New multinational astronaut crew launches to ISS

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 7, 2016 Last Edited: July 7, 2016

Brian Galloway

Three new crew members, including NASA biologist Kate Rubins, are currently en route to the International Space Station (ISS) after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on an upgraded Soyuz rocket Wednesday night, the US space agency has confirmed.

Rubins, along with Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi, began what will be a two-day journey at 9:36pm EDT on July 6. They will be testing the modified systems onboard the Soyuz MS-01 before docking on Saturday morning, according to Space.com.

Rocket scientists preparing for trip to ISS

The crew contains a multinational group of scientists. (Credit: NASA)

During a NASA TV broadcast, spokesperson Brandi Dean told reporters that the crew members were safely in orbit following “a picture-perfect launch” on a “beautiful, clear day in Baikonur.” Ivanishin reported that the three crew members were “feeling fine” following the liftoff.

Once he, Onishi, and Rubins dock with the ISS, they will join Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams of NASA and Flight Engineers Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos to return the station to a full six-person crew. The new arrivals will remain on the ISS until late October and will be involved with more than 250 research projects in various fields.

The Soyuz spacecraft climbs into the skies above Kazakhstan
(Credit: NASA TV)

Research will include attempt to sequence DNA in microgravity

Among those scientific investigations are experiments in the fields of fields of molecular and cellular biology, human physiology, fluid dynamics, materials science, and physics, including a remarkable research project where Rubins will attempt to sequence DNA in space.

According to Wired and Engadget, the biologist said that she plans to use a USB-sized device known as the MinION sequencer. The sequencer, which was invented by a UK company called Oxford Nanopore, costs just $1,000 (a fraction of most traditional sequencers), and Rubins said that she hopes it will provide insight into how such instruments work in microgravity.

“We’re going to see how that technology behaves in microgravity,” she told Wired during an interview conducted earlier this week. “Does the liquid layer form the same? Does the DNA sequence go through the nanopores the same way? Can we get good data out of this?”

If it works as expected, Rubins explained that her team hopes to use it to examine microbial communities on the space station. “Our water is recycled, our air is recycled,” she said. “It’s a really interesting environment that’s been in space for 10 years continuously now, and we’ve essentially put microbes up there. It’s going to be really interesting to see how that’s evolved.”

Other experiments will involve studies centered around temperature regulation on spacecraft, improving our understanding of bone loss from prolonged space travel, learning how to protect computers from radiation while in orbit, and testing a new type of three-dimensional solar cell, NASA said. The crew will also receive multiple resupply vehicles.

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Image credit: NASA

Science

NASA craft achieves world record for longest flight

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: July 6, 2016 Last Edited: July 6, 2016

Brian Galloway

NASA’s massive 18.8-million-cubic-foot (532,000-cubic-meter) balloon has finally come home to roost—and has set some impressive records along the way.

On May 17, NASA launched a super pressure balloon (SPB) from Wanaka Airport, New Zealand, with several goals in mind. First and foremost, they aimed to test and validate SPB technology, with the ultimate goal of a long-duration flight (as in, 100 or more days) at a mid-level altitude. Second, they hoped to take advantage of the trial to attach a gamma-ray telescope known as Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) to study radiation.

46 days, 20 hours, and 19 minutes later, the balloon made contact with Earth once more—a record-setting jaunt, according to a NASA release.

“We’re extremely pleased with the flight time we achieved with this mission, far and away the longest mid-latitude flight of a NASA heavy-lift balloon to date,” said Debbie Fairbrother, NASA’s Balloon Program Office chief. “We’ll continue to strive for even longer duration flight, 100 days or more, and what we learn from this year’s mission will help take us there.”

Many Records from NASA’s Craft

Besides smashing the flight-time record, the SPB flight marked a good number of other firsts. For example, it was the first time an SPB carried a science payload during a mid-latitude flight—the COSI telescope. Using this sensor, the team detected its first gamma-ray burst on May 30.

Moreover, the balloon was the first to complete a mid-latitude circumnavigation—which it finished in 14 days, 13 hours, and 42 minutes. Further, it was the first time the NASA team operated balloons in the northern and southern hemispheres at the same time, as a balloon was launched in Texas for 10 hours on June 30.

While the longer-duration flight was the hope for this test, NASA’s balloon operators called it early after the balloon after it began to vary too far from its operational float altitude of 110,000 feet (33.5 km). Some fluctuation was expected during its journey, as temperatures dropped between daytime and evening.

“Balloons are thermal vehicles, and some altitude variance isn’t uncommon during periods of extreme cooling and heating,” said Fairbrother. “Given the occasional periods of altitude variation we noted, and at times the magnitude we observed, we’re eager to retrieve the balloon and payload so we can analyze the flight data and balloon.”

But for this test, the balloon went a little too far for comfort. At one point, it dropped nearly as low as 70,000 feet (21.3 km) whilst flying over a severe cold storm, when temperatures dropped to as low as -112 Fahrenheit (-80 Celsius). It’s believed that the balloon bled off helium during the colder storms before resealing itself, although more data is needed to know for sure.

“At its core, this was always a test flight,” said Fairbrother. “We’re looking forward to the next phase of analysis. We’ll apply any lessons learned to future missions as we continue to eye our 100-day duration goal.”

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Image credit: NASA

Health

Possible new Parkinson’s biomarker found in urine

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 6, 2016 Last Edited: July 6, 2016

Brian Galloway

Using urine and cerebral-spinal fluid samples collected from patients more than five years ago, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered a potential new way to detect, diagnose, and monitor the progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Andrew West, a professor of neurology at UAB as well as the co-director of the university’s Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics, and his colleagues explained that a protein known as LRRK2 can undergo a specific type of mutation which can result in the onset of Parkinson’s, and that this biomarker can be detected in biofluids such as urine.

The most common LRRK2 mutation, identified as G2019S, causes the protein to add too many phosphates to itself and other proteins, and while doctors are not yet certain why this leads to the development of Parkinson’s, the discovery could help in the development of new drugs designed to combat the symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease, according to the research team.

“Nobody thought we’d be able to measure the activity of this huge protein called LRRK2 [pronounced ‘lark two’] in biofluids since it is usually found inside neurons in the brain,” Dr. West, whose research was supported in part by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease Research and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said in a statement.

Findings could aid in the development of new treatment options

The new biomarker correlates with both the presence and severity of Parkinson’s disease, the researchers explained. Two studies detailing their findings have been published: one in March in the journal Neurology, and the second in last month’s edition of Movement Disorders.

In the March study, the researchers found that elevated levels of phosphorylated LRRK2 could predict Parkinson’s onset for the 2% to 3% of patients carrying a mutation in the protein. Those findings were evaluated in a preliminary, 14-person cohort of stored urine samples which was followed by a larger replication study of 72 biobanked specimens.

In the second study, Dr. West and his colleagues expanded their analysis to Parkinson’s patients who did not have the LRRK2 mutations. Using 158 urine samples from both Parkinson’s patients and healthy control subjects, they found that roughly one-fifth of people who lacked the LRRK2 mutations but who had the neurodegenerative condition also had highly elevated phosphorylated LRRK2 similar to those with the mutations – a trait not found in control subjects.

The results suggest that people with elevated phosphorylated LRRK2 may be particularly good candidates for future drugs that reduce phosphorylated LRRK2, and the authors of those papers are hopeful that their findings will help pave the way for an inhibitor that has already proven to be successful at preventing neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in animal models.

“New biochemical markers like the one we’ve discovered together with new neuroimaging approaches are going to be the key to successfully stopping Parkinson’s disease in its tracks,” said Dr. West. “I think the days of blindly testing new therapies for complex diseases like Parkinson’s without having active feedback both for ‘on-target’ drug effects and for effectiveness in patients are thankfully coming to an end.”

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Image credit: UAB News

Science

Newly discovered ancient tomb was world’s first ‘telescope’

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: July 6, 2016 Last Edited: July 6, 2016

Brian Galloway

Looks like the telescope was invented some 5,500 years earlier than previously thought, as a new study out of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that certain prehistoric tombs known as passage graves acted as the world’s first astronomical observing tools.

Consisting of long, narrow passages terminating in larger rock burial chambers, such structures are often seen as separating the living from the dead, the mundane from the divine, the uninitiated from the initiated. Tombs may have served several ritual functions; the narrow passages seem to have been used for funeral rites in various cultures, while the chambers themselves may have served as a place for rites of passage. For example, an initiate would spend the night inside the tomb, bathed in utter darkness aside from the starlight leaking in from the passage.

And such a rite may have granted initiates rare insights into the heavens, as the authors argue that passage graves may have enhanced what early humans observed in the night sky—in a way akin to pirate eye patches.

Nottingham Trent University

Finding light in the darkness

With no other light and a limited view of the night sky, observers likely perceived the brightness and color of the sky differently than those simply standing outside.

“Here the passage acts to preserve dark adaptation of the eye as twilight during sunrise,” co-author Daniel Brown told WIRED. “Therefore a viewer in the grave would note the star with a brighter sky. So the passage grave act as a viewing enhancement beyond a pure pointer.”

“It is quite a surprise that no one has thoroughly investigated how for example the colour of the night sky impacts on what can be seen with the naked eye,” added project leader Kieran Simcox, a student at Nottingham Trent University.

To point, the team examined the 6,000-year-old Seven-Stone Antas, passage graves in central Portugal.

“The orientations of the tombs may be in alignment with Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus,” explained Dr. Fabio Silva, of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Silva added that passage tombs may have made it easier to observe this star during twilight—meaning Aldebaran would be detected earlier than otherwise, during its first appearance, which could serve as a vital seasonal marker.

“We argue that the restricted viewing through the grave passage out of the passage grave allows the viewer to note the appearance of Aldebaran much earlier,” said Brown to WIRED.

“Our work explores how 6,000-year-old passage graves have helped a viewer to spot stars during twilight conditions,” he added. “You might say this is the oldest instrument to assist a stone age observer.”

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Image credit: Unsplash

Health

This $2 test could help detect the Zika virus in the field

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 6, 2016 Last Edited: July 6, 2016

Brian Galloway

For the price of a can of soda, you could be able to quickly and accurately determine whether or not you (or someone you love) has contracted the Zika virus, thanks to a new test developed by a team of chemists and engineers from the University of Pennsylvania.

The new test, which is described in the latest edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry, costs just $2 and does not require any electricity or special technical know-how to use, the Penn team explained in a statement. All it requires is a saliva sample, and when the presence of the virus is detected, color-changing dye turns blue to alert the individual being tested.

Created by Research Assistant Professor Changchun Liu, Professor Haim Bau of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and their colleagues, the diagnostic is designed to be used in the field to quickly tell if a person has contracted the virus, rather than forcing them to wait for laboratory tests.

“Our work represents a proof of concept at this stage,” Bau explained, noting that before it can be approved for use by patients, the researchers need to ensure that “our assay and system match the performance of the gold standard and operate reproducibly and reliably. We are fortunate to have dedicated colleagues in endemic regions ready to assist us in this task.”

So how exactly does this diagnostic device work?

Ideally, a diagnostic test detects genetic material from the Zika virus itself. Alternatively, a test can look for antibodies produced by the body in response to the virus, the researchers explained, but these can lead to false negatives from infected people who have yet to produce antibodies or false positives from those with antibodies due to a different but similar condition.

Those issues can be avoided by using tests that look for RNA sequences from the virus itself, a type of diagnostic known as reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR. While these tests are effective, they require the use of laboratories to amplify (repeatedly copy) specific gene sequences in a sample so that they can be detected, making them unfit for field use.

Given that the implication process is the key obstacle preventing portable genetic testing, Lin, Bau and their colleagues set out to study the effectiveness of an alternative technique known as reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP), which requires only that a sample be kept at a specific temperature, not be cycles through multiple precise changes in temperature, as it required in tests that use the RT-PCR technique.

While it uses a simplified amplification process, the authors note that RT-LAMP forces them to use a more specialized set of short gene sequences or “primers” which are designed to match the regions of the virus’ DNA targeted by the diagnostic. Using data mining methods, they identified specific regions of the Zika virus genome that are different than all other known pathogens, then came up with primers through which they would be able to identify this specific sequence.

Using a diagnostic cassette and a processor, the device “isolates, concentrates and purifies” the nucleic acids in saliva, Liu explained. It then “carries out enzymatic amplification” and provides test results by changing the color of a dye – a process which takes about 40 minutes in all. Their diagnostic costs only about $2 to make, and laboratory tests have proven that it is as sensitive as RT-PCR tests, the study authors noted in a statement.

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Image credit: University of Pennsylvania

Space

China finishes assembling world’s largest radio telescope

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 5, 2016 Last Edited: July 5, 2016

Brian Galloway

Assembly of the world’s largest radio telescope, an instrument the size of 30 football fields, was completed on Sunday, as Chinese officials installed the last of the 4,450 panels on the device that will begin operations in September, according to BBC News and Xinhua News Agency.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope or FAST is a $180 million (£135 million) project designed to help researchers explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life, officials from China’s space program told reporters Sunday. The next involves debugging the telescope, and then testing the instrument, they added.

During the telescope’s first two to three years of operation, it will undergo additional adjustment and will be used for early-stage research. However, it will eventually be made available to teams of scientists all over the world, Peng Bo, the director of the National Astronomical Observatories Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory, told the state-run press agency.

Upon its completion, the telescope will eclipse Puerto Rico’s 300-meter Arecibo Observatory as the largest telescope on the planet, he added. Zheng Xiaonian, the deputy head of the NAO, said that he and his colleagues expect that FAST will be the standard bearer for radio telescopes over at least the next 10 to 20 years.

The telescope is slated to be a huge component in the search for gravitational waves and alien life. (Credit: Reuters)

Scientists believe FAST can detect gravitational waves, find alien life

The NAO, a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, clearly has high hopes for their new radio telescope. They believe that FAST can be used to study neutral hydrogen found in distant galaxies, detect faint pulsars, help detect low-frequency gravitational waves and even aid in the ongoing hunt for life on other planets, officials told Xinhua and BBC News.

Nan Rendong, chief scientist with the FAST Project, explained that “as the world’s largest single aperture telescope located at an extremely radio-quiet site, its scientific impact on astronomy will be extraordinary, and it will certainly revolutionize other areas of the natural sciences.”

FAST will improve the chances of detecting low frequency gravitational waves, according to Wu Xiangping of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Peng Bo added that the new radio telescope would increase the odds of finding an extraterrestrial civilization by at least 500% because of the instrument’s ability to observe “farther and darker planets” than current telescopes. Using FAST, NAO researchers believe they can find amino acids on distant worlds in under three years.

“The telescope is of great significance for humans to explore the universe and extraterrestrial civilizations,” Chinese science fiction writer and 2015 Hugo Award winner Liu Cixin told the Xinhua news agency from FAST’s location at a field in Pingtang County, in the southwestern province of Guizhou. “I hope scientists can make epoch-making discoveries.”

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Image credit: Xinhua News

Space

Study finally explains Mars got its moons

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 5, 2016 Last Edited: July 5, 2016

Brian Galloway

Long believed to have been asteroids captured by Mars, the planet’s two moons were likely created by a collision between the planet and a second, smaller object, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CRNS) has discovered.

In two new, independent and complementary studies, one of which was published in Monday’s edition of Nature Geoscience and another scheduled for future publication in The Astrophysical Journal, CRNS scientists and their colleagues reported that the shape and orbits of Mars’ moons eliminates the asteroid hypothesis, and that surface features are indicative of a collision involving an object approximately one-third the size of Mars.

Based on numerical simulations, they believe that Phobos and Deimos accreted from the outer part of a debris disc that formed following a giant impact on Mars. These models show that the moon formed from material in the denser inner disk and migrated outwards due to gravitational interactions with the disk. The ensuing orbital resonances resulted in the gathering of outer disk debris, ultimately forming two satellites approximately the same size as Phobos and Deimos.

