Shipwrecks found off Florida coast from 16th century Spain
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Debris discovered off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida earlier back in May likely belonged to Spanish ships bound for Havana, Cuba following a successful raid on a French fort, members of the expedition team responsible for the discovery told Live Science on Wednesday.
Earlier this month, Global Marine Exploration, Inc. (GME) announcedthat they had discovered three ornate bronze cannons, two of which were 10 feet long and a third which was 7.5 feet long, along with what appeared to be a marble monument of the French king’s coat of arms, scattered ballast and munitions in shallow water just east of the launch pads at Cape Canaveral.
The end of a bronze cannon found at the site. Credit: Jacksonville.com
Initially, GME believed that the that the wreckage was part of the remains of lost French vessels commanded by Jean Ribault in 1565, but additional analysis of physical evidence and research of historical records later ruled out that possibility, as the cannons and coat of arms were installed at Fort Caroline, an early French Huguenot colony located near modern-day Jacksonville.
GME chief executive Robert Pritchett told Live Science that the cannons and monuments were most likely seized by the Spanish during a raid on Fort Caroline, and that they were being taken to Havana, Cuba when the vessels encountered a storm that ultimately caused them to sink.
Recovery, research efforts currently held up by a permit issue
The remains of the ships were discovered in a four-mile long, half-mile wide “scatter field” of debris on the seafloor, the website explained, and were found in the vicinity of a later shipwreck believed to date back to the 1800s. In addition to the monument and the bronze cannons, GME found 19 iron cannons, 12 anchors, and a stone grinding wheel.
Markings on one of the cannons, which were discovered using underwater magnetometers that allowed divers to locate metal items buried beneath the seabed, indicated that it had been cast in the 16th century during the reign of French King Henry II, Pritchett told Live Science. The coat-of-arms monument, on the other hand, was made out of hand-carved marble, he noted.
The cannons and monument have yet to be recovered, as GME is waiting for Florida officials to approve a permit. In the meantime, Pritchett said that he is concerned that the artifacts could be targeted by looters. “These cannons are worth over a million dollars apiece,” and the monument may be even more valuable, he cautioned. “So if looters could find out the location, then a piece of history is gone forever, because it’s going to be sold on the black market.”
In a statement, GME chief archaeologist Jim Sinclair said that “the historical and archaeological significance of these artifacts cannot be overstated,” but as Pritchett told Live Science, his team will have to wait until they have a chance to recover and study them on land until they can learn more about them. “Right now, we’re waiting on the state of Florida,” he said.
‘New Stonehenge’ found buried just two miles from Stonehenge
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
More than 800,000 people trek out to the windswept Salisbury Plain each year to take in the wonder that is Stonehenge—but that may be the result of a competition some 4,500 years ago. Because a mere two miles away from Stonehenge have been found the remains of an enormous contemporaneous timber circle whose construction was likely never completed—and whose remains were carefully hidden.
As first reported by The Independent, the ring is more than 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter, and featured 200-300 timber posts. The posts themselves were large, reaching 20-23 feet (6-7 meters) in height and around two feet (60 cm) in diameter. They were sunk about five feet (1.5 meters) into the ground, leaving being the post holes that were discovered by archaeologists today. However, its construction appears to have been halted somewhat abruptly around 2460 BCE.
Durrington Walls excavation
The circle was found at an archaeological complex called Durrington Walls, which is just to the northeast of Stonehenge. Originally discovered using indirect sensing techniques, archaeologists believed it to be a site of a buried stone ring, but being originally composed of wood doesn’t make it any less significant—in fact, the Durrington Walls ring is the largest ancient monument of its kind in all of Great Britain.
Discovery points towards religious shift
But more than that, the fact that it was so close to Stonehenge right as it was expanded by the addition of its smaller ring with massive stones and as another important prehistoric religious complex was expanded at nearby Avebury indicates it came about in a time of great religious change. Its lack of completion, then, indicates there was likely a dramatic shift in the local religious or political climate.
“The new discoveries at Durrington Walls reveal the previously unsuspected complexity of events in the area during the period when Stonehenge’s largest stones were being erected – and show just how politically and ideologically dynamic British society was at that particularly crucial stage in prehistory,” Dr. Nick Snashall, the senior National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, told The Independent.
Durrington Walls excavation
In fact, the construction didn’t just come to an abrupt halt; the ring was totally dismantled, with the posts being lifted vertically from their holes and likely being used in other parts of the Durrington Walls complex. Then, the post holes were purposely filled in with blocks of chalk and then were covered over by a bank of chalk rubble—lending a good amount of weight to the idea that someone was trying to hide the site. With Stonehenge left untouched, it has led to even a little speculation of a competition between the two sites—and a clear loser.
Of course, as of yet, there is no clear indication of whether the site at Durrington Walls was buried by those trying to erase their own past, or by an outside group trying to assert their own cultural dominance—but archaeologists hope to dig up the truth.
Cognitive Offloading: Study shows Google is replacing our brains
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Who lost Superbowl XXV? Where was President McKinley shot? What movie featured Jim Carrey with God-like powers? We used to have to rack our brains or phone a friend to get answers to questions like these, but now – all you have to do is whip out your trusty smartphone.
According to a new study published in the journal Memory, our reliance on the internet changes our problem-solving process. The study found internet users tend to rely on the web as a memory aide, a phenomenon they called ‘cognitive offloading’.
Science Through Trivia
In the study, volunteers were first split into two groups and then asked to answer difficult trivia questions. One team used their own brainpower, and the other was permitted to use Google. Volunteers were then offered the chance to answer later easier questions by the technique of their choice, recall, or Google.
Volunteers who used the Internet were more prone to use Google for later questions compared to those who used their memory. The Google group also spent less time testing their own memory before grabbing the Internet; they were not only more prone to do it again, they also did it much more rapidly. Remarkably, 30 percent of volunteers who prior consulted the Internet didn’t even try to answer a single question from memory.
“Memory is changing,” study author Benjamin Storm, a human memory expert from the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a news release. “Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it. Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother. As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”
The new study indicated using a particular technique for fact finding has a marked impact on the likelihood of future repeat behavior. Future research may indicate any effects on human memory caused by our attachment to exterior information sources.
The researchers noted that the Internet is more extensive, trustworthy and faster on average than our memory, borne out by the more precise answers from volunteers in the Google group. With an untold amount of data just a Google search away, the need to recall trivial facts, numbers and statistics is inevitably becoming less needed to function in day-to-day life, the researchers said.
A 3,000 year old skull discovered last year in the Krasnoyarsk region of Russian allowed a team of scientists to determine how brain surgery would have been performed during the Bronze Age, according to reports published by the Daily Mail and the Siberian Times.
The skull, which was found in the Nefteprovod II burial ground at the Anzhevsky archaeological site southeast of Kansk, belonged to a male patient who died between the ages of 30 and 40, said Dr. Sergey Slepchenko of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk.
Dr. Slepchenko, who was previously a surgeon, explained that the skull contained markings that are believed to be from a surgical procedure and not related to ritualistic practices. Among those signs were an opening with evidence of bone healing on his left parietal bone, as well as signs of an inflammatory reaction on the bone plates themselves, according to the Times.
Those markings suggest that the man underwent a surgical procedure known as trepanation, in which a hole is made in the skull, exposing the “dura mater” layer in order to improve the brain pulsations. Long-term post-operative inflammation is believed to be the man’s cause of death.
Cannabis, ecstatic dancing used in place of anesthetic, pain killers
In lieu of an anesthetic, the patient was likely given mind-altering substances such as cannabis or magic mushrooms, and even ecstatic dancing might have been used to help him enter an “altered state of mind” during the lengthy procedure and to dull the pain, according to the Daily Mail.
The man, who was part of an unidentified ancient culture similar to the Karasuk people (but who was not one of them), is far from the first trepanation patient ever discovered in the region, noted Dr. Slepchenko; in fact, earlier work has found some that date back to the Neolithic period. Even so, the newfound skull scientists with a rare window into early brain surgery practices.
Credit: The Siberian Times
“For the preparatory phase of the operation, we can only use our best guess,” Dr. Slepchenko told the Times. “However, based on the shape and type of inclination of the edges, we may infer that the patient lay in a supine position with the head turned to the right. The surgeon probably stood face-to-face to the patient on the left side. Or the surgeon may have fixed the head with his left arm or between his knees and operated with his right hand.”
“While the surgeon made an incision, an assistant helped by stretching the skin at the edges of the wound, as well as passing instruments and other materials,” he added. He called it “likely” that “a wide cut to the bone through the skin and underlying tissues was performed,” and noted that “after the area was cut, the wound would have been opened to organize a ‘surgical field.’”
Doctors would have then removed the skin and tendon-like tissue to expose the bone underneath, which was then scraped. Changes to the bone that occurred during the healing process prevented the researchers from determining what kind of instrument was used, but judging from the shapes of the holes, they believe that it was some sort of scraper and not a knife.
Post-surgical complications likely led to the patient’s death
The scraping process would have continued until the dura mater was exposed, at which time the trepanation area could be widened, Dr. Slepchenko explained. Afterwards, the surgeons covered the opening with skin, and blood clots would have formed to prevent bleeding in the brain.
The wound “could not be too tight” to minimize infection risk, he noted. “It is not clear if sutures and/or bandages were applied; nor is it clear how the wound was drained. Yet some ethnographic records give evidence that these simple devices were implemented during trepanation.”
While the patient would have survived the procedure, odds are that post-surgical complications “such as wound abscess, meningitis, and brain abscess” ultimately led to his death after a period of time. Dr. Slepchenko and his colleagues have published a detailed reconstruction of what the early trepanation would have involved in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
“The key to successful surgery was the patient’s complete trust and confidence that the surgeon had the necessary skills and knowledge to carry out such an operation,” he told the Times. While a traditional Karasuk-style knife was also found in his grave, Dr. Slepchenko said that there is no evidence that the instrument was actually used as part of the surgery.
Scaly-tailed squirrel described as the ‘ultimate Pokémon’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
While millions of mobile gamers are obsessed with catching elusive creatures with the popular “Pokémon Go” app, biologists at the University of Southern California (USC) are working hard to track down an elusive, real-life creature that has never been spotted live by researchers.
Known as a Zenkerella, this hard-to-find animal is a mysterious scaly-tailed squirrel that lives in central Africa and which was dubbed “the ultimate Pokémon” by Erik Seiffert, a professor of cell and neurobiology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, in a Tuesday press release – and for a very good reason, too, as there had been no reports of it living in the wild for 20 years!
In fact, not even a dozen Zenkerella specimens could be found in museums around the world, the university said – that is, until Seiffert and his colleagues recently discovered three recently killed specimens of the elusive rodent that not only raises that amount to 14 but could also provide new insight into how this long-lived creature has evolved over the past 49 million years.
“Zenkerella could be seen as the ultimate Pokémon that scientists have still not been able to find or catch alive,” the USC professor, whose research was published in the August 16 edition of the journal PeerJ, explained. “After all, it probably only shows up in the middle of the night, deep in the jungles of central Africa, and might spend most of its time way up in tall trees where it would be particularly hard to see.”
Creature is one of just six surviving species alive during the Eocene epoch
Seiffert’s team used the newly-discovered specimens to sample Zenkerella‘s DNA for the first time, collecting cells from cheek swabs then comparing its genetic make-up with other rodents using an online database. Much to their surprise, they discovered that Zenkerella was a distant relative to two different scaly-tailed squirrels that had webbing between their limbs.
While this webbing made it possible for Zenkerella’s cousins to glide from one tree to another, the creature itself was unable to perform such feats, the study authors said. Nonetheless, it still belongs as part of the newly-formed Zenkerellidae family, which is part of the Anomaluroidea superfamily, because all three types of squirrels possess scales on the bottom of their tails that provided additional support and traction when they attempted to climb trees.
The three Zenkerella specimens were captured in ground snares near the southern tip of Bioko Island off the west coast of Africa. Villagers in the area told the USC team that they are actually able to catch the nocturnal creatures in traps once or twice each year, but that their meat is not desirable for consumption. Zenkerella is just one of six creatures with roots that date back to the Eocene epoch that are still alive today, according to Seiffert and his colleagues.
“It’s an amazing story of survival,” Seiffert said. “In strong contrast to Zenkerella, all of these five other ‘sole survivor’ mammal species have been fairly well studied by scientists. We are only just starting to work on basic descriptions of Zenkerella‘s anatomy. It’s fun to think that there might be other elusive mammalian species out there, deep in the rainforests of central Africa that will be new to science.”
Research conducted by a Hungarian team last year that hinted at the discovery of a new type of light particle could unveil a fifth fundamental force of nature, scientists from the University of California, Irvine confirmed in a newly-published paper.
In mid-2015, a team of experimental nuclear physicists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were searching for so-called “dark photos,” particles that would make up the unseen substance known as dark matter that experts believe is responsible for the majority of the universe’s mass, when they discovered a radioactive decay anomaly that hinted at a possible new particle.
This particle would be just 30 times heavier than an electron, but according to UCI physics and astronomy professor Jonathan Feng, the authors of that original study were unable to show that this particle represented a new force. “They simply saw an excess of events that indicated a new particle, but it was not clear to them whether it was a matter particle or a force-carrying particle,” Feng explained Monday in a statementreleased by the university.
He and his colleagues, who published their findings this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, reviewed that Hungarian group’s data as well as other, similar experiments, and found that the evidence supporting the existence of a fifth fundamental force – a breakthrough which Feng said would be “revolutionary” if validated.
“For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces,” the professor added. “If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”
Findings suggest that there may be a separate group of dark forces
Data collected as part of the various experiments reviewed by the UCI team showed that it was unlikely that they had discovered dark photons. However, their analysis showed that the particles could instead be a “protophobic X boson.” While the normal electrical force acts on photons and electrons, this new boson interacts only with electrons and neutrons, they explained.
Co-author Timothy Tait, also a physics and astronomy professor at the university, said that there is “no other boson that we’ve observed that has this same characteristic,” and Feng added that it “is not very heavy, and laboratories have had the energies required to make it since the ’50s and ’60s. But the reason it’s been hard to find is that its interactions are very feeble.”
“Because the new particle is so light, there are many experimental groups working in small labs around the world that can follow up the initial claims, now that they know where to look,” Feng noted, emphasizing that he is particularly intrigued by the possibility that this possible fifth force of nature could be associated with the electromagnetic and nuclear forces as “manifestations of one grander, more fundamental force.”
Furthermore, based on the currently understanding of the standard model, he and his colleagues believe that there could be a separate dark sector with its own matter and forces, and that the two sectors interact with one another through a difficult-to-detect series of fundamental interactions. The dark sector force, he speculates, “may manifest itself as this protophobic force we’re seeing as a result of the Hungarian experiment.”
Conspiracy theorists have long believed in a sinister secret program where the government sprays toxic chemical or biological agents out of high-flying aircraft, but new research published late last week debunks that myth.
In the study, Carnegie Institution for Science climate scientist Ken Caldeira and colleagues from the University of California Irvine and the nonprofit organization Near Zero, found that there is a simple explanation for these so-called “chemtrails” – larger engines and increased fuel efficiency enable planes to fly higher, resulting in more persistent condensation trails (contrails).
