Dark matter-rich dwarf galaxy found hidden in halo of lensing galaxy

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 15, 2016 Last Edited: April 15, 2016

Brian Galloway

Evidence of a dwarf dark galaxy hidden in the halo of another larger, gravitationally-lensed galaxy may be the first of many such objects to be discovered by astronomers, and could help solve the mystery of dark matter, National Radio Astronomy Observatory officials have revealed.

As the NRAO explained in a statement Thursday, they discovered subtle distortions in an image of SDP.81, an active star-forming galaxy located 12 billion light-years away that is being lensed by a massive foreground galaxy located a relatively close four billion light-years from Earth.

The image, which was taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) as part of ALMA’s Long Baseline Campaign in 2014, was of a phenomenon called an Einstein ring. However, as Stanford University researcher Yashar Hezaveh and his colleagues explain in a new study, it also contained hidden evidence of a dwarf dark galaxy in the nearby galaxy’s halo.

“We can find these invisible objects in the same way that you can see rain droplets on a window. You know they are there because they distort the image of the background objects,” the Stanford astronomer said. His team’s research is currently available online and has also been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

Dark matter content may have made dwarf galaxies hard to find

While in the case of a rain drop, the image distortions are caused by refraction, Hezaveh and his colleagues explained that the distortions in the image are generated by the gravitational influence of dark matter – mysterious particles that do not interact with visible light and which are thought to comprise as much as 80 percent of the total mass of the universe.

Although dark matter has yet to be identified, it does have appreciable mass and can be identified by the gravitational influence it exerts on other objects, the study authors explained. So they used thousands of computers to hunt for subtle anomalies with consistent and measurable counterparts in each band of radio data, which they used to analyze the halo of the lensing galaxy.

They discovered a lump, roughly one one-thousanth the mass of the Milky Way, in this primarily star-free region surrounding the galaxy. Based on its estimated mass, its relationship to the larger galaxy and the lack of an optical counterpart, Hezaveh’s team believes that this anomaly may be an extremely faint, dark-matter rich satellite of the lensing galaxy. Theoretically, the majority of galaxies should contain such dwarf galaxies, but detecting them has been difficult.

“This discrepancy between observed satellites and predicted abundances has been a major problem in cosmology for nearly two decades,” said co-author Neal Dalal, a researcher at the University of Illinois. “If these dwarf objects are dominated by dark matter, this could explain the discrepancy while offering new insights into the true nature of dark matter.”

“This is an amazing demonstration of the power of ALMA,” Hezaveh added. “We are now confident that ALMA can efficiently discover these dwarf galaxies. Our next step is to look for more of them and to have a census of their abundance to figure out if there is any possibility of a warm temperature for dark matter particles.”

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Image Credit: Y. Hezaveh, Stanford Univ.; ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ); NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

Science

Mystery sphere comes from 1,500 year old lost civilization, archaeologist claims

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 14, 2016 Last Edited: April 14, 2016

Brian Galloway

An enormous stone sphere found outside of the Bosnian town of Zavidovici is drawing global excitement—and skepticism.

The discovery was made by archaeologist Semir Osmanagich, also known as “Bosnian Indiana Jones”—and he claims it’s proof of a lost civilization dating back 1,500 years ago or more. According to a recent blog post, Osmanagich has been researching the phenomenon of stone balls for 15 years, a focus that has led him from Antarctica to Albania. After returning to Bosnia, he claims he’s found similar spheres in twenty different locations around the country.

Most, however, have been found near Zavidovici. According to Osmanagich, 80 of them used to exist near the small town in the 1930s.

“Most of them have been destroyed in 1970s after rumours of gold being hidden in the middle of them, some were taken by locals and moved to their backyards,” he wrote in the blog post.

Now, only eight survive in the forest around the town. The most recently excavated sphere, though, is the most massive stone ball ever found in Europe, according to Osmanagich.

“Preliminary results show the radius to be between 1.2 – 1.5 meters,” he wrote. “Materials have not been analyzed yet. However, brown and red color of the ball point to very high content of the iron. So, the density has to be very high, close to the iron which is 7,8 kg/c.c…Mass comes to be over 30 tons !

“It makes this Bosnian stone ball the most massive in Europe. However, if further lab testing shows higher content of iron, than this will be the biggest stone ball in the World surpassing those in Costa Rica (35 tons) and Mexico (40 tons).”

Which Osmanagich believes is an incredibly significant discovery.

“First, it would be another proof that Southern Europe, Balkan and Bosnia in particular, were home for advanced civilizations from distant past and we have no written records about them. Secondly, they had high technology, different than ours.”

Skeptics abound

But many experts aren’t buying what he’s selling. Osmanagich has made some wild claims in the past, the most infamous of which being that Bosnia’s Visoko Valley actually contained extremely ancient pyramids connected by underground tunnels—an idea which revealed no proof of human shaping following an excavation.

“There is some genuine archaeology on the hill and I’m told it’s medieval, possibly Bronze Age or Roman,” said Anthony Harding, the president of the European Association of Archaeologists, to Telegraph.co.uk, in regards to the pyramids. “But the speculation that there could be a 12,000-year-old structure beneath is a complete fantasy and anyone with basic knowledge of archaeology or history should recognize that.”

His most recent claims are quickly garnering similar criticism. Experts from the University of Manchester told MailOnline that the spherical stones could easily be the result of concretion—a natural process in which rock is formed by rain and other precipitation mixing with natural mineral cement and sediment, and which often results in spherical objects. The most famous example of this is the Koutu boulders in New Zealand.

Other experts told MailOnline that the round shape is also easily explainable by spheroidal weathering—a natural form of chemical weathering that leads to the formation of spherical layers of decayed rock.

But Osmanagich still believes he knows the truth. “[T]hey new [sic] the power of geometrical shapes, because the sphere is one of the most powerful shapes along with pyramidal and conical shapes. No wonder, that pyramids and tumulus phenomena can also be found in Bosnia.

“While visiting the site group of dowsers were recorded that aura field improve and grow when exposed to the vicinity of stone ball. It seems that ancient did one more thing better than us. They new [sic] Planetary energies better, living in the harmony with our Mother Earth.”

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Image credit: Semir Osmanagic

Science

Ancient Mongolian mummy discovered in Altai Mountains

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 14, 2016 Last Edited: April 14, 2016

Brian Galloway

Researchers have announced the discovery of the 1,500-year-old remains of a human female, believed to be of Turkik origin, in the Altai Mountains, and while the find itself is historic, it is not the only reason the that the find has been garnering attention.

As B. Sukhbaatar, a researcher at Khovd Museum who studied the remains, told the Siberian Times, the ancient remains were discovered wrapped in felt at an altitude of more than 2,800m in the mountain range connecting Siberia with Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

Credit: Khovd Museum

Researchers believe that the subject was female, but Sukhbaatar said that they will not know for certain until the body is carefully unwrapped and studied further. However, his team is hailing it as the first complete Turkik burial ever discovered in Central Asia, and he added that the person “was likely a woman, because there is no bow in the tomb.”

Also in the grave, the archaeologists discovered a saddle, a bridle, a clay vase, a wooden bowl, an iron kettle, a trough, the remains of an entire horse, four different sets of Mongolian clothing, a sheep’s head, pillows, and a felt travel bag filled with lamb remains and goat bones.