Writing in Nature Geoscience, the authors explained that “the larger inner moons fall back to Mars after about 5 million years due to the tidal pull of the planet, after which the two outer satellites evolve into Phobos- and Deimos-like orbits. The proposed scenario can explain why Mars has two small satellites instead of one large moon. Our model predicts that Phobos and Deimos are composed of a mixture of material from Mars and the impactor.”

A ring of material formed after another object impacted Mars. (Credit: A. Trinh/Royal Observatory of Belgium)

Findings rule out the possibility of asteroid capture

The asteroid hypothesis originated in part due to the small sizes and irregular shapes of Phobos and Deimos. However, even though they resembled asteroids, scientists were unable to explain how the planet captured them and turned them into satellites with nearly circular and equatorial orbits, the CRNS-led research team explained in a statement.

Similarly, a competing theory that Mars had been hit by a protoplanet in the late stages of its formation raised questions about why two moons would have formed rather than one. A third possibility suggested that Phobos and Deimos formed at about the same time as Mars. Again, however, this notion had issues: specifically, that the moons should have had close to the same composition as Mars, something that their low densities indicated was not the case.

The authors of the two new studies believed that they have found the answer: the moons were indeed the product of a giant collision that took place between Mars and a primordial body one-third its size. This collision would have occurred between 100 and 800 million years after the beginning of the planet’s formation, and the debris from the collision formed an extremely wide disk that included both a dense inner part of primarily matter in fusion, and a thin outer part that was comprised primarily of gas.

In the inner region of the disk, a moon about 1,000-times the size of Phobos formed. That moon has since disappeared, but its gravitational interactions acted as the catalyst for the accretion of debris that formed smaller, more distant moons, including Phobos and Deimos. Once the debris disk dissipated a few million years later, the tidal effects of the planets brought nearly all of the moons back down onto the planet. Only the two most distant ones survived.

Composition of the satellites supports early collision hypothesis

In The Astrophysical Journal study, another team of researchers further eliminated the asteroid capture hypothesis by showing that the light signatures given off by Phobos and Deimos are not compatible with that of the primordial matter that formed Mars, which included meteorites made up of ordinary chondrite, enstatite chondrite and/or angrite.

Based on this, and statistical arguments based on the compositional diversity of the asteroid belt, the researchers indicate that the moons had to have been formed as the result of a collisions, and their light signatures indicate that they are comprised of fine-grained, less-than-micrometer-sized dust particles.

While erosion from interplanetary dust can partially explain the small size of these grains, there also has to be another explanation: the moons had to have been made up of very fine dust grains to begin with. This could only have been the result of gas condensation in the outer area of the debris disk, not magma from the inner part. Furthermore, moons forming from fine grains would be extremely porous at their depths, which would explain their low densities.

The collision model proposed by these two studies could explain why the southern hemisphere of Mars has a higher altitude than the northern one, as the impact that caused Phobos and Deimos to form likely would have taken place in the Borealis basin. Observations and samples collected by upcoming missions to the Red Planet could confirm or invalidate this scenario, the CNRS said in a statement. Such missions are scheduled to begin within the next decade.

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Image credit: Labex UnivEarths / Université Paris Diderot

Fibromyalgia

Is going vegan another way to fight fibromyalgia?

Written By: Lauren Petermeyer

Published Date: July 5, 2016 Last Edited: July 5, 2016

admin

It seems to be well known that going vegan gives numerous health and environmental benefits, but is it possible that it could help you fight your fibromyalgia symptoms? There are multiple studies and personal accounts that say yes! Not only can going vegan improve your health all around, it has huge potential to ease your fibro symptoms, so its a win win.

Being a vegan means that you refrain from consuming or using any animal products. This includes eating meat, dairy, cheese, wearing leather and anything else that comes from an animal. How does what you eat affect your chronic disease?

Food is medicine. If you put bad, unhealthy food into your body, you will feel bad and unhealthy. A study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology found exactly that. They studied 18 fibromyalgia patients (including 15 control subjects who ate their normal diet) over a 3 month period of converting to a vegan diet to gather whether or not it helped with their symptoms. This particular study focused on a raw vegan diet, which includes raw fruits, vegetables and nuts that have not been cooked in order to retain all nutrients. The results showed that the people who followed a raw vegan diet for the time studied had significantly improved fibromyalgia symptoms.

Another similar study found in the BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine examined 26 people with fibromyalgia who ate a mostly raw vegan diet. The diet included raw fruits, salads, carrot juice, tubers, grain products, nuts, seeds, and a dehydrated barley grass juice product. Overall, the results showed that patients experiences a 46% improvement in their fibromyalgia symptoms, which is almost half! This study also mentions that people who begin a vegan diet see an improvement in their quality of life all around, and that it could be partially psychological. The combination of putting good things into your body and having the motivation to beat your fibromyalgia together produce amazing results that can’t be ignored.

Typically it takes 6-8 months for a full vegan diet to being to show improvements on your symptoms, but it is worth a try for everyone suffering. Be aware of how to safely switch to a vegan diet, and be sure to speak with your doctor first.

Fibromyalgia

Into the Fire: Summer Heat with Fibro

Written By: Holly Case

Published Date: July 4, 2016 Last Edited: July 4, 2016

admin

back view of young woman at cruise ship in sunhat and with waving at the wind scarf

Image: Aleksei Potov/Shutterstock

To most people, summer is one of the best times of the year. You can go outside in flip-flops instead of snow boots and spend your weekends at cookouts or on a friend’s boat. But when you have fibromyalgia, summer can be miserable. For many fibro sufferers, the rising thermometer during summer heat brings an increase in pain and fatigue. Even though many fibro sufferers start out with problems during rainy and cold seasons, heat sensitivity seems to come along as the disease progresses. If you’re already dreading another summer, follow some of these cool-down tips to make your life more manageable.

Avoid going outdoors during the peak heat of the day. You don’t want to become a shut-in during the summer and should try to make your life as normal as possible. However, the day’s heat is worst in the afternoon, so you may want to limit your outdoor activities to the early morning or late evening. If you do have to be outdoors during the hottest part of the day, wear a hat and stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible.

Wear loose, comfortable clothing. A lot of fibro sufferers are very sensitive to tight clothing and constricting fabrics. Even if you can personally tolerate tight, binding clothing, you should avoid it during the summer because it can be very insulating and make you feel hotter. Choose a summer wardrobe of loose-fitting clothes made of cotton, which will wick sweat away from your body and help you to stay cool.

Make sure to stay hydrated. It’s easy to get dehydrated on a hot summer day, and fibro patients find it harder to recover once they lose too many fluids. Clear, cold water is the best option if you can tolerate it. But if you’re not a big fan of plain water, cold water with sliced cucumbers or fruit is a refreshing and light-tasting alternative. Iced tea is also refreshing on a hot day—just be careful to choose a caffeine-free variety or to balance it with water, because caffeine can also be dehydrating.

Avoid spicy food. Nobody is saying that your summer diet has to be boring, but eating a lot of spicy food will raise your internal thermostat. Choose foods with a high water content instead, which fortunately includes some of summer’s best treats like popsicles and watermelon.

Have lozenges or hard candies on hand in case your throat gets dry. Many fibro sufferers find that a dry throat is one of the most painful side effects of hot weather. Sucking on a lozenge or hard candy can help fight this symptom and make you more comfortable.

Hide out in front of a fan or air conditioner. It’s totally okay to stay indoors on the hottest days of the year! Air conditioning and fans were created for a reason. Running your wrists under cold water is another little trick that can help to cool your body temperature.

Summer can be uncomfortable with fibromyalgia but with a little effort you can sail through the season. Just make sure to get a little bit of sun, since the vitamin D exposure will help you manage your symptoms, too.

Space

Juno prepares to enter Jupiter’s dangerous atmosphere

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: July 3, 2016 Last Edited: July 3, 2016

Brian Galloway

As Americans launch fireworks on Monday, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will be going through a trial by fire, as it will get its first exposure to the solar system’s most intense radiation environment, according to Space.com.

During the night of July fourth, Juno will fall into orbit around Jupiter, where it will be hit by a barrage of electrons moving at nearly the speed of light by the planet’s potent magnetic field.

“Once these electrons hit a spacecraft, they immediately begin to ricochet and release energy, creating secondary photons and particles, which then ricochet,” said Heidi Becker, the leader of Juno’s radiation-monitoring team, during a news conference. “It’s like a spray of radiation bullets.”

Juno needs to survive for more than a year

And Juno will have to survive this hail of bullets for about a year and a half, so that it can study Jupiter for the span of 37 orbits. After that, in February of 2018, Juno will plunge into the planet’s atmosphere—thus preventing the probe from accidentally introducing Earth microbes to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, which may already host life outside of our planet.

In order to keep Juno from frying prematurely, the team has devised a plan to both minimize radiation exposure and reduce its effects on the spacecraft. For example, the orbit Juno is planned to take will help it avoid Jupiter’s intense radiation belts as much as possible.

Beyond that, Juno is decked out in a sort of radiation Kevlar; its core is covered by a 400-pound (180-kg), 0.5-inch (1.75-cm) thick titanium suit. This should lower the radiation exposure of the probe’s main computers and the more sensitive components of several of its scientific instruments by 800 times (as compared to the outside). The outer parts of the scientific instruments are similarly protected, along with Juno’s star-tracking camera, which is used to help it navigate.

“Without that protection, the noise from the penetrating radiation would be too high to see stars, and Juno would never know where it was pointing,” said Becker.

But as long as all of this works to plan, Juno should be well-protected for doing its job—which mainly will involve mapping the gravitational and magnetic fields of the planet, as well as determining its composition and inner structure. Of particular interest is how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as whether or not it has a core, which can help scientists understand how, when, and where the planet formed.

Yet despite all this careful work, there is always a bit of concern when heading off into the unknown.

Jupiter has the scariest radiation environment of any planet in the solar system,” said Becker. “It’s the harshest, it’s the most intense and it hasn’t been fully explored yet — and it hasn’t been fully explored where we’re going.”

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Image credit: NASA

Science

Team discovers new shade of blue through ‘happy accident’

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: July 3, 2016 Last Edited: July 3, 2016

Brian Galloway

A vivid new blue pigment that was discovered by accident is soon about to be available for purchase, as a licensing agreement has been reached that is sending it to the marketplace via The Shepherd Color Company.

In 2009, Oregon State University chemists were attempting to create new materials from manganese oxide that could be used in electronics, according to an OSU release. After mixing the black manganese oxide with a variety of other chemicals and heating the combinations to about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1093 Celsius), one of the samples came out a bit different than expected—as in brilliant, impossibly blue.

Discovery described as a “happy accident”

“It was serendipity, actually; a happy, accidental discovery,” said OSU chemist Mas Subramanian, who is the Milton Harris Professor of Materials Science in the OSU College of Science.

The color is the result of the pigment’s unique crystal structure—it has trigonal bipyramidal geometry, which involves repeating patterns of pyramids with four faces. Because of this shape, the manganese ions are able to absorb red and green wavelengths of light while reflecting blue—resulting in the pure blue color we see.

Besides its natural beauty, though, there are a few other reasons why many were anxious to be able to use it. Namely, its blue color is both durable and stable in both oil and water, and the color does not fade out. Best yet, this pigment—which has been named “YInMn” blue—is nontoxic.

“The basic crystal structure we’re using for these pigments was known before, but no one had ever considered using it for any commercial purpose, including pigments,” said Subramanian. “Ever since the early Egyptians developed some of the first blue pigments, the pigment industry has been struggling to address problems with safety, toxicity and durability.”

The pigment is set to be sold in a variety of coatings and plastics, and may actually find an unusual place in future roofs. If one were to use this color in roofing materials, it could help keep buildings cool by reflecting infrared light. In fact, it has an infrared reflectivity of about 40 percent, which is significantly higher than other blue pigments.

“The more we discover about the pigment, the more interesting it gets,” said Subramanian. “We already knew it had advantages of being more durable, safe and fairly easy to produce. Now it also appears to be a new candidate for energy efficiency.”

Commercial quantities of the pigment will be available later this year.

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Image credit: Oregon State University

Science

Newly found Revolutionary War-era toilet is a window into the past

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: July 3, 2016 Last Edited: July 3, 2016

Brian Galloway

A plunge into an eighteenth-century toilet in Philadelphia has left archaeologists bowled over with its insights into Revolutionary War life, according to a new report by National Geographic.

While a lot of people usually think of archaeology as uncovering tombs or exploring temples, in reality, the majority of it is straight-up garbage—because while written sources can lie or be misled, the trash they left behind usually tells a more accurate story.

Which is why certain features—like latrines—can cause a lot of excitement, as people frequently used them to dump their trash before trash collection was an established practice. The pit latrine found behind a small Philadelphia house in the summer of 2014 was no exception; dug in 1776 and filled in in 1786, it provides a rare snapshot of life in the nascent United States.

Found fittingly on the future site of the Museum of the American Revolution, the latrine’s 619 artifacts reflect Philadelphia as it began to boom as a trade and manufacturing hub—like German tankards and fine Chinese porcelain (both broken, of course). Such items were then examined in the light of historical research into the time, including deeds, insurance maps, and Quaker meeting minutes.

Photograph courtesy of the Museum of the American Revoltuion

From this, the researchers have been able to estimate the exact date the pit was dug: July 10, 1776, when a couple named Benjamin and Mary Humphreys bought a house in the area. Of course, being a private home, one would assume their latrine would host the usual household garbage, but as it turns out, the Humphreys’ latrine revealed their secrets through their interesting trash.

Instead of broken kitchenware, the archaeologists pulled up huge numbers of drinking glasses, tankards, punch bowls, serving dishes, smoking pipes, and alcohol bottles.

What was the paraphernalia of a bar doing on a property that never had a tavern license, according to records? It appears that the Humphreys were running what was referred to as a “disorderly house”—something like a speakeasy of ill repute. Mary Humphreys would be arrested for this very reason some eight years later, in July of 1783.

Artifacts give surprising insight

Perhaps even more interesting, Some of the artifacts show a bit more of the political leanings of the time, starting with shards of glass with the word “love” etched on it.

“When we first saw that word we thought, ‘Oh, it’s just some lovesick guy who’s drinking too much and writing a message on the window,'” Rebecca Yamin, the excavation’s principal archaeologist, told National Geographic.

But then more of the glass was found, leading to a nearly-full phrase being recovered: “We admire riches and are in love with …”

“And we know the last word is idleness,” said Yamin. In fact, this was a somewhat popular quote at the time; it comes from an ancient Roman senator named Cato the Younger, and was repeated during a play that was making its rounds at the time. They play involved Cato defying the tyranny of Julius Caesar—which apparently reverberated well with American colonists who wished for independence from Britain.

“This quote would have been known to people who were thinking politically in 18th-century Philadelphia,” said Yamin. “This man was writing a political message, which is so consistent with what we know was going on in the taverns at the time.”

Of course, all this and much more was found—and some of it is even making its way into the future Museum of the American Revolution when it opens in April of 2017.

“Often in urban sites we dig this stuff up and it just goes into the basement of some state institution, never to be seen again,” said Yamin, “but in this case it’s really going to be seen. We’re really excited about that.”

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Image credit: Museum of the American Revolution

Technology

The Science of Fireworks– How do they work?

Written By: John Hopton

Published Date: July 3, 2016 Last Edited: July 3, 2016

Brian Galloway

Ever wondered how fireworks actually create the shapes and colors we see in the sky?

Mike Tockstein of Pyrotechnic Innovations has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and 15 years’ experience at major firework events, including the annual Fourth of July display at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Who better to tell us about the science of fireworks in the lead up to this holiday weekend?

What exactly is a firework?

Tockstein explains that: “What you see bursting in the sky on a large professional fireworks display” is an aerial shell “that is fired out of a mortar.”

“Contrary to what many may think, the big aerial bursts you see at a typical fireworks display do not come from rockets,” but rather “from a mortar with a charge of black powder.”

“That black powder also ignites the time fuse on the bottom of the shell as it is fired. That time fuse will burn for a certain amount of time based on the size (diameter) of the shell.”