The authors surveyed 77 experts, including geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution and atmospheric chemists specializing in condensation trails. All but one (76) said that they had never encountered evidence of any secret government spraying program, and agreed that the evidence cited by those making such claims could be easily explained through a series of well-understood physical and chemical processes and poor data sampling.
“We wanted to establish a scientific record on the topic of secret atmospheric spraying programs for the benefit of those in the public who haven’t made up their minds,” study co-author Steven Davis from UC Irvine explained in a statement. “The experts we surveyed resoundingly rejected contrail photographs and test results as evidence of a large-scale atmospheric conspiracy.”
Authors hope to ‘inform public discourse’ on the matter
The alleged chemtrail or “cover geoengineering” argument asserts that government agencies or industries are secretly spraying chemical or biological agents, as normal contrails dissipate rather quickly and the so-called chemtrails are more persistent and must therefore contain some kind of additional substance being sprayed for reasons kept hidden from the general public.
In their new paper, however, Caldeira, Davis and their fellow investigators set out to provide a scientifically-sound response to the 17 percent of people who, as part of an international survey conducted in 2011, reported that they believed in the existence of a secret, large-scale spraying program to some extent. However, they are not looking to change those people’s minds.
“Our goal is not to sway those already convinced that there is a secret, large-scale spraying program – who often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories – but rather to establish a source of objective science that can inform public discourse,” they explained in the August 10 edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters.
“Despite the persistence of erroneous theories about atmospheric chemical spraying programs, until now there were no peer-reviewed academic studies showing that what some people think are ‘chemtrails’ are just ordinary contrails, which are becoming more abundant as air travel expands,” Caldeira said in a statement.
“Also, it is possible that climate change is causing contrails to persist for longer periods than they used to.” he added. “I felt it was important to definitively show what real experts in contrails and aerosols think. We might not convince die-hard believers that their beloved secret spraying program is just a paranoid fantasy, but hopefully their friends will accept the facts.”
Capybaras could become Florida’s next invasive species
Written By: John Hopton
Brian Galloway
The capybara is the world’s largest rodent, reaching up to 50 kilograms or more. Not the kind of creature you would want to spread out of control – but that could happen in Florida, according to an expert biologist.
Elizabeth Congdon of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach told the the 53rd Annual Conference of the Animal Behavior Society that “Capybaras have been introduced to northern Florida,” and that “several sightings suggest they have been breeding.”
That in itself may not seem too worrying, but capybaras’ similarity to nutria – large invasive rodents that have run amok in several US states – suggests there could be trouble ahead.
Originating in South America, the semiaquatic animals live in social groups in forests near bodies of water, such as rivers, lakes or swamps. They have entered the state as pets, some of which escape or are released.
Don’t kill them all just yet
There are currently around 50 loose in northern Florida, and it is feared they may become an invasive species – a species causing economic or environmental harm, or harm to humans.
“They might be able to make a go of it in the United States,” Congdon said.
However, while they breed at a considerable rate, it is as yet unclear if they share the nutria’s destructive trait of digging into riverbanks, levees and other places and causing the ground to disintegrate.
Capybaras currently represent an opportunity as well as a potential threat.
“We want to keep them from spreading,” Congdon concludes, “but can we please not kill them all so I can study them?”
Cannabis use exploded 5,000 years ago– in two places at once
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
While cavemen were always into clubbing (bad dum tss), they apparently also enjoyed a bit of cannabis from time to time—or at least according to a new study out of the Free University of Berlin.
In fact, right around the end of the last ice age some 10,000 years ago, two separate groups of humans in Europe and Asia began to use cannabis, and 5,000 years ago, its use spiked, according to the paper in SpringerLink.
The study– a systematic review of archaeology related to cannabis and finding trends in its use, included various forms of cannabis found in at ancient sites (that is, fibers, pollen, and fruit) as well as imprints of the fruit found in objects like storage vessels.
Cavemen Weren’t Stoners
It’s important to note that the presence of these finds do not necessarily mean that ancient people were constantly high, as many modern readers may assume; cannabis plants were also a source of food and possibly medicine, and the fiber from the leaves could create fabric and rope.
Of course, it probably was also occasionally used for a good, old-fashioned drug trip. 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, for example, wrote about how a group of humans living in the area stretching from Ukraine to Central Asia called the Scythians inhaled the smoke of cannabis plants. A collection of Chinese poems called the Shi Jing, which are of a similar age, describe growing and using the plant as well.
As to how humans came upon the plant and domesticated it, cannabis tends to grow wherever humans live, thriving off areas full of our organic wastes—so it may have just been a happy accident that led to a 10,000-year relationship.
“In general, this ruderal plant is considered as one of man’s camp followers in prehistoric time, appearing quickly along roadsides, in dump heaps, and/or on the edges of fields after establishment of settlements,” wrote the authors.
Up until now, many believed that cannabis use began in one area alone, either China or Central Asia—but this study has found that independent groups of humans took it up in both Europe and Asia at the same time, meaning the happy accident happened twice.
Then, around 5,000 years ago—as one of the great migrations of humans began into Europe—its use began to increase, with markedly more archaeological records of it appearing and spreading throughout Eurasia via the Bronze Road.
New temporary tattoo lets you control your phone from your wrist
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Scientists from MIT Microsoft Research labs recently changed the game for the future of wearables with temporary tattoos that can control computers, change color, and transmit data via near field communication (NFC).
As detailed on MIT’s website, these tattoos are actually made of electrically-conductive gold leaf, which is transformed into working technology by designing a circuit in any graphic software, stamping out the circuit in gold, attaching a few materials to make the tattoo interactive, and then simply applying the gold to skin like a regular temporary tattoo (apply a damp sponge and peel off the paper backing). The tattoo itself can be removed from the skin at any time, and gold is skin-friendly, too.
Appropriately, the researchers have decided to call this technology DuoSkin.
And already, it has several interesting uses, described as input, output, and communication by MIT. For input, the tattoo can be used for a variety of purposes, like trackpads, buttons, and sliders—you can even control the volume of music on your smartphone from your skin.
For output, the tattoo can actually be used as a display, with a color change of the tattoo being triggered by thin heating elements within it—like to show a change in your body temperature or to reflect your current emotional state.
And for communication, the tattoo can be used to store and transfer data, meaning data can be read directly off your skin.
The tattoo configured to transmit data using NFC (Credit: MIT)
Of course, DuoSkin isn’t mean to just be functional—it’s meant to look beautiful and fashionable as well. The researchers can embed LED lights, for example, in the tattoos, to add more to their look.
Study finds how much of your tan comes from outside the galaxy
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Suntans and summertime go together like peanut butter and jelly, as the more time people spend outdoors swimming, playing sports, lying on the beach or cutting the grass, the greater amount of time they spend being exposed to rays originating from our galaxy’s central star, right?
Not exactly, according to researchers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). While it is true that most of the photons of light that bombards our skin in the summer do originate from the sun, a small fraction of them have origins beyond our solar system, experts from the Centre reported in a new study published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.
A team led by ICRAR astrophysicist Professor Simon Driver analyzed the photons that make up the light hitting the Earth and found that radiation originating from beyond our galaxy constitutes approximately one ten-trillionth of the average suntan. These photons (or tiny packets of energy) that comprise those waves range in wavelength from harmless to damaging, they said.
“Most of the photons of light hitting us originate from the Sun, whether directly, scattered by the sky, or reflected off dust in the Solar System,” Driver explained in a statement. “However, we’re also bathed in radiation from beyond our galaxy, called the extra-galactic background light. These photons are minted in the cores of stars in distant galaxies, and from matter as it spirals into supermassive black holes.”
Despite intergalactic origins, no cause for concern over extrasolar photons
Fortunately, the nearly 10 billion photons per second of extrasolar radiation that we are exposed to constitutes such a small fraction of the particles bombarding our skin on a regular basis during the summertime, the study authors emphasize that there is no need to be alarmed.
According to Professor Driver, while 10 billion photos per second may seem like a high amount, an individual would have to be exposed to it for several trillion years before they caused any real damage. Furthermore, co-author Rogier Windhorst from Arizona State University noted that the universe itself offers some protection against some of the incoming intergalactic radiation.
“The galaxies themselves provide us with a natural suntan lotion with an SPF of about two,” he explained. As the ultraviolet light of galaxies makes it way towards the Earth, nearly half of it is converted into a less damaging wavelength by dust grains, he explained. This helps to limit how much harm it can cause to those of us innocently going about our business during the summer.
The analysis was conducted using the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes along as well as other ground- and space-based NASA and ESA observatories, and was part of ICRAR’s ongoing work to better understand the evolution of mass and energy in the universe, the Centre noted. Driver’s team said that, using these instruments, they were able to collect the most accurate measurements of the extra-galactic background light to date.
“The processes which shape and shuffle mass generate vast quantities of energy, dwarfed only by the vastness of space,” the professor added. “The precise physics as to how this energy is released is still not fully understood and work continues to build numerical models capable of explaining the energy that we’ve now measured.”
—– Image credit: Thinkstock
Scientists have long been working towards understanding what drove the rapid evolution of the human brain over the past two million years, and now, a team of computer scientists out of Cardiff University have a new suggestion: Our brains grew through sizing up other people.
To put it less simply, judging whether someone else is worth helping led to our relatively large brain size.
“Our results suggest that the evolution of cooperation, which is key to a prosperous society, is intrinsically linked to the idea of social comparison — constantly sizing each up and making decisions as to whether we want to help them or not,” explained Professor Roger Whitaker, from Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, in a press release.
“We’ve shown that over time, evolution favors strategies to help those who are at least as successful as themselves.”
Learning About Ourselves Through Simulations
According to their study, which can be found in Scientific Reports, the team came to these conclusions after running hundreds of thousands of computer simulations based around a theory known as social brain hypothesis.
“According to the social brain hypothesis, the disproportionately large brain size in humans exists as a consequence of humans evolving in large and complex social groups,” said researcher Professor Robin Dunbar.
The research team took this idea a bit further by proposing that the behavior necessary for such groups itself—like cooperation—drove the evolution of the human brain. Specifically, they hypothesized that the constant assessment of other humans and judging whether or not to help them altered the human brain over the generations until it reached its current form.
To test this idea, the team created a sort of game using computer models. In this game, two simulated players were randomly chosen from the population. One player would then make a decision regarding whether or not they wanted to donate to the second player—a decision based off of how the first player judged the second’s reputation.
If the first player decided to donate to the second, they incurred a cost and the second player received a benefit. Both players’ reputations were updated, and a new game began. This was repeated hundreds of thousands of times.
The results seem to certainly favor social brain hypothesis.
“Our new research reinforces this hypothesis and offers an insight into the way cooperation and reward may have been instrumental in driving brain evolution, suggesting that the challenge of assessing others could have contributed to the large brain size in humans,” said Dunbar.
—– Image credit: Thinkstock
Greek mythology is dotted with a few rare, dark stories of human sacrifice—and now, one of them might just be true.
Atop Mount Lykaion—the earliest known site where Zeus was worshipped and his mythological birthplace—archaeologists have uncovered evidence of what appears to be a 3,000-year-old human sacrifice.
As reported by ekathimerini.com, an excavation by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens has discovered the skeleton of a teenaged boy amid the ashes of a thousand years of sacrificed animals. He was found in the heart of a 100-foot-broad (30-meter-broad) altar next to a manmade stone platform.
It is unclear how the boy died, but the location of his body is extraordinarily unusual.
“Whether it’s a sacrifice or not, this is a sacrificial altar … so it’s not a place where you would bury an individual. It’s not a cemetery,” excavator David Gilman Romano, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Further, Mount Lykaion is closely tied to human sacrifice, both in mythology and in literary sources. In some tales, a Greek named Lykaion instituted the worship of Zeus there, only to later be transformed into a wolf after trying to trick Zeus into eating human flesh. And Plato, for example, tied it to a Greek cult that practiced human sacrifice to Zeus. Some sources claimed that those who were apportioned the meat of the sacrificed human would become a wolf for nine years.
First Evidence of Human Sacrifice in Greece
However, despite these numerous ties to human sacrifice, the archaeological evidence across Greece has been almost entirely absent. In fact, human remains were conspicuously missing from the Mount Lykaion site until now.
“Several ancient literary sources mention rumours that human sacrifice took place at the altar, but up until a few weeks ago there has been no trace whatsoever of human bones discovered at the site,” said Romano.
And besides being found on an ash altar, the boy’s remains were further unusual in that part of the upper skull was entirely missing, the body was aligned between two stones on an east-west axis, and stone slabs covered the pelvis.
Should the bones prove to be a human sacrifice—which they truly appear to be, given their unusual placement and treatment—it would be the first time one has been discovered on the Greek mainland in known history.
Mount Lykaion itself was the home of tens of thousands of animal sacrifices, starting in the 16th century BCE and ending around the death of Alexander the Great, and humans occupied the area for another 1,500 or so years before that. The body found has been dated to around 1,000 BCE, as pottery from the 11th century was found with it—which ties the body with the end of the Mycenaean civilization, the people written about by Homer.
As to why such a barren, exposed site was occupied 5,000 years ago, no one is certain, but we may yet find out in the years to come—since only seven percent of the altar area has been excavated so far.
Tiny island foxes make remarkable, record-setting recovery
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Three once-threatened groups of foxes residing on an island off the Southern California coast have made history as the fastest creatures to recover from the US Endangered Species List, officials announced on Thursday.
In a statement, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, confirmed that the San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Island fox subspecies had been removed from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife, just 12 years after their declining numbers first earned them a place on the register.
US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell called their recovery “an incredible success story,” as well as “a model for partnership-driven conservation efforts across the country.” A fourth subspecies of fox, the Santa Catalina Island fox, was also down listed from endangered to threatened.
“The remarkably rapid recovery of the island fox shows the power of partnership, focus, and science,” added Scott Morrison, Director of Conservation Science at The Nature Conservancy. “Many aspects of this recovery effort – from its scientific rigor to the collaborative enterprise that drove it – can serve as model to advance conservation elsewhere.”
Mammals had been given a 50 percent chance of extinction by 2010
According to Reuters and the Washington Post, the diminutive foxes have called the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California home for several thousand years, but during the 19th century, their numbers started to decline when settlers brought livestock to the islands.
Some of the pigs those settlers brought with them got loose and attracted golden eagles, which began to prey on both the swine and the foxes. During the late 1990s, the number of foxes fell to less than 200, according to reports, but as of last year, there are now nearly 6,000 of them.
Credit: National Park Service
When they were officially listed as endangered in 2004, the rare mammals were given a 50-50 chance of dying out by the end of the decade. However, thanks to efforts to remove feral pigs from the islands, reduce the influx of golden eagles and vaccinate them against canine distemper, the population numbers of all four subspecies are at or above historic levels, officials said.
“It’s remarkable to think that in 2004, these foxes were given a 50 percent chance of going extinct in the next decade. Yet here we are today, declaring three of the four subspecies recovered and the fourth on its way,” said FWS Director Dan Ashe. “That’s the power of the ESA – not just to protect rare animals and plants on paper, but to drive focused conservation that gets dramatic results.”