A spread of some of the artifacts found with the mummy. Credit: Khovd Museum

Detail on the inside of a saddle bag. Credit: Khovd Museum

Wait… are those Adidas?

One interesting note that has captured the attention of publications such as the Daily Mail and the New York Daily News, as well as countless social media users all over the world, is the method in which the mummy’s feet were wrapped, and its similarity to a modern-day pair of sneakers.

Naturally, some users quipped (at least, we hope they were joking) that this might be evidence of time travel, with one even wondering if one of the Doctor’s companions from the sci-fi TV show Doctor Who might have accidentally been left behind in ancient Mongolia. Sadly, the mummy is not actually wearing Adidas sneakers, but there is still plenty to get excited about.

Sukhbaatar called the discovery of the remains “a very rare phenomenon” and called it “the first complete Turkik burial at least in Mongolia – and probably in all Central Asia.” He said that the horse was a four- to eight-year-old mare that “clearly” had been “deliberately sacrificed.”

He told the Times that they found four coats that were made of cotton, and interestingly enough, that camel wool has been used in the garments alongside sheep wool. They dated the items found buried with the person, coming up with “a preliminary date of around the 6th century AD.” This discovery provides new insight into “the beliefs and rituals of Turkics,” Sukhbaatar added.

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Image credit: Siberian Times

Science

UK couple discovers $70,000 chunk of whale vomit

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 14, 2016 Last Edited: April 14, 2016

Brian Galloway

Typically, when a husband and wife encounter vomit, they’re far from excited – but when said vomit comes from a whale, making it worth up to $70,000 (£50,000) due to its rarity and desirability as an ingredient in perfumes (that’s a different story entirely).

According to The Guardian and the International Business Times, Lancashire natives Gary and Angela Williams were walking along Middleton Sands beach when they picked up the pungent scent of rotting fish. Rather than turning around and heading for more pleasant-smelling pastures, they chose to follow the odor and found a grey-colored lump about the size of a rugby ball.

They had read about whale vomit, also known as ambergris, in their local newspaper and decided to wrap the object up in a scarf and take it home. Perfume makers use ambergris in their products to try to make scents last longer, but the substance is very rare, and thus can be quite valuable. In this case, the 1.57 kg lump found by the couple could net them well over $70,000.

“It was a bit of a shock,” Gary Williams told the Daily Mirror. “It was down a section of the beach where no one really walks. It smells bad though. It’s a very distinctive smell, like a cross between squid and farmyard manure. It feels like a rock hard rubber ball. Its texture is like wax, like a candle. When you touch it you get wax sticking to your fingers.”

‘Floating gold’ lives up to its name

He and his wife are said to be negotiating with potential buyers in France and New Zealand, and he said that if they are able to earn a considerable sum of money by selling the ambergris, that it would “go a long way towards buying us a static caravan. It would be a dream come true.”

This isn’t the first lump of whale vomit found in the region, according to the Guardian. In 2013, a 2.7 kg piece was found on the shore in Morecambe Bay, not far from where the Williams family was walking. It was valued at close to $170,000 (£120,000). A 1.1 kg chunk of ambergris found in Wales sold for more than $15,500 (£11,000) during an auction in September 2015.

Also known as “floating gold,” ambergris is secreted in a sperm whale’s bile duct and intestines, and is believed to make it easier for the creatures to pass hard and sharp objects they consume by accident. Once a whale vomit, the ejected materials float around the ocean for several years, and ultimately harden into a smooth, grey-colored lump due to exposure to the salt water.

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Image credit: SWNS

Science

Inky the Octopus escapes aquarium in New Zealand

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 13, 2016 Last Edited: April 13, 2016

Brian Galloway

It’s not every day that you hear about an octopus on the lamb, but apparently a cephalopod named Inky from the National Aquarium of New Zealand is doing just that.

In an escape worthy of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Shawshank Redemption, Inky apparently noticed that maintenance workers accidentally left a gap at the top of his tank—and took it as an opportunity. After slipping through the gap, he slid down and slithered across the floor before squeezing his rugby-ball-sized (slightly larger than an American football) body down a six-inch (150-mm) diameter drain pipe—or at least, that’s what the aquarium staff have gathered after finding his tracks.

The Houdini of the Sea

Octopodes, incidentally, are great at squeezing into tiny places.

“As long as its mouth can fit,” Rob Yarrall, from the National Aquarium, told Stuff.co.nz. “Their bodies are squishy but they have a beak, like a parrot.”

The pipe happily leads to the sea, meaning Inky—who was taken in after being found injured in a crawfish pot in 2014—is now back home. In fact, he’s been cavorting about in the wild for about three months, as his escape was only made public yesterday.

Aquarium guests already miss him—he was popular with both the staff and visitors, according to Yarrall—but many are cheering him on, too. Octopodes are quite intelligent creatures, and often need a lot of stimulation to keep them from getting bored—and it seems like Inky may have been looking for some excitement.

“Octopuses are famous escape artists but Inky really tested the waters here,” Yarrall told The Guardian. “I don’t think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, as octopi are solitary creatures. But he is such a curious boy, he would want to know what’s happening on the outside. That’s just his personality.”

“You never know, there’s always a chance Inky could come home to us,” Yarrell added.

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Image credit: National Aquarium of New Zealand

Science

Study discovers how early humans used fire to their advantage

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 13, 2016 Last Edited: April 13, 2016

Brian Galloway

Researchers have long known that the discovery of fire was a game-changer for early humans, but exactly how our ancestors came to harness this powerful force has long been the source of heated debate. Now, a University of Utah team believes they’ve found the answer.

In a paper published Sunday by the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, lead author Christopher Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in the university’s anthropology department, and his colleagues presented a new hypothetical scenario which proposes that early humans first became reliant on flame due to Africa’s increasingly fire-prone environment some 2-3 million years ago.

As the conditions around them became drier and naturally-occurring fires started becoming more common, our ancestors began to harness the phenomenon during their search for and preparation of food. Rather than fire being an accidental or serendipitous discovery, the study authors believe that an altered landscape may have turned early humans into active pyrophiles.

Our ancestors likely would have taken advantage of natural fires

Parker’s team developed models using the optimal foraging theory to hypothesize what kinds of benefits a fire-altered landscape would provide early humans. They found that, thanks largely to the increased resources and energy provided by fire’s use, our ancestors would have been able to travel much farther, and it probably helped them expand into other parts of the world.

The new study contradicts other hypothetical scenarios, including one that suggests the first fire was the result of a spark, created by pounding rocks together, which spread to a nearby bush. As Kristen Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at Utah and senior author of the new study, pointed out in a statement , however, such proposals come up short.

“The problem we’re trying to confront is that other hypotheses are unsatisfying. Fire use is so crucial to our biology, it seems unlikely that it wasn’t taken advantage of by our ancestors,” she explained. “All humans are fire-dependent. The data show that other animals and even some of our primate cousins use it as an opportunity to eat better; they are essentially taking advantage of landscape fires to forage more efficiently.”