“The larger the shell, the higher it needs to go before functioning, the longer the time fuse is designed to burn. Once the time fuse burns to its end, it spits fire into the center of the aerial shell.”

That fire ignites a burst charge, which is a composition designed to produce a large volume of hot gas in a short very short amount of time. This breaks the shell open at high velocity and ignites all of its contents.

Different shells have different effects inside of them, but a standard shell contains combustible pellets, known as “stars,” composed of chemicals that burn a certain color or produce a certain look as they travel through the sky.

How are the different colors made?

“Different colors of fire are made using different types of chemicals,” Tockstein explains. “For example, Barium compounds produce green, Strontium compounds produce Red, Sodium compounds produce Yellow, and Copper compounds produce blue. Those are just the basic colors, but you can have subtle levels in between, in addition to many other fancy effects.”

How do fireworks produce different shapes in the sky?

Aerial shells are either spherical or cylindrical, Tockstein says, and “since a spherical shell breaks open in a spherical way, you can achieve patterns” such as happy faces, Saturn and its rings, or hearts simply by arranging the stars inside the shell in those patterns.

An aerial shell’s small, combustible pellets make up a firework’s “pixels,” so to speak. By inserting a piece of cardboard into the shell and then arranging the pellets in a required pattern around that, the cardboard insert forces the stars to explode outward in that pattern.

However, Tockstein explains, “patterns that are not very symmetrical are more difficult to successfully produce in the air with an exploding shell. We can produce virtually any shape, logo, word or sentence on what we call a ‘set piece’ or ‘lance work.’ These are ground mounted devices that contain a bunch of tiny ‘lances’ which are like small road flares that can be made to burn in any color.”

“The lances are arranged into the desired pattern then simultaneously ignited with ‘stickymatch’ or ‘quickmatch’ which is fuse that burns very fast.”

Is there anything else we should know about our Fourth of July fireworks?

“Although fireworks displays typically don’t use rockets, some of the shells appear to leave a trail of sparks behind them as they rise in the air before exploding at their peak. These tails were made to give the visual effect of a rocket flying into the air.”

No single person is recognized as the official designer of patterned shells, although they were likely developed in China, which is still the largest manufacturer and exporter of fireworks in the world, having first invented them in the 7^th century.

Additional source: LiveScience.

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Space

NASA announces continuation of New Horizons mission

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 2, 2016 Last Edited: July 2, 2016

Brian Galloway

As had been expected, the historic New Horizons mission will continue as the first spacecraft to ever visit the dwarf planet Pluto will now travel to an 2014 MU69, an object located even deeper in the Kuiper Belt, officials at the US space agency confirmed on Friday afternoon.

New Horizons, which became the first probe to ever complete a flyby of Pluto in July 2015, will now head towards 2014 MU69, a tiny Kuiper Belt object (KBO) located about one million miles (1.6 billion km) from Pluto. It is expected to rendezvous with the KBO on January 1, 2019.

“The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise,” NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said in a July 1 press release. “We’re excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that wasn’t even discovered when the spacecraft launched.”

NASA also announced that it had decided to keep the Dawn spacecraft at Ceres for now rather than have it travel to the main belt asteroid Adeona, as Green explaining that continued tracking of Ceres as it moves closer to the sun “has the potential to provide more significant science” than a flyby of Adeona.

Why 2014 MU69, and what exactly will the mission entail?

Although both 2014 MU69 and Pluto are located in the same region of space, the two objects are quite different, according to Space.com. Pluto is 1,474 miles (2,372 km) wide, while 2014 MU69 is much smaller, with an estimated width of just 13 to 25 miles (21 to 40 km).

New Horizons is expected to come within 1,900 miles (3,000 km) of the 2014 MU69 during its 2019 flyby, or about four times closer to the object than it was during its Pluto flyby, the agency noted. The undisturbed, four million year old object is believed to be the most pristine ever to be visited by a spacecraft, according to principle investigator Alan Stern.

“We discovered 2014 MU69 (or MU69, for short) in a dedicated search for possible extended mission flyby targets that we conducted in 2014, using the Hubble Space Telescope,” Stern, who works out of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, wrote in an April blog post. It is roughly 500,000 times less massive than Pluto, placing it “in a key intermediate size regime to better understand planetary accretion,” he added.

Stern went on to note that New Horizons would be using all seven of its scientific instruments to study the Kuiper Belt object, and that its encounter with MU69 “will include detailed global and high-resolution mapping, including color mapping… compositional mapping, searches for moons of MU69, studies of its surface properties, and searches for an atmosphere.”

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Image credit: NASA

Space

Rosetta’s ‘Grand Finale’ will be crashing into comet 67P

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 1, 2016 Last Edited: July 1, 2016

Brian Galloway

It was the first spacecraft ever to orbit a comet nucleus, the first probe to ever fly alongside said comet as it headed towards the inner solar system, and carried the first lander ever to touch down on a comet’s surface, and now plans are in place for Rosetta spacecraft’s grand finale.

As the European Space Agency (ESA) first announced on Thursday, Rosetta’s mission will come to a spectacular close on September 30, as the orbiter will make a controlled descent towards and ultimately crash into the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P).

The decision to bring the mission to a close was made due to the spacecraft’s increasing distance from the Earth and the Sun, the ESA explained. Currently travelling towards Jupiter, Rosetta can no longer gather adequate amounts of solar energy to power of all its systems and instruments to full capabilities, and the distance has also hampered the ability to downlink scientific data.

First launched in March 2004, Rosetta has been subjected to the harsh conditions of space for 12 years, meaning that it was nearing the end of its natural lifespan anyway, the agency added. Thus the decision was made to send the orbiter onto the surface of the comet rather than risk placing it in hibernation as it journeyed more than 850 million kilometres from the Sun.

The Philae lander has been operating on the surface of Comet 67P, and Rosetta will soon join the lander on the comet’s surface. (Credit: ESA)

Preparations for Rosetta’s final descent to begin in August

The surface of comet 67P. (Credit: ESA)

While Rosetta and its Philae lander have already provided scientists with enormous amounts of scientific data, the spacecraft will have one last chance to shine as it makes the final descent, the ESA said. As it spirals towards the comet’s surface, it will have a chance to “make many once-in-a-lifetime measurements, including very-high-resolution imaging,” the agency noted.

During its final moments, officials hope that the orbiter will be able to obtain data that can only be collected during these final moments. Once Rosetta reaches the surface, communications will be terminated and its operations will come to a close. Preparations for its final descent will begin in August, as operators adjust the probe’s trajectory to move it into place for its last hurrah.

“We’re trying to squeeze as many observations in as possible before we run out of solar power,” ESA Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor said in a statement. “30 September will mark the end of spacecraft operations, but the beginning of the phase where the full focus of the teams will be on science. That is what the Rosetta mission was launched for and we have years of work ahead of us, thoroughly analysing its data.”

“Planning this phase is in fact far more complex than it was for Philae’s landing. The last six weeks will be particularly challenging as we fly eccentric orbits around the comet – in many ways this will be even riskier than the final descent itself,” added Rosetta operations manager Sylvain Lodiot. “The closer we get to the comet, the more influence its non-uniform gravity will have, requiring us to have more control on the trajectory, and therefore more manoeuvres – our planning cycles will have to be executed on much shorter timescales.”

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Image credit: ESA

Science

The Antarctic ozone hole is healing, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: July 1, 2016 Last Edited: July 1, 2016

Brian Galloway

The hole in the Antarctic ozone layer is slowing beginning to heal, mostly thanks to an international treaty signed in 1987 banning the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), according to new research published in this week’s edition of the peer-reviewed journal Science.

In the study, Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT, and her colleagues reported that in September 2015, the hole had shrunk by more than four million square kilometers (almost 2.5 million square miles), or about half the area of the continental US, since reaching its largest point 16 years ago.

While that recovery varies from time to time due to volcanic eruptions, the overall trend is that the Antarctic ozone layer is on the road to recovery, and much of the credit is being given to the passage of the Montreal Protocol, the agreement that looked to ban CFC use globally. As a result the amount of atmospheric chlorine originating from CFCs, chemical compounds that previously had been used in old refrigerators and aerosol cans, has been on an overall decline.

“We can now be confident that the things we’ve done have put the planet on a path to heal.” Solomon said Thursday in a press release. “We did something that created a situation that we decided collectively, as a world, ‘Let’s get rid of these molecules’?” “We got rid of them, and now we’re seeing the planet respond.”

Our actions are starting to pay off for the ozone layer. (Credit: Unsplash)

If trends continue, hole could close completely by mid-century

Scientists first discovered the ozone hole in the 1950s, and about three decades later, they first noticed that the October total ozone was decreasing. As a result, they began to measure October levels of Antarctic ozone, which can be destroyed by chlorine provided that there is enough light and the atmosphere is cold enough to produce polar stratospheric clouds.

Previous data has demonstrated that ozone depletion typically starts in late August, just after the region’s winter comes to an end, and that the hole is completely formed by early October. Since this is the case, Solomon’s team decided to observe the hole in September, when the ozone hole was still forming during the winter. They discovered that the rate at which the hole opens during the month of September has decreased along with chlorine levels.

They tracked the ozone hole in September every year from 2000 through 2015, analyzing the ozone data collected by satellites and weather balloons as well as satellite measurements of the sulfur dioxide emitted by volcanoes (which can also result in ozone depletion). The researchers also tracked wind, temperature and other meteorological data.

Their analysis revealed that, as of September 2015, the ozone hole was more than four million square kilometers smaller than it was at its 2000 peak, and that at least half of this shrinkage was due directly to reduced levels of atmospheric chlorine. Furthermore, Solomon said that she sees no reason why the trend should not continue, and that if chlorine continued to dissipate from the atmosphere, the Antarctic ozone hole could permanently close by mid-century – provided no unexpected volcanic eruptions cause it to temporarily expand.

“What’s exciting for me personally is, this brings so much of my own work over 30 years full circle,” said the professor, whose research into chlorine and ozone played a key role in bringing about the Montreal Protocol. “Science was helpful in showing the path, diplomats, countries, and industry were incredibly able in charting a pathway out of these molecules, and now we’ve actually seen the planet starting to get better. It’s a wonderful thing.”

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Image credit: MIT

Health

Marijuana found to fight Alzheimer’s-forming plaque in the brain

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 30, 2016 Last Edited: June 30, 2016

Brian Galloway

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered preliminary evidence that tetrahydrocannabinol and other compounds typically found in marijuana may help reduce the accumulation of toxic proteins commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers published their findings this month in the journal Aging and Mechanisms of Disease and reported these compounds helped promote the cellular removal of amyloid beta in studies conducted using lab-grown neurons. While the findings are preliminary, they may aid in the development of new ways to treat this common neurodegenerative condition.

In a statement, senior author and Salk professor David Schubert said that while similar studies had “offered evidence that cannabinoids might be neuroprotective against the symptoms” of the disease, he believes his team’s research is “the first to demonstrate that cannabinoids affect both inflammation and amyloid beta accumulation in nerve cells.”

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive brain disorder that results in memory loss and can severely damage an individual’s ability to perform day-to-day tasks. Currently, the disorder affects more than five million Americans, according to US National Institutes of Health. It is also the primary cause of dementia and one of the leading causes of death among seniors.

David Schubert, the lead author of the study. (Credit: Salk Institute)

Possible link between THC, benefits of exercise in Alzheimer’s patients

Doctors have long known that amyloid beta accumulates in the nerve cells of the aging brain long before the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are detectable. The protein is a primary component of the disease’s trademark plaque deposits, but its exact role in the progression of Alzheimer’s is still not fully known.

In their new study, Schubert and his colleagues altered nerve cells to produce high amounts of amyloid beta in order to mimic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease and found that elevated levels of the protein were associated with cellular inflammation and higher rates of neuron death.

Next, they exposed those cells to THC and found that the marijuana compound not only reduced amyloid beta levels but also reversed the nerve cells’ inflammatory response to the protein, thus allowing those cells to survive. The findings suggest cannabinoid-like compounds produced by the nerve cells themselves could prevent those cells from dying, the authors said.

Furthermore, they explained that receptors in brain cells can be activated by endocannabinoids, a class of lipid molecules which the body produces and uses for intercellular signaling in the brain, Schubert, Salk Institute colleagues Pamela Maher and Daniel Daughtery, and co-authors Oswald Quehenberger and Aaron Armando from the University of California, San Diego added.

While the researchers emphasize that the findings are the result of exploratory laboratory models and that the results need to be verified in clinical trials, they may indicate that endocannabinoids may explain why exercise has been shown to potentially slow Alzheimer’s progression and that the THC found in marijuana could have similar benefits.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Dinosaur extinction let mammal evolution ‘explode’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 30, 2016 Last Edited: June 30, 2016

Brian Galloway

Mammals evolved far more quickly in the 10 million years following the mass extinction of the dinosaurs than they did during the previous 80 million years, according to a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In fact, lead author Dr. Thomas Halliday of the University College London Genetics, Evolution & Environment department and his colleagues reported that the evolution of placental mammals (a group that includes nearly 5,000 modern species, including humans) occurred at a near steady rate before the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but exploded soon thereafter.

“Our ancestors – the early placental mammals – benefitted from the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and competing mammal groups. Once the pressure was off, placental mammals suddenly evolved rapidly into new forms,” Dr. Halliday said in a statement.

“In particular, we found a group called Laurasiatheria quickly increased their body size and ecological diversity, setting them on a path that would result in a modern group containing mammals as diverse as bats, cats, rhinos, whales, cows, pangolins, shrews, and hedgehogs,” he added. In short, the study authors found that the mass extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs had “a marked impact on placental mammal diversification.”

Early mammals benefitted from the decreased competition after the meteor struck.

Placental mammals rising from the ashes of destruction

Dr. Halliday’s team studied the last common ancestor for all placental mammals, a creature which lived during the late Cretaceous period, approximately three million years before non-avian dinosaurs died off following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K-Pg) mass extinction. This makes that ancestor 20 million years younger than previously believed, they noted.

By analyzing fossils dating from the Cretaceous to modern day, the researchers were able to estimate the timing of different divergences in the fossil record, thanks partially to an updated tree of life the same team created and released last year. They measured slight changes to the bones and teeth of 904 placental mammal fossils and used the evolutionary tree to map changes to different species anatomy over time.

Based on this data, they were able to determine that the average rate of evolution for these early mammals both prior to the K-Pg mass extinction and afterwards, to determine what impact that event had on the diversification of placental species. Their findings “refute those of other studies which overlooked the fossils of placental mammals present around the last mass extinction,” said senior author Professor Anjali Goswami, a geneticist and earth scientist at UCL.

“Using rigorous methods, we’ve successfully tracked the evolution of early placental mammals and reconstructed how it changed over time,” Professor Goswami added. “While the rate differed between species, we see a clear and massive spike in the rates of evolution straight after the dinosaurs become extinct, suggesting our ancestors greatly benefitted from the demise of the dinosaurs.”

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Image credit: Unsplash

Science

Pigs communicate ‘personality’ through grunts, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 30, 2016 Last Edited: April 17, 2018

Brian Galloway

While they may not exactly be speaking Pig Latin, new research indicates that members of the Suidae family of even-toed ungulates can reveal important information about their personalities and their overall welfare through the grunts they use to communicate.

Published in the latest edition of the journal Royal Society Open Science, the new study was led by researchers at the University of Lincoln and Queens University Belfast, and also found a link between the rate of a pig’s vocalizations and the quality of its living conditions.

As lead author Mary Friel, a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast, explained Wednesday in a statement, “The aim of this research was to investigate what factors affect vocalizations in pigs so that we can better understand what information they convey.”

“Understanding how the vocalizations of pigs’ relate to their personality will also help animal behaviorists and welfare experts have a clearer picture of the impact those personalities have on communication, and thus its role in the evolution of social behavior and group dynamics in social species,” she added.