Island foxes are roughly the same size as a house cat, standing about one-foot tall and weighing between three and five pounds, according to Reuters. The Channel Islands are the only places on Earth where they can be found, and as of 2015, there are 700 foxes on San Miguel Island, 1,200 on Santa Rosa Island,2,100 on Santa Cruz Island and 1,800 on Santa Catalina Island.
Studying poop shows ancient shark ate its own young
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
An ancient group of sharks living approximately 300 million years ago were cannibalistic and would even devour their own young, according to fossil evidence collected as part of researchdetailed in Thursday’s edition of Palaeontology.
Lead author Aodhán Ó Gogáin, a Ph. D. student in the Trinity College Dublin School of Natural Sciences, and his colleagues studied coprolites (or fossilized feces) of adult Orthacanthus sharks and found that they contained tiny teeth belonging to young members of their own species.
An Orthacanthus coprolite with a black box showing the tooth of a young Orthacanthus. (Credit: Aodhán Ó Gogáin – Trinity College Dublin)
Orthacanthus sharks, the study authors explained, lived in coastal swamps along the equator and used protected lagoons to raise their offspring – but when food started to become scarce, they did not hesitate to cannibalize their own young in order to obtain much-needed sustenance.
“Orthacanthus was a three-metre-long xenacanth shark with a dorsal spine, an eel-like body, and tricusped teeth,” Ó Gogáin explained in a statement. “There is already evidence from fossilized stomach contents that ancient sharks like Orthacanthus preyed on amphibians and other fish, but this is the first evidence that these sharks also ate the young of their own species.”
Why bother eating your own young?
Ó Gogáin’s team found evidence of shark cannibalism in unusual spiral-shaped coprolites found in the Minto Coalfield of New Brunswick. Because of the shape of the fossilized dung, they were able to link it to Orthacanthus, as the shark possessed a unique corkscrew-shaped rectum.
In-depth analysis of the coprolites found they contained many fossilized teeth belonging to juvenile Orthacanthus, confirming that the creatures engaged in fillial cannibalism (which is just a fancy way of saying they would eat their own young). This discovery is not unprecedented, since as BBC Newsnoted, modern-day bull sharks are also know to consume their own offspring.
Researchers gathered samples from an old coal mine in New Brunswick, Canada. (Credit: Aodhán Ó Gogáin)
“We don’t know why Orthacanthus resorted to eating its own young,” co-author Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang of Royal Holloway University of London said. “However, the Carboniferous Period was a time when marine fishes were starting to colonize freshwater swamps in large numbers. It’s possible that Orthacanthus used inland waterways as protected nurseries to rear its babies, but then consumed them as food when other resources became scarce.”
He added that filial cannibalism is “relatively unusual,” telling BBC News. “We generally find it in rather stressed ecosystems, where for whatever reason, food is running scarce. Obviously it’s evolutionarily a bad move to eat your own young unless you absolutely have to… Part of this story, we think, is that during this invasion of fresh water, sharks were cannibalizing their young in order to find the resources to keep on exploring into the continental interiors.”
How did the first Americans reach North America? New study brings up questions
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
The earliest Americans could not have simply crossed a land bridge from Siberia into Alaska during the last Ice Age approximately 13,000 years ago, as the pathway would not have been passable until nearly 1,000 years later, according to the authors of a new study.
In the paper, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Mikkel W. Pedersen from the Natural History Museum of Denmark and his colleagues studied ancient DNA as well as the remains of plants, animals, and pollen collected from lake sediments in the region and found that it would not have been a viable passageway for migration until 12,600 years ago.
According to Science, this indicates the first settlers to cross into North America must have taken a vastly different route, as the pathway known as the ice-free corridor was not yet available to them. Since this more interior route was not an option, the research team determined travelers may have taken a coastal path as far back as 14,700 years ago.
“This is a really neat and pioneering study,” Stephen Jackson, a paleoecologist with the USGS Southwest Climate Science Center in Tucson, Arizona, who was not involved in the work, told Science. Since the new study examined both traditional data and environmental DNA (eDNA), “we stand to learn a good deal more about how to interpret our records.”
Early migrations most likely traveled along the Pacific coast, study finds
Experts have long asserted that the first people to cross into North America crossed Beringia, a now-submerged region in the Bering Sea that once connected Siberia to Alaska. Until recently, the assumption was that they then continued south by crossing the ice-free corridor, but the new study shows that this path would have been “biologically unviable” at the time.
According to Pedersen’s team, this pathway would have been impassible until roughly 12,600 years ago, as the corridor lacked essential resources such as game animals that would have been necessary for food, and wood for fuel and tools. Unable to travel directly across Beringia, these settlers would have instead followed paths along the Pacific coast, they said in a statement.
Their conclusion comes following an analysis of DNA, macrofossils and other evidence which they extracted from sediments and sequenced en masse using a special technique called “shotgun sequencing” that does not focus on searching for particular species. Using this method, the study authors found that the corridor would have lacked the plant and animal resources that the earliest travelers would have needed in order to survive such an arduous journey.
While there is still debate as to whether these individuals were members of the so-called Clovis people or part of another civilization, “The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it,” co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, explained.
“That means that the first people entering what is now the US, Central and South America must have taken a different route. Whether you believe these people were Clovis, or someone else, they simply could not have come through the corridor, as long claimed,” Willerslev added. “Most likely, you would say that the evidence points to their having travelled down the Pacific Coast. That now seems the most likely scenario.”
Scientists discover the culprit behind the Piltdown Man hoax
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
A more than 100-year-old mystery appears to be resolved, as scientists believe they have proof of who created the now-infamous forgery known as the Piltdown Man, as reported by the BBC.
In 1912, a scientist and amateur collector known as Charles Dawson uncovered a human-like skull with an ape-like jaw containing two remaining teeth near the village of Piltdown in England. Here was an ancient human ancestor that had never been seen before, and naturally, the discovery sent scientific community into a frenzy.
Three years later, in 1915, Dawson found a matching tooth and skull fragments nearly two miles away (three km), at a site he dubbed Piltdown II.
The fake fossils were dug up near Piltdown in Sussex. (Credit: Natural History Museum)
It took until 1953 to show that the bones were in fact a clever hoax. But who was the culprit?
No one ever confessed to the forgery, but plenty of names were suggested. Dawson himself was a suspect, as was a French priest who excavated an isolated canine at Piltdown I in 1913. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ended up being a suspect, along with a great number of other people.
And now, new tests on the Piltdown specimens have revealed not only how they were made, but who likely made them.
Cross-Examining Both Piltdown Sites
According to the research published in Royal Society Open Science by a variety of specialists including historians, dental experts, and paleobiologists, the bones from the two Piltdown sites come from two or three humans and one orangutan. In all cases, a red-brown stain was spread on the bones to give them an aged appearance, with dental putty used to fix the bones in place. Local Piltdown gravel was then packed into the bones’ crevices.
With this, the Piltdown I and II sites have been definitively linked together—meaning the most likely culprit is the only man uniquely tied to both: Charles Dawson.
“What we’ve been able to demonstrate is a signature, a fingerprint throughout all of these specimens, even including the second molar from the second Piltdown site,” Dr. Isabelle De Groote, first author of the study, told BBC.
“Dawson is the only one who ever said there was a Piltdown II site; he’s the only one who was ever associated with it and we can clearly link that molar to the original specimens.”
The team looked at samples of Piltdown gravel to determine a common signature. (Credit:
In fact, the clever forgeries add even more credence to the notion that Dawson was the culprit.
“It was very carefully done,” said De Groote. “That’s another thing that exonerates some others – for example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the suspects.
“Obviously he could write a good story, but he probably would never have had the skill or the scientific knowledge to prepare a forgery like this one.”
Dawson also had the scientific background necessary to pass off the hoax; he knew scientists expected the earliest human ancestor to have a big brain paired with an ape-like jaw, and he apparently tailored his forgeries to match this expectation.
“When a jaw and the skull bones were announced, there was a big discussion at the Geological Society about what the canine in such an animal would look like. And, ta-da – six or seven months later, a canine shows up and it looks exactly like what they had predicted,” said De Groote, who added that she has a newfound awareness of the importance of taking all evidence into consideration and being aware of one’s own preconceptions.
“If something fits a hypothesis maybe too well, question it again,” she said.
Study shows six million Americans are drinking contaminated water
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
While the elevated lead levels in the Flint, Michigan water supply have been the subject of much media coverage in recent months, new research published this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters reveals that similar issues are affecting millions of Americans.
The study, led by Xindi Hu of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, reveals that as many as six million people throughout the US are drinking water containing unsafe levels of toxic industrial chemicals that have been linked to cancer and other health problems.
Hu’s team analyzed levels of polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), chemicals that repel oil and water and are typically used in paint, non-stick cookware and clothing, in more than 36,000 water samples and found that as many as six million Americans are consuming H2O that contains unsafe levels of these chemicals, which have been in use for six decades.
“For many years, chemicals with unknown toxicities, such as PFASs, were allowed to be used and released to the environment, and we now have to face the severe consequences,” Hu, who is a doctoral student at the Chan School, explained in a statement. She added that the problem may even be more widespread, as “government data for levels of these compounds in drinking water is lacking for almost a third of the U.S. population – about 100 million people.”
“Virtually all Americans are exposed to PFAS,” which, as Hu told ResearchGate, is a problem since the chemicals “have been linked to a wide range of adverse health effects including kidney cancer, elevated cholesterol, obesity and endocrine disruption,” leading the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to add them to a list of contaminants and several companies to begin phasing out their usage in their products.
Industrial sites, military bases among areas with highest PFAS levels
According to CNNand Reuters, Hu’s team examined more than 36,000 water samples that had been collected by the EPA between 2013 and 2015, testing each of them for six kinds of PFASs. In addition, they looked at industrial sites where the chemicals are used or manufactured, as well as military training sites or airports that use fire-fighting foam containing the substances.
They detected PFASs at EPA-mandated minimum reporting levels in 194 out of the 4,864 water supplies across 33 states studied, and reported that 66 of those public water sources contained at least one sample measuring at or above levels deemed unfit for human consumption. The highest levels were found near industrial sites, military bases and wastewater treatment plants.
Three-fourths of those unsafe drinking water supplies were found in 13 states, led by California, according to the study authors. The others, in order of detection frequency, included New Jersey, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Georgia, Minnesota, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Illinois. So does this mean that people living in those states should stop using tap water and stock up on bottles of imported spring water?
“Not necessarily,” Hu told ResearchGate on Tuesday. “Concerned residents should talk to their local department of health to ask for more information about PFASs in their drinking water. The drinking water in Hoosick Falls, NY, was found to have very high concentrations of PFASs, and residents were advised to stop drinking tap water until the public water supplies were able to reduce PFASs to acceptable levels.”
Engineers from Iowa State University have taken one giant step forward in the development of self-destructing technology that could help keep military secrets out of the hands of the enemy, or eliminate the need to surgically remove temporary medical devices from patients.
Also known as transient devices, such technology could also be used in environmental monitors that could simply dissolve when exposed to rain, and now ISU mechanical engineering professor Reza Montazami and his colleagues have developed a battery suitable for use in such devices.
According to Engadget and BBC News, his team’s battery is capable of delivering enough power to operate a desktop calculator for 15 minutes – and is encased in a degradable polymer composite that swells and dissolves 30 minutes after being exposed to water. Montazami is hailing the breakthrough as the first practical transient battery ever created.
The battery, which is detailed in researchpublished recently in the Journal of Polymer Science, Part B: Polymer Physics, is 5 mm long, 1 mm thick and 6 mm wide. It is similar to traditional batteries in terms of structure and electrochemical reactions. However, because it is made from lithium-ion, it currently cannot be used in devices designed to be implanted in humans – a flaw that researchers are hoping to ultimately correct in future versions of the transient battery.
Montazami and his co-authors noted that their work is at the proof-of-concept stage, and that a battery capable of powering more sophisticated electronic equipment is still a long ways off, as they need to determine how to create larger, higher capacity versions of batteries with complex structures and multiple layers while also attempting to reduce the amount of time it would need to self-destruct. An array of multiple smaller batteries may be the key.
So how does this self-destructing battery work, anyway?
According to BBC News, the dissolving battery contains an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte separator sandwiched within two layers of polyvinyl alcohol-based polymer. When it is exposed to water, its polymer casing starts to swell, breaking apart the electrodes and causing it to dissolve – but not completely, as the battery contains nanoparticles that do not degrade.
“Unlike conventional electronics that are designed to last for extensive periods of time,” the ISU mechanical engineering professor and his co-authors explained, “a key and unique attribute of transient electronics is to operate over a typically short and well-defined period, and undergo fast and, ideally, complete self-deconstruction and vanish when transiency is triggered.”
While developing the new battery, Montazami said that his team faced three major challenges. First, they wanted to develop a battery that could produce voltages close to the same level as a commercial battery, as many devices will not function is voltage output is low or unsteady. The next challenge, he explained in a statement, was to simulate the complex, multilayered structure of regular batteries, and the final one was to actually fabricate the power sources, which he said took several attempts due to the high degree of difficulty.
The result is a unit that self-destructs 1,000 times faster than previous attempts at such a battery, according to IEEE Spectrum, while delivering twice the voltage of prior transient power sources. “This is a battery with all the working components,” Montazami said in a statement, adding that it is “much more complex than our previous work with transient electronics.”
Earth Overshoot Day: We’ve used up our ‘budget’ of resources for the year
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A quick online search tells you that August 8 was Bowling Day and International Cat Day, but Monday also marked a far more somber occasion: Earth Overshoot Day, or the day where the planet’s population used up all of its allotted resources for the entire calendar year.
According to Quartz and the Huffington Post, the Global Footprint Network has monitored Earth Overshoot Day annually since 1971. It represents the point in which humanity exhausts the natural resources needed to live sustainably for a 365-day period. Each day beyond that point puts us in “ecological debt,” the group said.
As the National Geographic Society pointed out, this year the occasion arrived earlier than ever before, beating the previous record – set just last year – by five days and continuing the trend of mankind blowing through its allotment of natural resources at an ever-increasing rate.
“When overshoot day arrives, it means we have spent all the interest on the planet’s ecological bank account and are now dipping into the capital,” Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation ecology at Duke University, explained to the Society. “That is, we’re depleting what our planet does for us, so year after year, there is less for us to use. Less forest, fewer fish in the ocean, less productive land – burdens that fall disproportionately on the world’s poor.”
What exactly is Earth Overshoot Day, and how is it calculated?
Officials at the California-based Global Footprint Network use a basic formula to determine when we use up our allotted resources for any given year. They take the planet’s biocapacity (the amount of resources that are available), then divide it by mankind’s ecological footprint (how many of those resources we consume).
That number is then multiplied by the number of days in a year, and the date is determined. The organization said that the global population currently uses 1.6 Earths worth of crops, forest land, livestock, and other resources annually, and by the 2030s, they anticipate that we will be using up more than two Earth’s worth of resources every year, according to the Huffington Post.
“Globally, the longer we go on pretending that natural resources are unlimited, the faster we are jeopardizing the very capacity of our planet to provide us with the renewable resources that we need to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves,” GFN spokesman Sebastian Winkler told the website.