The scenario proposed by her team is the first to suggest that fire use was not a happy accident, and that early members of the genus Homo had to adapt to their increasingly arid and fire-prone surroundings. They reconstructed the tropical climate and vegetation that would have existed in Africa roughly 2-3 million years ago, and found evidence that allowed them to develop this new proposed scenario.

Fire would have made food easier to find, chew and digest

Recent carbon analyses of soils from this era found in parts of Ethiopia and Kenya suggest that woody plants were giving way to more tropical, fire-prone grasses between 3.6-1.4 million years ago, Parker, Hawkes and their fellow researchers explained.

When combined with drier conditions and a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, this resulted in an increased frequency of naturally-occurring fires. This trend, in turn, led ancestral humans to take advantage of its benefits, adapting to eat grassland plants and foods that had been cooked in these flames, according to the study authors.

Ultimately, early humans began to see how they could take advantage of the benefits of fire, such as the way that it exposed previously hidden holes and animal tracks, thus reducing the time they needed to spend searching for food. Furthermore, they learned that foods which had been burned were easier to chew, and in some cases, their nutrients were easier to digest.

“Evidence shows that other animals take advantage of fire for foraging, so it seems very likely that our ancestors did as well,” said Hawkes. “This scenario tells a story about our ancestors’ foraging strategies and how those strategies allowed our ancestors to colonize new habitats. It gives us more insight into why we came to be the way we are; fire changed our ancestors’ social organization and life history.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Stephen Hawking announces $100 million interstellar exploration project ‘Breakthrough Starshot’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 13, 2016 Last Edited: April 13, 2016

Brian Galloway

Famed physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, Internet billionaire Yuri Milner, and a team of top scientists recently announced a new project designed to develop and create a tiny, prototype, laser-powered spacecraft capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in just two decades.

As Space.com and the Associated Press reported, Milner and Hawking officially announced the $100 million project, Breakthrough Starshot, during a media event held on Monday. The goal is to develop hundreds of spacecraft, each weighing far less than one ounce, and then send them to the neighboring star system – some 2,000 times further than any ship has ever gone.

The spacecrafts would utilize light beams and light sails for propulsion, and would be capable of reaching velocities of nearly one-fifth the speed of light. While the project may sound somewhat far-fetched, Hawking told reporters he believes that they will be able to accomplish their mission of exploring the Alpha Centauri star system “within a generation.”

“The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars, but now we can transcend it,” the astrophysicist added, according to published reports. “Today, we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos. Because we are human, and our nature is to fly.”

Project would search for potentially habitable planets, signs of life

Overcoming that limit will be no easy task. As the Washington Post pointed out, Voyager 1 currently holds the record for distance traveled by a human-built spacecraft. While it has been able to reach interstellar space, it would still need another 40,000 years to reach the closest star to our sun, and it would have ceased functioning long before then, the newspaper said.

So how does the Breakthrough Starshot team hope to make it to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years? The goal is to make a spacecraft that is roughly the size of a wafer, attach it to an extremely thin light sail, and launch it into orbit on a mothership. The tiny spacecrafts would then be shot into space by lasers beamed from a high-altitude, ground-based facility. If they can travel 20 percent the speed of light, they could complete the 4.37 light-year voyage in just two decades.

The Laser Array in action. Credit: Breakthrough Starshot

The Breakthrough Starshot initiative is being oversee by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, a Silicon Valley-backed consortium that presents awards to researchers in the fields of life science, physics and mathematics. By sending nano-sized spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, Milner, Hawking and their colleagues hope to see if there are any planets, especially potentially habitable ones, in the star system – and, yes, they plan to look for signs of life once they get there as well.

“There’s one underlying big theme, which is looking for other life in the universe,” Milner told the Post. “But this initiative also has a theme of pure exploration behind it.” He also explained to Space.com that the spacecraft “could capture images of possible planets and other scientific data and send them back home in a beam of light.” Should the mission succeed, he added, “it will tell us as much about ourselves as it will about Alpha Centauri.”

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Image credit: Breakthrough Prize Foundation

Science

French cave paintings are 10,000 years older than we thought, oldest in the world

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 12, 2016 Last Edited: April 12, 2016

Brian Galloway

The cave drawings in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, France may be taking back the crown for the oldest animal paintings on Earth, as an international team of scientists have found new evidence that they are 10,000 years older than previously believed.

Chauvet-Pont d’Arc is a cave located in the Ardèche département, a region that is found in south-central France. Discovered in 1994, it features human hand prints as well as drawings of 14 different animal species, ranging from cave bears to big cats. It was long believed to be the oldest known human-decorated cave in the world, with its artwork estimated to be from between 22,000-18,000 BCE.

However, in 2014, a cave on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia knocked Chauvet-Pont d’Arc off its pedestal, as researchers dated its animal paintings to roughly 35,000 years old. The Sulawesi cave also contained the earliest hand stencil, coming in at about 40,000 years old.

Dating to discover the oldest cave paintings

But now, as detailed in the paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have collected and analyzed more than 350 dates obtained by radiocarbon, uranium-series, and chlorine-36 dating (techniques involving the decay of radioactive chemical elements) and thermoluminescence (which shows when certain types of minerals were last exposed to high heat, like cook fires or torch marks).

These dates—80 of which were previously unpublished—all come from 15 years of studying “objects” of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc generally related to rock art and human activity in the cave. For example, scientists dated the materials used to draw the animals, like charcoal collected from fires. They also examined things like charcoal torch marks and the bones of a variety of animals found inside the cave.

From their analysis, the researchers discovered a totally new timeline for the cave. According to their results, humans left their first marks inside the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave from 37,000 to 33,500 years ago, and then occupied the cave again from 31,000 to 28,000 years ago. Analysis of the animal bones, meanwhile, show that cave bears also liked to prowl the cave up until about 33,000 years ago—although the researchers don’t think humans and bears tried to live in the cave at the same time. (It definitely was not Paddington.)

However, dangerous rock slides drove both humans and bears away from the cave, with the mouth finally being sealed by rock around 23,500 to 21,500 years ago.

Either way, though, the new timeline of the animal cave paintings puts them in the same range as the Sulawesi ones in Indonesia, meaning Chauvet-Pont d’Arc may just contain the oldest known animal drawings on Earth.

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Image Credit: Jean-Michel Geneste, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication

Technology

WATCH: New metal foam turns a bullet to dust

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: April 12, 2016 Last Edited: April 12, 2016

Brian Galloway

Composite metal foams (CMFs) are capable of transforming an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact, according to a video recently posted to the internet.

Considering the fact that these foams can also be lighter than metal plating, the material has obvious implications for creating new kinds of body and vehicle armor, according to researchers from North Carolina State University who developed the foam.

The video features a composite armor crafted from composite metal foams stopping a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor piercing projectile fired with conventional evaluation procedures set up by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ).

“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters,” said Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State who has spent years working with CMFs. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.”

Which industries can use this material?

There are numerous areas that could benefit from an extremely light and strong armor material. For instance, applications from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste call for a material to not just be light and strong, but also effective at resisting extremely high temperatures and stopping radiation.

In 2015, with support from the Department of Energy, Rabiei revealed CMFs work well at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. A few months ago, Rabiei published a study demonstrating these metallic foams withstand fire as well as heat twice as effective as the metals they are made from.