Pigs are incredibly social creatures, and recording their grunts can tell us a lot about their personalities. (Credit: Thinkstock)

Vocalizations can even reveal animal’s overall wellbeing

Friel, Dr. Lisa Collins, a specialist in animal health, behavior and welfare epidemiology in the Lincoln School of Life Sciences, and their colleagues devised a series of experiments involving 72 male and female juvenile pigs which were split between two different types of pens.

Half of the pigs were housed in “enriched” pens with plenty of living space and straw bedding, while the rest were kept in compact, concrete-floored pens (which still met all UK animal welfare requirements, the researchers emphasize). They then conducted both a social isolation test and a novel object test to get a sense of each pig’s personality.

The pigs each spent three minutes in social isolation, then five minutes in a pen with an object it had not encountered before: either a large white bucket or an orange traffic cone. The researchers monitored the behavior and the grunts of the pigs during each test, which they conducted again a couple of weeks later to ensure that the responses of the pigs were repeatable.

Friel, Collins and their colleagues also recorded the frequency of grunts made by counting how many were produced per minute of the test, and studied the impact that the different qualities of environments had on the vocalizations produced. They discovered that pigs which demonstrated more proactive personalities types produced grunts at a higher rate than reactive ones. They also found that male pigs kept in poorer conditions made fewer grunts than those living in better pens, suggesting male pigs are more susceptible to environmental factors.

The research confirms that a pig “uses acoustic signals in a variety of ways; maintaining contact with other group members while foraging, parent-offspring communication, or to signal if they are distressed,” Dr. Collins said. “The sounds they make convey a wide range of information such as the emotional, motivational and physiological state of the animal. For example, squeals are produced when pigs feel fear, and may be either alerting others to their situation or offering assurance.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

‘Helicopter parenting’ harms child success, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 29, 2016 Last Edited: June 29, 2016

Brian Galloway

Parents who are too involved in their children’s lives as they prepare to enter college could be inadvertently hampering their transition into adulthood, causing them to become depressed and experience anxiety during this crucial period, according to a newly-published study.

While it is important for mom and dad to help out as young adults prepare to leave home for the first time, intervening too much in decision making and becoming helicopter parents could have serious mental health implications, researchers from Florida State University reported in a paper now available online and scheduled to be published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.

“Helicopter parents are parents who are overly involved,” FSU doctoral candidate Kayla Reed, who co-authored the new study along with assistant family and child sciences professor Mallory Lucier-Greer and others, explained in a statement. “They mean everything with good intentions, but it often goes beyond supportive to intervening in the decisions of emerging adults.”

The term “helicopter parenting” is typically applied to adolescents and pre-teens, but Reed and her colleagues examined how college-age (18- to 25-year-old) students are affected by the over-involvement of their parents, and found that such behavior could both harm their emotional and physical wellbeing, resulting in increased levels of anxiety and depression as well as a reduced ability to handle difficult life tasks or make key decisions on their own.

Parents should help their children through life, but there needs to be a balance between assistance and independence for the child’s mental health. (Credit: Unsplash)

Parental over-involvement can reduce self-efficacy, lead to depression

The study authors surveyed more than 460 college students, asking each to measure how their mothers influenced their life decisions based on how she would respond to different scenarios. Moms were chosen because they tend to act as the primary caregivers in families, they said.

Students were also asked to assess their own ability to manage difficult situations or cope with complicated tasks, and found that those men and women whose moms allowed them to be more autonomous reported higher levels of life satisfaction, physical health and self-efficacy (or the ability to handle tougher life tasks or make difficult decisions on their own).

On the other hand, students whose mothers were “helicopter parents” were more likely to self-report low levels of self-efficacy, increased levels of anxiety and depression, and lower levels of overall life satisfaction and physical health. The authors said that they hope to expand upon their research by looking at parental behavior as young adults prepare to enter the workforce for the first time.

“The way your parents interact with you has a lot to do with how you view yourself. If parents are simply being supportive, they are saying things like ‘you can manage your finances, you can pick out your classes.’ It changes if they are doing that all for you,” said Lucier-Greer. “I think there are good intentions behind those helicopter behaviors, but at the end of the day you need to foster your child’s development.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Fire use discovery sheds light on the demise of the ‘hobbits’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 29, 2016 Last Edited: June 29, 2016

Brian Galloway

In a discovery that could help explain how and why Homo floresiensis, the extinct species also known as the hobbits, disappeared approximately 50,000 years ago, researchers have discovered that modern humans had been using fire in Indonesia far earlier than previously believed.

First discovered at the Liang Bua site on the island of Flores in 2003 and given their nickname because of their small stature, Homo floresiensis was a group of hominids believed to have been part of the same genus as modern humans (Homo sapiens). Currently, scientists believe that the original specimen dates back to between 190,000 and 60,000 years ago.

Previous estimates had suggested that the species survived on Flores until as recently as 12,000 years ago, and with the most recent stone tools dating back to just 50,000 years ago, there is now a period lasting from 46,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago during which researchers are not sure what took place there. The new study, which was published in the June 30 edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, could provide some clues that will help solve the mystery.

“We now know that the hobbits only survived until around 50,000 years ago at Liang Bua. We also know that modern humans arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia at least 50,000 years ago, and most likely quite a bit earlier,” lead author Dr. Mike Morley, a geoarchaeologist and research fellow at the University of Wollongong Australia’s Centre for Archaeological Science, said in a statement. “This new evidence, which is some of the earliest evidence of modern human activity in Southeast Asia, narrows the gap between the two hominin species at the site.”

Liant Bua cave in Indonesia. (Credit: Dr Mike Morley )

Findings ‘extremely important’ in the quest for answers

In their new study, Dr. Morley and colleagues from UOW and the National Research Centre for Archaeology in Indonesia analyzed environmental changes that took place at Liang Bua between 190,000 and 20,000 years ago and found evidence of fire places which they believe were used by modern humans for warmth and to cook food between 41,000 and 24,000 years ago.

Since there has been no evidence discovered to date that Homo floresiensis ever used fire during its 130,000 years living at the site, the study authors believe that this is evidence of early modern human activity during this period, which Dr. Morley noted could be “extremely important” when it comes to the search to discover exactly what exactly led to the extinction of the hobbits.

As he explained, “finding the fire places in such an excellent state of preservation allows insights into the behavior of these people.” He and his colleagues said that they plan to continue hunting for additional evidence that will further narrow the time gap, and which could ultimately put our direct ancestors in the same place and time as the hobbits, possibly leading to the discovery of an interaction between the two species that could have led to the downfall of Homo floresiensis.

Their findings also provide further proof of the dispersal of Homo sapiens throughout southeast Asia and into Australia approximately 50,000 years ago, and they come just a few weeks after a team of scientists from UOW reported on the discovery of 700,000 year old fossils that they believed belonged to an ancestor of Homo floresiensis, the researchers noted.

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Image credit: Paul Jones | University of Wollongong

Space

Team finds three new ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanets

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 29, 2016 Last Edited: June 29, 2016

Brian Galloway

It looks like new Olympians need to be added to the pantheon, because three new exoplanets belonging to the “hot Jupiter” family have just been discovered by an international team of astronomers, according to a new paper on arXiv.

The planets—named Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b, and Qatar-5b—were identified by the Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES), which is operated by the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI) run out of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha, Qatar. The survey involved a robotic wide-field camera system in New Mexico to trawl the universe searching for gas giants as they transit (cross in front of) their host stars, according to Phys.org.

And so far, this system has yielded results—in 2010 and 2011, it detected Qatar-1b and Qatar-2b, and now have come out again with the three new exoplanets.

After the international team—which is led by Khalid Al-Subai, QEERI’s acting executive director—made the most recent discoveries, they quickly deployed the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES) at the Fred L. Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona and the four-foot (1.23 m) Zeiss Telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain in order to determine the physical characteristics of the planets.

Detailing the characteristics of the new planets

They discovered that all three are what are known as “hot Jupiters,” or gas giants that have similar characteristics to Jupiter. This class of planet orbits around its central star in less than 10 days and logically have extremely high surface temperatures since they are so close to their parent stars. For these three exoplanets, temperatures range from 1400 K (2060 F, or 1130 C) to 1700 K (2600 F, or 1430 C).

Of the three, Qatar-4b is the biggest and most massive—its radius is about 1.55 times that of Jupiter, and it’s nearly six times more massive. Further, it completes an orbit around its host star in 1.8 days.

Qatar-3b and Qatar-4b are smaller with a similar size and mass. Both have radii 1.1 times that of Jupiter and have about 4.3 times the mass. The main difference between the two is the length of their orbits; Qatar-3b takes two and a half days, while Qatar-5b takes about three.

All in all, this study shows the value of ground-based surveys like QES and has helped create a fuller picture of the hot Jupiter family. With luck, more work will be done in this manner that will help fill in more gaps, such as the origin of hot Jupiters and the architecture of their planetary systems.

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Image credit: QNA

Space

Researchers discover complex organic molecules in ring around planet

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 29, 2016 Last Edited: June 29, 2016

Brian Galloway

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a group of researchers has for the first time identified a ring-shaped structure of complex organic molecules surrounding a newborn star – a discovery the report in the latest edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

While astronomers have long known that these molecules form in diffuse gas clouds which float in interstellar space, and believe that some of them were transported from this space between the stars into our solar system’s planet-forming disk about 4.6 billion years ago, the exact kinds and amounts of molecules originating from interstellar space remained a mystery.

However, those molecules, which include methanol (CH3OH) and methyl formate (HCOOCH3), played a vital role in the chemical evolution that ultimately resulted in the rise of life on Earth. In recent years, radio astronomy observatories have shown that such organic molecules exist around Solar-type protostars, but until now, those instruments were unable to resolve their distributions.

Now, researchers from the University of Tokyo and the RIKEN research institute used ALMA to analyze the distribution of different organic molecules around IRAS 16293-2422A, a Solar-type protostar located in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, at a high-spatial resolution and discovered a that the object was surrounded by a ring of organic molecules 50 times the size of Earth’s orbit.

Findings show that how materials reach planetary systems differ

The size of the ring, they explained in a statement, is comparable to the size of the Solar System and the ring structure is believed to represent the boundary region separating infalling gas from a rotating disk-like structure around the protostar. During their observations, they clearly spotted a large concentration of both methyl formate and carbonyl sulfide (OCS).

They measured the motion of gas containing HCOOCH3 using the Doppler effect, and found “a clear rotation motion specific to the ring structure,” said Yoko Oya, a graduate student in physics at the University of Tokyo. The distribution of methyl formate around the protostar seems to be limited to a more confined region than the OCS distribution, which is primarily used to trace the infalling gases and which Oya’s team used to identify the HCOOCH3 and methanol.

According to the study authors, these saturated organic molecules originate in interstellar space and are preserved on the surfaces of dust grains. Once they reach the outer boundary of the disk, the shock created by collisions between the disk and infalling matter, combined with heating by the protostar’s light, causes the molecules to evaporate.

The new study provides the first direct evidence that organic materials from interstellar space do actually contribute to the formation of a planetary system by entering the rotating disk structures from which those systems originate. Combined with earlier research by the same team, in which they discovered a similar ring of sulfur monoxide around another Solar-type protostar, the paper demonstrates that the method through which materials are delivered to a planetary system differ from star to star, and could alter our understanding of how life originated here on Earth.

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Image credit: Caltech

Science

Human activity created a new mosquito species, study shows

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: June 29, 2016 Last Edited: April 17, 2018

Brian Galloway

We know species around the planet are going extinct due to human activities, but humans are also triggering the rapid development and emergence of new species, according to a new report.

Published in Proceedings of Royal Society B, the new study summarizes the cause of manmade speciation and talks about why newly evolved species can’t just replace extinct wild species.

Many examples show humans can drive evolution via mechanisms like accidental introductions, domestication of animals and crops, unnatural selection due to hunting, or the emergence of novel ecosystems like urban centers.

“The prospect of ‘artificially’ gaining novel species through human activities is unlikely to elicit the feeling that it can offset losses of ‘natural’ species. Indeed, many people might find the prospect of an artificially biodiverse world just as daunting as an artificially impoverished one” study author Joseph Bull from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, said in a news release.

Genetic data for the damselfly in Central America suggests that forest fragmentation has led to a divergence into more than one species. (Credit: Katja Schultz via Flickr)

Creating a new mosquito species

In one example of manmade evolution, the standard house mosquito has adapted to the ecosystem of the subway system in London and established a subterranean population. Now known as the ‘London Underground mosquito’, it can’t interbreed with its surface counterpart and is essentially regarded as a new species.

“We also see examples of domestication resulting in new species. According to a recent study, at least six of the world’s 40 most important agricultural crops are considered entirely new” Bull said.

Moreover, unnatural selection because of hunting can lead to new attributes emerging in animals, which may ultimately lead to new species. Planned accidental transfer of species can also result in hybridization with other species. As a result of latter, countless new plant species have appeared in Europe and gone extinct over the last three centuries.

While we cannot quantify just how many speciation events have been triggered by human activities, the effect is potentially considerable, the study team said.

“In this context, ‘number of species’ becomes a deeply unsatisfactory measure of conservation trends, because it does not reflect many important aspects of biodiversity,” said study author Martine Maron, an associate professor of ecology from the University of Queensland. “Achieving a neutral net outcome for species numbers cannot be considered acceptable if weighing wild fauna against relatively homogenous domesticated species. However, considering speciation alongside extinction may well prove important in developing a better understanding of our impact upon global biodiversity.”

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Image credit: Walkabout12 via Wikimedia Commons

Science

New pear-shaped nucleus could ruin time travel forever

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 28, 2016 Last Edited: June 28, 2016

Brian Galloway

A new form of atomic nuclei has been confirmed, and its very existence may change what we thought were the fundamental aspects of physics—and could put a nail in the coffin of time travel, according to a new paper in Physical Review Letters.

Unlike all other known forms of atomic nuclei, this one is pear-shaped—meaning it’s not symmetrical. To understand what this means and why it’s important, we need to go back a few billion years, to the Big Bang.

Currently, the general thought is that the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter—a symmetry which probably would have just resulted in them cancelling each other out. In our current times, though, matter won out, meaning all of us have the pleasure of existing.

This of course begs the question: Where the heck is all the antimatter?

Which is where our new pear-shaped form comes in. Up until now, the forms of the nuclei of atoms have been symmetrical in shape, which happens to pair nicely with a theory known as CP-Symmetry. CP-Symmetry involves a symmetry of charge and coordinates in space in the universe.

“In particle physics, if you have a particle spinning clockwise and decaying upwards, its antiparticle should spin counterclockwise and decay upwards 100 percent of the time if CP is conserved,” Ethan Siegel from It Starts With a Bang explained to Forbes. “If not, CP is violated.”

Pear-shaped nucleus shakes up our view of physics and time travel

Up until now, the thought has been that CP was law and balance existed—a notion carried through in the shape of nuclei. Symmetry ruled the universe throughout. Well, it did until 2013 anyway, when the first pear-shaped nucleus in the isotope Radium-224 was discovered by physicists at CERN.

“[T]he protons enrich in the bump of the pear and create a specific charge distribution in the nucleus,” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told BBC News. “This violates the theory of mirror symmetry and relates to the violation shown in the distribution of matter and antimatter in our Universe.”

Now, Scheck and his team were able to directly observe this distortion, thus confirming CERN’s previous findings. This time, it was seen in the nucleus of the isotope Barium-144—and the distortion was even more pronounced than predicted, which leads Scheck to believe that this little pear indicates time travel is a no-go.

Another reason why the TARDIS will never be a reality (Credit: BBC)

“We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, proving there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present,” said Scheck.

Of course, whether that holds true or not is a topic for the future.

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Image credit: CERN

Science

Massive new helium source is a ‘life saver’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 28, 2016 Last Edited: June 28, 2016

Brian Galloway

While helium may be best known as the gas people use to fill up balloons and inhale to make their voices sound funny, it is actually a critically important element that has been in short supply as of late, but the discovery of a massive new helium gas field could change everything.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe and it’s used in important applications such as MRI scanners, welding, and nuclear energy. Helium is the second most abundant gas in the universe, yet reserves of the element are running out here on Earth, and there may soon be a catastrophic shortage, according to Oxford and Durham University researchers.