“Balancing how much renewable natural resources we use with how much is generated is paramount if mankind is to thrive on our beautiful planet,” Winkler added. “Each of us has the opportunity to participate: the choices we make every day as consumers and as citizens actively contribute to the world that we will leave future generations.”
In addition to breaking down the average global rate of consumption, the GFN also pointed out some of the worst offending nations. According to their statistics, if every country lived like the US, they would use up 4.8 Earths worth of resources each year, while living like Australia would require 5.4 Earths worth of resources. Conversely, the citizens of India were calculated to use the least, consuming just 0.7 Earths worth of resources.
Life with fibromyalgia means that simple activities that most people take for granted may be so overwhelming and exhausting that you avoid them or put them off.
Shopping is one of the most common activities that fibro-sufferers and those with other disabilities find difficult. While most people with fibromyalgia just suffer in silence and try to develop coping strategies, retailers can do a few things to help make the shopping experience more comfortable for fibro-patients.
Because people with fibromyalgia have money to spend just like anyone else, it should be worth it for retailers to make some accommodations.
Pay Attention to Fragrances
Any building that has hundreds or thousands of people coming through every day can develop an unpleasant smell. Most retailers choose to address this by contracting with professional services that provide commercial air fresheners and odor filtration. Many fibro-sufferers are especially sensitive to fragrances and will have a negative reaction to strong perfumes.
Change Your Store Lighting
Many people are sensitive to the effects of exposure to fluorescent lights. Even though this intolerance is common among the general population, it’s much more pronounced among fibro-sufferers. Retailers can make life easier by switching from fluorescent overhead lights to ones that are less likely to trigger unpleasant reactions. LED lights cost a bit more upfront but tend to be long lasting and are much better tolerated by people with fibromyalgia (as well as by chronic migraine sufferers.)
Provide Extra Seats or Benches
Walking through a store—particularly a large superstore—can be extremely exhausting for someone with fibromyalgia or another disability. Many fibro-sufferers are still mobile but need to stop and take a rest after a great deal of walking. Most stores don’t have extra seating available anywhere. Providing a seat or bench at a couple strategic points throughout the store wouldn’t take much away from valuable retail floor space but would be greatly appreciated by people with disabilities, including fibro-sufferers.
Mind the Width of Your Aisles
Some people with fibromyalgia have more limited mobility and have to use a cane or even a motorized wheelchair. When the aisles are piled high with merchandise, particularly if stocking is being done during shopping times, it can be a hazardous nightmare for people who need a little more room to maneuver.
Offer Respectful Help
Everyone wants to be treated with respect and dignity, and fibro sufferers are no exception. But it’s a fact that sometimes a person with fibromyalgia won’t be able to reach items on shelves, for example, or will need assistance at checkout. Retailers can help by making sure the store is adequately staffed at all times.
Install Kiosks and Ship-to- Store Options
Most people with fibromyalgia can’t just shop for leisure and need to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible Install self-serve kiosks that will help customers access what they need more easily. Ship-to- store options will also help fibro-sufferers to order what they need online to further cut down on their time in the store.
Meet Granny: At 105, she’s the world’s oldest killer whale
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A killer whale estimated to be 105 years old, meaning that it was born a year before the Titanic sank, is apparently alive and well after being spotted off the coast of Washington.
Officially known as J2 but affectionately nicknamed “Granny,” the whale was seen swimming with other orcas in the Salish Sea and near San Juan Island’s False Bay near Washington state on July 27, the Daily Mail and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported earlier this month.
Granny pictured jumping out of the water. (Credit: EcoVentures)
Granny, which was first spotted in 1971 when she was an estimated 60 years old, is believed to be the matriarch of a group of whales in the northern Pacific Ocean. Though experts believe she is 105, there is a 12 year margin of error about her age, meaning she could be only 93 years old – which still far exceeds the typical orca lifespan of between 60 and 80 years.
Experts from Ocean EcoVentures explained to the Daily Mail that they were able to identify J2 thanks to special markings on her dorsal fin and a notch shaped like a half-moon, and in a recent blog post, they said that she and her group, the Southern Resident Killer Whales, had spent a few weeks foraging and travelling through the Strait of Georgia near British Columbia.
How experts determined Granny’s age (and why she’s not all that unusual)
According to the author of that blog post, Simon Pidcock, Granny “has been swimming pretty much non-stop for over 100 years. The Southern Residents on average travel about 72 miles in a 24-hour period day in, day out. This means in Granny’s lifetime she has swam around the world the equivalent of a 100 times.”
The earliest pictures of J2 were from 1967, according to Pidcock, and whale researchers believe that she has been alive since 1911. In 1976, she was spotted travelling with a mature bull known as “Ruffles” due to the trailing edge of his dorsal fin. Ruffles was thought to be the only survivor among Granny’s offspring, as these whales typically remain with their mothers for life.
Researchers tell Granny apart through a white patch on her dorsal fin alongside a half-moon shaped notch. (Credit: EcoVentures)
Ruffles was at least 20 years old in 1971 and passed away in 2010 when he was believed to be approximately 60 years old. Since Granny was never spotted with any other young whales after his death, experts believe that he was her final calf. Since most female killer whales stop having offspring around the age of 40, and Ruffles was born in 1951, that would place J2’s birth year at 1911, according to the Daily Mail.
While it is rare for orcas to live for more than 100 years, Granny’s longevity is hardly unique among members of the Southern Residents, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. K7, a female better known as Lummi, died eight years ago at the age of 98, and another female, L25 or Ocean Sun, is believed to be 85 years old, the Pacific Whale Watch Association (PWWA) told the newspaper.
New kidney stone treatment would be the first new treatment in 30 years
Written By: Brian Galloway
Brian Galloway
Kidney stones are incredibly painful and there is very little a person can do to relieve the pain or stop them from occurring. However, new research claims a natural fruit extract can dissolve calcium oxalate crystals, which are the most common ingredient in kidney stones. Could this be much-needed relief for people suffering frequent kidney stones?
Jeffrey Rimer, an associate professor at the University of Houstonclaims this could be the first advancement in kidney stone treatment in over 30 years. He is the lead author in the study, published today in the journal Nature.
HCA as a kidney stone prevention method
This study provides the first evidence that the chemical hydroxycitrate (HCA) can prevent calcium oxalate crystals from growing and even dissolve them in certain circumstances.
HCA could be important because there has been very little advancement in preventative treatment for kidney stones in the last 30 years. Doctors tell patients to avoid certain foods and take citrate (CA) in the form of potassium citrate, but it often comes with negative side effects.
HCA is found in the Garcinia Cambogia fruit, commonly found in Asia. (Credit: Thinkstock)
When comparing CA and HCA, hydroxycitrate turns out to be more potent and shows unique qualities that would lend itself to developing new treatments. For example– HCA is excreted in urine, which is a requirement for such a kidney stone treatment.
After comparing the two compounds, the team of researchers then used atomic force microscopy, or AFM, to study how HCA interacted with calcium oxalate crystals.
AFM images showed the crystal shrinking when exposed to HCA. Rimer initially thought the finding was an abnormality.
Chung’s initial finding was correct. The researchers then turned to discover why he was correct.
Researchers applied density functional theory (DFT) – an accurate computational method used to study the structure and properties of materials – to address how HCA and CA bind to calcium and to calcium oxalate crystals. They discovered HCA formed a strong bond with crystal surfaces, inducing a strain that is relieved by the release of calcium and oxalate.
“HCA shows promise as a potential therapy to prevent kidney stones,” the researchers wrote. “HCA may be preferred as a therapy over CA (potassium citrate).”
Testing in human subjects has been successful so far. Rimer’s team notes that the preliminary findings are promising, but additional safety tests are needed to determine if HCA can be used in drug form.
—– Image credit: Thinkstock
Writing in the latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, paleoanthropologist April Nowell and her colleagues explained they excavated a total of 10,000 stone tools from a site known as Shishan Mars, a desert oasis located close to Azraq, Jordan. Some of those tools included residual remains of horses, wild cattle, ducks, and rhinoceroses, they noted.
Image of one of the tools uncovered in the study (Credit: UVic)
“Researchers have known for decades about carnivorous behaviors by tool-making hominids dating back 2.5 million years, but now, for the first time, we have direct evidence of exploitation by our Stone Age ancestors of specific animals for subsistence,” Nowell explained Monday in a statement.
“Based on lithic, faunal, paleoenvironmental and protein residue data, we conclude that Late Pleistocene hominins were able to subsist in extremely arid environments through a reliance on surprisingly human-like adaptations including a broadened subsistence base, modified toolkit, and strategies for predator avoidance and carcass protection,” she and her colleagues wrote.
Study shows that early hominid populations were surprisingly adaptable
Nowell and her colleagues recovered 10,000 stone tools from the excavation site, which is now a desert but was once an increasingly arid wetland, over a three-year period. They examined 7,000 of those instruments, including scrapers, flakes, projectile points, and hand axes, and found a total of 17 which tested positive for blood and other animal products.
Image of the site, which is quickly becoming a lush wetland (Credit:
The discovery suggests that the people living in the region 250,000 years ago were able to adapt surprisingly well to a demanding habitat, the study authors said. “The hominins in this region were clearly adaptable and capable of taking advantage of a wide range of available prey, from rhinoceros to ducks, in an extremely challenging environment,” explained Nowell.
“What this tells us about their lives and complex strategies for survival, such as the highly variable techniques for prey exploitation, as well as predator avoidance and protection of carcasses for food, significantly diverges from what we might expect from this extinct species,” she continued, adding that the team’s work “opens up our ability to ask questions about how Middle Pleistocene hominins lived in this region.”
In fact, the new study could result in an improved understanding of interbreeding and population dispersals involving modern humans, Neanderthals and other ancient populations across Europe and Asia, the authors said. Furthermore, the findings could shed new light on early hominin diets and provide a new way for researchers that have access to ancient tools obtained from other sites to determine if those early humans also ate animals, despite the lack of obvious remains.
Researcher uncovers the secret to a happy single life
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
From matchmaking apps to speed dating services to meddling moms, clearly a lot of time and effort goes into ensuring that people end up as part of a couple, but as one researcher from the University of California, Santa Barbara explains, it is possible to be single and happy.
During an addressat the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention on Friday, Dr. Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor in social psychology at the university, presented research showing that single people value performing meaningful work more than their married counterparts and that they also tend to be more connected with friends and family.
“When people marry, they become more insular,” Dr. DePaulo said in a statement, adding that many single men and women tend to embrace that lifestyle and are actually more likely to enjoy a higher degree of psychological growth and development than those who have gotten married.
“The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude,” she added. “It is time for a more accurate portrayal of single people and single life – one that recognizes the real strengths and resilience of people who are single, and what makes their lives so meaningful.”
Findings indicate that there is ‘no one blueprint for the good life’
Scientific research focusing on the wellbeing of singles is sparse, according to Dr. DePaulo. As she reviewed papers discussing individuals who had never married, she learned that the majority of the 814 studies she found did not specifically set out to examine single people, but used them as a comparison group to learn more about married couples and marriage itself.
Those that did focus on never-married reached some rather interesting conclusions, she added. For instance, one study comparing lifelong singles with married individuals found that those who were unwed possessed a higher sense of self-determination, and were more likely to experience a “sense of continued growth and development as a person.”
Another study reported that lifelong singles who were more self-sufficient were less likely they were to experience negative emotions, while the opposite proved to be true for married men and women – those who were less dependent on others (including their spouses) were actually more likely to experience negative emotions, according to the authors of a June 2009 paper.
The findings run contrary to the notion that married people should be doing better than the nearly 125 million unmarried Americans over the age of 16, Dr. DePaulo said, in light of the many laws that benefit them. In fact, she said that married men and women have “access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections, many of them financial.
“Considering all of the financial and cultural advantages people get just because they are married, it becomes even more striking that single people are doing as well as they are,” the UCSB professor added, emphasizing that her research shows that “there is no one blueprint for the good life. What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”
—– Image credit: Thinkstock
Climate change could release Cold War-era toxic waste
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Toxic waste housed at an abandoned Cold War-era US military base in Greenland may soon be released into the nearby ecosystem as climate change causes the ice entrapping those hazardous chemicals to melt, researchers reported recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In the new study, William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Toronto, and his colleagues wrote that warming conditions in the Arctic are causing part of the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, including the section covering the abandoned military base called Camp Century.
According to Live Science and Scientific American, Camp Century was a 136 acre (0.55 square km) used in part as the site of secret tests evaluating the feasibility of deploying nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Once it was decommissioned in 1967, the infrastructure and the hazardous materials it contained were abandoned, to be entombed forever beneath the ice sheet– Or so the US military thought.
Camp Century during construction in 1959. (Credit: US Army)
Colgan and his colleagues believe climate change is causing the ice covering the base to slowly melt, and suggest that before the end of the century the toxic waste could be uncovered, posing a serious threat to the surrounding ecosystems.
“Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different areas of the world,” Colgan, who led a team of researchers from the US, Switzerland, and Denmark, said Thursday in a statement, “and now climate change is modifying those sites. It’s a new breed of climate change challenge we have to think about.”
Hazardous waste could begin spreading within the next 75 years
As part of their research, the study authors took an inventory of the waste materials left behind at Camp Century when it was decommissioned and found that about 53,000 gallons (200,000 liters) of diesel fuel and 63,000 gallons (240,000 liters) of wastewater, including some raw sewage, are still on the site, along with an unknown amount of low-level radioactive coolant.
They also analyzed historical US military documents to determine the location and the depths of the waste materials, and measured how much the ice sheet covering it had shifted during the past several decades, according to Live Science. They found that the waste covered an area of close to the size of 100 football fields, then conducted climate models to see what happens next.
“When we looked at the climate simulations, they suggested that rather than perpetual snowfall, the site could transition from having a buildup of snow to having primarily melting conditions as early as 2090,” Colgan said. “Once the site transitions from net snowfall to net melt, it’s only a matter of time before the wastes melt out; it becomes irreversible.”
Since polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), toxic chemicals that were at one time used regularly in electrical equipment, are among the waste materials at the Camp Century site, that would be bad news for the surrounding environment. PCBs, the researchers explained, can damage the immune and reproductive systems as animals, and have also been linked to cancer in humans.
“The question is whether it’s going to come out in hundreds of years, in thousands of years, or in tens of thousands of years. This stuff was going to come out anyway,” explained James White, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder who was not involved in the new study.
“What climate change did was press the gas pedal to the floor and say, ‘it’s going to come out a lot faster than you thought,’” he added. In fact, Colgan’s team found that unless climate change slows, the ice sheet covering Camp Century could start to melt within the next 75 years. While it takes much longer for the base itself to become exposed, meltwater could flow through structures there, collecting and transporting toxic waste as it flows.
Adults suffering from severe asthma could soon have new hope in the form of a pill known as Fevipiprant, which in early clinical trials has shown to reduce symptoms such as inflammation in the airways according to a new Lancet Respiratory Medicine study.
Fevipiprant, a prostaglandin D2 receptor 2 antagonist, works by preventing inflammatory cells from reaching a patient’s airways reduces the frequency of severe attacks by half, BBC News and The Telegraph reported Friday. Patients who have uncontrolled asthma and took part in the trial told researchers that their symptoms had improved drastically .
