting tool
The researchers first discovered one of the stars and the planet nine years ago using observations from ground-based telescopes, but additional analysis revealed a third object which could not be identified. As lead author David Bennett of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland explained, there were two different, equally plausible scenarios early on.
“The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star,” Bennett said. He and his colleagues then used Hubble images along with gravitational microlensing to determine that the light from the foreground lens system was much too faint to have been from a single star.
The brightness level, they determined, was consistent with that of a pair of closely-orbiting red dwarf stars, meaning the system they were looking at had to be comprised of two stars and a single planet. Follow-up observations conducted using Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 with the benefit of a nearly perfect alignment confirmed this discovery, as the lensing magnified the light so much that it “allowed us to see the signal of the two stars,” Bennett said.
Their research has successfully demonstrated that microlensing can detect planets orbiting double-star systems, the authors noted, suggesting that Hubble and its successors may be a powerful tool in the ongoing hunt for new and potentially habitable exoplanets.
“This discovery suggests we need to rethink our observing strategy when it comes to stellar binary-lensing events,” study co-author Yiannis Tsapras from the Astronomisches Recheninstitut (Astronomical Calculation Institute) in Heidelberg, Germany, explained in a statement. “This is an exciting new discovery for microlensing.”
Scientists finally discovered what creates these mysterious space blobs
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Since they were first discovered 16 years ago, scientists have been wondering how and why the unusual objects known as Lyman-alpha blobs – gigantic clouds of hydrogen gas which glow 10 times more brightly than the Milky Way – were so bright, or why the even existed at all.
Now, as the Washington Postreported Thursday morning, they have found their answer: using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of researchers has discovered that Lyman-alpha blob 1 (the original object discovered by Caltech astronomers back in 2000) contained a pair of young galaxies creating new stars at an extremely fast pace.
This activity causes the cloud of gas enveloping these stars to glow like “a streetlight on a foggy night,” lead author Jim Geach, an astronomer with the University of Hertfordshire, told the Post. “You see the diffuse glow because light is scattering off the tiny water droplets. A similar thing is happening here, except the streetlight is an intensely star-forming galaxy and the fog is a huge cloud of intergalactic gas. The galaxies are illuminating their surroundings.”
Geach and his colleagues believe that their discovery could help scientists better understand how galaxies form and evolve. The two located at the heart of Lyman-alpha blob 1 are currently in the first stages of their development, but eventually, they will likely merge into one elliptical galaxy, similar to but considerably larger than our own Milky Way, the newspaper explained.
Findings could shed new light on formation, evolution of galaxies
Lyman-alpha blob 1 (also known as LAB-1) is one of the largest and most thoroughly analyzed objects of its kind, the researchers explained in a statement. It is three times larger than the Milky Way (measuring 300,000 light years across) and is so far away that its light takes approximately 11.5 billion light years to reach the Earth, they added in a second press release.
Most experts believe that LABs are the incubators in which the universe’s most massive galaxies form, which is why this new research – published recently in The Astrophysical Journal– is such an important breakthrough in understanding the evolution of galaxies The glow which surrounds these objects in particular could lead to new discoveries about the processes that occur within the difficult-to-study primordial gas clouds surrounding young galaxies.
“Unveiling the galaxies shrouded in LAB-1 did more than just put to bed the longstanding issue of the gas cloud’s glow,” explained study co-author Desika Narayanan of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “It provided a rare opportunity to see how young, growing galaxies behaved when the universe was quite young.”
“What’s exciting about these blobs is that we are getting a rare glimpse of what’s happening around these young, growing galaxies,” said Geach. “For a long time, the origin of the extended Lyman-alpha light has been controversial. But with the combination of new observations and cutting-edge simulations, we think we have solved a 15-year-old mystery: Lyman-alpha Blob-1 is the site of formation of a massive elliptical galaxy that will one day be the heart of a giant cluster. We are seeing a snapshot of the assembly of that galaxy 11.5 billion years ago.”
Charred Dead Sea Scroll read using X-ray technology
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Using X-ray scanning technology, researchers from Israel and the US have managed to read an ancient, charred Biblical scroll discovered in the 1970s in a synagogue on the western shores of the Dead Sea, BBC News and the New York Times revealed on Wednesday.
Made from carbonized parchment, the document was determined to be too fragile to be opened and read, leaving its caretakers unable to do anything but conserve it, hoping that there would be a day that new technology would be able to reveal its contents. As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science Advances, after nearly five decades of waiting, that day has come.
Researchers from the University of Kentucky, along with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, used a computer to create a three-dimensional image of the document using X-ray scanning technology, and found that it contained a series of passages from the Book of Leviticus virtually identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible dating back to at least the third or fourth century.
At nearly 2,000 years old, the fragments represent the earliest known copy of the text ever found by archaeologists, and according to the Times, the digital image was able to capture words which were “amazingly clear and legible, in contrast to the scroll’s blackened and beaten-up exterior.”
“We were amazed at the quality of the images,” Michael Segal of the School of Philosophy and Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told BBC News. “Much of the text is… close to as readable as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls or high-resolution photographs of them.”
Some of the scrolls were too charred and fragile to unwrap. (Credit: Gali Tibbon)
Technique could be used to read other damaged ancient texts
The scroll contains the first two chapters of the Book of Leviticus, and like the Masoretic texts (which the Times called “the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible and the one often used as the basis for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles”), it contains only consonants as early Hebrew texts did not include vowels.
Previously, the oldest known fragments of the Old Testament dated back to the 8th century, and according to BBC News, the researchers believe that the newly identified texts may help them to learn more about how the modern Hebrew Bible was developed. Furthermore, they are confident that this scanning technique could help them read other scrolls too fragile to be read normally.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we think anything would come of it,” Pnina Shor, the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), told the Times. Now that their technique has been used successfully, the researchers believe that it could also be useful in reading other Dead Sea scrolls, and nearly 300 carbonized texts destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
“Our approach for recovering substantial ink-based text from a damaged object results in readable columns at such high quality that serious critical textual analysis can occur,” the study authors wrote in their paper. “Hence, this work creates a new pathway for subsequent textual discoveries buried within the confines of damaged materials.”