However, using a new approach to gas exploration, Durham University Ph.D. student Diveena Danabalan, Oxford Earth Sciences Professor Chris Ballentine and their colleagues have found a potential new source of helium in Tanzanian East African Rift Valley, making this the first time that a cache of this rare gas has ever been intentionally discovered.

Once perfected, new technique could be a ‘game changer’

The UK-based researchers discovered that volcanic activity provides enough heat to release helium from ancient rocks, and that volcanic activity in the Rift Valley has released helium from said rocks, then trapped it in shallower gas fields. The team presented their findings as part of the ongoing Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Yokohama, Japan.

“We show that volcanoes in the Rift play an important role in the formation of viable helium reserves,” Danabalan said in a statement. “Volcanic activity likely provides the heat necessary to release the helium accumulated in ancient crustal rocks. However, if gas traps are located too close to a given volcano, they run the risk of helium being heavily diluted by volcanic gases such as carbon dioxide, just as we see in thermal springs from the region.”

As such, their current goal is to identify the so-called “goldilocks-zone” that exists between the ancient rocks and the modern volcanoes in order to perfectly balance helium release and volcanic dilution. Once they do, independent projections have calculated that they will be able to obtain as much as 45 billion cubic feet (BCf) of helium from just one part of the rift valley. Ballentine said such a haul would be enough to completely fill more than one million MRI scanners.

“To put this discovery into perspective,” the Oxford professor added, “global consumption of helium is about 8 BCf per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world’s largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf. Total known reserves in the USA are around 153 BCf. This is a game changer for the future security of society’s helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

Team develops promising Zika vaccine candidates

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: June 28, 2016 Last Edited: June 28, 2016

Brian Galloway

Researchers around the world have been racing to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus, and it appears that a large team of US researchers have developed two very promising candidates.

According to a report published in the journal Nature, researchers developed one potential vaccine using a Zika virus isolated in Brazil, and another candidate using a Zika virus isolated in Puerto Rico. Preclinical results showed both candidates were able to protect mice against an infection with the Zika virus by stimulating the rodents’ immune system. Furthermore, neither candidate was found to have significant side effects.

One of the candidates, a purified inactivated virus vaccine (PIV), was developed by researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) and this potential vaccine will be the first to move forward because it is based on a kind of vaccine that has prior approval to treat other flaviviruses, a genus of viruses that includes the West Nile virus, dengue virus and the Zika virus.

The mosquito-borne illness has become one of the world’s most pressing health risks. (Image credit: Thinkstock)

Working with proven technologies

In a news release, Army officials said their scientists are trying to tamp down risk by steering clear of unproven technologies that could trigger a licensing delay.

“This critical first step has informed our ongoing work in non-human primates and gives us early confidence that development of a protective Zika virus vaccine for humans is feasible,” Col. Nelson Michael, the WRAIR Zika program co-lead, said.

WRAIR researchers are moving quickly to formulate and test the PIV vaccine, and they said they intend to start human clinical trials before the end of the year. Even more human trials are being planned by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), through its Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units.

“Our laboratory in Thailand has been conducting biosurveillance for Zika for the past three years, since we started to observe dengue-like illnesses in Thailand and the Philippines that were not dengue and did not test positive for other likely causes,” Thomas said. “These efforts gave us a head-start for our vaccine development efforts.”

Infectious diseases have long been a menace to US military personnel, and the military has extensive skills and abilities in developing countermeasures. WRAIR is focusing on a Zika vaccine together with other government agencies.

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Image credit: WRAIR

Space

Dwarf planet Makemake has a moon, astronomers find

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 28, 2016 Last Edited: June 28, 2016

Brian Galloway

Makemake, a dwarf planet and one of the largest Kuiper Belt objects discovered to date, has a moon, according to a new study led by astronomers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and published in Monday’s edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The elusive, dark satellite was difficult to find, lead author Dr. Alex Parker and his colleagues explained in a statement, as much of its orbit is spent almost directly within the glare of the icy dwarf planet due to a nearly edge-on configuration. The newfound moon is believed to be less than 100 miles wide, while Makemake itself is approximately 870 miles across.

First discovered in 2005, Makemake is a football-shaped planet that has a diameter roughly two-thirds that of Pluto’s and his covered in frozen methane, according to the study authors. The new moon, which has been dubbed MK2, is much 1,300 times darker than the Kuiper Belt object that it orbits, and was found using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.

“Makemake’s moon proves that there are still wild things waiting to be discovered, even in places people have already looked,” said Dr. Parker. MK2’s detection means that all four of the currently-designated dwarf planets are home to at least one satellite, according to SwRI.

The discovery of Makemake’s moon could lead to new discoveries for other objects. (Image Courtesy of NASA/SwRI/Alex Parker)

Research could lead to discovery of other previously undetected moons

The authors of the new study are not the first to search for a moon around Makemake, but previous attempts to locate the satellite proved unfruitful. Now, the successful discovery of MK2 has astronomers hopeful that they may also find previously undetected satellites orbiting other large Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs).

Before findings MK2, researchers believed the fact that Makemake lacked a moon meant that it might have escaped a giant impact event during its past. Now, they plan to investigate its density to see if the moon was formed by such a collision, or if the object has been pulled in by the dwarf planet’s gravity. Based on the abundance of moons orbiting KBOs, the study authors believe that impact events are common among these dwarf planets.

The findings will also prove beneficial in other ways, Dr. Parker explained: “With a moon, we can calculate Makemake’s mass and density. We can contrast the orbits and properties of the parent dwarf and its moon, to understand the origin and history of the system. We can compare Makemake and its moon to other systems, and broaden our understanding of the processes that shaped the evolution of our solar system.”

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Image credit: NASA/Hubble WFC3/SwRI/Alex Parker

Space

Jupiter awaits arrival of the Juno probe

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 27, 2016 Last Edited: June 27, 2016

Brian Galloway

In a statement you’d never read in Roman mythology, a glowing Jupiter awaits the arrival of Juno—as scientists have created stunning new images and maps of Jupiter a week ahead of the arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

In fact, the maps are the highest resolution achieved to date of the giant planet, revealing its current temperatures, composition, and cloud coverage. Created using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and a newly-upgraded thermal imager called VISIR, the maps were derived from observations taken during the span of February to June of this year, allowing researchers to better characterize the atmosphere of Jupiter before Juno arrives.

“We used a technique called ‘lucky imaging’, whereby individual sharp frames are extracted from short movies of Jupiter to ‘freeze’ the turbulent motions of our own atmosphere, to create a stunning new image of Jupiter’s cloud layers,” explained Dr. Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester, in a Royal Astronomical Society press release. “At this wavelength, Jupiter’s clouds appear in silhouette against the deep internal glows of the planet. Images of this quality will provide the global context for Juno’s close-up views of the planet at the same wavelength.”

Fletcher and his team also studied how giant storms, vortices, and wave patterns shape the appearance of Jupiter, this time using the EXES spectrograph on NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii. They made numerous observations across many different wavelengths, allowing them to pinpoint certain features and cloud layers and thus create the first global spectral maps of Jupiter taken from Earth.

“These maps will help set the scene for what Juno will witness in the coming months,” said Fletcher. “We have seen new weather phenomena that have been active on Jupiter throughout 2016.

“These include a widening of one of the brown belts just north of the equator, which has spawned wave patterns throughout the northern hemisphere, both in the cloud layers and high above in the planet’s stratosphere. Observations at different wavelengths across the infrared spectrum allow us to piece together a three-dimensional picture of how energy and material are transported upwards through the atmosphere.”

Infrared view of Jupiter (left) compared to a visible light image of the planet (right).

Other contributors to the project

Of course, Fletcher and his team did not accomplish all this alone; several telescopes in Hawaii and Chile and amateurs from around the world contributed to the project, so that scientists would better understand the climate of Jupiter before Juno arrives.

And once Juno does arrive, it will orbit around Jupiter, skimming to around 3,100 miles (5,000 km) above the planet’s clouds about once every two weeks. The images taken during these close encounters will altogether provide global coverage of the planet.

“The combined efforts of an international team of amateur and professional astronomers have provided us with an incredibly rich dataset over the past eight months,” said Dr. Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who leads the Juno campaign. “Together with the new results from Juno, this dataset will allow researchers to characterise Jupiter’s global thermal structure, cloud cover and distribution of gaseous species. We can then hope to answer questions like what drives Jupiter’s atmospheric changes, and how the weather we see is connected to processes hidden deep within the planet.”

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Image credit: ESA

Science

Deep aquifers could provide ‘water windfall’ to California

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 27, 2016 Last Edited: June 27, 2016

Brian Galloway

New research appearing in this week’s edition of journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents both good and bad news for the drought-stricken residents of Central Valley in California: unexpectedly high amounts of groundwater that will be difficult to access.

According to study co-authors Robert Jackson and Mary Kang from Stanford University, prior estimates of groundwater in the region were based on decades-old data that only extended to a maximum depth of 1,000 feet. As such, it failed to account for water contained in deep aquifers and accounted for as little as one-third of the groundwater actually in the Central Valley.

“It’s not often that you find a ‘water windfall,’ but we just did,” Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor at the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, said in a statement. “There’s far more fresh water and usable water than we expected.”

Unfortunately, actually using that water to provide relief to the area’s residents may be easier said than done, he and Kang reported, as it might be difficult to find an economically feasible way to use it, and it could be difficult to prevent it from becoming contaminated by petroleum-related activities. Nonetheless, the findings provide hope to drought victims everywhere.

This discovery comes at a time where water is at a premium in California. (Credit: Rob Jackson, Stanford University)

Concerns over fracking, salinity of water could hamper usage

California has been experiencing a severe drought for the past five years, and in 2014, Governor Jerry Brown declared a state-wide drought emergency. To keep up with the demand for H2O, the state has become increasingly reliant upon groundwater sources, according to the authors.

In years past, water contained in aquifers 1,000 feet beneath the surface was “too expensive to use,” but these days, it is “used widely,” Jackson explained. As part of their research, he and his colleague reviewed data from 938 oil and gas pools and more than 35,000 oil and gas wells, and found that factoring in deeper sources of groundwater could increase the usable amount to 2,700 cubic kilometers, or nearly three times current estimates for the Central Valley.

The catch is that much of that water is between 1,000 and 3,000 feet underground, meaning that it will be more expensive to pump to the surface. Also, Jackson and Kang are concerned that accessing the water in these deeper aquifers may exacerbate the ground subsidence in the region, causing the gradual sinking of the land to worsen, and that the water in these aquifers could have higher levels of salt concentration, requiring extensive desalination treatments to make it usable.

The researchers are also concerned that petroleum-related drilling activities are taking place in up to 30 percent of the sites where these deep aquifers are located. While the fact that hydraulic fracturing is taking place in the vicinity of groundwater does not render that source unusable, it is a cause for concern, according to Kang.

“No one is monitoring deep aquifers. No one’s following them through time to see how and if the water quality is changing. We might need to use this water in a decade, so it’s definitely worth protecting,” the postdoctoral associate explained, adding that her team’s findings “are relevant to a lot of other places where there are water shortages, including Texas, China and Australia.”

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Image credit: Rob Jackson, Stanford University

Science

Does gun control work?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 27, 2016 Last Edited: June 27, 2016

Brian Galloway

As Americans continue to debate the effectiveness of gun control laws in the aftermath of the recent mass shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association could provide the answer once and for all.

In the new study, University of Sydney Emeritus Professor Simon Chapman and colleagues Philip Alpers and Professor Mike Jones from Macquarie University report statistical evidence that Australia has seen an accelerated decline in intentional firearm deaths and an absence of fatal mass shootings since passing gun control laws 20 years ago.

In 1996, following an April incident in which a man used two semiautomatic rifles to kill 35 people and wound 19 others in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the Australian government first passed into law a gun buyback program and new regulations banning rapid-fire long guns. Programs such as these were in place in all six states and two territories by August 1998.

During the 18 years prior to the passing of the laws, there were 13 fatal mass shootings reported throughout Australia, Chapman said in a statement. Since the institution of the buyback program and the new regulations, however, there have been none, he and his colleagues discovered.

Leaving guns by the roadside has been a good choice for Australia.

Findings suggest similar regulations could work elsewhere

Those laws even prohibited weapons that were already in private ownership, and by January 1, 1997, the federal and state governments launched a program to buy back the firearms at market price. Since October 1997, possession of any prohibited weapons has been punishable by large fines and prison time, and a similar program for handguns was enacted in 2003.

Based statistics reported by the study authors, more than one million privately-owned weapons have been surrendered or seized, and subsequently melted down, and the number of Australian households reporting gun ownership decreased by 75% between 1998 and 2005. As it turns out, those trends have resulted in a significant drop in mass shootings involving fatalities.

Between 1979 and 1996, there were 13 fatal mass shootings – defined as an event in which five or more victims, not including the perpetrator(s), were shot to death, throughout Australia – with a total of 104 men and women killed and at least 52 others wounded. Since 1996, when the first gun control and buyback laws were passed, there have been no mass shootings nationwide.

Furthermore, between 1979 and 1996, the number of total firearm-related deaths in Australia had been declining at an average rate of 3% per year. In the past 20 years, the average decline in gun-related fatalities has decreased at a rate of 5% annually. The number of suicides that involved the use of guns has also decreased significantly and firearm-related homicides have also experienced a slight downward trend, according to Chapman and his colleagues.

“Australia’s experience shows that banning rapid-fire firearms was associated with reductions in mass shootings and total firearm deaths. In today’s context, these findings offer an example which, with public support and political courage, might reduce gun deaths in other countries,” said Chapman. “The acceleration of the decline in gun-related deaths means lives saved,” Jones added. “We can argue over how many but the data says lives have been saved.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Feathers, hair, and scales have a common ancestor, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 26, 2016 Last Edited: June 26, 2016

Brian Galloway

Scientists have long pondered whether or not the hair of mammals, the feathers of birds, and the scales of reptiles had a common evolutionary link, and now, after decades of debate, they finally have an answer, thanks to new research published today in the journal Science Advances.

In that study, experts from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics demonstrated that hairs, feathers, and scales have identical molecular and micro-anatomical signatures during the early stages of their developments, suggesting that all three types of skin features likely evolved from a common reptilian ancestor.

Avian feathers and mammalian hairs both develop from a similar structure known as a placode, or a localized thickening of the epidermis with cells that reduce proliferation rate and express a specific set of genes. This has long puzzled experts, however, as the two types of creatures did not evolve from the same reptilian lineage and thus are not technically sister groups.

However, previous research has shown that reptilian scales do not develop from an anatomical placode. This has led to speculation that these structures probably evolved independently in both birds and mammals during the course of their development, but as the study authors explain in a statement, there’s actually something else at work here.

Feathers, scales, and hair are all more closely related than we thought.

Molecular signals, mutations reveal link between skin features

The UNIGE and SIB teams, led by science faculty members Michel C. Milinkovitch and Nicolas Di-Poï, have demonstrated that reptile scales actually develop from a placode after all, and that it possesses anatomical and molecular signatures identical to avian and mammalian placodes.

The researchers observed and analyzed both the morphological and molecular mechanics of skin in the developing embryos of snakes, lizards and crocodiles, and found evidence that supports an earlier Yale University-led study which discovered that scales, hairs and feathers share molecular signatures during the course of their development.

“We have identified in reptiles new molecular signatures that are identical to those observed during the development of hairs and feathers, as well as the presence of the same anatomical placode as in mammals and birds,” Milinkovitch explained. “This indicates that the three types of skin appendages are homologous: the reptilian scales, the avian feathers, and the mammalian hairs, despite their very different final shapes, evolved from the scales of their reptilian common ancestor.”