Now that these CMFs are getting to be well understood, there might be an even bigger selection of technologies that utilize this light, tough material.

Last year, researchers at the University of Texas debuted body armor made from a different kind of bullet-stopping material made from a nanofiber-based structure tougher than Kevlar. The material can also be stretched to seven times its original length.

To create the novel material, the team twisted nanofibers into coils and yarns, which generated bonds 10 times stronger than that of a hydrogen bond.

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Image credit: North Carolina State University

Science

The International Space Station could have a timeshare by 2020

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: April 12, 2016 Last Edited: April 12, 2016

Brian Galloway

Maybe you can’t afford a summer home in outer space, but can I interest you in an affordable timeshare arrangement?

On Monday, Bigelow Aerospace and United Launch Alliance announced a partnership to put an apartment-sized living space in orbit within the next four years.

The living module, called B330, is planned to have 12,000 cubic feet of internal space and can support all manner of zero-gravity research. And yet, the module will also be designed to host space tourists.

“We are exploring options for the location of the initial B330 including discussions with NASA on the possibility of attaching it to the International Space Station (ISS),” said Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, said in a news release. “In that configuration, the B330 will enlarge the station’s volume by 30 percent and function as a multipurpose testbed in support of NASA’s exploration goals as well as provide significant commercial opportunities. The working name for this module is XBASE or Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement.”

“Our hope is that NASA would be the primary customer for that structure, and that we would be given permission to commercialize and, essentially, we would be time-sharing,” Bigelow said at the recent National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. “If we were flying a cargo mission, then we could accommodate an amateur astronaut or two.

“There are scenarios where it could be a week or two, and there are scenarios where it could be 45 days or 60 days and this would be applicable to if it were on station or if it were a free-flyer, we’d have more latitude to accommodate these kinds of things,” he added.

The Biglelow president added that the habitat module program would consider making room for large international corporations.

“We would love to see Disney have a Disney space station,” Bigelow said.

Bigelow already has a living habitat attached to the ISS, its Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), which arrived at the ISS this weekend. The module will be deployed on the exterior of the station to create more room for astronauts and experiments. The BEAM module will also showcase the technology needed to make B330 successful.

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Image credit: NASA

Science

The Bible is older than we thought, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 12, 2016 Last Edited: April 12, 2016

Brian Galloway

An analysis of biblical texts recovered from the Judahite desert fortress of Arad and dated back to approximately 600 BCE reveals that literacy was widespread at the time that the Old Testament was completed, a team of researchers from Tel Aviv University revealed in a new study.

According to the authors of the new paper, which was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scholars have long agreed that several key biblical texts were written starting in the 7th century BCE, but there has long been a debate over the precise date of their completion – were they finished before the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE?

“There’s a heated discussion regarding the timing of the composition of a critical mass of biblical texts,” co-lead investigator Professor Israel Finkelstein from TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations, explained in a statement. “To answer this, one must ask a broader question: What were the literacy rates in Judah at the end of the First Temple period? And what were the literacy rates later on, under Persian rule?”

Professor Finkelstein and his colleagues analyzed 16 inscriptions from the fortress of Arad using image processing techniques, machine learning algorithms, and other methods, and found at least six different authors were responsible for the inscriptions. As the fort was a remote outpost, the researchers concluded that basic literacy must have spread throughout the military, with even lower-ranked personnel being able to effectively read and write.

This indicates that an educational infrastructure capable of widespread literacy was present in the Kingdom of Judah prior to the destruction of the first Temple, the researchers reported. It would be another 400 years (circa 200 BCE) before a comparable level of literacy would once again be found in this region, narrowing down when the biblical texts may have been completed.

‘Several hundred’ people may have been literate during First Temple period

The content of the inscriptions, as well as the fact that six different authors were responsible for their creation, indicates that the ability to read and write existed throughout the military chain of command, study co-author Barak Sober explained. Machine-learning algorithms allowed Sober’s team to eliminate the possibility that a single individual wrote all of the texts.

Those inscriptions included a series of instructions for troop movements and the registration of expenses for food, and the tone and nature of the commands indicate that they were not written by professional scribes specializing in the craft. Based on the remote location of the fortress, the small army that would have been stationed there and the narrow time period of the writings, the researchers concluded that the literacy rate among the garrison must have been high.

“We found indirect evidence of the existence of an educational infrastructure, which could have enabled the composition of biblical texts,” said co-author Professor Eli Piasetzky with the TAU School of Physics and Astronomy. “Literacy existed at all levels of the administrative, military and priestly systems of Judah. Reading and writing were not limited to a tiny elite.”

“Now our job is to extrapolate from Arad to a broader area,” Finkelstein noted. “Adding what we know about Arad to other forts and administrative localities across ancient Judah, we can estimate that many people could read and write during the last phase of the First Temple period. We assume that in a kingdom of some 100,000 people, at least several hundred were literate.”

“Following the fall of Judah, there was a large gap in production of Hebrew inscriptions until the second century BCE, the next period with evidence for widespread literacy,” he added. “This reduces the odds for a compilation of substantial Biblical literature in Jerusalem between ca. 586 and 200 BCE.”

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Image credit: Tel Aviv University

Science

This is your brain on drugs– Researchers show LSD’s effect on the mind

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 12, 2016 Last Edited: April 12, 2016

Brian Galloway

Children of the 80s will no doubt remember the “this is your brain on drugs” television PSAs in which a man cracked and fried an egg to represent the impact that using illicit substances would have on a person’s cognitive function:

Though dubbed one of the best commercials of all time by TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, the ad was clearly not meant to provide an actual look at the damage that a drug could cause to a person’s gray matter – but scientists from Imperial College London and the Beckley Foundation have now, for the first time, visualized the effects on one such substance on the human brain.

The researchers, who reported their finding this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), conducted a series of experiments which demonstrated the impact that the psychedelic compound Lysergic acid diethylamide (also known as LSD) would have on the brain activity of 20 health volunteers being studied at a specialized research facility.

In most individuals, information from the eyes is processed by a region of the brain located near the back of the head known as the visual cortex, the study authors explained. However, in people who experience the dreamlike hallucinations commonly associated with LSD, additional parts of the brain also become involved in visual processing process, playing a role in the altered state of consciousness so often associated with use of the recreational substance.

Changes to visual processing lead to ‘altered consciousness’

As part of their research, Dr Robin Carhart-Harris from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London and his colleagues administered used a trio of neuroimaging techniques (arterial spin labeling, blood oxygen level-dependent measures, and magnetoencephalography) to analyze the brain activity of the volunteers during resting-state conditions.

“We observed brain changes under LSD that suggested our volunteers were ‘seeing with their eyes shut’ – albeit they were seeing things from their imagination rather than from the outside world,” Dr. Carhart-Harris said in a statement. “Many more areas of the brain than normal were contributing to visual processing under LSD – even though the volunteers’ eyes were closed.”

Furthermore, he added that the size of this effect “correlated with volunteers’ ratings of complex, dreamlike visions,” and that while the brain is normally comprised of “independent networks that perform separate specialized functions, such as vision, movement, and hearing,” when a person is under the influence of LSD, the individuality of those networks “breaks down,” resulting in what he described as “a more integrated or unified brain.”