Lost Anglo-Saxon palace discovered near Sutton Hoo burial site
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Remnants of an ancient Anglo-Saxon royal palace discovered near the Sutton Hoo burial site in East Anglia, England, might have been part of the “king’s village” referred to by the Venerable Bede in the 8th-century scholar’s book An Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
According to BBC News and the Daily Mail, archaeologists found a 75-foot by 30-foot structure at Rendlesham in Suffolk, roughly four miles away from the well-known Sutton Hoo excavation, using aerial photography and light detection and ranging survey equipment. They believe that the building, which is part of a 120-acre site, may be a large hall or the main place itself.
“We’re convinced we’ve found a royal settlement of very high status, and I suppose it would be a large hall rather than a palace as it would spring to mind to us,” project coordinator Faye Minter, a member of the Suffolk County Council archaeological unit told BBC News Tuesday. Her team believes that other burial sites, similar to Sutton Hoo, may also be located in the vicinity.
“We hope there will be more to come,” Minter said. “Whether or not they would be ship burials like Sutton Hoo, who can say?” Approximately 4,000 items, including weights, metalwork and coins, one-fourth of which are Anglo-Saxon in origin, have been discovered at the Rendelseham site, which is believed to have been linked to the Sutton Hoo location.
Credit:
New find may be the ‘largest and richest settlement of its time’
In the late 1930s, Edith Pretty, owner of the Sutton Hoo site, asked archaeologists to investigate one of several large mounds on her property. The ensuing dig resulted in the discovery of an 88-foot ship and several other artifacts, most of which are now on display in the British Museum.
Minter and her colleagues believe that Sutton Hoo would have been the burial site of the Anglo-Saxon King Raedwald, who lived at Rendlesham before his death in about 624 AD. Experts say that the Rendlesham palace was likely one of several the late monarch would have resided in.
As Dr. Helen Geake of the British Museum told BBC News, “There would have been quite a few of these palaces or halls dotted around. The king [of the time] would have toured his kingdom in order to show his magnificence to his people, so he would have had lots of places to base himself around East Anglia.” Nonetheless, she called the palace’s discovery “incredibly exciting.”
The find will officially be announced by Minter and the Suffolk County Council archaeological unit during a September 24 meeting in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, according to the Daily Mail. A council spokesperson told the Xinhuanews agency that the upcoming conference “will reveal that Rendlesham has the largest and richest settlement of its time known in England.”
“The quality of some of the metalwork leaves no doubt that it was made for and used by the highest ranks of society,” added Professor Christopher Scull of Cardiff University and University College London. “These exceptional discoveries are truly significant in throwing new light on early East Anglia and the origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.”
Scientists discover the tardigrade’s survival secret
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Scientists have long known that unusual aquatic creatures known as tardigrades were capable of surviving boiling, freezing, and intense radiation, but a new study led by researchers at the University of Tokyo discovered exactly what makes these creatures so close to indestructible.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Professor Takekazu Kunieda and his colleagues explained that the creatures also known as water bears possess a protein that protects their DNA by swaddling it like a baby in a blanket — a survival secret that they believe could eventually be used to protect human cells from radiation, according to the Washington Post.
Tardigrades, explained BBC News, roll themselves up into little desiccated balls (meaning that they become severely dehydrated) in order to protect themselves from extreme conditions, such as sweltering heat, prolonged arid conditions or even the vacuum of space. Now, however, Prof. Kunieda’s team has pinpointed the genetic causes that prevent damage to the creature’s DNA.
While examining the tardigrade genome, they found a specific protein that attaches itself to the creature’s DNA and which appeared to have a protective mechanism. The protein, dubbed Dsup (short for damage suppressor) is believed to not only protect tardigrade DNA from the impact of radiation exposure and other harmful stimuli, but also repairs any damage that does occur.
“We guess that Dsup binds densely to DNA to provide a shield against environmental stress, somehow making DNA inaccessible to any damaging agents,” Prof. Kunieda explained to New Scientist. “To our knowledge, this is the first identification of a DNA-associating protein which confers DNA protection and improved tolerance to radioactivity in animal cells.”
Protein could protect cells during space travel and cancer treatments
After discovering Dsup, the researchers modified human cells in order to make them produce the protein. They found that the enhanced cell cultures experienced about 40% less damage from X-rays than unaltered cells, suggesting that Dsup could ultimately be used to help protect the DNA of men and women from radiation as well.
Furthermore, Kuneida told New Scientist that the protection all but disappeared when he and his colleagues disrupted the Dsup gene using RNA, clearly illustrating that it is the primary factor in delivering this cellular protection. While transferring the protein into other animals using genetic engineering could boost their resistance to radiation, he warns that this could be difficult.
Nonetheless, the Tokyo researcher is optimistic that it could be done: “As Dsup improved the radiation tolerance of human cultured cells, I hope it might be possible to improve the radiation tolerance of individual animals… It could be helpful for space flight, radiotherapy and radiation workers in the far future,” protecting them during cancer treatments or from cosmic rays.
University of Edinburgh Professor Mark Blaxter, who was not involved in the research, said that the findings were “groundbreaking,” telling BBC News that “this is the first time an individual protein from a tardigrade has been shown to be active in radiation protection… [And] radiation is one of the things that’s guaranteed to kill you.”
Groundbreaking 2,000 year old skeleton found at Mediterranean shipwreck site
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Archaeologists working at the same Mediterranean shipwreck containing a 2nd century BC device often dubbed “the world’s oldest computer” have discovered a 2,000-year-old human skeleton, according to a report published earlier this week in the journal Nature.
The bones were discovered on August 31 off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera, and the AFP news agency said that they were surprisingly well-preserved given their age. Currently, the individual’s identity is unknown, but that may change if DNA can be recovered from the bones.
A partial skull found among the wreck (Credit: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO)
The skeleton was discovered by researchers at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. Thus far, they have recovered a partial skull (which includes the jaw and teeth), two long arm bones, both femurs, and multiple ribs, with additional bones embedded in the seafloor and awaiting excavation.