Furthermore, the researchers also analyzed the bearded dragon, a lizard species which comes in three different variants: one with normal scales, one with reduced-sized scales and one that lacks scales completely due to a genetic mutation. By comparing each of their genomes, the scientists were able to discover the specific gene affected by the aforementioned mutation.

“’We identified that the peculiar look of these naked lizards is due to the disruption of the ectodysplasin-A (EDA), a gene whose mutations in humans and mice are known to generate substantial abnormalities in the development of teeth, glands, nails and hairs,” Milinkovitch noted. When EDA malfunctions in lizards, the researchers found that it is unable to develop a proper scale placode. A similar mechanism has been observed in humans and birds, furthering the link between the three different types of skin features.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Four skeletons, other artifacts recovered during Pompeii dig

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 25, 2016 Last Edited: June 25, 2016

Brian Galloway

Four skeletons, including one belonging to an adolescent female, and a cache of gold coins have been recovered from the ruins of an ancient shop on the outskirts of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city destroyed following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, reports indicate.

According to the Associated Press, a team of Italian and French archaeologists discovered bones in the back of the shop belonging to four young victims killed after the volcano erupted, covering the shop and the entire city with an estimated 13 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) of ash and pumice.

Credit: Giorgio Cosulich

Officials from the local office of the Pompeii site, which is located near Naples in the Campania region of Italy, announced the discovery on Friday. They also added that three gold coins and the flower-shaped pendant of a necklace were found among the bones in the shop, which also housed an over likely used to create bronze objects, the wire service noted.

The archaeologists added that there is evidence that looters had ransacked the shop following the eruption, likely hunting for treasured buried beneath the volcanic ash. Fortunately, it appears that the coins and the pendant had avoided detection, allowing for their recovery this week.

Excavations continue at workshop, nearby second site

Archaeolgists from l’Ecole française de Rome (The French School at Rome), le Centre Jean Bérard, and le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) are leading the expedition, according to Forbes, and have released images of both the coins and the remains, which they called important for learning more about the life and death of the residents of Pompeii.

Excavations on the workshop began last month, as researchers began searching through the site and a second ancient shop located near a necropolis in the Herculaneum port area, the AP said. It is unknown at this point what kind of business was conducted at the second site, which features a circular well that was dug out of the terrain and can be reached using a spiral staircase.

Work at the Pompeii site also revealed the tomb of what is believed to be an adult male lying on his back, with at least six funerary vases that had been painted black. The tomb has been dated to the fourth century BC and “adds to the rare funerary testimony of the pre-Roman age,” members of the excavation team said in a statement, according to the AP.

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Image credit: Pompeii Archeological Site Press Office/ AP Photos

Science

What did Earth’s magnetic field used to look like?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 25, 2016 Last Edited: June 25, 2016

Brian Galloway

In the distant past, Earth’s magnetic field was considerably different than it is today, and it likely originated from more than just two poles, according to a new study from Peter Driscoll, an Earth and planetary scientist from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Driscoll investigated the affect that the solidification of the Earth’s core might have had on the magnetic field, using models of the planet’s thermal history to make a surprising discovery: the world which we call home did not necessarily have just a north pole and a south pole.

In fact, in a statement, he explained that he found “a surprising amount of variability” in these simulations, and that these models “do not support the assumption of a stable dipole field at all times, contrary to what we’d previously believed.” During solidification, Driscoll added, Earth may have shifted from a two-polar world to one in which the weaker magnetic field fluctuated wildly between different poles, and eventually back to the bipolar world we know today.

“These findings could offer an explanation for the bizarre fluctuations in magnetic field direction seen in the geologic record around 600 to 700 million years ago,” he said, pointing out that there would be “widespread implications for such dramatic field changes” during ancient times.

Earth’s magnetic field hasn’t always been as regular as it is today

So how is this even possible, and what does it mean?

As Driscoll and the Carnegie Institution explained, Earth generates a powerful magnetic field that extends from its core out into space. This field helps protect the atmosphere, deflecting high-energy particles originating from the Sun and elsewhere in the solar system that would otherwise bombard the surface with cosmic radiation that could be harmful to living organisms.

The magnetic field is created by a phenomenon known as the geodynamo, which involves the motion of liquid iron in the outer core caused by heat loss and the solidification of the inner core. Yet the inner core was not always solid, which led to the question: what impact would the early solicitation of the inner core have had on the planet’s magnetic field?

In order to try and solve this problem, Driscoll created a model of the Earth’s thermal history that dates back 4.5 billion years. His models indicate that the inner core should have begun to solidify roughly 650 million years ago, so he conducted additional simulations to look for changes to the magnetic field during this time, and found that approximately 1 billion years ago, the planet may have shifted from a modern-looking magnetic field to one that was vastly different.

While the modern-type field would have been a “strong” magnetic field with opposing poles in the north and south, the transition would have caused it to become “weaker” and to experience a series of wild fluctuations in terms of intensity and direction, the Institution explained. During this time, the field would have originated from several different poles. Then, soon after the core is believed to have solidified, the simulations predict that magnetic field would have returned to a traditional “strong,” two-pole one.

“Overall, the findings have major implications for Earth’s thermal and magnetic history,” the Institution said, “particularly when it comes to how magnetic measurements are used to reconstruct continental motions and ancient climates. Driscoll’s modeling and simulations will have to be compared with future data gleaned from high quality magnetized rocks to assess the viability of the new hypothesis.”

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Image credit: Peter Driscoll, Carnegie Earth and Planetary Science

Science

Team finds 12,000 year old campsite in Canada

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 24, 2016 Last Edited: June 24, 2016

Brian Galloway

A site uncovered during the construction of a highway bypass in New Brunswick, Canada has yielded hundreds of objects that are believed to be about 12,000 years old, according to Global News.

Discovered by an archaeologist nearly two years ago near the province’s capital, Fredericton, archaeologists have just recently been able to spend three weeks excavating the site, which appears to date from an extremely rare time period—meaning it stands to fill in some gaps in local history.

“This gives us our only glimpse into what people were doing during this time period,” explained New Brunswick’s Provincial Archaeologist Brent Suttie to CTV News Atlantic.

“From other areas in the province, we know that by about 13,000 years ago people are living here,” he added. “We have a few sites down in the Penfield area and then we have very famous sites like Debert in Nova Scotia that date to 11,600 years old. We don’t have anything in between those sites.”

Campsite might have been an ancient “beachside resort”

In fact, the excavation team so far has discovered that the campsite—currently surrounded by roads and trees—was once on the beach of an enormous lake.

“There’s actually two concentrations at either end of the site,” said Suttie. “This is actually on a beach overlooking what used to be a glacial lake and so this lake was basically like Grand Lake but much, much larger.”

“The entire town of Fredericton was underwater at the time and this was the shoreline of that lake,” he added.

Besides the discovery of this lake, the team has also uncovered hundreds of ancient stone tools (including projectile points) and flakes (which come off rocks as they are shaped or re-worked), as well as an intact campfire pit with charcoal.

“It’s very, very rare to find a campfire from 12,000 years ago, intact like this,” said Suttie, according to CBC News.

Along with adding a new chapter to the local history textbook, this site offered something unusual in terms of the poignant: Two of the field technicians who worked on the site, Tyson Wood and Shawna Goodall, are Indigenous people.

“To know that they were having a fire in this exact position and my ancestors could be all sitting around this beach shore, having a fire, fishing, camping,” Wood told Global News. “Just to unearth that.”

“Just to hold an artifact in your hand that you know that you’re the first person to hold that in 13,000 years … you get the goosebumps every single time,” said Goodall.

It is certainly not an experience that will be forgotten.

“With the Maliseet people it’s all about oral tradition and talking and telling stories,” Wood explained. “Now that I’m going to be able to bring my own stories back to my community and tell them, that’s just a great feeling.”

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Image credit: Shane Fowler/CBC

Science

Pottery fragments connected to lost Roanoke colony, team finds

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 24, 2016 Last Edited: June 24, 2016

Brian Galloway

Two minuscule objects found on Roanoke Island may yet provide some big hints as to what happened there in the 1580s, leading to the mysterious disappearance of Roanoke Colony.

The objects were two fragments of pottery, both perhaps ¾ of an inch (two centimeters) across, but are being described as the most significant pieces of pottery found in the area since the 1940s, according to local news site WTKR.

Found around 75 yards (68 meters) from the site is believed to have held the 16^th-century fort built just before the arrival of those who would form the Lost Colony, the sherds are blue, white, and brown. They have been identified as pieces of an ointment or medicine jar dating to the time period of the first expeditions to Roanoke or the attempted establishment of two permanent colonies, all of which took place between 1584 and 1587.

Of course, the most famous of the colonies—now known as the Lost Colony—was the one established in 1587. Its governor left several months into its establishment to secure supplies in England; when he returned in 1590, the entire colony of more than 200 people had simply vanished, only leaving the word “CROATOAN” carved on a fence post.

“The pottery itself is a type of pottery which is a tin-glaze,” said Eric Deetz, an archaeologist with the First Colony Foundation who is a member of the team who found the pottery, according to the Huffington Post. “This form was pretty much only used between the 1570s and 1620s.”

According to Deetz, the sherds formed a jar that would have been about three inches (7.6 cm) tall and 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) in diameter.

Credit: National Parks Service

So what does this mean for the Lost Colony?

“I think it’s another piece of the puzzle that you can connect to the Raleigh colonies,” said Jami Lanier, Cultural Resources Manager for The Outer Banks Group, according to WTKR.

And of course, with a find such as this, archaeologists can add to their knowledge of what life was like in the colony, perhaps even testing the jars for residues to see what illnesses colonists were attempting to fight. The spread of disease across the newly-formed colony may have played a large role in its disappearance, perhaps driving colonists to seek aid from local Native American tribes.

“That’s the most important value is the stories they [the sherds] can tell and they are pieces of the puzzle that can perhaps help solve the mystery,” added Lanier.

Can you really learn all that much from a tiny potsherd?

While two tiny pieces of pottery seem like they’re pretty insignificant, in truth, you can learn a surprising amount from them. Things like the materials used (Where is the clay from? How fine or coarse is it? What kind of paint and/or glaze is used?); painted designs or writing on the face of the sherd; or the shape of the sherd (like if it was part of a lip or a base, or if designs were impressed on the surface) can tell you enormous amounts of information, like the time period, the wealth of the owner, and the shape of the entire object.

“A single piece is as good as a whole pot,” Deetz told Huffington Post.

In the case of the sherds here, for example, the type of paint used and the design give archaeologists the time period; their shapes were used to extrapolate the shape of the rest of the object. (The sherds were large enough “to give me the size and the shape and the form of the pot,” said Deetz).

Incidentally, in archaeology, the difference between a sherd and a shard (besides a single letter) is the difference between finding ceramic fragments and finding glass or obsidian ones—and also helps you keep from being mocked by your peers.

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Image credit: National Parks Service

Health

Texas mom picks up British accent after surgery

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: June 24, 2016 Last Edited: June 24, 2016

Brian Galloway

While a Texas mom may not spend a lot of time eating chip buttys or tweed kettle pie, what has been coming out of her mouth is suddenly very, very English.

According to a report from a local Houston TV station, Texas native Lisa Alamia recently underwent a jaw surgery that not only changed her overbite, it also gave her a British accent. Specifically, English commenters have said online , Alamia’s new accent sounds as if it comes from Lancashire, a county in the northwest of England that the Texas mother of three is not known to have ever visited.

“People who don’t know me, they’re like, ‘Hey, where are you from?'” Alamia told KHOU. “I’m from Rosenberg. They’re like, ‘Where is that?’ I’m like, ‘Right here in Rosenberg.’ ‘Oh, you’re from here? How do you talk like that?’ So that’s where the whole story comes up.”

Switching accents out of the blue

Alamia’s oldest daughter Kayla said she thought her mother was joking with her at first.

“But then she showed me that the doctor diagnosed her with foreign accent syndrome,” Kayla said. “Then I was like, ‘Oh, Lord.’”

Foreign Accent Syndrome is speech dysfunction that causes an abrupt change to speech such that the speaker is recognized as speaking with a ‘foreign’ accent. The condition is frequently brought on by damage to the brain, possibly by a stroke or traumatic injury. In some instances, no clear cause has been recognized.

Speech may be changed in with respect to of pacing, inflection, and tongue positioning, so that is regarded as sounding foreign. Listeners can still comprehend the sufferer’s speech; it does not sound disordered or nonsensical

Foreign Accent Syndrome has been recorded in cases around the planet, including accent shifts from Japanese to Korean and British to French. There have only ever been 150 known instances of Foreign Accent Syndrome thus far. In some cases, the accent has faded over time, and in other cases the switch was permanent.

Lisa Alamia said she plans to undergo speech therapy in an attempt to get back her normal American accent.

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Image credit: KHOU

Space

Hubble spots ‘Dark Vortex’ on Neptune

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 24, 2016 Last Edited: June 24, 2016

Brian Galloway

For the first time this century, NASA scientists can confirm that a dark vortex has been spotted in Neptune’s atmosphere, as the new feature is clearly visible in images obtained last month by the Hubble Space Telescope, US space agency officials announced on Thursday.

While this isn’t the first time that something like this has been spotted around Neptune, as a dark vortex was detected twice previously (once by Voyager 2 in 1989, once by Hubble in 1994), these latest images verify that Jupiter is not the only planet in our solar system with its own spot.

In Neptune’s case, the dark vortices spotted by University of California at Berkeley astronomer Mike Wong and his colleagues are high pressure systems that are typically accompanied by what the researchers refer to as bright “companion clouds.” These clouds form as ambient air is forced over the vortex, causing its component gazes to freeze and form crystals of methane ice.

“Dark vortices coast through the atmosphere like huge, lens-shaped gaseous mountains,” Wong explained in a statement. “And the companion clouds are similar to so-called orographic clouds that appear as pancake-shaped features lingering over mountains on Earth.”

Credit: NASA

Dark vortices vary greatly in terms of size, shape, duration

Wong, along with a group of collaborators from Cal-Berkeley, the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) and elsewhere, discovered a dark feature located close to and slightly below a patch of bright clouds in an image of Neptune captured by Hubble in May. This high-pressure system, they noted, is best observed at blue wavelengths.

It was nearly one year ago, in July 2015, that several astronomers and observatories detected bright clouds in the distant planet’s atmosphere and began to wonder if they might be companion clouds associated with an unseen dark spot. That September, members of the OPAL program, a project that uses Hubble to compile annual global maps of the solar system’s outer planets, first spotted a dark vortex near where a group of clouds had been tracked from the ground.

The new Hubble images show that vortex a second time, confirming the OPAL team’s previous sighting and allowing them to create a higher-quality map of the feature and its surroundings, the agency said. Over the years, these dark vortices have been surprisingly diverse in regards to their sizes, shapes and durations, and the researchers hope that this new breakthrough will help reveal how they form, how they interact with the environment and how they ultimately dissipate.

“The results from Hubble confirm the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program theory that Neptune’s spots are a sustaining feature,” Orlando Sentinel reporter Emilee Speck said, adding that the shape of the clouds are similar to those found above high peaks here on Earth.

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Image credit: NASA

Health

Gene editing tool CRISPR gets clearance for human trials

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: June 23, 2016 Last Edited: June 23, 2016

Brian Galloway

The genetic editing tool known as CRISPR has been described as a game changer, and in response to the groundbreaking results is has produced; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has approved it for the first human clinical trial.

The approved trial is focused on improving cancer treatments that use the patient’s own immune cells to fight off the disease.

“Cell therapies [for cancer] are so promising but the majority of people who get these therapies have a disease that relapses,” lead researcher Edward Stadtmauer, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania, told Nature News.

Using gene editing for immune system treatment

Designed to more see if CRISPR is safe for use in humans, the trial will involve using CRISPR to make edited T-cells from the immune systems of 18 patients with melanoma, sarcoma or myeloma.

One change will place a gene for a protein designed to recognize cancer cells and teach the T cells to target them. A second genetic change will eliminate a normal T-cell protein that may restrict the initial edit. A third edit will take out the gene for a protein that recognizes the T cells as immune cells and stop the cancer cells from shutting them down. The scientists will then place the edited cells into the same patient from which they originally came.