Dr. Carhart-Harris said these findings suggest the observed changes underlie “the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience.” Normally, he said, the brain becomes more compartmentalized as a person ages, but the brain in the LSD state behaves more like it did during infancy.

Findings could help treat depression, psychiatric disorders

In a related study, published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, the researchers reported that they found altered visual cortex activity in people under the influence of LSD, and that the combination of the drug and music caused the region to receive more information from a part of the brain associated with mental imagery and personal memory.

As this part of the brain, the parahippocampus, communicated more with the visual cortex, the subjects reported experiencing more complex visions, such as re-living scenes from various parts of their lives, the authors said. The study marked the first time that scientists had observed the interaction between a psychedelic compound and music with the brain’s biology. They hope that the study will one day help with the development of a way to treat psychiatric disorders.

“A major focus for future research is how we can use the knowledge gained from our current research to develop more effective therapeutic approaches for treatments such as depression,” said Mendel Kaelen, a Ph. D. student and lead author of the music paper. “For example, music-listening and LSD may be a powerful therapeutic combination if provided in the right way.”

“Scientists have waited 50 years for this moment – the revealing of how LSD alters our brain biology,” added Professor David Nutt, the senior researcher on the study as well as the chair in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial. “For the first time we can really see what’s happening in the brain during the psychedelic state, and can better understand why LSD had such a profound impact on self-awareness in users and on music and art. This could have great implications for psychiatry, and helping patients overcome conditions such as depression.”

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Image credit: Imperial College London

Technology

Solar panel breakthrough generates electricity during rainstorms

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 11, 2016 Last Edited: April 11, 2016

Brian Galloway

Solar panels are revolutionizing the future of energy—just look at the solar-powered airplane Solar Impulse—but they have one major drawback. Namely: If it’s raining, they don’t generate nearly as much energy, and they can only store limited amounts of power to get through long stretches of cloud cover. (Sorry England.)

Now, according to Science News Journal, researchers from China believe they have found the solution to the rainy day blues—because they have figured out how to make energy from rain.

Generating energy during rainstorms

According to their paper in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, the answer is graphene. Graphene is a very electrically conductive material, and by adding a layer of electron-rich graphene as thin as a single atom, it allows a massive amount of electrons to flow across the surface.

Rain contains salts that separate into their ionic forms when in solution. (The classic example: NaCl, or table salt, separates into Na+ and Cl- when added to water. However, rain also contains salts with ammonium and calcium as well.) When this rainwater strikes the graphene surface, it clings to the surface, forming a double-layer pseudocapacitor. The energy difference between the layers—the electrons of the graphene and the cations in the water—is so strong, that electricity is generated.

All in all, these solar cells may mean our future may be just a little brighter, even in the rain.

“The new solar cell can be excited by incident light on sunny days and raindrops on rainy days, yielding an optimal solar-to-electric conversion efficiency of 6.53 % under AM 1.5 irradiation and current over microamps as well as a voltage of hundreds of microvolts by simulated raindrops,” wrote the authors in the paper.

Now, 6.53 percent isn’t the best efficiency on Earth—some panels can convert up to 22.5 percent of the energy they receive—but it’s definitely better than nothing.

“All-weather solar cells are promising in solving the energy crisis,” added the authors.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

How did Mars get its moons? New study holds the answer.

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: April 11, 2016 Last Edited: April 11, 2016

Brian Galloway

Phobos and Deimos, the two oddly-shaped moons circling Mars, are widely thought to have once been asteroids that were ensnared by the Red Planet’s gravity, but new research presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas last month concluded the two moons are the result of a massive collision between Mars and a Pluto-sized planetary body.

Those supporting the asteroid theory have had difficulty explaining the moons’ fairly circular orbit around Mars. If they were asteroids captured by Mars’s gravity, they would likely have irregular orbits, research has shown. One circular orbit might happen by chance, but two would be against the odds, study researcher Julien Salmon of the Southwest Research Institute told New Scientist.

Changing past moon formation models

In the past, models of a moon-forming Mars collision have shown the material tossed by a collision into an orbiting disc gradually comes back down to the planet, which means nothing would be left to form Phobos and Deimos.

In the new study, Salmon modified models used to analyze the formation of Earth’s moon, which could also be the consequence of a large collision. The models showed an impacting object with around 3 percent of the mass of Mars could generate the proper type of disc to form the two moons

The outcomes indicate that such an object, with approximately the same mass as Pluto, would toss around a thousandth of Mars’s mass into orbit, and the fringe of the disc would extend past the 15,000 mile orbit of Deimos, the outer moon.

Over time, the material closer to Mars would form into large bodies, but the planet’s gravity would ultimately pull them back down. However, the outer section of the disk would rotate quickly enough to remain it out of Mars’ gravity, and the material would coalesce into the Phobos and Deimos, according to the study.

“The idea is that Phobos and Deimos are the only two survivors of a once much larger population of satellites,” Salmon said.

The SwRI research added that an impact would also explain Mars’ relatively fast rotation and the large differences in surface heights between northern and southern hemispheres.

“It makes sense to think about a big impact for Mars,” he said.

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Image credit: NASA

Space

NASA recovers Kepler satellite from Emergency Mode

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 11, 2016 Last Edited: April 11, 2016

Brian Galloway

NASA announced that Kepler has been recovered from Emergency Mode and is now stable and operational. The team plans to conduct system tests to make sure the craft is fully operational over the coming days.

“It was the quick response and determination of the engineers throughout the weekend that led to the recovery. We are deeply appreciative of their efforts, and for the outpouring of support from the mission’s fans and followers from around the world.” claimed an official from NASA.

Thankfully this important scientific instrument will continue to operate, hopefully for years to come.

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A spacecraft emergency has been declared by the Kepler Mission, as mission engineers have discovered that the Kepler spacecraft is in Emergency Mode (EM).

As reported by NASA, the startling find was made during a scheduled contact with the spacecraft on April 7. Emergency Mode is Kepler’s lowest operational mode and uses up large amounts of fuel. The team behind the Kepler Mission is now racing to recover from EM.

Declaring a spacecraft emergency helps them to fix the problem even faster, as it grants them priority access to ground-based communications at NASA’s Deep Space Network. Of course, communication with Kepler itself isn’t easy—being almost 75 million miles (roughly 121 million kilometers) from Earth, it takes 13 minutes for signals to reach the craft and return to Earth—a delay that’s acceptable during normal operations, but potentially costly while trying to save it.

Kepler itself is a space observatory that was launched in 2009 with the goal of detecting Earth-like planets. It is equipped with a photometer that detects planets during transits with the stars they orbit– thereby dimming the light that Kepler “sees” from the stars. (Incidentally, this is how aliens could find our planet.)

By the end of its prime mission in 2012, it had detected nearly 5,000 exoplanets. In 2014, it was given a new mission titled K2, in which it searches for more exoplanets while studying other astronomical objects, like supernovae. It has continued to find more potential life-bearing planets, including 234 new candidates in 2014.

Houston, we have a problem

So far, results indicate that Kepler went into Emergency Mode about three days ago; it is unclear why this happened. Last time the mission engineers checked in on the spacecraft was April 4^th, and it was operating normally at the time. NASA has promised updates in regards to its condition as soon as they become available.