“A unique feature of this study was how it included measurements of symptoms, lung function using breathing tests, sampling of the airway wall, and CT scans of the chest to give a complete picture of how the new drug works,” study author Christopher Brightling, a clinical professor in respiratory Medicine at the University of Leicester, told The Telegraph.
“Most treatments might improve some of these features of the disease, but with Fevipiprant improvements were seen with all of the types of tests,” Brightling added. “This new treatment could help stop preventable asthma attacks, reduce hospital admissions, and improve day-to- day symptoms- making it a ‘game changer’ for future treatment.”
Experts ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the early clinical trial results
He and his colleagues recruited approximately 60 patients who reported having severe asthma symptoms, despite regularly being seen by specialists and using steroid inhalers, and split them into two groups: one of which was given a 225mg of Fevipiprant twice a day for 12 weeks and one of which were given placebo in addition to the drugs they were already taking.
The study found that those who were given the new asthma drug experienced a reduced sputum eosinophil count, meaning that there were fewer inflammatory white blood cells in their phlegm and airways – a symptom commonly used to measure severe asthma. Over the three month span, the sputum eosinophil count of the asthma patients in the Fevipiprant group dropped from 5.4% to 1.1% on average, Brightling and his fellow researchers reported.
While the findings are from an early proof-of-concept study and need to be validated in a long- term trial, Dr. Samantha Walker, Director of Research and Policy at Asthma UK, told reporters that the research “shows massive promise and should be greeted with cautious optimism.”
“The possibility of taking a pill instead of using an inhaler will be a very welcome one,” she added, “particularly as this study focused on people who develop the condition in later life, some of whom we know can struggle with the dexterity required to use an inhaler. More research is needed and we’re a long way off seeing a pill for asthma being made available over the pharmacy counter, but it’s an exciting development.”
Professor Stephen Durham, a lung specialist at Royal Brompton Hospital, added that the authors had provided “compelling evidence” that Fevipiprant tablets had “the ability to reduce asthmatic inflammation, increase lung function and improve asthma control in this severe group,” and that it “may also reduce the frequency of asthma attacks, avoid steroid tablet side effects” and reduce the costs of treating severe asthma patients.
Overweight people’s brains age more rapidly, study finds
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Individuals who are overweight or obese have brains that appear a decade older than leaner individuals, according to a new study in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Our brains normally get smaller with age, but researchers are finding obesity, already associated with conditions like diabetes and heart disease, may also impact the onset and advancement of brain aging; however, direct studies supporting this link are lacking.
In a study that viewed information from individuals at one point in time, scientists reviewed the impact of obesity on brain structure throughout the adult lifespan to investigate if obesity was linked with brain variations manifestation of aging. The team studied information from nearly 470 volunteers between the ages of 20 and 87.
Discovering Differences Between BMI Levels
The scientists split the information into two categories derived from weight: lean and overweight. They discovered striking changes in the volume of white matter in the brains of overweight people evaluated with those of their leaner counterparts. Overweight people had a widespread decline in white matter as opposed to slender people.
The team then determined how white matter volume associated with age across the two groups. They found a difference in brain age of 10 years, with overweight individuals having brains that appeared older.
Strikingly, however, the scientists only witnessed these inconsistencies from middle age forward, indicating that our brains may be significantly susceptible during this period of aging.
“As our brains age, they naturally shrink in size, but it isn’t clear why people who are overweight have a greater reduction in the amount of white matter,” study author Lisa Ronan, a psychiatrist at the University of Cambridge, said in a news release. “We can only speculate on whether obesity might in some way cause these changes or whether obesity is a consequence of brain changes.”
Regardless of the clear inconsistencies in the volume of white matter between lean and overweight individuals, the scientists discovered no link between being overweight or obese and a person’s cognitive abilities, as assessed using a conventional test comparable to an IQ test.
“We don’t yet know the implications of these changes in brain structure,” said Sadaf Farooqi, a professor at Cambridge Neuroscience. “Clearly, this must be a starting point for us to explore in more depth the effects of weight, diet, and exercise on the brain and memory.”
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Pictured is a comparison between grey matter (brown) and white matter (yellow) between two people of the same age and sex with different BMI levels. (Image credit: Lisa Ronan)
The US ban on research involving chimeras – human-animal hybrids developed by adding stem cells from a person into the embryo of a different species – could soon be at least partially lifted, according to a proposalreleased Thursday by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
That proposal would lift the ban, which according to Naturehas been in place since September of last year, in specific cases while also establishing a panel to review the ethics of projects that apply for grants. It would also reduce the time frame in which human cells can be introduced to non-human primate embryos to before the development of the central nervous system.
By doing so, the NIH hopes to limit the number of human stem cells which would become part of the chimera’s brain, the publication added. Furthermore, the new rules would any the breeding of animals with human cells to prevent a human-like embryo in the womb of a primate, and/or the birth of offspring that is closer to human than the creatures which gave birth to it.
“Biomedical researchers have created and used animal models containing human cells for decades to gain valuable insights into human biology and disease development,” explained Dr. Carrie D. Wolinetz, Associate Director for Science Policy at the NIH. “To advance regenerative medicine, it is common practice to validate the potency of pluripotent human cells – which can become any tissue in the body – through introducing them into rodents.”
“With recent advances in stem cell and gene editing technologies, an increasing number of researchers are interested in growing human tissues and organs in animals by introducing pluripotent human cells into early animal embryos,” she added, noting that chimera research “holds tremendous potential for disease modeling, drug testing, and perhaps eventual organ transplant” but also raises “ethical and animal welfare concerns.”
Researchers have mixed reaction to the proposed guidelines
Under the new program, Wolinetz said that any grant applications that would potentially raise ethical or animal welfare-related issues would undergo panel review. Specific attention will be paid to experiments that involve primates at any stage of development and project in which an animal’s brain could be affected by human cells.
Research involving rats would be exempt from review, Nature explained because NIH scientific advisors are confident that the substantial differences between the brains of people and rats make it impossible for such rodents to become human-like following stem cell injection. The agency is currently accepting public comment on the planned changes to their chimera research policy.
Reaction to the proposal has been mixed, according to the publication. University of Rochester neuroscientist Steven Goldman told the journal that he was relieved that the funding ban would be lifted and called the guidelines “more intelligent from the standpoint of where the science is.”
However, Ali Brivanlou, a developmental biologist at Rockefeller University in New York, believes that the rules should focus less on the timing of stem cell injection and more on the degree to which an animal can be made human. In addition, Francoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, is concerned that this type of research will create a new group of human-like animals without establishing guidelines for how they should be treated.
Wolinetz said that the moratorium on funding would remain in place while the NIH collects public comments on the proposal, but noted that she hoped to have the new guidelines in place by January 2017, when the next round of grants will be awarded by the federal agency.
Legends have long claimed that China’s first dynasty, the Xia, arose after Emperor Yu tamed a large-scale flood that threatened the country’s civilization. Researchers never found any evidence to corroborate the tale – until now.
By analyzing sediments and the bones of three young children, Dr. Wu Qinglong, a professor of geography at Nanjing Normal University, and his colleagues have discovered evidence that such a flood probably happened sometime around 1900 BC.
According to BBC News and the Washington Post, Dr. Wu was conducting research around the Yellow River in 2007 when he found rock deposits resembling “outburst flood sediments” in the form of green schist and mudstone. The sediment layers were far thicker than was normal for the area, suggesting that they were originally deposited there by a tremendous flood.
He recruited a team of archaeologists, geologists, and historians to further investigate the site, and they concluded a nearby earthquake triggered an avalanche which formed a natural dam in the river. That dam lasted for six to nine months before bursting, and once it did, as much as 16 cubic km worth of water flooded the lowlands downstream.
As Wu told reporters during a teleconference, the investigation “showed that the sediments from this outburst flood are up to 20m thick, and up to 50m higher than the Yellow River – indicating an unprecedented, devastating flood.” His team published their findings in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
The team successfully carbon dated three skeletons to date the flood (Credit: Cai Linhai)
Findings provide possible link between Xia dynasty, Erlitou culture
During the course of their investigation, Wu’s team carbon-dated organic matter found along with the flood deposits, as well as bones belonging to three young children believed to be victims of the cataclysmic event. The results indicated that the flood occurred sometime around 1922 BC – “plus or minus about 28 years,” study co-author Dr. Darryl Granger told BBC News.
Granger, a geologist at Purdue University, noted that the flood waters would have extended as far as 2,000 km (more than 1,200 miles) downstream while traveling 300-500,000 cubic meters per second. That’s “roughly equivalent to the largest flood ever measured on the Amazon river” and “among the largest known floods to have happened on Earth during the past 10,000 years.”
It’s also 500 times the size of a typical flood on the Yellow River caused by rainfall, the study authors explained. While the dating of the event is earlier than some earlier estimates, it would coincide with a transition from Stone Age culture to Bronze Age culture – specifically, the rise of the Erlitou culture, an early Chinese Bronze Age society previously identified by researchers. The study suggests that the Xia dynasty and the Erlitou culture could be linked.
“This is the first time a flood of this scale – large enough to account for it – has been found,” co-author David Cohen, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at National Taiwan University, told the AFP. The discovery “provides us with a tantalizing hint that the Xia dynasty might really have existed,” he noted. “If the Great Flood really happened, perhaps it is also likely that the Xia dynasty really existed, too. The two are directly tied to each other.”
Desert elephants pass down knowledge through generations, study finds
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
While the DNA of Namibian desert elephants is the same as that of African savanna elephants, the former species has learned how to adapt to its environment and that unique knowledge makes it worthy of species protection, according to new research published online Wednesday.
Writing in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Alfred Roca, a professor of animal sciences and a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues explain that Namibian desert-dwelling elephants have learned to cover their bodies in sand wetter by their urine or water regurgitated from a pouch under their tongue to stay cool.
Furthermore, this group of pachyderms are able to remember the location of limited amounts of water and food in their habitats, which are considerably larger than those of other elephants, and help shape their ecosystems by creating paths and digging watering holes. In order to ensure that these elephants are able to continue passing on their wisdom and survival skills, steps need to be taken to protect them from potential threats, the study authors explained.
“The ability of species such as elephants to learn and change their behavior means that genetic changes are not critical for them to adapt to a new environment,” Roca said in a statement. “The behavioral changes can allow species to expand their range to novel marginal habitats that differ sharply from the core habitat.”
Surviving in the Namibian Desert is difficult– so elephants pass their knowledge through generations. (Credit: Thinkstock)
Survival skills ‘crucial’ to survival of elephants in arid regions
As part of their research, Roca’s team analyzed both the nuclear and the mitochondrial DNA of both desert-dwelling and non-desert-dwelling elephant populations located throughout Namibia. They found that there were no significant genetic differences between the two populations, with one exception – those living in the Caprivi Strip region of the African nation.
Since female elephants live in close matrilineal family groups, mutations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which are passed from mothers to offspring, are linked to geographic populations. So it should not come as a surprise that the mtDNA of elephants living in the Caprivi Strip is similar to that of elephants from the bordering countries of Botswana and Zimbabwe, the authors said.
Aside from Caprivi Strip elephants, however, there is an overall lack of genetic differentiation, which the researchers said is consistent with historical movements of the populations during the Namibian War of Independence. Their analysis also revealed other migration patterns, including the fact that elephants living in the Ugab River region shared mtDNA with those living near the Huab River, a group from which the Ugab River elephants are believed to have migrated.
Furthermore, by analyzing their mtDNA, Roca’s group found that the lack genetic differences in these elephants was most likely due to the long distances they traveled, their large ranges, recent increases in population size and range, and/or gene flow (the transfer of alleles or genes from one population to another) resulting from male elephants breeding with different groups of females.
Despite their genetic similarities, desert-dwelling elephants “should be conserved,” Roca said. “Their knowledge of how to live in the desert is crucial to the survival of future generations of elephants in the arid habitat, and pressure from hunting and climate change may only increase in the coming decades. The desert elephants are also rumored to be larger, which may put them at greater risk for trophy game hunting.”
The Echo Hunter: A newly discovered ancient whale with amazing hearing
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
This newly identified fossil whale species could hear frequencies far above the range of human hearing, new research published in the August 4 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology has revealed.
The discovery suggests that whales first developed high-frequency hearing some 10 million years earlier than previous research had indicated, according to lead author Morgan Churchill, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine and his colleagues.
“Previous studies have looked at hearing in whales but our study incorporates data from an animal with a very complete skull,” Churchill said in a statement. “The data we gathered enabled us to conclude that it could hear at very high frequencies, and we can also say with a great degree of certainty where it fits in the tree of life for whales.”
“This was a small, toothed whale that probably used its remarkable sense of hearing to find and pursue fish with echoes only,” added co-author and associate professor Jonathan Geisler. “This would allow it to hunt at night, but more importantly, it could hunt at great depths in darkness, or in very sediment-choked environments.”
The fossil of Echovenator sandersi. (Credit: Jonathan Geisler)
Findings could help determine what ear features hear different noises
High-frequency hearing, Geisler explained, is one of two primary traits required for echolocation, or the use of sound waves and their echoes to establish the location of objects. Like bats, some whales use echolocation to hunt, but doing so requires them to have the ability to produce a high-frequency call, as well as the ability to hear and interpret those noises.
The study, which was part of a series of research projects funded through a $220,000 grant to the associate professor’s team from the National Science Foundation (NSF), verified that most of the characteristics associated with high-frequency hearing in whales emerged about 27 million years ago, around the same time as echolocation. Some features, however, evolved even earlier.
Churchill, Geisler and their fellow researchers analyzed the skull of a 27-million-year-old whale specimen discovered 15 years ago in South Carolina. They focused on the bony support structure of the inner ear membranes, as well as its surroundings, and found that the species now known as Echovenator possessed ultrasonic hearing abilities, meaning that it could detect frequencies well beyond the range of human hearing.
While scientists know that the semi-aquatic predecessors of modern whales that lived about 60 million years ago had limited high-frequency hearing abilities, statistical analyses performed by the authors of the new study enabled them to determine that at least some characteristics linked to this ability evolved in whales before echolocation, eventually becoming more refined.
“Knowing when and how echolocation evolved is a critical step in our project,” Geisler noted, “and we are studying how the evolution of echolocation influenced the evolution of skull shapes in cetaceans.” He added that as biological studies turn ever more to computer models, his team’s study could help determine what inner ear features are necessary for hearing sounds at different frequencies.
New dust-sized implants can track everything in your body
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Fitness trackers have become some of the more popular types of wearable technology in recent years, but engineers at the University of California, Berkeley want to take the concept one step further by developing miniscule, wireless sensors to monitor a person’s internal health.
These devices would be approximately the same size as a grain of dust and would be implanted into a person’s body, where they would provide real-time monitoring of organs, muscles, and/or nerves, the researchers explained in the August 3 edition of the journal Neuron.
The implant will allow for real-time monitoring of nerve or muscle activity anywhere in the body. (Credit: Ryan Neely)
Furthermore, the sensors don’t use batteries and could be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, thus providing a potentialnew way to treat disorders such as epilepsy or to activate a person’s immune system. The devices, which have already been implanted in the muscles and peripheral nerves of rats, use ultrasound both as a source of power and as a way to read the collected data.