“Last year’s excitement over CRISPR was in anticipation of this,” said Dean Anthony Lee, a member of the NIH’s Recombinant DNA Research Advisory Committee (RAC), which reviewed the proposal.

CRISPR has garnered most interest due to its simplicity. However, the T-cell trial will not be the first test of the effectiveness of using gene editing to battle diseases.

In 2014, a trial used another gene-editing system known as zinc-finger nuclease. This trial took blood from 12 individuals with HIV and eliminated the gene that encodes a protein on T cells that is attacked by the virus. The team said they hoped that this would stop infection of the cells. The outcomes were encouraging, and the process is now being used in clinical trials for many other applications.

Despite the fact that CRISPR is easier to use than other means and better at editing numerous genes at once, a major challenge will be overcoming CRISPR’s inclination for ‘off-target’ edits. These are situations involving the unintentional edits to the genome. In spite of precautions, the immune system could still assault the edited cells, trial researchers said.

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Image credit: Steve Gschmeissner/SPL

Health

Cancer can spread between shellfish species, study finds

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: June 23, 2016 Last Edited: June 23, 2016

Brian Galloway

We typically don’t think of cancer as a disease we can catch from another person, but that isn’t necessarily the case for animals living on the sea floor.

According to a new study in the journal Nature, cancer can spread among multiple species of shellfish.

The study showed that in quite a number species of bivalves, including mussels and clams, cancer cells from infectious cells have propagated from animal to animal through sea water. The cancer, referred to as disseminated neoplasia, is a leukemia-like illness that affects bivalves in many parts of the planet.

The rarity of contagious cancer

One-to-one transmission of cancer cells is quite uncommon. Up to now, the phenomenon had only been identified in two types of mammals.

In 2015, the same team behind the new study discovered a third instance of cancer transmission in the soft shell clam (Mya arenaria) after originally suspecting the root cause behind the cancer cluster was a virus.

The team then considered if cancers in other mollusks are also brought on by contagious cells. To figure this out, the study team analyzed the DNA of cancers and normal tissue from mussels (Mytilus trossulus), cockles (Cerastoderma edule), and golden carpet shell clams (Polititapes aureus) gathered from the coasts of Canada and Spain.

In each species, the scientists uncovered the cancers were brought on by separate clones of cancer cells that were genetically unlike their hosts. They also discovered that in one species, the carpet shell clam, the contagious cancer cells originated from an associated but distinct species. The scientists determined that this cancer was as a result of cross-species transmission.

“Now that we have observed the spread of cancer among several marine species, our future research will investigate the mutations that are responsible for these cancer cell transmissions,” study author Stephen Goff, a biochemistry professor at Columbia University Medical Center, said in a news release.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Scientists make first observation of Milky Way’s supermassive black hole

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 23, 2016 Last Edited: April 17, 2018

Brian Galloway

For the first time, astronomers using a new instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have conducted observations of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, officials from the facility announced early Thursday morning.
The instrument in question is known as GRAVITY. It is part of the VLT Interferometer, and it combines light from all four of the array’s telescopes so that it can achieve the same spatial resolution and precision in measuring positions as a telescope 130 meters in diameter – a 15-fold increase over the individual telescopes’ capabilities, according to ESO officials.
“These results provide a taste of the groundbreaking science that GRAVITY will produce as it probes the extremely strong gravitational fields close to the central supermassive black hole and tests Einstein’s general relativity,” the Observatory explained. “Even from early test results, it is already clear that it will soon be producing world-class science.”
One of the primary goals of the new instrument, they added, is to conduct detailed observations of the four million solar mass black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. While experts have known the black hole’s position and mass for more than a decade, using GRAVITY to precisely measure the movement of stars orbiting the black hole will allow scientists to better analyze the gravitational field surrounding it and test the general theory of relativity.

An image of the Milky Way’s center Credit: ESO/MPE/S. Gillessen et al.

Breakthrough comes just in the nick of time

With that ultimate goal in mind, the ESO scientists are calling these first observations of the Milky Way’s black hole, which is located in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer) some 25,000 light years from Earth, “very exciting.” They have already used GRAVITY to monitor a star known as S2 as it orbits the black hole over a period of just 16 years.
These observations have demonstrated the instrument’s sensitivity, as it was able to detect this relatively faint star after just a few minutes time, and indicates that they should soon be able to use the device to gather extremely precise positions of S2 equivalent to measuring an object’s position on the Moon within a few centimeters. By doing so, they can determine whether or not the object travels around the black hole in the manner predicted by Einstein’s theory.
“It was a fantastic moment for the whole team when the light from the star interfered for the first time — after eight years of hard work,” GRAVITY’s lead scientist, Frank Eisenhauer of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, said in a statement. “First, we actively stabilized the interference on a bright nearby star, and then only a few minutes later we could really see the interference from the faint star – to a lot of high-fives.”
The timing of this breakthrough is ideal, the ESO said. In 2018, S2 will be at its closest distance from the black hole – only 17 light-hours away and moving at a velocity of nearly 30 million km per hour. At this distance, the influence of general relativity will be at its greatest and GRAVITY scientists will be able to obtain their best results at the attempt to measure two relativistic effects (the gravitational redshift and the precession of the pericentre) of the star orbiting the black hole. It will be another 16 years before a similar opportunity presents itself, the Observatory said.
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Image credit: ESO

Space

NASA discovers unexpected new mineral on Mars

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 23, 2016 Last Edited: June 23, 2016

Brian Galloway

The surprising discovery of a mineral volcanic mineral on Mars forces scientists to rethink the volcanic history of the Red Planet, researchers from NASA’s Johnson Space Center and their colleagues report in a new study.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of astronomers led by Richard Morris, a planetary scientist at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division of the US space agency, said that they discovered the mineral tridymite in a rock sample collected by the Curiosity Rover at Gale Crater.

That sample, which was collected in July 2015 from a location called “Buckskin,” came as a shock to the scientists, as tridymite is generally linked to silicic volcanism, a type of activity known about on Earth but not believed to have been important or even present on the Red Planet.

By finding it, the NASA-led group (which also included scientists from the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and elsewhere) has evidence suggesting Mars could have been home to explosive volcanoes capable of leaving behind the silica mineral.

Credit: NASA

Searching for alternative explanations for tridymite’s presence

“On Earth, tridymite is formed at high temperatures in an explosive process called silicic volcanism,” Morris said in a statement, adding that Mount St. Helens in Washington and the Satsuma-Iwojima volcano in Japan are two such volcanoes. “The combination of high silica content and extremely high temperatures in the volcanoes creates tridymite.”

On Mars, however, the tridymite “was incorporated into ‘Lake Gale’ mudstone at Buckskin as sediment from erosion of silicic volcanic rocks,” he added. “Significant amounts” of the mineral was detected in a sample collected by Curiosity on Sol 1060 (1,060 Martian days since the rover initially landed) by its X-ray diffraction instrument, the US space agency noted.

According to the authors, tridymite tends to crystallize at low pressures and high temperatures, and while it most likely formed as a result of silicic volcanism, there is at least one potential but less likely alternative: a series of processes including the high-temperature alteration of silica-rich residues of acid sulfate leaching could have resulted in tridymite formation.

The researchers examined Earth-based evidence to see whether or not the mineral could actually form at lower temperatures from geologically reasonable processes other than silicic volcanism, but found that this was unlikely. Nonetheless, they said that they are planning to continue to look for alternative methods to explain how tridymite could have formed without extreme heat.

“I always tell fellow planetary scientists to expect the unexpected on Mars,” said Doug Ming, ARES chief scientist at Johnson and co-author of the new study. “The discovery of tridymite was completely unexpected. This discovery now begs the question of whether Mars experienced a much more violent and explosive volcanic history during the early evolution of the planet than previously thought.”

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Science

Team finds 4,000 year old art gallery in Siberia

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 22, 2016 Last Edited: June 22, 2016

Brian Galloway

More than 20 ancient pictographs have been discovered in a remote region of Siberia on the Largi River near the village of Gorbitsa, according to The Siberian Times.

Well, technically speaking, they have been discovered multiple times over the millennia, but most recently (as in, three years ago) scientists found the site and have been researching it carefully before making it known to the public.

“We now have a complete copy, with which we can work already to study the images, and analyse the plot (depicted in these pictures),” said one of the researchers, Dr. Sergei Alkin from Novosibirsk State University. “On the one hand, our task was to tell everyone about these amazing petroglyphs, brought to the study by other scientists. On the other hand, we wanted this rock art to remain undamaged with no marks and drawings left by tourists.”

As for the number of vertical lines above the horizontal line, it is quite possible that these show dugout canoes with people sitting in them.’ Picture: Sergei Alkin

What do the images mean?

The images are composed of red and orange ocher—a naturally-occurring pigment composed partially of ferric oxide (sometimes called rust). They seem to depict ancient humans, a bull, a tree, and some birds, although many of them are up for debate.

“Of course, we must understand that interpretation of these images is not easy,” said Alkin. “Central in the composition are the anthropomorphic images. It is difficult to say definitely who they represent: the hunters or spirits? In particular, there is a figurine, close to which is depicted a circle – a solar sign, the sign of the sun. It has a cross inside. The glyph may represent shaman drums in these cultures. So it is possible to assume that the figure with the solar sign depicts a shaman with a drum.”

Another puzzling image involves something that might resemble a modern comb, with several dots above it. The dots may simply be a method of bookkeeping—perhaps something like the artist’s number of cattle, according to a Novosibirsk State University release.

The experts kept the ancient art gallery discovery under wraps for three years to preserve the integrity of the site as they returned for more trips to study the intriguing drawings. Picture: Sergei Alkin

“As for the number of vertical lines above the horizontal line, it is quite possible that these show dugout canoes with people sitting in them,” said Alkin to the Times. “Anyway, this is how such images have been interpreted by colleagues in other regions. There is only one such image known in Trans-Baikal region so far.”

While it isn’t entirely certain who created the pictographs—perhaps people of Tungus or Mongolian origin—preliminary testing offers up better evidence of a date: 4,000 years old. And it’s pretty unique relative to finds in the area to boot.

“The rock art at Largi river is a rare site,” said Alkin. “It is large and contains many images, while generally…the rocks in this area show between one and three poorly preserved drawings. Secondly, we are pleased that it is perfectly preserved.”

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Image credit: Sergei Alkin

Space

Scientists watch ‘dormant’ black hole consume a star

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 22, 2016 Last Edited: June 22, 2016

Brian Galloway

For the first time, astronomers have conducted detailed observations of a tidal disruption event involving a once-dormant supermassive black hole – a breakthrough which could soon make it possible to reliably measure the spin of these gravitationally-dense regions of spacetime.

Nearly 90 percent of the largest black holes in the universe are dormant, meaning that they are not actively consuming matter or giving off radiation. In some cases, however, a star can wander too close to these sleeping giants and whet their appetites, so to speak, causing a tidal disruption event – a phenomenon in which the star is yanked apart by the black hole’s tidal forces.

Now, a team of astronomers from the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland have become the first scientists to successfully document X-rays in the depths of a previously- dormant black hole’s newly-acquired accretion disk (the large cloud of star remains encircling the black hole) following such an event.

Not only does this mark the first time that such observations have been made for a dormant supermassive black hole, but the researchers explained in a statement that the techniques they used could ultimately be used to accurately measure black hole spin. Their findings have been published in Wednesday’s advanced online edition of the journal Nature.

Astronomers surprised at the location of black hole X-rays

As part of their research, Erin Kara, a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow in astronomy at UMD and the Joint Space-Science Institute, and her colleagues were able to determine the shape and activity of the accretion disk near Swift J1644+57, a tidal disruption which took place in the center of a tiny galaxy located approximately 3.8 billion light years away in the Draco constellation.

“Most tidal disruption events don’t emit much in the high-energy X-ray band,” Kara explained in a statement. “But there have been at least three known events that have, and this is the first and only such event that has been caught at its peak.”

“NASA’s Swift satellite saw it first and triggered the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and NASA’s Suzaku satellite to target it for follow-up. So we have excellent data,” she added. “We’re lucky that the one event we have is showing us all these exciting new things.”

Kara noted that she was surprised that X-rays would be able to originate in the depths of a tidal disruption’s accretion disk, as astronomers had long believed that during such an event, energetic X-rays would be created further away from the black hole in its relativistic jets (large beams of particles that are ejected by the black hole and which reach close to the speed of light).

“Before this result, there was no clear evidence that we were seeing into the innermost regions of the accretion disk. We thought the emission was from the jet pointed at us, or further away and not close to the central black hole,” she explained. “This new study shows us that, actually, we can see this reverberation at work very close to the central black hole.”

How this breakthrough could help measure black hole spin

Previously, the majority of our knowledge about supermassive black holes had come from a relatively small percentage of objects that are actively accumulating and consuming matter, the study authors explained. However, research suggests that such black holes only make up about one-tenth of the total population, making the new data extremely significant.

“Understanding the black hole population in general is important,” said study co-author Chris Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at UMD. “Black holes have played an important role in how galaxies evolved. So even if they’re dormant now, they weren’t before. If we only look at active black holes, we might be getting a strongly biased sample. It could be that these black holes all fit within some narrow range of spins and masses. So it’s important to study the entire population to make sure we’re not biased.”

Because the Swift J1644+57 event resulted in the uber-quick consumption of the shredded star, it exceeded the Eddington Limit (the theoretical maximum for how quickly a black hole is able to consume matter) for a brief period of time – a discovery which could help experts determine how supermassive black holes are able to grow to sizes several million times that of our sun.

Kara and her colleagues used a technique known as X-ray reverberation mapping to outline the inside of the accretion disk. This method is similar to the way in which scientists map seafloors using the intervals between echoes, except that instead of sound, they detected delays between the arrivals of X-ray signals reflected from iron atoms in the accretion disk. While they are not yet able to use this technique to measure the speed and direction of a black hole’s spin, they are anticipating being able to do so in the near future.

“Looking at tidal disruption events with reverberation mapping might help us probe the spin of black holes in the future,” said Reynolds. “But just as importantly, we can follow along after an event and watch how the accretion disk spins down and energy dissipates as the black hole returns to a quiescent state. We might finally be able to observe all of these various states that, so far, we only know from theory textbooks.”

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Image credit: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State U.

Technology

China’s new supercomputer blows everything else out the water

Written By: John Hopton

Published Date: June 22, 2016 Last Edited: June 22, 2016

Brian Galloway

Until very recently the fastest supercomputer in the world belonged to China. It has now been replaced by the Sunway TaihuLight – also from China. In fifteen years China has gone from having zero supercomputers in the top 500 to having more than any other country.

Oh, and the TaihuLight uses chips made solely in China.

It will be 2018 before anything faster comes online in the United States, by which time, of course, China will in all likelihood have made further huge strides ahead. China’s latest effort is five times faster than anything else on the planet.

Not that this should all be about national pride or power – such advancements should benefit everyone – but some in the US are getting concerned.

“Massive domestic gains in computing power are necessary to address the national security, scientific, and healthcare challenges of the future,” said Rep. Randy Hultgren, a Republican from Illinois whose American Super Computing Leadership Act has twice been passed by the House of Representatives. “It is increasingly evident that America is losing our lead.”

What will the supercomputer be used for?

For those happy to revel in China’s success, the figures are staggering.

The TaihuLight boasts a theoretical peak performance of 125 petaflops, 10,649,600 cores, and 1.31 petabytes of primary memory.

In comparison, a MacBook uses four cores and Mira, the sixth fastest computer in the world, harnesses just under 800,000.

“At one level they’re not very different from your desktop system,” said Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility where Mira resides. “They have a processor that looks very similar to the one in a laptop or desktop system—there’s just a lot of them connected together.”

As for the software, “You can use a factory as an example,” explained Papka. “A lot of people are working on putting a car together at the same time, but they’re all working in a coordinated manner. People who write programs for supercomputers have to get all of the pieces working together.”