All in all, the past two weeks haven’t been great for space enthusiasts—because besides Kepler, it was recently discovered that a new Japanese satellite, Hitomi, which has an unprecedented potential to make breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, is tumbling out of control. As of yet, its engineers have not been able to recover it, either.

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Image credit: NASA

Science

Humans helped kill off Neanderthals with STDs and other diseases, study shows

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 11, 2016 Last Edited: April 11, 2016

Brian Galloway

Research published earlier this year suggested that Neanderthal genes might have boosted our immunity and given us allergies, and now new research suggests that we may have returned the favor by infecting them with diseases we transported from Africa to Europe.

In the new study, which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology this weekend, researchers from University of Cambridge and Oxford Brookes University reported that Neanderthals throughout Europe may have been infected by diseases that were brought there by Homo sapiens, and that said diseases may have contributed to their eventual demise.

Since both species were hominids, the researchers explained, it would have been easier for these pathogens make the jump from one species to another. Infections passed from modern humans to Neanderthals could have included tapeworm, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers, and herpes – all of which are chronic conditions that would have weakened the Neanderthals and made them less able to find food, thus harming the overall fitness of the species.

“Humans migrating out of Africa would have been a significant reservoir of tropical diseases,” Dr. Charlotte Houldcroft with the Cambridge Division of Biological Anthropology said Sunday in a statement. “For the Neanderthal population of Eurasia, adapted to that geographical infectious disease environment, exposure to new pathogens carried out of Africa may have been catastrophic.”

Research suggests that disease transmission predates agriculture

Dr. Houldcroft and her colleagues reviewed evidence from recent research into the genomes of various pathogens and DNA from ancient skeletal remains, and found that some of the pathogens that currently affect humans could be several thousand years older than previously believed.

As genomic analysis has confirmed that modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and that the two species exchanged genes associated with diseases, and in light of evidence that viruses moved into humans from other hominins while still in Africa, the study authors believe that it is safe to assume that Homo sapiens could – and probably did – pass diseases onto their ancient relatives.

“However, it is unlikely to have been similar to Columbus bringing disease into America and decimating native populations,” explained Dr. Houldcroft. “It’s more likely that small bands of Neanderthals each had their own infection disasters, weakening the group and tipping the balance against survival.”

She and co-author Dr. Simon Underdown, a researcher in human evolution from Oxford Brookes University, reported in their study that several infectious diseases may have been evolving along with humans and other hominids for at least tens of thousands of years. This would run contrary to the long-held view that infectious diseases exploded about 8,000 years ago, when agriculture began to supplant the hunter-gatherer way of life.

The researchers believe that diseases actually pre-date agriculture, and that many diseases that have long been thought to have originated in herd animals (including tuberculosis) actually had been originally transmitted to those creatures by humans. While Dr. Houldcroft and Underdown said that they have yet to find any concrete evidence of infectious disease transmission between humans and Neanderthals, they are convinced that, based on the overlap of time and geography and the evidence of interbreeding, that such transmission most likely took place.

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Image credit: University of Utah

Science

Tiger populations are rising for the first time in 100 years

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 11, 2016 Last Edited: April 11, 2016

Brian Galloway

For the first time in more than a century, the number of wild tigers roaming the forests of Asia has increased, researchers from the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Tiger Forum revealed Monday ahead of a major conservation conference regarding the species in New Delhi.

According to BBC News and Associated Press reports, the organizations are crediting improved efforts to protect wild tigers in several countries with helping the estimated population rise from an all-time low of about 3,200 six years ago to 3,890 during the most recent global census.

It marks the first time that tiger numbers have increased since 1900, when there were more than 100,000 tigers living in the wild, and while experts told reporters that the news was cause for celebration, they are not fully convinced that there are actually more tigers in the wild. Rather, the increase may be due to improved survey methods and an expanded search area.

“For the first time after decades of constant decline, tiger numbers are on the rise,” said Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, in a statement. “This offers us great hope and shows that we can save species and their habitats when governments, local communities and conservationists work together.”

Conservationists ‘simple formula’ appears to be paying dividends

The results of the new census, which compiles data from IUCN and the latest national tiger surveys, was presented just prior to the 3rd Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation, a conference at which government officials look for ways to accomplish the previously-established goal of doubling the global population of wild tigers by the year 2022.

WWF and Global Tiger Forum officials are crediting increases in the number of tigers in India, Russia, Nepal and Bhutan as once reason for the increased tiger totals. Nearly two-thirds of all wild tigers (2,226) were found in India alone, while Russia had 433, Nepal had 198, and Bhutan had 103, according to the survey.

Additional tigers were recorded in Bangladesh (106), China (more than 7), Indonesia (371), Laos (2), Malaysia (250), Thailand (189) and Vietnam (less than 5), the AP said. No tigers were found in Cambodia, and data from Myanmar was not included because census takers believed that their official count of 85 tigers in 2010 was too far out of date to be used.

“More important than the absolute numbers is the trend, and we’re seeing the trend going in the right direction,” Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at WWF, told the AP. Having “high-level political commitments… can make all the difference,” she added. “When you have well protected habitat and you control the poaching, tigers will recover. That’s a pretty simple formula. We know it works.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Fibromyalgia

Why Your Immune System Needs Extra Care With Fybromyalgia

Written By: Holly Case

Published Date: April 11, 2016 Last Edited: April 11, 2016

Preston Hemmerich

If you’re one of the estimated 6 to 18 million people in the U.S. with fibromyalgia, you already know how easy it is to feel tired and run down. Once you have what’s called a fibromyalgia “flare,” when your symptoms are at their worst, it can take quite a while to recover. The key to recovering from a flare is prevention, because there’s little you can do to stop a flare once it has started. Here are some points to consider about how your immune system plays a role in fibromyalgia flares.

Symptoms of Fibromyalgia Flares

Experiencing a fibromyalgia flare is very similar to feeling like you have a virus. Common symptoms include extreme fatigue, headaches, muscle aches, and a general feeling of being run down.

Other symptoms of fibromyalgia include digestive complaints including irritable bowel syndrome, depression, chemical sensitivities, allergies, and yeast/candida overgrowth.

Is Fibromyalgia an Immune System Disorder?

Fibromyalgia shares most of its symptoms with autoimmune disorders like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. However, researchers do not yet agree on a definite cause for fibromyalgia and therefore it is unknown if it’s an immune system disorder.

What we do know is that a fibromyalgia flare is more likely to occur at times when your immune system is already run down. It is unknown whether the weakened immune system is the cause of the fibro flare or is just occurring at the same time, but ultimately the goal in either case is prevention.

The Role of Stress in Fibromyalgia

Stress is one of the possible triggers for fibromyalgia flares. If you have fibromyalgia, you already know that flares often follow periods of great stress at work, at home or in your finances. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, a history of stress is strongly linked to fibromyalgia. Physical and emotional stress both put you at greater risk of having a fibro flare so it’s important to take steps to reduce your stress response.

Tips for Boosting Your Immune System

The techniques that promote a healthy immune system are many of the same ones that help us to deal with stress. If we can address stress in a productive manner and try to lead a balanced life, fibromyalgia flares may be less likely. Here are some of the best self-care techniques you can take:

Get some exercise every day. Exercise can be an intimidating thought when you have fibromyalgia. Since you’re already fatigued, it sounds like exercise will make you even more tired. However, the opposite is true. Even 10 minutes of gentle walking is better than no exercise. The goal is to just get your body moving and the result is that your symptoms will likely improve.