WHOI underwater archaeologist and excavation co-director Brendan Foley told Nature that he and his colleagues were “thrilled” by the find, which is rare because in most cases, the victims of shipwrecks are swept away by currents and eaten by fish within a period of decades. These bones have survived centuries, he said. “We don’t know of anything else like it.”
Researchers hope to recover DNA from the newfound bones
Foley’s team recovered the remains from the Antikythera Shipwreck, a well-known wreck that contains the remains of a Greek trading ship dating back to around 65 BC and which was found off the island of Antikythera in the Aegean Sea (hence the name given to the shipwreck).
While this is the first skeleton to be recovered from the wreck, it gained notoriety following the discovery of a technological device known as the Antikythera Mechanism, a complicated system composed of roughly 40 bronze cogs and gears used by the ancient Greeks to monitor the cycles of the solar system, the AFP said. It preceded similar European devices by some 1,500 years.
The Antikythera Mechanism (Credit: National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece)
The researchers claim that the skeleton is the first to be recovered from an ancient shipwreck in the era of DNA analysis, and in a statement, DNA expert Dr. Hannes Schroeder from the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen (who will be studying the remains once he receives permission to do so from the Greek government) said that the bones are so well preserved that he may be able to identify the individual’s ethnicity and geographic origin.
“Against all odds, the bones survived over 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea and they appear to be in fairly good condition, which is incredible,” Dr. Schroeder said. He told Nature that the fact that the archaeologists were able to recover the petrous bones (bones located behind the ear) was fortuitous, as they tend to preserve genetic material better than other parts of the skeleton. “If there’s any DNA,” he explained, “then from what we know, it’ll be there.”
“This is the most exciting scientific discovery we’ve made here,” Foley told The Guardian. His colleague Dr. Schroder added that it remained to be seen how successful the team’s attempts to recover DNA from the newfound skeleton would be. “This is uncharted waters,” he explained. “I’ve never dealt with submerged remains like this before. We won’t know if it works until we try, but it is definitely worth trying.”
For decades, the term “bird brain” has been used to refer to a person of lower intelligence, but a new study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests this term might not be appropriate.
In their new PNAS paper, University of Otago psychologist Dr. Damian Scarf and his colleagues revealed that pigeons were capable of distinguishing actual words from non-words by processing letter combinations visually, performing these tasks just as well as baboons.
According to Dr. Scarf’s team, this is the first study of its kind to identify a non-primate species as possessing “orthographic” abilities, meaning that they possess at least some of the conventions (spelling, capitalization, word breaks, punctuation, etc.) required for writing a language.
Give the little guys some credit. They’re smarter than you think (Credit: Unsplash)
“A novel theory suggests that orthographic processing is the product of neuronal recycling, with visual circuits that evolved to code visual objects now co-opted to code words,” the study authors wrote. “We provide a litmus test of this theory by assessing whether pigeons, an organism with a visual system organizationally distinct from that of primates, code words orthographically.”
They added that the pigeons “not only correctly identified novel words” but also displayed “the hallmarks of orthographic processing, in that they are sensitive to the bigram frequencies of words, the orthographic similarity between words and non-words, and the transposition of letters. These findings demonstrate that visual systems neither genetically nor organizationally similar to humans can be recycled to represent the orthographic code that defines words.”
Birds’ success rate was ‘significantly’ better than simple luck
As part of the research team’s experiments, a quartet of pigeons were taught to peck out four-letter words in English as they appeared on a screen, or to peck a symbol when they saw a four-letter non-word appear. Additional words were added, one at a time, until each of the birds had accumulated vocabularies of 26 to 58 words and more than 8,000 nonwords.
Next, the researchers tested the pigeons to ensure that they were actually learning to tell words from non-words (instead of simply memorizing them) by introducing them to a never-before-seen group of words. The birds identified these new words at a rate “significantly above chance,” the researchers said Monday in a statement.
Dr. Scarf explained that the birds likely accomplished this feat by determining whether there was a greater chance statistically that specific two-letter pairs known as bigrams (such as EN and AL) were more likely to be associated with words or non-words. Essentially, the birds looked at letter pairs and determined whether or not each set commonly reappeared in actual words.
The findings, co-author Onur Güntürkün from Ruhr University in Germany, demonstrates that “pigeons – separated by 300 million years of evolution from humans and having vastly different brain architectures – show such a skill as orthographic processing is astonishing.” His colleague, Otago University Professor Michael Colombo, added that “we may have to seriously re-think the use of the term ‘bird brain’ as a put down.”
New discovery changes everything we know about Earth’s origin
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
New research published earlier this week in the journal Nature has revealed that the Earth and other planetary objects formed during the early years of the solar system share similar chemical origins – a discovery that is in stark contrast to what scientists have believed for decades.
Using data collected through thermal ionization mass spectrometry, Audrey Bouvier, a professor and cosmochemist from Western University in Ontario, Canada, and Maud Boyet of the Magmas and Volcanoes Laboratory at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, reported that Earth and several other extraterrestrial objects share identical initial Neodymium-142 levels.
Neodymium-142 (142Nd) is one of seven isotopes found in the chemical element neodymium, a metal that is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust and commonly used to create magnets for use in commercial products such as microphones and earbuds, the authors explained in a statement.
“How the Earth was formed and what type of planetary materials were part of that formation are issues that have puzzled generations of scientists,” said Bouvier, who is also the Curator of the Western Meteorite Collection as well as Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Planetary Materials at the university. “And these new isotopic measurements of meteorites provide exciting answers to these questions about our origins and what made the Earth so special.”
Explaining differences between Earth’s interior and chondrites
Research conducted 11 years ago revealed a slight variation in 142Nd between terrestrial rocks and chondrites, stone meteors believed to have been vital building blocks of our homeworld, the researchers explained. These findings were interpreted as a differentiation of the Earth’s interior and chondrites during the planet’s first 30 million years of existence.
“The isotopes of Nd were measured precisely in 2005 but in different materials,” Bouvier said in an interview with the Daily Mail Thursday. “The interpretation back then was that the difference between Earth and chondrites had to be the consequence of Earth’s differentiation into different internal layers (mantle, crust, core) very early in its history.”