Dubbed “neural dust,” the sensors have already been reduced down to a one millimeter cube and contain a piezoelectric crystal. The crystal converts ultrasound vibrations emanating from outside a person’s body into electricity, which is used to power a tiny transistor on the device which is in direct contact with a nerve or muscle fiber, the study authors explained.
Devices could also be used to power prosthetics, researchers claim
Voltage spikes in the fiber causes changes to the circuit and the vibration of the crystal, which in turn changes the echo detected by the ultrasound receiver (which in the majority of instances will also be the source of the vibrations). Since ultrasound technology is common in hospitals and the vibrations can penetrate most parts of the body, it seemed like a natural fit.
Furthermore, as co-lead author Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC-Berkley, noted in a statement, “I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader.”
Detail of the implant on a nerve fiber of a rat. (Credit: Ryan Neely, UC Berkeley)
“Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something supertiny superdeep,” Maharbiz, who co-authored the study along with colleague and UC-Berkley neuroscientist Jose Carmena, explained. “But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data.”
In order to test out their devices, Maharbiz and Carmena powered up the sensors using six 540-nanosecond ultrasound pulses delivered once every 100 microseconds. This provided them with continual readouts from the device in real-time. So far, the experiments have been limited to just the peripheral nervous system and muscles, but the researchers are confident that they could also be effective in the brain and central nervous system and brain, and could even be used to control prosthetic devices eventually.
“The original goal of the neural dust project was to imagine the next generation of brain-machine interfaces, and to make it a viable clinical technology,” said neuroscience graduate student Ryan Neely. “If a paraplegic wants to control a computer or a robotic arm, you would just implant this electrode in the brain and it would last essentially a lifetime.”
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Image credit: Stephen McNally and Roxanne Makasdjian, UC Berkeley
Researchers catch first-ever glimpse of Io’s atmospheric collapse
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
For the first time, scientists have directly observed Io’s atmosphere during an eclipse, getting an up-close look at the atmosphere of the Jovian moon freezes onto the surface when it is shaded by Jupiter, according to research published Tuesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
As lead author Constantine Tsang of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and his colleagues explained, each day the gas giant’s shadow moves stretches across Io’s surface during an eclipse, causing the sulfur dioxide gas emitted by volcanoes on the moon to freeze and fall to the surface. When the eclipse ends, the ice warms and the atmosphere reforms through sublimation.
“This research is the first time scientists have observed this phenomenon directly, improving our understanding of this geologically active moon,” Tsang, a senior research scientist in the SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division, explained in a statement.
“This confirms that Io’s atmosphere is in a constant state of collapse and repair, and shows that a large fraction of the atmosphere is supported by sublimation of SO2 ice,” added fellow SwRI scientist John Spencer. “Though Io’s hyperactive volcanoes are the ultimate source of the SO2, sunlight controls the atmospheric pressure on a daily basis by controlling the temperature of the ice on the surface. We’ve long suspected this, but can finally watch it happen.”
Credit: Southwest Research Institute
Detecting, monitoring heat signatures the key to collecting eclipse data
Tsang, Spencer and their colleagues monitored Io using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES), and found that the atmosphere of the moon began to “deflate” when temperatures fell from -235 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun to -270 degrees Fahrenheit during an eclipse.
Each eclipse lasts for two hours every Io day (1.7 Earth days), and in a full eclipse, the moon’s atmosphere effectively collapses due to the freezing of the sulfur dioxide, which settles onto the surface in the form of frost, according to the researchers. When the moon re-enters full sunlight, the frost is heated and sublimates, or converts directly back into an atmospheric gas.
The new study is the first to conduct direct observations of the moon’s atmosphere, as previously scientists had been unable to see through the darkness created by Jupiter’s shadow. However, by using TEXES’ ability to use heat radiation instead of sunlight to measure atmosphere, as well as the Gemini telescope’s ability to detect very faint heat signatures, the SwRI-led team was able to observe Io’s atmosphere for a total of 40 minutes over two nights in November 2013.
“No direct observations of Io’s atmosphere in eclipse have previously been possible, due to the simultaneous need for high spectral and time sensitivity, as well as a high signal-to-noise ratio,” the study authors wrote. “Here we present the first ever high-resolution spectra at 19 µm of Io’s SO2 atmosphere in Jupiter eclipse from the Gemini telescope.”
“The strongest atmospheric band depth is seen to dramatically decay from 2.5 ± (0.08)% before the eclipse to 0.18 ± (0.16)% after 40 min in eclipse,” they added. “Further modeling indicates that the atmosphere has collapsed shortly after eclipse ingress, implying that the atmosphere of Io has a strong sublimation-controlled component. The atmospheric column density – from pre-eclipse to in-eclipse – drops by a factor of 5 ± 2.”
DNA’s dynamic structure makes it the blueprint for life
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
A new study published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology has revealed how the framework of DNA has predisposed it to be the primary carrier of life-giving genetic information and not its molecular cousin RNA.
Using a cutting edge imaging technique, the study researcher were able to see how DNA’s double helix is a more robust molecule that can contort into various shapes to buffer against possible chemical destruction. In comparison, when RNA is shaped into a double helix it becomes too stiff and falls apart.
“There is an amazing complexity built into these simple beautiful structures, whole new layers or dimensions that we have been blinded to because we didn’t have the tools to see them, until now,” study author Hashim M. Al-Hashimi, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University, said in a news release. The study is likely to “rewrite textbook coverage” on DNA and RNA.
When the first model of the DNA double helix was published in 1953 by the famed Watson and Crick, the paper described just how DNA base pairs would fit together. Yet other scientists struggled to offer proof of this. In 1959, a biochemist named Karst Hoogsteen captured an image of a base pair that had a somewhat bent geometry, with one base turned 180 degrees in relation to the other. Subsequently, both Watson-Crick and Hoogsteen base pairs have been viewed in pictures of DNA.
DNA can absorb chemical damage in a way RNA cannot (Credit: Huiqing Zhou, Duke University)
Studying the Double Helix
Five years ago, the team behind the new study revealed how base pairs continuously switch back and forth between Watson-Crick and the Hoogsteen styles in the DNA double helix. Al-Hashimi said Hoogsteen base pairs normally appear when DNA is ensnared by a protein or harmed by chemicals. The DNA returns to its simpler pairing when it is discharged from the protein or the damage is repaired.
“DNA seems to use these Hoogsteen base pairs to add another dimension to its structure, morphing into different shapes to achieve added functionality inside the cell,” Al-Hashimi said.
In the new study, researchers set out to determine if the same phenomenon was occurring with RNA. Using a state-of-the-art imaging method referred to as NMR relaxation dispersion, researchers examined double artificial helices — one made of DNA and one made of RNA. Using the NMR process, the team could follow the flipping of individual bases that constitute the spiraling steps, pairing up based on either Watson-Crick or Hoogsteen rules.
Prior analyses indicated that at any particular time, one percent of the bases in the DNA double helix were changing into Hoogsteen base pairs. But when the team checked out the equivalent RNA double helix, they discovered zero detectable movement; the base pairs were all frozen in the Watson-Crick configuration.
The scientists wondered if their simulation of RNA was an exception or anomaly, so they developed a wide range of RNA molecules and screened them under a wide range of conditions, but still none seemed to change. They were concerned the RNA might actually be developing Hoogsteen base pairs, but that they were taking place so swiftly that they weren’t capable of catch them in the act. The team added a chemical referred to as a methyl group to a particular spot on the bases to stop Watson-Crick base pairing, so the RNA would be held in the Hoogsteen configuration. They said they were shocked to see the two strands of RNA then came apart.
The team said RNA doesn’t form Hoogsteen base pairs because its double helical structure is more packed together than DNA’s. Consequently, RNA can’t change one base without hitting another or moving around atoms, which would rip the helix apart.
“For something as fundamental as the double helix, it is amazing that we are discovering these basic properties so late in the game,” Al-Hashimi said. “We need to continue to zoom in to obtain a deeper understanding regarding these basic molecules of life.”
By using low radio frequency observations and spectral modeling, astronomers have discovered new information about the closest and brightest supernova ever viewed from Earth, even though the object actually collapsed nearly three decades ago!
A global group of researchers led by experts from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) used the Murchison Widefield Array in a remote part of the West Australian desert to analyze what it now known as supernova remnant 1987A in frequencies of between 72 MHz and 230 MHz – the lowest frequency observations of the object ever collected.
Previously, only the final 20,000 years or 0.1% of the star’s lifespan had been observable, but as the authors reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the low-frequency data collected enabled the researchers to trace the supernova’s history back an additional several million years, revealing that the one-time red supergiant had lost its matter at a much slower rate and generated far slower winds than previously believed.
“Our new data improves our knowledge of the composition of space in the region of supernova 1987A; we can now go back to our simulations and tweak them, to better reconstruct the physics of supernovae,” lead researcher Joseph Callingham, a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), said in a statement.
Lack of radio interference key to successful observations
Callingham and his colleagues chose to use the Murchison Widefield Array because its remote location in the Australian outback was free from FM radio interference – something that study co-author and former CAASTRO Director Bryan Gaensler explained was of vital importance.
“Nobody knew what was happening at low radio frequencies because the signals from our own earthbound FM radio drown out the faint signals from space,” he said in a statement. “Now, by studying the strength of the radio signal, astronomers for the first time can calculate how dense the surrounding gas is, and thus understand the environment of the star before it died.”
By turning the array towards the supernova remnant, which is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the researchers were able to detect extremely faint, low-frequency hisses emanating from its location. While previous studies were limited to when the star was in its final, blue supergiant phase, the new observations allowed the researchers to observe it in its red supergiant phase.
“Low-frequency radio waves are very sensitive to the presence of intervening plasma,” said co-author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, Deputy Director of CAASTRO and ICRAR. “They tell us a great deal about the density of matter immediately in front of the supernova remnant. Their presence also tells us about the in-situ acceleration of very high-energy particles called cosmic rays, many of which are believed to be created in young remnants such as this.”
Lack of fresh water killed the last mammoths, study finds
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
While most of the world’s wooly mammoth population died out by approximately 10,500 years ago, one group managed to survive for another 5,000 years before climate change finally caused their water supply to dry up, according to the authors of a new study.
The research, which was led by Pennsylvania State University professor Dr. Russell Graham and published in this week’s edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that a group of mammoths living on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea outlived most of their relatives, but increasingly shallow water ultimately left them unable to quench their thirst.
According to BBC News and the Daily Mail, post-Ice Age warming of the planet caused the sea levels to rise and the mammoths’ island habitat to shrink in size. Furthermore, some of the freshwater lakes that they used to keep hydrated were flooded by saltwater from the ocean, leading to increased competition for the few remaining watering holes. The increasing number of mammoths using these lakes ultimately made them unusable as well, Dr. Graham said.
“As the other lakes dried up, the animals congregated around the water holes. They were milling around, which would destroy the vegetation – we see this with modern elephants,” he explained to BBC News. “And this allows for the erosion of sediments to go into the lake, which is creating less and less fresh water. The mammoths were contributing to their own demise.”
St. Paul Island off the coast of Alaska was one of the last places where Mammoths lived. (Credit: Jack Williams and Yue Wang)
Research said to be relevant to modern-day island populations
Dr. Graham and his colleagues reached this conclusion after analyzing the remains of 14 wooly mammoths using radiocarbon dating, and collecting sediments from underneath the lake floor in order to study their contents in order to determine what the lake environment was like at various points throughout history.
The researchers concluded these mammoths outlived their mainland cousins by about 5,000 years, becoming trapped on the island after a land bridged wound up being submerged by rising sea levels. There, they managed to survive until conditions worsened, and the influx of saltwater combined with the lack of freshwater from melting snow or rain caused their sources of drinking water to become increasingly limited.
“We do know modern elephants require between 70 and 200 liters of water daily,” Dr. Graham told BBC News. “We assume mammoths did the same thing. It wouldn’t have taken long if the water hole had dried up. If it had only dried up for a month, it could have been fatal.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison geography professor John “Jack” Williams, who was part of the research team, said that the discovery was relevant to modern-day islands and the people and animals currently living in those locations. As such, he and his colleagues hope to create a model of the conditions at St. Paul Island during the time it was inhabited by mammoths.
“It’s a cool story in multiple ways. I can’t think of any other case where freshwater availability was the driver of extinction,” Williams, who also serves as director of the UW–Madison Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research, said in a statement. “We want to model the island as it was when the mammoths existed on it. We want to learn the carrying capacity of the island, their population numbers, their dietary and water requirements.”
The evolutionary trait leading to the female orgasm began as a way to stimulate ovulation in early mammals, scientists from Yale University and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital reported in new research published online Monday.
Writing in the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B Molecular and Developmental Evolution, Gunter Wagner, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale as well as a member of the university’s Systems Biology Institute, and his colleagues set out to investigate what role the female organism played in biology, as it appeared to be unrelated to human reproduction.
“Prior studies have tended to focus on evidence from human biology and the modification of a trait rather than its evolutionary origin,” Wagner said in a statement. Instead, his team focused on a particular physiological trait known to accompany human female orgasms: the neuro-endocrine discharge of prolactin and oxytocin. They found that in many other mammal species, this release is associated with ovulation, suggesting that there is some link between the two.
In short, they concluded that the female organism may have originally been an adaptation which was directly involved in reproduction by inducing ovulation. Over time, however, the importance of its function was diminished, resulting in it becoming relegated to a secondary role in people.
Development of cyclical ovulation linked to relocation of the clitoris
The research could help solve a mystery that has dated back to the era of the Greek philosophers, as past research in the area had found no known link between female orgasms and the number of offspring or the reproductive success rate of humans, the authors explained in a statement.
Biologically speaking, reproduction is extremely diverse among different types of mammals, the researchers said. However, there are same characteristics that can be traced through the history of mammalian sexual activity. For example, the ovarian cycles of human females are not influenced directly by males, but the cycle is dependent upon males in some other mammalian species.
Wagner and his colleagues concluded that shows male-induced ovulation evolved first and that spontaneous or cyclical ovulation evolved later. Furthermore, by comparing female genitalia of different types of mammals, they found that the development of cyclical ovulation was linked to the relocation of the clitoris from within the copulatory canal, reducing the chances that it would receive enough stimulation during sex to produce the neuro-endocrine reflex known as orgasm.
“Homologous traits in different species are often difficult to identify, as they can change substantially in the course of evolution,” said co-author Mihaela Pavličev from the Center for Prevention of Preterm Birth at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “We think the hormonal surge characterizes a trait that we know as female orgasm in humans. This insight enabled us to trace the evolution of the trait across species.”
Skydiver survives 25,000 foot jump without a parachute
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Folks living in the Simi Valley region of California, don’t panic: if you witnessed something strange falling back to Earth on Saturday evening, it wasn’t a meteorite, a falling piece of space junk or a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin – it was skydiver Luke Aikins making history.
Aikins, a 42-year-old with more than 18,000 jumps to his name already, jumped from an altitude of 25,000 feet en route to becoming the first person ever to skydive and land without using a parachute or wingsuit, according to the Washington Post and the New York Daily News.