Sleep tight. Sleep deprivation is almost like a badge of honor in American culture. Although too little sleep takes its toll on everyone, people with fibromyalgia are more vulnerable than most to its effects. Make a serious effort to get at least 7 or 8 hours of sleep every night.

Eat a healthy, well-balanced diet. Include lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, good fats, and lean protein. Fibromyalgia patients are more affected by a poor diet than average, so eating well plays a major part in actually feeling well.

Space

Cassini spacecraft did not detect Planet Nine, NASA claims

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 10, 2016 Last Edited: April 17, 2018

Brian Galloway

An update, but still optimistic news on the hunt for Planet Nine: redOrbit and other news sites reported that the Cassini spacecraft detected Planet Nine’s tug—and thus its potential location, but NASA claims this isn’t the case.

As clarified by NASA, the Cassini spacecraft did not experience unexplained deviations in its orbit around Saturn. Instead, the gravitational pull of Planet Nine would manifest even more significantly.

“An undiscovered planet outside the orbit of Neptune, 10 times the mass of Earth, would affect the orbit of Saturn, not Cassini,” said William Folkner, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he develops planetary orbit information used for NASA’s high-precision spacecraft navigation.

“Although we’d love it if Cassini could help detect a new planet in the solar system, we do not see any perturbations in our orbit that we cannot explain with our current models,” added Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

However, while Cassini’s orbit is unperturbed, Saturn’s is, according to Scientific American. In fact, nothing else in our solar system seems to be able to account for these deviations, excluding the potential Planet Nine. And so, researchers at the Côte d’Azur Observatory altered their model of the solar system, placing Planet Nine in different locations of its hypothetical orbit, until something clicked. Planet Nine existing 600 astronomical units (about 56 billion miles or 90 billion kilometers) away towards the constellation Cetus is the best fit to explain Saturn’s orbit.

It’s possible that the mystery planet could be changing Saturn’s orbit. Credit: NASA

But that’s not all

Continuing on its path of correction, NASA added that another recent paper—which predicted that if Cassini’s data tracking could continue until 2020, the data could reveal the most probable location for Planet Nine—was perhaps a bit optimistic, as Cassini will fall low on fuel and plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere around the end of 2017.

However, Cassini may not even be necessary to find Planet Nine. If the findings from the Côte d’Azur Observatory turn out to be true, then the new planet could be detected by the Dark Energy Survey, or perhaps by detecting the light it emits from its own internal heat.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL

Health

Breakthrough method delivers drugs directly to the brain

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 9, 2016 Last Edited: April 9, 2016

Brian Galloway

In a breakthrough which could help in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and chemotherapy-resistant forms of cancer, researchers from Cornell University have discovered a way to get past the blood-brain barrier and safely deliver drugs directly into the brain itself.

For more than 100 years, doctors and scientists have struggled to treat brain disorders and other types of diseases that required drugs to be delivered across the barrier, a layer of specialized cells known as endothelial cells designed to protect the brain from undesirable substances.

The barrier, which lines the brain’s blood vessels, can selectively allow molecules essential to normal body function – molecules such as amino acids, oxygen, glucose, and water – entry into the brain. Hoping to capitalize on this behavior, the Cornell researchers found that Lexiscan, an FDA-approved drug, activates receptors that are expressed on the endothelial cells.

Using this knowledge, Margaret Bynoe, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and her colleagues were able to deliver both chemotherapy drugs and larger antibodies that bind to Alzheimer’s disease plaques directly into the brains of mice.

Discovery could lead to new cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s treaments

To test their technique, which was described in the April 4 edition of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Bynoe, postdoctoral associate Do-Geun Kim and their fellow researchers created a model of the blood-brain barrier using human primary brain endothelial cells. Their experiments found that Lexiscan had the same effect on the model barrier as it did in mice.

“We can open the BBB for a brief window of time, long enough to deliver therapies to the brain, but not too long so as to harm the brain,” Bynoe, senior author of the study, explained in a press release. “We hope in the future, this will be used to treat many types of neurological disorders.”

She and Kim found that a protein called P-glycoprotein is highly expressed on brain endothelial cells, and is responsible for preventing most of the drugs delivered to the brain from getting past the barrier. Lexiscan, however, activates receptors on the endothelial cells, down-regulating the protein expression and temporarily switching off the barrier so that it can get past it.

“We demonstrated that down-modulation of P-glycoprotein function coincides exquisitely with chemotherapeutic drug accumulation” in the brains of mice and across an engineered BBB using human endothelial cells,” said Bynoe. “The amount of chemotherapeutic drugs that accumulated in the brain was significant.”

This protein is also expressed by several forms of cancer, making them chemotherapy-resistant, the authors said. By building on their findings, Bynoe believes that it may someday be possible to modulate these receptors to regulate P-glycoprotein in these tumor cells. The study’s findings could lead to new treatments for these cancers, as well as for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, autism, and other brain-related disorders.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Can money buy you happiness? New study has the answer.

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 9, 2016 Last Edited: April 9, 2016

Brian Galloway

Who says that money can’t buy you happiness? Certainly not researchers from the Cambridge Judge Business School and the Cambridge University Department of Psychology who reported that purchases really could have a positive impact on a person’s life satisfaction rating.

The researchers, who published their findings in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science, teamed up with a UK-based multinational bank to examine nearly 77,000 transactions, asking the customers involved to fill out a standard personality and life-satisfaction survey.

They found that people who spent a more on purchases that closely aligned with their personality traits tended to be more satisfied with life, and that the spending-personality trait association was even stronger than the link between happiness and total income or total spending.

“Historically, studies had found a weak relationship between money and overall well-being,” Joe Gladstone, a research associate from Cambridge Judge Business School and one of the authors of the new study, explained in a statement. “Our study breaks new ground by mining actual bank-transaction data and demonstrating that spending can increase our happiness when it is spent on goods and services that fit our personalities and so meet our psychological needs.”

Findings could be used by online retailers to make customers happy

Gladstone, along with Sandra Matz, a PhD candidate in the Cambridge Psychology Department, and Big Data Analytics and Quantitative Social Science lecturer David Stillwell, reviewed a total of 76,863 anonymous transactions from 625 participants as part of their study.

The customers were asked to complete a standard personality and life satisfaction questionnaire, and consented to their responses being matched anonymously to their bank transaction date. Data was then broken down in 59 different categories of spending, each with at least 500 transactions over a six-month period.

Those spending categories were then matched with the “Big Five” personality traits, according to Gladstone and his colleagues: openness to experiences (artistic vs. traditional), conscientiousness (self-controlled vs. easygoing), extraversion (outgoing vs. reserved), agreeableness (compassionate vs. competitive) and neuroticism (prone to stress vs. stable). The purchases of the actual customers were then rated into one or more of these classifications.

The results showed that, in general, people tended to spend more money on products that match their personalities, and that those who bought goods or services that more closely matched their personalities reported higher overall satisfaction with their lives. The authors believe that the results could be used by online merchants to improve their search-based recommendations to recommend goods that will actually make customers happier, thus improving the relationship between buyer and seller.