However, in their newly-published study, she and Boyet demonstrated that the differences in these neodymium isotopes were actually present during the initial growth phase of the Earth, and were not introduced at a later time as initially believed. In fact, using new and improved methods of data collection, they learned that not all meteoritical objects in the solar system were exactly alike.
Specifically, their measurements revealed that while different objects found in the solar system contained both the elements neodymium (Nd) and samarium (Sm), there were slight variations in the isotopic compositions of those elements, suggesting that the solar system was not chemically uniform even during its earliest phases and that materials formed from earlier stellar generations were incorporated in different amounts when planets first formed.
“The Earth evolved from materials that were different or in different proportions than the ones that built other planets such as Mars,” Bouvier told the Daily Mail. “It took longer than we thought for the Earth to form and evolve but we find that both Earth and the moon share more and stronger similarities with their building blocks and chemical evolution.”
Ancient jeans? World’s oldest indigo-dyed cloth found in Peru
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A newly discovered piece of fabric discovered recently at the Huaca Prieta ceremonial mound in northern Peru features the oldest known use of indigo dyes, pushing the earliest known use of the coloring back by nearly 1,600 years, according to researchpublished late last week.
According to Smithsonian.com and the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Splitstoser, an archaeologist and textile expert from George Washington University, and his colleagues reported in the latest edition of Science Advances that the recently discovered scraps of dyed cotton are thought to be about 6,200 years old, making them over 1,500 years older than the earliest-known dyed fabrics from Egypt and 3,000 years older than the first blue-dyed Chinese textiles.
The striped pieces of cloth were originally discovered during a 2007 expedition at Huaca Prieta, a ceremonial mound located on Peru’s north coast that was occupied between 4,000 and 14,500 years ago. Thousands of pieces have been discovered, 800 of which were directly examined by Splitstoser and confirmed to be far older than any dyed textiles discovered to date, including the indigo-dyed bands dating back to Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty (approximately 2400 BC).
“It is possible it is the earliest known example of cloth dyeing in the world,” he told the Times last Friday. While not all of the one- to three-foot swatches of cloth used the same weave, each of them had been cut, torn or ripped from a larger piece of cloth, Splitstoser added.
Credit: Lauren Urana
Findings show that scientific contributions of western peoples, author says
Since these fragments had no arm, leg or neck holes, the researchers believe that they were not used for clothing, according to the Times. Rather, it is likely that they were used to carry objects to the ceremonial site, where both the items and the textiles were used or ritually deposited.
Furthermore, the study authors found many of the cloth pieces appeared to have been wet at one point, and many appeared to have been twisted or balled up as if they had been wetted down and then wrung out and discarded. The discovery of smashed gourd fragments on a ramp leading up to the site led Splitstoser to assume that the gourds contained liquid that was poured onto the fabrics and their contents and that this liquid was later squeezed out of the cloth.
Splitstoser and his colleagues said that they initially couldn’t tell the swatches had been dyed because they were so dirty, but after they were cleaned in 2011, faint traces of an indigo color began to show up. According to Smithsonian.com, they tested eight of the cloth patches using a cutting-edge technique known as high-performance liquid chromatography and confirmed its presence in five of them. The lack of indigo in the others may be due to the age of the fabrics, they noted.
“The people of the Americas were making scientific and technological contributions as early and in this case even earlier than people were in other parts of the world,” the archaeologist told LiveScience. “We in the West typically skip over the accomplishments of the ancient people of the western hemisphere… but in this case, the cottons domesticated by the people of South America and Mesoamerica form the basis of the cottons we wear today.”
Hubble Telescope gets close-up look at a comet disintegrating
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in January and released by NASA last week provide the best look yet at a disintegrating comet, showing in great detail how solar radiation was ultimately responsible for the demise of the 4.5-billion-year-old object.
According to Space.com and Motherboard, the photographs were taken over a three-day span when the 1,600-foot-long comet known as 332P/Ikeya-Murakami or Comet 332P was roughly 150 million miles from the sun, or approximately the same distance away as planet Mars.
The images show the core being trailed by several bluish-white specks, and as the 332P (which is made from ice and dust) travels along its path, the sun’s rays cause it to begin breaking apart, and in later images, 25 building-sized fragments are clearly shown drifting away from the comet.
The observations “suggest that” the comet “may be spinning so fast that material is ejected from its surface,” NASA explained. The debris that resulted “is now scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail, larger than the width of the continental US,” the agency noted. “These observations provide insight into the volatile behavior of comets as they approach the sun and begin to vaporize.”
Comet appears to be ‘fragmenting itself into oblivion’
Believed to be nearly as old as the solar system itself, Comet 332P was originally discovered in November 2010 by Japanese astronomers Kaoru Ikeya and Shigeki Murakami. For most of its lifespan, the comet remained in the Kuiper Belt, but a fateful encounter with Neptune caused the comet to slingshot towards the planets and the sun, according to Motherboard.
The new images show that the comet fragments alternately become brighter or darker as the icy patches on their surface rotate into or out of sunlight, NASA explained. Also, these observations show that the shards (which make up about 4% of the comet and are between 65-200 feet wide) change shape and move away from each other at speeds of just a few miles per hour. The comet itself also changes brightness on a cycle of between two and four hours, the agency said.
So what exactly is happening to the comet? Based on the Hubble data, researchers believe that when the sun heats 332P, it causes eruptions of dust and gas from its surface. These jets cause the rotation of the comet to increase due to its small nucleus, and the increased rate of spin causes chunks of matter to essentially fall off the comet and drift off into space.
“We know that comets sometimes disintegrate, but we don’t know much about why or how they come apart,” lead researcher David Jewitt from UCLAsaid in a statement. “The trouble is that it happens quickly and without warning, and so we don’t have much chance to get useful data.” He added that Hubble’s “fantastic resolution” allowed his team to monitor small, faint fragments of the comet and watch them as they change from one day to the next.