Instead, Aikins leapt from a platform in the desert wearing an oxygen mask, which he removed about 7,000 feet into his freefall, and used GPH and lights to land on a target emblazoned onto a 100-foot by 100-foot net suspended 200 feet above the ground – all on national TV, as the entire stunt was broadcast live on Fox.
“I’m almost levitating, it’s incredible,” he told the Associated Press after landing. “This thing just happened! I can’t even get the words out of my mouth.” He then thanked the crew members who helped him prepare for the jump, which was two years in the making, and later posted a message to his Facebookpage expressing gratitude for the support he received.
Stunt had been meticulously planned
While other divers have made jumps without chutes, the Washington Post pointed out that they either were assisted by a partner who had a parachute, put one on after leaping from the plane, or used a wingsuit to help control their decent. Aikins had none of those support systems.
For that reason, the dive almost never happened, as reports indicate that the Screen Actors Guild almost forbade Aikins from making the jump without a parachute. He almost called off the jump at that point, claiming that wearing a chute would have actually made the jump more dangerous, but the Guild ultimately relented and the dive went on as originally scheduled.
Three other skydivers made the jump as well, but each of them were wearing parachutes. One of them recorded the jump using a camera, while another left a smoke trail so that the people on the ground could following his descent and the third carried the oxygen canister used by Aikins. The trio then opened their chutes at a target altitude and left him to complete the free-fall on his own.
The lights being used to guide Aikins were strong enough to be visible at 25,000 feet, and would change color if he was off course, allowing him to attempt to make adjustments, according to the Post. After successfully landing, Aikins climbed out of the net, walked over to his wife, Monica, and four-year-old son, Logan, were watching, and gave both of them a big hug.
As the authors of that paper explained in a statement, single-celled microbes dominated the Earth for more than three billion years before the first multicellular organisms emerged approximately 600 million years ago. Among the most successful of those early creatures were nearly immobile marine organisms shaped life discs, tubes, and fronds and called Ediacarans.
Ediacarans spread around the world, but 60 million years after they emerged, the first animals – metazoans – emerged. Metazoans could move independently at some point during their lifetime, and fed on either the products of other organisms or the organisms themselves, they added.
This eventually led to an event that paleontologists refer to as the Cambrian explosion: a period spanning 25 million years during which vertebrates, mollusks, arthropods, annelids and most of the other modern animal families emerged. It was these events that ultimately resulted in what is known as the end-Ediacaran extinction, as these new organisms made such radical changes to the environment that they caused their less complex predecessors to die out completely.
“These new species were ‘ecological engineers’ who changed the environment in ways that made it more and more difficult for the Ediacarans to survive,” explained Simon Darroch, the lead investigator of the new study as well as an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt.
Drawing parallels with modern-day environmental changes
Darroch and his colleagues previously reported on fossils which appeared to show stressed-looking Ediacara communities associated with animal burrows. Now, their new study confirms that they have discovered a well-preserved mixed community of Ediacarans and animals – the best evidence to date that the two groups shared a close ecological association.
“Until this, the evidence for an overlapping ecological association between metazoans and soft-bodied Ediacaran organisms was limited,” the Vanderbilt professor said. “Here, we describe new fossil localities from southern Namibia that preserve soft-bodied Ediacara biota, enigmatic tubular organisms thought to represent metazoans and vertically oriented metazoan trace fossils.”
“With this paper we’re narrowing in on causation,” he added. “We’ve discovered some new fossil sites that preserve both Ediacara biota and animal fossils (both animal burrows – ‘trace fossils’ – and the remains of animals themselves) sharing the same communities, which lets us speculate about how these two very different groups of organisms interacted.”
While they have not been able to verify the identity of the creature responsible for those trace fossils, the researchers noted that the burrow-like structures are similar to those associated with Conichnus, a cone-shaped organism that has been discovered in the Cambrian period. Some of these burrows, Darroch said, are often believed to have been formed by sea anemones, passive predators which could have fed on the larvae of Ediacarans.
“These new fossil sites reveal a snapshot of a very unusual ‘transitional’ ecosystem existing right before the Cambrian explosion, with the last of the Ediacara biota clinging on for grim death, just as modern-looking animals are diversifying and starting to realize their potential,” he said, noting that there is “a powerful analogy between the Earth’s first mass extinction and what is happening today. The end-Ediacaran extinction shows that the evolution of new behaviors can fundamentally change the entire planet, and today we humans are the most powerful ‘ecosystems engineers’ ever known.”
Reusable Falcon 9 rocket completes first full-duration test-fire
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Having all but mastered landing their reusable Falcon 9 boosters, SpaceX on Thursday test-fired one of those rockets at full thrust for 150 seconds (the same amount of time they have to function during an actual trip to space) to demonstrate that they can indeed work a second time.
According to Ars Technica and The Verge, the test-fire took place at the aerospace firm’s testing site in MacGregor, Texas, and involved a Falcon 9 rocket that in May had been used to delivered a Japanese communication satellite into orbit. Said booster was upright and secured for the entire duration of the test, which was designed to simulate the length of a first-stage burn.
SpaceX has posted video of the test-fire to YouTube, and while CNETcorrectly pointed out that there is “nothing super dramatic” about the whole thing. Officials are touting Thursday’s event as the first full-duration, stand-up test of a recycled rocket – and as such, an important step forward in their work.
To date, the California-based aerospace firm has successfully landed five Falcon 9 boosters, the first on which came following a commercial satellite launch last December. Three additional landings, all involving autonomous sea-based landing platform, occurred in April and May of this year, while the fifth landed on the ground earlier this month.
Successful test paves the way for first re-fly attempt this fall
As those who have been following the story already known, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is hoping to recycle booster rockets as a way to reduce the costs associated with spaceflight, as being able to use them more than once could reportedly reduce the price tag by several million dollars.
Despite the five successful landings, the company has yet to attempt to re-fly any of the Falcon 9s that they have recovered thus far, although they have set tentative plans to do so later on this year (possibly in September or October, according to The Verge). Earlier this month, Musk told reporters that the first attempt would utilize the second recovered rocket (the one from the April test flight), as he intended to preserve the December one as a monument of sorts.
“Getting to the point where they are not only recovering them intact, but reusing them and, here is the key point, reusing them on launches where there is a customer paying for that launch, that is the hard part,” Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell told the Christian Science Monitor recently.
“It is the reuse that still remains to be proven. The landing of the stages they seem to have got down now, not 100 percent but they have basically got that sorted. So doing that for three stages at once is an operational challenge, but it is not a fundamental challenge,” McDowell added. “I see no reason why they can’t do this, and it is going to be spectacular.”
Zika virus epidemic: Should the United States be worried?
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’ve heard of the Zika virus: a mosquito-borne pathogen which can also be transferred through sexual contact with an infected person.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Zika is primarily spread through the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito (Ae. aegypti and/or Ae. albopictus). While those mosquitoes were once exclusive to tropical or subtropical regions of the world, they can be found in most regions these days, thanks in part to human activity.
Zika infection is rarely fatal, and in fact, most people who contract the virus don’t even get sick enough to go to the hospital. However, the virus can also be transmitted from a pregnant mother to her unborn fetus, resulting in birth defects including microcephaly, a defect which causes the child to have a smaller-than-expected head and a poorly-developed brain.
Much of the concern regarding the Zika virus has centered around microcephaly, and while the CDC reports that (as of June 29) there have been approximately 3,000 reported cases of the virus in US states and territories, there is not currently concern of a major outbreak in the US. But could there be?
Understanding how Zika can (and can’t) be transmitted
We tend to view Zika transmission as such: a mosquito bites a person who is infected with the virus, then bites other individuals, thus transmitting the disease to them. However, as Dr. Alfred Scott Lea, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told redOrbit via email, this explanation is “perhaps a bit simplistic.”
“Mosquitoes can also transmit the virus transovarially to their eggs, which become larvae and then mature into adult mosquitoes,” he explained. “These adult offspring can then transmit the virus contracted from its mother. Just exactly how much transmission is accomplished by each route of exposure is unknown… [but] to date, there is no vaccine or effective treatment.”
In addition to contracting the virus through mosquito bites, the CDC warns that the Zika can be passed from a pregnant woman to her fetus during the pregnancy or around the time of birth, but that there have not yet been any reports of an infant contracting the virus through breastfeeding. Infected males can also pass the virus sexually to their partners, and the virus can even be spread before the man begins experiencing symptoms, and after said symptoms pass.
As of February 1, there had been no confirmed cases of Zika being transmitted through a blood transfusion in the US, although several such instances have been reported in Brazil, according to the CDC. Those claims are being investigated. As of June 15, there has been one instance of the disease being contracted by a scientist who had been working in a US-based laboratory.
So, what are the odds of a Zika epidemic in the continental US?
We know that the virus has already crossed the border into our country – and has already killedan unidentified elderly Salt Lake City woman who contracted the disease while traveling – but could mosquitoes turn a few isolated cases into a full blown national epidemic?
In June, the New York Times reported that the CDC was working on a blueprint to deal with just such an event, and they had drafted a 60-page blueprint laying out how to deal with domestic cases of Zika infection. As the CDC’s deputy director, Dr. Anne Schuchat, told the newspaper, “We know that Zika is a completely unprecedented problem and the front-line response is going to be crucial. The summer is starting, and the mosquitoes are coming.”
Recent reports reveal multiple cases of the virus appearing to spread through mosquitoes in Florida, leading researchers to believe that the virus has spread to mosquito populations in the United States.
Recent Florida-based reports suggest that the virus could exist in US mosquito populations (Credit: Thinkstock)
However, health experts added that they do not anticipate widespread transmission of the virus in the states because most homes in the US are air-conditioned and people don’t leave their windows open without using screens.
Most of the US is less densely populated than Brazil, so it’s tougher for the short-lived mosquitoes to spread the disease. Ae. aegypti usually only flies about one city block before dying.
Nonetheless, Dr. Lea said that “most experts expect that we will see cases in the USA sometime in the near future,” and Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Fox News that “all of the conditions where they’re present in Latin America and the Caribbean are also present in Texas and other Gulf Coast states.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, disagrees “I don’t think Zika will become widespread in the United States like it has in South America and the Caribbean,” he told WKRN-TV during an interview in May. “We could have some local introduction with a little bit of spread, but that shouldn’t alarm us because the response will be fast.”
“Many areas in the continental US, primarily in the Southeast and Gulf Coast regions, have mosquitoes that can become infected with and spread Zika virus, so it is possible that these imported cases could result in local spread of the virus in some areas,” the Department of Health and Human Services websitesaid. “Limited local transmission may occur in the mainland United States, but we believe it is unlikely that we will see widespread transmission of Zika.”
How can Americans protect themselves, domestically and abroad?
There are currently no vaccines that can prevent Zika infection, and Dr. Schaffner told WKRN –TV that while “a large number of drug manufacturers… are working on a vaccine,” they are “not close.” In fact, he noted, such a vaccine is “a good year or more away.” So how can residents of the US protect themselves, both at home and when traveling to other parts of the world?
To avoid possible infection with the Zika virus, both Dr. Lea and Dr. Schaffner recommended wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants instead of shorts, and applying mosquito repellant exposed skin. Spend the night in enclosed, air-conditioned environments when possible, and sleep under mosquito netting when that isn’t an option, they added.
Also, take steps to eliminate places around your home that could act as breeding grounds for mosquitoes. “An individual can practice basic environmental control by eliminating standing water in their immediate environment – like in birdbaths and old tires in the yard,” Dr. Lea told redOrbit.
Mosquito netting is an effective way to keep yourself safe if you can’t sleep with the windows closed. (Credit: Thinkstock)
“Sexually active women need to be very careful about achieving pregnancy if their partner has been to South or Central America where an exposure may have occurred,” he added. “The CDC recommends condom use during any and all forms of sexual activity for the entire duration of the activity for prevention.”
Tests can determine whether or not a person has either contracted to been exposed to Zika. These examinations are provided primarily by the CDC, some local health departments and laboratories. However, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are developing an inexpensive test which could quickly and accurately determineif you came into contact with the virus.
Bright flash in western US caused by Chinese rocket
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Bright flashes of light were observed in the western US this week, initially believed by some to have been caused by an unidentified flying object. Sadly the flash has a more mundane source, according to KNTV News and the Los Angeles Times.
The streaks were observed mostly in Nevada and California. Several individuals caught photos and videos of the event, many of which can be viewed at The Huffington Post. However, if they were hoping to catch aliens on an interstellar vacation– they’re out of luck, as officials confirmed the lights were caused by a Chinese rocket.
Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas initially confirmed the streaks resulted from a meteor that was burning up in the atmosphere. The US Strategic Command later claimed the phenomenon was caused by the remains of a Chinese-made Chang Zheng-7 rocket re-entering the atmosphere sometime around 9:36 pm Pacific time.
Lt. Colonel Martin L. O’Donnell, told the L.A.Times the rocket was among 16,000 man-made objects orbiting the planet which were being tracked by officials at the Joint Space Operations Center. The majority of those objects, he added, typically burn up in the sky during re-entry or land over water, and the CZ-7 posed no threat to people on the ground.
Jonathan McDowell, an researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the newspaper that the CZ-7 rocket had launched on June 25 and spent a month in low orbit before returning to Earth. It was likely traveling at a velocity of about 18,000 mph at the time, he added, creating a trail of light nearly 50 miles overhead.
Here is a video showing the streaks traveling across the sky (Warning– Profanity):
Stargazers still have a chance to see fireballs from the Delta Aquarids
Prior to confirmation that the CZ-7 was the cause, Dr. Ed Krupp of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles told KABC-TV that the streaks may have been caused by a meteor from the Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower, which had reached peak viewing conditions on Wednesday night.
As redOrbit’s own John Hopton reported on Monday, the ongoing Delta Aquarids peaked on July 28 and 29, with up to 20 meteors per hour visible during prime viewing conditions. Those living in the Southern Hemisphere have and will continue to receive the best view, but those in the north will also have plenty of chances to witness the annual event.
While it’s too late to see the CZ-7 burn up upon re-entry, catching a glimpse at a quality meteor shower is not a bad consolation prize. To do so, head out to an area that is free of light pollution between midnight and dawn (between 2 and 3am) and look towards the southern part of the sky. Alternatively, you can also watch the shower online courtesy of the folks at Slooh.com.
As for those who did manage to catch a glimpse at the rocket’s re-entry, former SpaceXengineer turned photographer Ian Norman told The Press-Democrat that it was “a cool experience… it was beautiful to see it going across the sky.” Likewise, Brigham Young University student Matt Holt said that he was “excited” to see it. “I was in awe at the science of space.”
New solar cell converts atmospheric CO2 into usable energy
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A new type of solar cell developed by engineers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)not only converts sunlight into usable energy but can also recycle atmospheric carbon dioxide, changing it directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, according to a newly-published study.
As Amin Salehi-Khojin, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC, and his colleagues reported in the July 29 issue of the journal Science, their solar cell is capable of turning CO2 into fuel at a cost relatively close to the price of a gallon of gasoline.
“The new solar cell is not photovoltaic – it’s photosynthetic. Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight,” Salehi-Khojin said in a statement.