And plenty of those very talented people are naturally interested in contributing to China’s new baby. Three of the six finalists for a prestigious high-performance computing award are applications built to run on TaihuLight.

So what will the incredible supercomputer be used for (other than putting the rest of the world to shame)?

According to TaihuLight’s stewards, advanced manufacturing, Earth-system modeling and weather forecasting, life science, and big data analytics will be major goals.

“Each time we make an increase, we can add more science to the problem,” Papka believes. “For the foreseeable future, until we can model the real world on a quark-for-quark basis, we’ll need more powerful computers.”

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Image credit: Sunway Taihulight System

Science

Salts on Mars: Are they a good thing or a bad thing?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 22, 2016 Last Edited: June 22, 2016

Brian Galloway

Perchlorates, a type of salt that is a key component of solid rocket propellant, could potentially be hazardous to astronauts travelling to Mars and those colonizing the Red Planet, according to features published earlier this week by Astronomy Magazine and Science World Report.

Powerful oxidizing agents produced commercially here on Earth, perchlorates are reportedly 10,000 times more abundant in Martian soil than they are here on Earth, which could be both a good thing and a bad thing for people travelling to and living and working on the Red Planet.

In addition to being useful as a propellant, perchlorates could be broken down to release oxygen to make the air breathable for people, Astronomy explained. However, as potassium perchlorate can be prescribed by doctors to treat hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid), men and women exposed to high levels of the substance could experience hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid).

Furthermore, while high concentrations of these salts allow water to remain in its liquid state on Mars, it would be toxic to drink and would not support microbial life, Science World Report said. They have also been linked to agranulocytosis and aplastic anemia, two conditions that involve a life-threatening deficiency of blood cells, and are especially dangerous to breastfeeding children.

These health issues could be “devastating for Martian colonists,” Astronomy explained.

“This means that we’ll have to take extreme precaution to remove perchlorate from Mars water and dirt, or from any crops that we grow in it,” the publication added. “Dust will have to be kept from contaminating air circulating through life support systems. Future explorers and colonists will have to do all of this, not only as they capture the perchlorate in order to reap its benefits.”

Salty streaks on Mars could be a great thing for initial colonists or a huge danger. Credit: NASA

Many potential benefits, but health risks and other issues remain

Perchlorate was first detected on the surface of Mars in 2009 when NASA’s Phoenix lander identified the salt and found that it was abundant. Then, last September, the space agency’s MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) found high concentrations of perchlorate in recurring slope lineae (RSL) features formed from relatively recent flowing water on the planet’s surface.

Changes to physical chemistry caused by dissolving salts enable subsurface liquid water to reach the surface and occasionally pool as lakes or streams, thus demonstrating how water on Mars can remain in the liquid state long enough to alter the landscape. By tracing the sources of these salts, scientists could find underground water, and potentially native microorganisms, but it would also affect the choice of a landing site and could result in terraforming on the Red Planet.

The energy and oxygen contained in perchlorate could be the difference between the success and the failure of an early colony as previous studies indicated the resources found on the planet will be vital, especially when it comes to producing enough fuel to transport astronauts or colonists from Mars back to Earth or operating vehicles designed to explore the planet.

From 1981 through 2011, ammonium perchlorate was the primary propellant used in the space shuttles’ solid rocket boosters, Astronomy said, and will likely be used to power smaller ships used to carry Mars travelers off the surface and back to a larger, orbiting vessel for the voyage back home. Since it has four oxygen atoms per molecule, these salts could also be used in life-support systems, but as noted above, they are in many ways a double-edged sword.

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Image credit: NASA/University of Arizona

Science

Study finds farming was invented in two places at once

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: June 21, 2016 Last Edited: June 21, 2016

Brian Galloway

A new study out of Harvard Medical School has found that, according to the genomes of 44 ancient Middle Eastern individuals, farming was actually invented twice—independently by two different groups.

Around 11,000 years ago, one of the most important revolutions in human history occurred: the Neolithic revolution, when our ancestors made the shift from hunting and gathering in nomadic groups to a more sedentary lifestyle. Early farmers were able to slowly domesticate a variety of crops and animals—which then led to their spread around the world about 9,000 years ago.

And for a long time, the prevailing notion was that all of this arose from one place: the southern Levant region (which includes Israel and Jordan). Of course, dozens of studies have examined this idea, but the hot climate of the area makes it difficult to extract DNA from skeletal remains of the time period, meaning hard data is sometimes a challenge to come by.

Which is where recent advances paved the way for this latest genomic study, which can be found in a preprint on the bioRxiv server. As it turns out, scientists recently discovered that one particular bone in the body is extremely good at preserving DNA across millennia: a tiny ear bone known as the petrous. Thanks to this, Harvard researchers Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich were able to extract and analyze the genomes of 44 Middle Eastern individuals who lived 3,500 to 14,000 years ago.

Farming was such a good idea that two groups thought of it at the same time. (Credit: Unsplash)

The surprising development of farming

The results were a bit surprising. Two groups of Neolithic farmers emerged—one in the southern Levant, and another across the Zagros Mountains in western Iran—which had stark differences in their genetic makeup. In fact, the Zagros farmers were much more closely related to hunter-gatherers who had lived in the region before the Neolithic. Of course, in farming had started in the Levant and was transmitted as farmers spread from there, one would expect to find close similarities between the DNA of the Levant and Zagros groups—which clearly was not the case.

The researchers have taken this to signify, then, that farming did not develop in the southern Levant alone, but also independently developed in the Zagros region.

“There has been a school of thought arguing that everything happens first in the southern Levant and everyone learns how to be farmers from this initial dispersal,” said Roger Matthews, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, UK, who co-directs the Central Zagros Archaeological Project in Iran, according to Nature.

“But the archaeological evidence shows very strong local traditions that are clearly not in communication with each other, persisting for centuries if not millennia.”

However, there is a good likelihood that these independent farmers did not stay in separate bubbles, but actually mixed together genetically in eastern Turkey. From there, the farmers migrated to Europe, bringing their now-combined farming techniques with them. Others spread into what is now the Eurasian steppe, India, Pakistan, and East Africa.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Electric field stripped Venus of its ocean, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 21, 2016 Last Edited: June 21, 2016

Brian Galloway

In what is being hailed as an “amazing” and “shocking” discovery, researchers at NASA and University College London (UCL) have discovered an “electric wind” around Venus that may have played an essential role in stripping the oceans from the planet’s surface.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, are based on new findings from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express mission which revealed that the planet has an electric field strong enough to accelerate oxygen to speeds fast enough that the heavy, electrically-charged component of water can escape its gravity.

“It’s amazing and shocking,” Glyn Collinson, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who previously worked at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement. “We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space. This is something that definitely has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars.”

Venus is similar to Earth in terms of its size and gravity, and according to the US space agency, there is evidence that it may have once had oceans of water on its surface. However, due to the planet’s average surface temperatures of roughly 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius), any such ocean would have boiled off long ago, rendering the planet uninhabitable.

Furthermore, its atmosphere has between 10,000 and 100,000 times less water than that of the atmosphere surrounding Earth, despite the fact that its pressure is roughly 100 times higher. So what caused that steam to disappear? As it turns out, this newly discovered electric wind might have been the culprit, as Collison said that it was “capable” of pulling off such a feat.

Findings could help identify habitable zones of distant stars

According to the study authors, when water molecules reach a planet’s upper atmosphere, the light from the sun breaks them down into faster-moving hydrogen ions and heavier oxygen ions that tend to be carried off by the electric field. By studying electrons flowing away from Titan, Mars, and Venus, the researchers found that in most cases, those ions are lost forever.

Collison said that his team discovered that this mechanism is responsible for the escape of more than 100 metric tons of oxygen ions per year from Venus, and that their findings indicate that the electric field powering the phenomenon is surprisingly strong – at least five times more powerful than that found here on Earth, for reasons that scientists do not completely understand.

Venus might have been much more Earth-like in the past. Credit:

“We don’t really know why it is so much stronger at Venus than Earth but, we think it might have something to do with Venus being closer to the sun, and the ultraviolet sunlight being twice as bright,” said Collison, whose team made the discovery using the electron spectrometer on the Venus Express’ ASPERA-4 instrument. “It’s a challenging thing to measure and even at Earth to date all we have are upper limits on how strong it might be.”

By using the spectrometer to monitor electrons flowing out of the upper atmosphere, the authors noticed that the electrons were not escaping at their expected speeds because those electrons had been tugged on by the planet’s electric field. They measured the change in velocity, discovering that the field was far stronger than previously expected. The findings could allow astronomers to improve the estimated size and location of habitable zones around other stars.

“Even a weak electric wind could still play a role in water and atmospheric loss at any planet,” said co-author and Goddard scientist Dr. Alex Glocer. “It could act like a conveyor belt, moving ions higher in the ionosphere where other effects from the solar wind could carry them away.”

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Image credit: NASA

Science

Study shows new crops can’t keep up with climate change

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: June 21, 2016 Last Edited: April 17, 2018

Brian Galloway

Climate change is outpacing scientists’ ability to develop new crops capable of coping with the warming conditions, and unless action is taken quickly to speed up the introduction of improved grains, yields will significantly decrease over the next decade, a new study warns.

Professor Andy Challinor of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds and his colleagues reported Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, it typically takes between 10 and 30 years to breed and adopt a new crop variety.

In the meantime, the temperatures across the tropics have been steadily increasing, meaning that by the time the crop is ready for planting, it ends up growing in conditions far warmer than it was originally developed in. Based on available farming data and other information, the study authors devised best and worst case scenarios for current crop breeding systems.

They found that crop duration could become significantly shortened in as little as two years time in some parts of the world, and within the next 15 years in the majority of corn-growing regions of Africa, according to BBC News. Only the most optimistic scenarios allow for crop development to keep pace with climate change through 2050.

“The actual changes in yield may be different but this effect is there, the impact of this change in duration will occur unless breeding changes,” Challinor explained to the UK media outlet. “The durations will be shorter than what they were bred for – by the time they are in the field they are, in terms of temperature, out of date.”

Crops in Africa will be the first to be hit by climate change. Credit: (Francesco Fiondella/International Research Institute for Climate and Society)

Identifying the problem and searching for a solution

While Challinor’s team focused on African-based corn production, they said that the underlying processes affecting that industry are applicable to crop growth throughout the tropics. Gradually rising temperatures and increased drought and heatwave frequency will shorten the time between planting and harvesting, resulting in fewer crops, they said in a statement.

Why does it typically take at least 10 years for newly-developed crops to be ready to be planted by farmers? The authors told BBC News that it is due in part to the limited number of crops that required government testing and market access restrictions. While they noted that it is important to speed up development, they also said scientists need to do a better job of predicting the future climate conditions when working on their new crop types.

“We can use the climate models to tell us what the temperatures are going to be. We can then put those temperature elevations into the greenhouses and then we can breed the crops at those temperatures,” Challinor said. “People are beginning to do this, but this paper provides the hard evidence of the necessity of it.”

He also said that turning to genetic modification is not necessarily the answer, telling BBC News that while it would help researchers “get a new variety of crop faster… it doesn’t get you out of the testing requirement.” In fact, he added, “the testing may in fact be greater and it doesn’t help it all with farmers accessing seeds and markets – the problem will remain even for a magic GM crop.”

Instead, he and his colleagues propose investing more in agricultural research so that improved seeds can be developed at a faster rate, allowing farmers to try and stay ahead of climate change. They also suggest that crop developers should start using climate simulations to predict future conditions, then heat greenhouses to those temperatures when working on new crop varieties so that they are already acclimated to the conditions when first used in the real world.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Fibromyalgia

5 summer activities seniors with fibro should try to avoid

Written By: Sara Snoddy

Published Date: June 20, 2016 Last Edited: June 20, 2016

Preston Hemmerich

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Image: Halfpoint/Shutterstock

Summer is the season of fun—for most people. It’s a time for young adults to break out the bikinis and swimming trunks and hit the beach and a time for families to vacation, vacation, vacation. But for people with fibromyalgia, notably seniors, summer fun doesn’t always have the same connotations. Especially if you’re a woman, since fibromyalgia is more prevalent among us, you have a higher chance of being called the “debbie downer” of at group functions, or you may be considered “boring”. Seniors with fibromyalgia in particular are likely to know what it feels like to miss out on activities they can’t take part in for fear of aggravating their symptoms, or from just sheer exhaustion.

That’s not to say you’ll be labeled the buzzkill at every gathering, or that you can’t enjoy yourself. But it does mean there are some activities you should take part in with moderation. Most of the time a person with fibro on their own can pace themselves when spending time outdoors, but in larger families there is sometimes pressure to do more than you may be able to handle, and we know how demanding grandchildren can be. Communication among adult family members is key in those situations, as well as staying hydrated and eating healthy. For seniors with fibro, or anyone, taking care of your body in the summer heat is very important. Here are some outdoor activities that seniors with fibro may want to avoid in the sweltering summer months:

Hiking

Whether you’re an ambitious middle-ager, a young upstart, or a grey-hair, hiking is actually a universal activity that many people enjoy at some point in their life. But your age bracket will probably determine where, exactly, you choose to get your trail on. For seniors with fibro, smaller trails with fewer hills are more desirable, and, depending on where you travel to, it can actually be a peaceful experience. The Great Smokies of the larger Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina offer a scenic atmosphere and down-home feel of the surrounding towns that appeal to both young families and those more advanced in their life. With many streams, waterfalls, and rocks to stop and admire from pull over points, seniors with fibro can pace easily themselves while being shielded from the sun the deeper they enter the mountains.

Outdoor music

Old timers may not think they should worry about this one, but there are actually a lot of chances to run across some form of live entertainment these days. Select outdoor shopping centers even have scheduled musicians to serenade shoppers, and most come complete with convenient rockers and calming fountains. Think Branson Landing in Branson, Missouri, a popular destination for older adults with its Vegas-without-the-debauchery vibe it has. But outdoor arenas or sitting areas don’t always have shade, making the summer months an uncomfortable time to visit for some. Whether you’re just passing the time while your wife shops or if you actually planned on going to that Jazz Festival on the square, be sure to bring a hat if you decide to stay and make sure you buy a bottle of water from a vender.

Gardening

Gardening might seem a little out of place here, as most believe it to be a calming hobby. Most gardening takes place in the spring and summer months, the hottest time of the year, and fibromyalgia causes the body to have heat sensitivity. For seniors with fibro, gardening may actually end up more of a frustrating experience than an enjoyable one. Fibro causes muscle pain and soreness, and if you’ve ever tended to a flower bed you know that requires a fair amount of bending over and kneeling on hard soil. If you’re a true green thumb, you might be better off keeping a small herb garden in in the backyard or sideyard and leave the landscaping to a paid expert.

Parks

It’s always amazing to see that senior couple still keeping up with youngsters and riding coasters at some theme park, but it’s a rarity. Most people above sixty are not likely to ride a rough roller coaster with good reason, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get roped into walking around the park all day while everyone else is having fun. There’s a couple of solutions to this problem depending on how high your tolerance and patience is: 1) you can agree to watch the grandkids and take them on the kiddie rides; 2) you find a park that offers more than just thrills—Dollywood and Busch Gardens at Williamsburg, Virginia, come to mind; 3) you just stay away and save yourself the hassle. Who really wants to walk around a theme park in the middle of the summer anyway?

Boating

Boating isn’t usually a culprit for worsening fibro symptoms, but if we get down to the brass tax, there’s actually a lot of ways this activity can cause problems for seniors with fibro. For one, not all boat owners invest in shade covers, and that alone can cause people with fibro to easily overheat. But going out in the cooler months may not be the answer either. Fibro often causes sensitivity to cold as well, and if a boat such as a pontoon has no place for you to get out of the wind, it can have a similar effect as heat would. In fact, colder weather is probably worse considering the cold can make joints and muscles stiff. Of course, if you’re rich and own a yacht, or have nice friends, you can just come sail away.