“That has allowed us to make the best measurements ever obtained on such an object,” he added. “In the past, astronomers thought that comets die when they are warmed by sunlight, causing their ices to simply vaporize away. Either nothing would be left over or there would be a dead hulk of material where an active comet used to be. But it’s starting to look like fragmentation may be more important. In Comet 332P we may be seeing a comet fragmenting itself into oblivion.”
Mating duels between different members of some species are not all that unusual, but the one witnessed earlier this month by Arkansas resident Dawn Kelly was truly rare in that it not only featured a type of creature not normally prone to such behavior, but two different species!
The encounter in question took place near the Buffalo National River Park and involved two types of venomous snakes – a cottonmouth and a copperhead – according to Live Science and National Geographic. Upon encountering the unusual combatants, she recorded their fight with her smartphone, then sent the video to the Auburn University Museum of Natural History.
Shortly thereafter, Kelly learned just how unusual what she had witnessed truly was.
As David Steen, a wildlife ecologist and assistant research professor at the Alabama facility first watched the footage, he said he “knew immediately” that he “was looking at something that was going to blow everybody’s minds.” Steen told Nat Geo that it’s “unusual to see snakes fighting,” he added that “what makes this particular observation is that they are two different species.”
Evidence of cross-species mating between different vipers?
Kelly told LiveScience that she first saw the viper vs. viper encounter while looking out of the window in her Snowball, Arkansas cabin. The two snakes, each of whom were said to be at least two feet long, were so focused on their fight that she was able to sneak up on them and film them for several minutes before they finally noticed her.
“To my knowledge, no one’s ever documented two different vipers in combat before,” Steen told the website. What makes it more unusual is that, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, vipers of different species do not typically mate with each other (although Nat Geo pointed out that this behavior has taken place in captivity, resulting in hybrid “cottonhead” snakes).
Does the fact that these two serpents were squaring off against the same, unseen female suggest that cross-species mating is more common amongst snakes than previously believed? “It’s one observation, so we don’t want to read into it too much,” Steen explained. “We don’t know if it’s necessarily widespread behavior, but it does make us want to rethink what we know about how these species interact with each other.”
Of course, Nat Geo also pointed out that since the female object of their desire does not appear in the video footage, there is the possibility that there were multiple possible mates – one belonging to each species – located somewhere off-camera. Since Kelly’s presence was ultimately detected, we are left to ponder exactly who won, and how everything turned out in the end.
Studying tremors in Scotland can unlock the key to finding life on Mars
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
The discovery of hydrogen in rocks an island chain off the west coast of Scotland suggests that similar processes may be taking place on Mars, and that it could potentially lead to the evolution of life on the Red Planet, according to new research published in the journal Astrobiology.
Professor John Parnell of the University of Aberdeen and his colleagues were studying rocks on the remote islands of Barra and Uist, which are part of the Outer Hebrides, when they discovered that those rocks experience tremors which may be capable of generating hydrogen in the crust.
According to The Independent and the Daily Mail, Mars also experiences these kinds of quakes, and they could produce conditions conducive to microbial life on the Red Planet. Hydrogen produced in this way could provide energy for simple subterranean organisms, the authors said.
In a statement, Parnell, a professor in the university’s School of Geosciences, explained that earthquakes “cause friction,” and that his team’s analysis of ancient rocks on the Outer Hebrides had “demonstrated how this creates hydrogen,” which he noted is “a fuel for simple microbes.”
“So microbes could live off hydrogen created in the Earth’s subsurface as a result of seismic activity,” the professor added. “This is a model that could apply to any other rocky planet, and on Mars there are so-called ‘Marsquakes’ that may produce hydrogen and therefore could feed life in the Martian sub-surface.”
Waiting until 2018 for additional ‘InSight’ into the findings
Even using conservative estimates of the current seismic activity on Mars, the researchers said, there would likely be enough hydrogen generated to be useable for microbes, thus enhancing the possibility that there are suitable habitats for biological organisms beneath the planet’s surface.
Their findings could make NASA’s upcoming InSight mission all the more interesting. InSight, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2018, will be studying seismic activity on Mars during the course of its time at the Red Planet, Parnell said. His team’s findings, he added, “will make those measurements all the more interesting.”
InSight will collect this data using an instrument known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), which will drill into rocks and measure seismic resonance on the Red Planet. It is one of two primary tools that the robotic lander will be using, according to the Daily Mail. The other, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), will make precise measurements of the planet’s rotation and heat loss.
InSight was originally supposed to launch next month before the discovery of a leak forced the US space agency to delay lift-off. Earlier this month, NASA announced that the new launch date would begin on May 5, 2018, with a Mars landing scheduled for November 26. The length of the delay is due to the fact that launch opportunities are driven by orbital dynamics, they explained.
Meet Diego– the giant tortoise who saved his species through tons of sex
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
It sounds like the plot of an R-rated sex comedy: a group of creatures is close to extinction and it falls to one male to single-handedly repopulate the endangered species by having sex with as many females as possible – and to ramp up the camp factor, he’s over 100 years old.
However, as Metroand CBS News reported this week, the tale is far from fiction, although the protagonist of this story is not a human. In actuality, he’s Diego the giant tortoise, a centenarian who was transported from the San Diego Zoo to the island of Española in the Galapagos around 50 years ago with the hopes that he would be able to breed with females in the wild.
To say those efforts proved fruitful would be an understatement. In the past five decades, Diego has fathered at least 800 offspring and has been credited with single-handedly saving his species, Chelonoidis hoodensis, according to media outlets. Prior to his arrival, there were only a pair of male turtles and a dozen females, all of whom were too far from one another to mate.
“[Diego’s] a very sexually active male reproducer. He’s contributed enormously to repopulating the island,” Galapagos National Park tortoise preservation specialist Washington Tapia said in an interview with the AFPnews agency. “We did a genetic study and we discovered that he was the father of nearly 40 percent of the offspring released into the wild on Espanola.”
Diego’s journey from the Galapagos to the US and back again
The 175-pound, 35-inch long, nearly five-foot tall giant tortoise is the dominant male out of the three assigned to repopulate on Española, the AFP noted. He lives along with six females in an enclosure located at a tortoise breeding center on Santa Cruz Island.