These so-called “artificial leaves” essentially due the work of power plants, and could lead to the creation of solar farms capable of efficiently producing fuel while removing significant levels of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at the same time, the study authors noted. Salehi-Khojin’s team has filed a provisional patent application for their newly-developed technology.
So how does it work?
In traditional solar cells, sunlight is converted into electricity and then stored in batteries for later use. However, in the UIC engineers’ artificial leaf device, atmospheric CO2 is converted directly into a substance known as synthetic gas or syngas. Syngas, which is a mixture of hydrogen gases and carbon monoxide, can either be burned directly or converted into hydrocarbon fuels.
The engineers use a series of chemical reactions known as reduction reactions to convert carbon dioxide into burnable forms of carbon. This process could potentially make the use of fossil fuels obsolete, they explained, provided scientists could find an inexpensive catalyst for them. In most cases, reduction reactions require the use of precious metals and have been relatively inefficient.
Searching for “a new family of chemicals with extraordinary properties,” Salehi-Khojin and his fellow researchers turned their attention to a group of nanostructured compounds called TMDCs (transition metal dichalcogenides). By pairing them with an unconventional ionic liquid that served as the electrolyte inside a two-compartment, three-electrode electrochemical cell, one particular TMDC – nanoflake tungsten diselenide – proved to be a quality catalyst.
The new cell uses artificial leaves to create fuel. (Credit: Thinkstock)
This new catalyst, first author and UIC postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi explained, is “more active” and better at “[breaking] carbon dioxide’s chemical bonds” than traditional types of catalysts, such as silver. It is also 20 times less expensive and works up to 1,000 times faster, he added. While other scientists have used TMDC catalysts to produce hydrogen in other ways, this marks the first time they have survived reduction reactions involving CO2.
Building upon their discovery, the UIC team developed a cell made up of two 18 square cm-long silicon triple-junction photovoltaic cells to capture light, the tungsten diselenide and ionic liquid co-catalyst system on the cathode side, and an anode side that consists of cobalt oxide in potassium phosphate electrolyte. When exposed to light of average intensity (100 watts/square meter), the cell becomes energized, producing hydrogen and carbon monoxide in the cathode while freeing hydrogen ions and oxygen in the anode.
“The results nicely meld experimental and computational studies to obtain new insight into the unique electronic properties of transition metal dichalcogenides,” said Robert McCabe, program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which helped fund the project. “The research team has combined this mechanistic insight with some clever electrochemical engineering to make significant progress in one of the grand-challenge areas of catalysis as related to energy conversion and the environment.”
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Image credit: University of Illinois at Chicago/Jenny Fontaine
Four Zika virus cases in Florida unrelated to travel
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Florida health officials recently announced they were investigating four cases of the Zika virus that don’t appear to be related to travel.
“Evidence is mounting to suggest local transmission via mosquitoes is going on in South Florida,” said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said, according to Reuters. “These cases fit similar transmission patterns for mosquito-borne diseases such as Chikungunya that we’ve seen in South Florida in years past.”
To verify if Zika is being passed on locally, epidemiologists must survey homes with an infection and neighbors within a 150-yard radius, the range of the mosquitoes that transport the virus.
The federal Zika response plan classifies Zika transmission as two or more instances not a consequence of travel or sex with an infected person that take place in a 1-mile diameter in a single month. Proof of the virus in native mosquito populations may also be used to confirm local transmission.
Florida is Looking into the New Cases
Florida officials said they started investigating the new cases and the state is calling for both residents and visitors in the investigation areas to provide urine specimens. The outcomes of these tests will help the department figure out the how many people have been affected.
Along with the four potential instances of non-travel related transmission, Florida officials reported nearly 330 travel-related instances of Zika. The state is currently tracking 53 pregnant women who were confirmed to have the virus.
Health officials said they were puzzled the other day when they found a caretaker had caught Zika after looking after a dying elderly man with the disease. It was said to be the first instance of transmission that didn’t involve mosquitoes or sexual contact.
In February, the World Health Organization announced the Zika virus a global public health emergency because the virus has been associated with acute brain defects in newborns. Infected adults typically exhibit mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.
In acute cases, children born from mothers with Zika can die and babies who survive can face intellectual disability and developmental delays.
Thus far, cases outside of Latin America and the Caribbean have been spread by travel to that area or sexual transmission.
NASA officials are preparing to launch the planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Launching in 2017-2018, TESS will look for planets near the brightest stars just outside our solar system using the “transit technique”.
When a planet passes between Earth and its parent star, it obstructs some of the star’s light. Like many other planet-hunting efforts, TESS will look for these telltale dips – or transits – in brightness, which can expose the planet’s presence and give scientists critical details.
TESS will be able to discover sizes and orbit lengths of the exoplanets it recognizes. These two data points are essential to understanding if a planet can support life. Almost all other planet data will come from follow up observations, by both ground- and space-based telescopes, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launching in 2018.
Finding Exoplanets Near the Earth
While NASA’s Kepler mission looked for exoplanets thousands to tens of thousands of light-years away, TESS will hunt for exoplanets hundreds of light-years or less in all directions around our solar system.
TESS will survey the majority of the sky by breaking it into 26 segments referred to as tiles. The spacecraft’s potent cameras will search continually at each tile for just more than 27 days, gauging visible light from the brightest stars every two minutes. TESS examine at stars considered to be at the twelfth apparent magnitude and greater, with the greater the apparent magnitude, the fainter the star. Most skywatchers can see stars at the sixth magnitude in a clear night sky.
One of the project’s goals is to locate Earth- and super-Earth-sized planets. These are challenging to discover due to their small size, but TESS will be focusing on smaller stars, which should make finding these small planets much easier. This is due to the fact that the fraction of the host star’s light that a planet obstructs is relative to the planet’s size.
Kepler searched for life far into the universe, but TESS will search closer to home. (Credit: NASA)
While the search for exoplanets is the main goal of the mission, TESS will also examine of other astrophysical items through the Guest Investigator (GI) Program. Because TESS is performing a near all-sky survey, it has the capacity to perform interesting research on various kinds of astronomical targets.
“The goal of the GI Program is to maximize the amount of science that comes out of TESS,” said Padi Boyd, director of the Guest Investigator Program Office at NASA.
According to Boyd, TESS could detect flaring young stars, binary star pairs, nearby supernovae and potentially supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.
“We hope the broader science community will come up with many unique science ideas for TESS, and we hope to encourage broad participation from the larger community,” she said.
Imprisoned in rock for at least 200 million years, a fragile skeleton belonging to a small plant-eating dinosaur is finally being analyzed by scientists thanks to the most powerful X-ray machine on the planet, BBC News and the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
The skeleton belongs to a juvenile member of the species Heterodontosaurus tucki, which died out in the beginning of the Jurassic Period. This kind of dinosaur was once abundant but scientists have primarily had to rely on incomplete fossil sets in order to study it, which has made it difficult to learn much about these creatures.
In 2005, South African paleontologist Billy de Klerk found what is being described as the most complete set of Heterodontosaurus tucki ever discovered near a small town in Grahamstown, South Africa . The team was able to excavate the fossils still encased in rock, but the fragile state of the remains made it impossible to study using a standard CT scanner.
The bones were transported to the European Synchrotron Radiation Source (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, where de Klerk’s team spend five days scanning the dinosaur’s skeleton using high-powered X-rays. The results were “amazing,” Jonah Choiniere from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, said in an interview with the Daily Mail.
Here’s an artist’s impression of what the dinosaur might have looked like. (Credit:ESRF)
Study could provide new insight into plant-eating dinosaurs
Working alongside Dr. Vincent Fernandez of the ESRF, Professor Choiniere scanned the fossils hoping to determine how the species was able to move, eat, and breathe. They also scanned its fist-sized skull and believe they will be able to create a 3D reconstruction of its brain to learn more about its behavior.
“Right away when we open these images we can tell quite a few things about the skull,” he told the Daily Mail. “One of the things is that it’s likely a juvenile: the skull bones aren’t strongly sutured together. We can also tell that we’re really able to reconstruct the skull very, very well. On the first scans we can see the openings in the skull, which are for the balance organs.”
This is the most complete specimen of this dinosaur species ever uncovered. (Credit: ESRF/P.JAYET)
Choiniere also found the dinosaur had extra teeth located in its jaw that could replace those worn down from grinding, confirming a long-held hypothesis. They also marveled at the minute, delicate palate bones of the heterodontosaurus, which despite being no more than a millimeter in size, remained intact, suggesting that the specimen was not damaged when buried underneath the rock.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about early plant-eating dinosaurs. We need new specimens like this one and new technology like the synchrotron to fill in those gaps,” Professor Choiniere told BBC News. “We can digitally reconstruct the balance organs of the animal and tell how it held its head and how it interacted with its environment,” he told the Daily Mail.
VIDEO: Watch the first orangutan taught to copy human speech
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A team of scientists from Durham University in the UK may be one step closer to understanding how humans originally developed the ability to speak thanks to an orangutan named Rocky, who has demonstrated the ability to mimic a person’s vocalizations as part of a new study.
Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, anthropologist Dr. Adriano Lameira and his colleagues explained that they set out to investigate whether or not an orangutan would be able to learn new sounds and control its voice, and through a series of repetition-based experiments, they provided “the first evidence for real-time, dynamic and interactive vocal fold control in a great ape.”
As Popular Science explained, in order for actual spoken language to evolve, humans first had to master their vocal cords. However, since this ability has never been observed in any other kind of primate, some experts believed that it did not evolve until after we diverged from great apes.
However, Dr. Lameira’s team engaged Rocky in an imitation game at his home, the Indianapolis Zoo, and found that this might not be the case after all. The orangutan had to copy various noises produced by a person in order to earn snacks, and demonstrated the ability to alter both the pitch and tone of his vocalizations while also producing calls resembling vowels and consonants.
Check it out here:
Findings could alter our understanding of when speech evolved
The researchers then went on to compare Rocky’s vocalizations against a database containing at least 12,000 hours of observations from more than 120 wild and captive orangutans. They found that the sounds produced by Rocky were not a match to any known, normal orangutan calls.
The findings suggest that apes such as orangutans possess the ability to control their vocalizations and suggest that spoken language may not have developed after humans split from the great apes, the study authors explained in a statement. After all, their study revealed that Rocky was able to produce new sounds extemporaneously in a turn-taking context, Popular Science noted.
“Instead of learning new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by arousal over which they have no control, but our research proves that orangutans have the potential capacity to control the action of their voices,” Dr. Lameira pointed out. “This indicates that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally.”
“It’s not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes,” he added. “Our latest findings open up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans.”
Why aren’t there large craters on Ceres? NASA weighs in.
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
As the largest object in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, the dwarf planet Ceres should have been covered in large craters – but much to their surprise, researchers analyzing data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft found that its surface contained only smaller impact basins.
Those scientists, who reported their findings Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, are now looking to explain why Ceres, which should have been home to 10 to 15 craters larger than 250 miles (400 km) wide and 40 more than 62 miles (100 km) wide, has just 16 craters that meet the latter criteria, none of which are larger than 175 miles (280 km) across.
Previously, Dawn analyzed the surface of the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, Vesta, and found that its surface was covered with large impact sites like those that should have been found on Ceres, according to Space.com. So why aren’t there any very large craters on Ceres?
“We concluded that a significant population of large craters on Ceres has been obliterated beyond recognition over geological time scales, which is likely the result of Ceres’ peculiar composition and internal evolution,” lead investigator Dr. Simone Marchi, a senior research scientist in the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder Colorado, explained in a statement.
Ceres appears to have regenerated itself, possibly due to ice content
According to Space.com, Ceres is roughly 4.5 billion years old and was in existence during the most collision-heavy period in the history of the universe, which makes it highly unlikely that it would have escaped unscathed. Dr. Marchi and his colleagues conducted hundreds of computer simulations of collisions that the dwarf planet may have existed during its lifetime.
Those simulations show the odds of Ceres having so few large craters was just 2%. So where are they? The study authors believe they have found clues explaining what might have happened in the dwarf planet’s topography. They discovered three shallow, roughly circular basins up which were up to 500 miles (800 km) wide and hidden underneath a surface with smaller craters.
Formally known as “planitiae,” these basins might have created by older, larger impacts, then covered over by material that was then exposed to impacts from smaller objects, the researchers explained. Ceres’ interior structure could explain how this occurred: if, as the evidence suggests, the upper layers of the dwarf planet contain ice, this less-dense substance could have caused the surface to smooth out more quickly than if it had been made entirely of rock. Another possibility is that cryolava may have flowed over the surface, covering up the impact sites.
“It is as though Ceres cures its own large impact scars and regenerates new surfaces, over and over,” Dr. Marchi said in a statement. “Regardless of the specific mechanism(s) for crater removal, our result requires that large crater obliteration was active well after the late heavy bombardment era, or about 4 billion years ago. This conclusion reveals that Ceres’ cratering record is inextricably linked to its peculiar composition and internal evolution.”
If you’re looking for a protein rich beverage to wash down those avocados and blueberries, you might want to consider cockroach milk, as researchers at the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India report that it could be the next so-called superfood.
Writing in the latest edition of the journal IUCrJ, biochemist Subramanian Ramaswamy and an international team of colleagues revealed that Pacific Beetle Cockroaches feed their young with a special formula that is not only rich in protein, but other nutrients, fat, and sugar as well.
According to CNN, the substance isn’t cockroach milk per se, but rather a liquid that forms protein crystals in the guts of the roach offspring that drinks it. However, it could someday be refined into a food supplement suitable for human consumption, the study authors told the Washington Post.
While it might not taste like much – at least, not according to Ramaswamy, who told the Post that he once ate some of the crystals on a dare after losing a drinking competition – the research team noted that those crystals have four times more energy as an equivalent mass of cow’s milk, and three times as much as the same quantity of buffalo milk.
“The protein crystals are milk for the cockroach infant,” Leonard Chavas, one of the scientists who was involved in the work, told CNN. He added that the substance was “important for its growth and development.” Likewise, Ramaswamy told the Post that the roach crystals were “a complete food” and could be used “in protein drinks.”
Researchers looking to reverse-engineer Cockraoch Milk
Experts have long known that the Pacific Beetle Cockroaches (Diploptera punctata) – the only species of cockroach that gives birth to live young instead of laying eggs – nourishes developing offspring by secreting a protein-rich liquid from its brood sac, which acts like a uterus.
What they did not know, however, is that the young cockroaches did not simply digest the stuff. Rather, they found that the embryos were filled with crystals that turned out to be made primarily of protein. The scientists then conducted a series of tests and discovered that the cockroach milk is among the most nutritious and highest calorie substances in the natural world.
“It is what one would need: protein, essential amino acids, lipids, and sugars,” Chavas explained, adding that the high energy content of the substance helps Pacific Beetle Cockroaches grow to be much larger than the offspring of other, related species. Currently, the crystals must be taken out of the gut of the roach embryos, but the researchers are hoping to be able to reverse engineer the original liquid – once they fully understand the processes involved in its production.
Furthermore, additional research needs to be conducted to ensure that the crystals are not toxic to humans, the Post said. Then there is the matter of taste, and the fact that consuming the milk of a cockroach could be a tough sell, particularly in the western world. But if the research team finds a way to overcome all of those hurdles, they may have just discovered the next superfood.
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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