Tapia explained that Diego was discovered at the San Diego Zoo (for which he is named) after his species was determined to be at risk, resulting in an international campaign to locate more of the rare tortoises. Tapia said that it is unclear when he arrived in the US, but that he believes the tortoise was taken by a scientific expedition to Espanola “sometime between 1900 and 1959.”
According to CBS News, he was most likely brought to California by Dr. Harry Wegeforth, the founder of the San Diego Zoo, following one of his two voyages to the Galapagos, one of which took place in 1928 and the other in 1933. The zoo returned him home to Española in 1977, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Thanks largely to his reproductive prowess, there are now more than 2,000 giant tortoises living on the island, meaning that the species is no longer on the brink of extinction. “I wouldn’t say [the species] is in perfect health, because historical records show there probably used to be more than 5,000 tortoises on the island. But it’s a population that’s in pretty good shape – and growing, which is the most important,” Tapia explained.
NASA discovers the cause of red spot on Pluto’s moon Charon
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Researchers may have finally found the cause of the large red spot at the north pole of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon: the satellite and the planet which it orbits share an atmosphere, and methane gas escaping from Pluto is being trapped and frozen by Charon, according to a new study.
The red spot, discovered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its historic July 2015 flyby of Pluto and its moons, is caused when trapped methane gas from Pluto’s atmosphere is frozen to Charon’s icy surface at the pole, then chemically transformed first into hydrocarbons, then into a reddish type of organic materials known as tholins, by ultraviolet radiation.
As lead author Will Grundy, a planetary scientist at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona and part of the New Horizons mission team, told Space.com via email, “Methane is volatile enough that it can only stick to the surface during the long, cold polar winters.” Models created by Grundy and his colleagues found that the UV rays eventually stripped the methane of its hydrogen.
That activity left behind carbon, which paired with other molecules to produce a substance which persisted even when surface temperatures increased. Those remaining hydrocarbons continued to accumulate and become increasingly carbon-rich, and over a period of several million years, they become tholins that produce the reddish hue, the authors wrote in the journal Nature.
Polar temperatures, length of winter led to methane accumulation
Based on data collected by New Horizons following its flyby of Charon, Grundy’s team wasted little time speculating that the red spot was created by tholins produced by the transfer of Pluto’s atmosphere to its moon – a phenomenon resulting from the dwarf planet’s relatively tiny size and inability to maintain its atmosphere, according to Space.com’s report.
While that atmosphere escapes outward in all directions, Grundy told the website that Charon’s gravity is strong enough to capture some of that lost methane. He and his colleagues then used a system to simulate how the moon’s temperature changed throughout history, and found that due to the extremely cold temperatures at its poles (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit; -273.15 Celsius) and the length of the winter (one Earth century), the captured gas has plenty of time to freeze.
“For the most part, Charon’s surface is too warm for methane to stick, so the methane molecules that make it to Charon’s surface just bounce around there until they either escape back to space again or find a place cold enough to stick,” Grundy told Space.com via email. “The winter pole does get cold enough for methane to stick; so methane will accumulate there, but only until the sun rises again in the spring and warms it back up.”
“This study solves one of the greatest mysteries we found on Charon, Pluto’s giant moon,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) as well as a co-author of the new study, added in a press release. “And it opens up the possibility that other small planets in the Kuiper Belt with moons may create similar, or even more extensive ‘atmospheric transfer’ features on their moons.”
—–
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Men don’t workout to build muscle– it’s because they feel ashamed
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
While the amount of muscle mass or body mass index (BMI) ratings have little impact on when and how frequently a man will go to the gym to work out, hidden concerns over how much body fat can greatly affect attendance habits, according to new research published this month.
They found that while attitudes regarding their BMI or muscle did not predict how frequency the men would attend the gym, those with feelings of guilt or shame associated with body fat tended to be more likely to participate in unplanned, spontaneous workout sessions – patterns which the researchers warn can be difficult to sustain over time.
“Coaches, trainers, and even ‘gym buddies’ need to be aware of individuals’ motivations and reasons for attending a gym,” Dr. Keatley explained in a statement. “Spontaneous gym goers are more likely to be motivated by guilt, shame or pressure, so it’s important to turn this around and place a focus on positive feelings of achievement and pride, fostering a long-term healthier behavior change.”
Why guys like Vin Diesel and Hugh Jackman are to blame
The new study, which the authors claim is the first to examine the body attitudes of men along with both their explicit (conscious) and implicit (non-conscious) motivations for exercising, may help health and fitness experts improve long-term gym attendance patterns by focusing on goals and personal autonomy instead of body image.
“With the recent growth of ‘selfies’ and the return of muscle-bound Hollywood hero icons like Vin Diesel and Hugh Jackman, there’s a real risk that males may be more influenced to attend the gym more regularly and workout to a point where it becomes dangerous or detracts from their wellbeing,” Dr. Keatley said.
Dr. Keatley and Caudwell recruited 100 men, all of whom had slightly elevated BMI levels and said that they worked out for about one hour two to three times per week. Only 16% claimed that appearance or amateur bodybuilding was their motivation for working out, and just 8% said their goal was just to train and/or compete.
Each participant filled out a self-reporting questionnaire, rating things like whether or not they felt like others were pressuring them to work out on a scale of one (not very true) to four (very true). They then also were asked to associate either positive or negative words (willing, forced, spontaneous and restricted, for example) with words relating to themselves and others.
“Anyone can be affected by what they see online, the social cues images can give, and the popular conceptions of an ‘ideal body image,’” Dr. Keatley noted. “This study is important in showing that whilst they may be more unlikely to admit it, body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia can and do affect males as well as females, and therefore should be investigated fully.”
Sugar industry officials paid off scientists for positive research results
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
During the 1960s, researchers were paid off by the sugar industry to downplay sucrose’s role in causing coronary heart disease, focusing instead on fat and cholesterol as the primary causes of the condition, a shocking new report published in JAMA Internal Medicine has revealed.
According to Reuters and Ars Technica, the study in question was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, and while it was written by nutrition professors, the core objectives of the research were set forth by the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), which is today the Sugar Association– a fact which was not disclosed by the authors at the time.
Furthermore, Laura A. Schmidt of the University of California, San Francisco and her colleagues revealed in the newly-published report that they had found evidence that the SRF also funded the research and reviewed drafts of the manuscript prior to publication. Their activity was one part of a larger campaign to counter “negative attitudes toward sugar,” Reuters explained.
We know candy is bad for us, but the sugar industry changed public perception of the substance (Credit: Thinkstock)
Harvard University professor of nutrition D. Mark Hegsted, who co-led the SRF’s first studies into heart disease in 1965-66, also went on to become head of nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture and had a prominent role in establishing the dietary guidelines that are still in use by the federal government today, according to Ars Technica.
“All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats – for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic,” the website reported on Monday.
Project 226 and its decades-long impact on public health policy
Schmidt and her co-authors wrote that they had unearthed a series of communications between the SRF, Hegsted, and Roger Adams, a professor who served on the SRF’s scientific advisory board between 1959 and 1971, in the archives at the University of Illinois and Harvard Medical Library, as well as additional foundation literature obtained through other sources.
What they found, Reuters said, is that in 1954, SRF president Henry Haas gave a speech which emphasized that convincing Americans to reduce their fat intake and replacing that caloric intake with carbohydrate-rich foods would increase per-capita sugar consumption by one-third. Studies published in 1962, however, argued that low-fat, high-sugar diets could increase cholesterol, and in response, the SRF launched an aggressive campaign to promote the benefits of sugar.
As an increasing amount of research examined the link between blood sugar and arterial plaque accumulation, the SRF approved “Project 226” in July 1965. Project 226, the report said, was to be a literature review on cholesterol metabolism helmed by Hegsted and other scientists who had financial ties to the sugar industry. In September 1966, the SRF first asked for an additional draft of the research, but there is no direct evidence that the group edited those drafts in any way.
On November 2, the SRF approved a draft which concluded that the only dietary change needed to prevent coronary heart disease was the reduction of fat consumption. The two-part review was published the following year in the NEJM, Reuters noted, but no mention was made of the SRF’s funding or participation in the study (the journal did not require authors to disclose any potential conflicts of interests until 1984, the news organization pointed out).
“Although the contribution of dietary sugars to CHD is still debated,” Schmidt’s team wrote, “what is clear is that the sugar industry… steadfastly denies that there is a relationship between added sugar consumption and CVD risk.” They added the documents they uncovered demonstrate “how the industry sought to influence the scientific debate over the dietary causes of CHD in the 1950s and 1960s, a debate still reverberating in 2016.”
“The sugar association paid very prestigious Harvard scientists to publish a review focusing on saturated fat and cholesterol as the main causes of heart disease at the time when studies were starting to accumulate indicating that sugar is a risk factor for heart disease,” the UCSF health professor told Reuters during a telephone interview. “That has an impact on the whole research community and where it’s going to go.”
Many of the world’s 6,000-plus languages use similar sounds for similar concepts, groundbreaking research has found. Most notably, this still applies to unrelated languages.
While similarities would be expected for languages from the same family, the same part of the world and/or the same original language (e.g. Latin), it is surprising to learn that languages with completely separate identities also have plenty of shared sound-meaning pairs.
The findings, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to long-standing ideas in linguistics. In fact, the study has thrown a spanner in the works of research into the history of the global languages.
“The more we look into languages, the more we learn that they are extremely complex…” said author Damian Blasi, a language data scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.
Typically, basic words across unrelated languages sound nothing alike. “Ptitsa,” “ndege” and “tori” all mean “bird” in Russian, Swahili and Japanese, respectively, for example.
But the long-held idea that there is no significant crossover has never been comprehensively tested. Now, advancements in technology and modern statistical methods have allowed experts to analyze thousands of language data sets at once.
Noses and tongues
Blasi and his team team studied around 70 percent of the world’s languages using word lists covering 100 basic and universal concepts, to see if similar sounds emerged. (Rocks, for example, are a basic concept as they are common to all parts of the world, whereas snow is not).
They were able to exclude sound patterns that existed only because two languages were related. Even after that, a surprising number of connections were found.
Among the examples: words for “tongue” often tend to have an “l” or a “u” (such as the Spanish “lengua”), while words for “nose” often have an “n” sound. Words for “round” often have an “r,” and “small” is associated with “ee” sounds.
The research may even mean that similarities in related languages are due in some cases to human instinct to link certain sounds with certain meanings, rather than to the shared heritage of the languages.
Researchers have already proposed potential reasons why these patterns crop up:
“Perhaps “l” is associated with tongues and “n” is associated with noses because those body parts play a role in making those sounds,” Blasi said, adding, “That…calls into question some of the attempts that people have put forward in order to determine the prehistory of many linguistic families.”
For now, though, Blasi and his team are not trying too hard to pinpoint why these shared patterns exist, but simply that they do.
Rare Roman gold coin discovered during Jerusalem excavation
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Archaeological excavations at Mount Zion in Jerusalem have for the first time discovered a gold coin bearing the likeness of Roman Emperor Nero, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte researchers in charge of the dig revealed earlier this week in a press release.
Drs. Shimon Gibson, James Tabor, and Rafael Lewis confirmed that the coin, better known as an aureus (an ancient Roman gold piece valued at 25 silver denarii) contained the portrait of a bare-headed Nero as Caesar and the inscription “NERO CAESAR AVG IMP” along the edge.
On the other side of the coin is the image of an oak wreath containing the letters “EX S C” with the inscription “PONTIF MAX TR P III” surrounding it. These inscriptions enabled the research team to determine that the coin had been struck in either 56 and 57 AD.
“The coin is exceptional because this is the first time that a coin of this kind has turned up in Jerusalem in a scientific dig,” said Gibson, a British-born archaeologist and a professor in the UNC-Charlotte Department of Religious Studies. “Coins of this type are usually only found in private collections, where we don’t have clear evidence as to the place of origin.”
Coin is evidence of the Roman occupation of the region
The coin would have been minted a little more than a decade before the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, the archaeologists said. It was discovered in rubble located outside the ruins of first-century Jewish villas they were in the process of excavating.
“The coin probably came from one of the rich 2000-year old Jewish dwellings which the… team [has] been uncovering at the site,” said Gibson. “These belonged to the priestly and aristocratic quarter located in the Upper City of Jerusalem. Finds include the well-preserved rooms of a very large mansion, a Jewish ritual pool (mikveh) and a bathroom, both with their ceilings intact.”
The archaeologists hypothesized that the gold coin was part of one of these individual’s stores of wealth, amassed before their mansions were razed – along with the rest of the city – by Titus and the Roman legions. The valuable coin was likely hidden prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and simply overlooked by Roman soldiers looting in the aftermath of their demolition.
According to Gibson, the aureus was “a valuable piece of personal property” that “wouldn’t have been cast away like rubbish or casually dropped. It’s conceivable that it ended up outside these structures in the chaos that happened as this area was destroyed.” It is also historically significant because it is evidence of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and the surrounding area, and gives researchers a clear late date for said occupation, he and his colleagues added.
Team uncovers massive 30 ton meteorite in Argentina
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Last week, researchers uncovered a meteorite weighing over 30 tons in northern Argentina.
The meteorite was found more than 670 miles north of Buenos Aires and it is thought to be the second largest ever discovered.
“While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 tons,” said Mario Vesconi, president of the Astronomy Association of Chaco. He added that “the size and weight surprised us,” according to the Xinhua news agency.
“It was in Campo del Cielo, where a shower of metallic meteorites fell around 4,000 years ago,” the researchers behind the discovery said.
The researchers said the meteorite will be weighed again to confirm its mass.
Second to One Meteorite
The heaviest meteorite ever discovered, called Hoba, weighed in at 72 tons. It was discovered in Namibia, Africa, nearly 100 years ago. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California Davis said they have made the first ever discovery of an ‘extinct meteorite’ – a meteorite of a type that doesn’t fall to Earth anymore. The discovery could transform thinking around the progression of life on our planet.
Most meteroites, around 85 percent, are referred to as ordinary chondrites. They contain round pellets known as chondrules, which develop when molten mineral droplets rapidly cool in space, and are considered to come from rocky asteroids
Around 50 percent these ordinary chondrites are L-types, and approximately 470 million years ago there was a hundredfold boost or more in the quantity of L-types that dropped to Earth. This indicates the parent asteroid of all the L-type chondrites went through a significant collision with a different asteroid around that time.
This coincided with the Ordovician Period, when coral reefs first appeared and other significant shifts in marine life diversity took place. The lead author of a study into the extinct meteorite, Birger Schmitz, a geologist at Lund University in Sweden, said the two events may be associated.
“We base our view of how the solar system formed and evolved on the meteorites that fall on Earth today,” Schmitz explained. “If these meteorites are not representative of what has been falling on Earth in the past, we have to take that into consideration when reconstructing how the original nebula condensed into solid planets and asteroids.”
—– Image credit: News.cn
New technology lets monkeys type Shakespeare using their brain
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
New brain-sensing technology invented by Stanford University neurosurgeons has been used to enable monkeys to transcribe passages from the works of Shakespeare and a prominent national newspaper at a rate of up to 12 words per minute, the school announced on Monday.
In a pilot experiment, the technology developed by electrical engineering professor Krishna Shenoy and postdoctoral fellow Paul Nuyujukian enabled the primates to replicate sections from Hamlet and the New York Times by directly reading their brain signals, then using the data it collected to direct a cursor over a keyboard, the researchers explained in a press release.
Previous versions of the technology, which was created to help people with movement disorders communicate, had been somewhat successful but what “slow and imprecise,” the scientists said. The latest experiments were designed to test improvements seeking to improve the accuracy and speed of the brain scanning interface, and thus far, they are optimistic about the results.
“Our results demonstrate that this interface may have great promise for use in people. It enables a typing rate sufficient for a meaningful conversation,” explained Nuyujukian, who plans to join Stanford’s faculty as an assistant professor of bioengineering in 2017. TheInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has published a paper detailing his team’s work.
Device could make it easier for paralyzed people to communicate
While most currently available technology in this field either tracks the movements of the eyes or individual facial muscles, such devices are limited and require a level of muscular control that some individuals simply do not have, the study authors explained. However, directly monitoring brain signals could eliminate such issues, making communication much easier.
The device that Shenoy and Nuyujukian are working on uses a multi-electrode array implanted in the brain to directly read signals from the regions of the brain that typically directs movements of the hand and arm, and uses algorithms to transmit that information directly to a computer mouse. Those algorithms are what the Stanford researchers say they have been working to improve.
The interface used in the experiments was “exactly what a human would use,” Nuyujukian said, and while individual components of it had already been tested, the new study marks the first time that the team has measured the typing rate that was possible using the technology. As it turns out, the improved algorithms allowed the animals to time three times more quickly than was possible using other brain-to-computer interfaces, according to the study authors.
However, they also note that the monkeys being used to test the technology had been specifically trained to type letters corresponding to what appeared on a screen in front of them. People using the system would likely type more slowly and would be unlikely to achieve the 12 words/minute threshold, as they would stop to think about what they wanted to say or how certain words would be spelled. Nonetheless, Nuyujukian touted the technology as a significant advancement.
“We cannot quantify is the cognitive load of figuring out what words you are trying to say,” he explained in a statement. “Also understand that we’re not using auto completion here like your smartphone does where it guesses your words for you.” However, he noted that the technology could eventually be linked with the same kind of word-completion technology used by popular smartphones or tablets to further increase typing speeds.
—–
Image credit: Thinkstock
Fibromyalgia Treating is now part of the RedOrbit.com community!
We are excited to announce that FibromyalgiaTreating.com is now part of RedOrbit.com. All of the same great people, writers and editors but now with more firepower. We now have access to an enormous amount of additional research information
from doctors and scientists. We can now extend to other conditions that may be part of your everyday lives and help you on a broad level if that is what you need. We are here for you and now, better than ever so sit back and enjoy
the new Fibromyalgia Treating by RedOrbit!