“Our findings suggest that spending money on products that help us express who we are as individuals could turn out to be as important to our well-being as finding the right job, the right neighborhood or even the right friends and partners,” said Matz. “By developing a more nuanced understanding of the links between spending and happiness, we hope to be able to provide more personalized advice on how to find happiness through the little consumption choices we make every day.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

SpaceX successfully lands Falcon 9 rocket on floating platform

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 9, 2016 Last Edited: April 9, 2016

Brian Galloway

After several near misses, SpaceX successfully landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform at sea for the first time on Friday night, bringing the booster to rest on a ship off the coast of Florida following a successful liftoff of its Dragon spacecraft.

According to Space.com, the two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off at 4:43 p.m. EDT on Friday afternoon, departing Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and delivering supplies, equipment, and experiments, as well as a new inflatable habitat, to the crew onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Shortly after liftoff, the Falcon 9’s first stage separated from the Dragon capsule and executed a series of engine burns before vertically lowering itself onto the drone ship, nailing the landing for the first time after four previous failed attempts over the past 15 months, the website noted. A previous successful landing took place at a ground-based landing pad in Cape Canaveral.

At a press conference afterwards, SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets that the maneuver was like “trying to land on a postage stamp” and said that he was elated that the Falcon 9 “landed instead of putting a hole in the ship or tipping over” – an accomplishment which Musk called “another step toward the stars.”

Inflatable habitat, muscle loss experiment included among cargo

In addition to being the first successful sea-based landing for SpaceX, Friday’s launch was also the first successful cargo launch for NASA since a Falcon 9 catastrophically explored only two minutes into its flight last June. That incident was due to a defective internal structural part, the Journal said. The firm has since improved its quality-control and safety procedures.

In addition to pulling off its at-sea landing for the first time, SpaceX was able to deliver supplies and other cargo to the ISS. Included in its payload is an inflatable habitat known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) which NASA believes “has the potential to revolutionize work and life on the space station.”

“The cargo will allow investigators to use microgravity conditions to test the viability of expandable space habitats, assess the impact of antibodies on muscle wasting, use protein crystal growth to aid the design of new disease-fighting drugs, and investigate how microbes could affect the health of the crew and their equipment over a long duration mission,” Dava Newman, Deputy Administrator of the US space agency, said in a statement.

The habitat will arrive on the orbiting facility in an unpressurized trunk, and roughly five days later, it will be removed and attached to the station. BEAM is expected to be inflated by the end of May, and at full size, the habitat will be about 10 feet in diameter and 13 feet long. It will be tested for a period of 24 months, during with time the crew will collect sensor data and monitor conditions in the habitat. The goal is to create a living area for astronauts that occupies less room on spacecraft while still providing adequate work and living space once in orbit.

In addition, the Dragon capsule delivered an experiment designed to assess whether or not myostatin inhibition can help prevent muscle atrophy and weakness in mice during prolonged space missions, an experiment to study fluids at the atomic level, and a protein crystal growth experiment centered around the design and development of drugs.

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Image credit: SpaceX

Science

What happened on Easter Island? New research could hold the key

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: April 8, 2016 Last Edited: April 8, 2016

Brian Galloway

Nearly 900 moai stand silent watch on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), yet because of a lack of a written or oral history from the native islanders, we have no clear idea why they exist. Even worse, we don’t know happened to the people who erected them. Now, a team of researchers from Spain think they’ve narrowed down what led to their civilization’s collapse.

Over the years, many researchers have tried to pinpoint the exact reason why the once-thriving Rapa Nui civilization declined so drastically by the time the island came to European attention on Easter Sunday in 1722.

The most popular theory falls into the category of human greed: The Rapa Nui people, after arriving from east Polynesia between 800 and 1200 CE, depleted the island of its resources. Termed as ecocide, this led to their forests being wiped out—a theory supported by a shift from palm pollen to grass pollen in island sediments. A cultural collapse soon followed.

Many potential theories for the island’s decline

However, there are other compelling ideas. One in particular posits that the Polynesians arrived a little later—1200 to 1300 CE—and brought rats with them. The rats then consumed an enormous amount of palm fruit across the island, leading to deforestation. Cultural collapse would happen later, thanks to the European arrival—a well-documented genocide, that was also coupled with new diseases brought to the island and enslavement of many Rapa Nui people.

“These different interpretations may be complementary, rather than incompatible,” said Dr. Valentí Rull, senior researcher of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, in a Phys.org statement. “In the last decade, there’s been a burst in new studies, including additional research sites and novel techniques, which demand that we reconsider the climatic, ecological and cultural developments that occurred.”

With technological advances, some of the holes missing from the previous evidence are beginning to be filled in. For example, pollen samples have been the primary source for most of the conclusions about the island—but there are other, more reliable, ways to determine what exactly happened.

And so, the authors reviewed a large number of more recent Rapa Nui studies. According to their paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, they performed various analyses in an attempt to piece together all these various documents into a coherent story.

Using a (finally) complete set of sedimentary samples for the past 3,000 years on Easter Island, they were able to analyze the environmental shifts on the island—showing the weather patterns, droughts, and wet seasons that likely drastically affected the forests’ growth, as well as sea travel to the island in the first place.

Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis also have illuminated where humans lived on the island, what plants they grew and ate, and what cultures played a role before the arrival of the Europeans. For example, the presence of sweet potato paired with the genes of the human remains indicates that Amerindian settlers likely joined the Polynesian settlers on the island at some point before European arrival.

But most importantly, their review contradicts the leading theory of what happened to the native peoples on Easter Island, pointing more towards genocide instead of ecocide.

“These findings challenge classical collapse theories and the new picture shows a long and gradual process due to both ecological and cultural changes,” said Rull. “In particular, the evidence suggests that there was not an island-wide abrupt ecological and cultural collapse before the European arrival in 1722.”

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Image credit: Ben Leshchinsky/Fickr

Space

What does ‘Planet Nine’ look like? Scientists model the planet’s size and temperature

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 8, 2016 Last Edited: April 8, 2016

Brian Galloway

Originally detected back in January, the mysterious object thought to be a ninth planet in the solar system has commanded a lot of attention in the scientific community, and now University of Bern astrophysicists have shed new light on what this planet’s possible appearance.

In new research accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, professor Christoph Mordasini and Ph.D. student Esther Linder created a model of this new world, which was originally detected by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, a pair of planetary scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Mordansini and Linder explained that the so-called ‘Planet Nine’ is an ice giant with an envelope of hydrogen and helium, similar to but smaller than Uranus and Neptune. Furthermore, they used planetary evolution models to estimate that the object likely had a present-day radius of about 3.7 Earth radii and a temperature of negative 226 degrees Celsius.

“This means that the planet’s emission is dominated by the cooling of its core, otherwise, the temperature would only be 10 Kelvin,” Linder said in a statement. “Its intrinsic power is about 1000 times bigger than its absorbed power,” she added, and it is “about 700 times further away as the distance between the Earth and the Sun.”

So why haven’t we been able to see it yet?

The new study, which comes just days after researchers reported evidence from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft that narrowed down the potential location of the theorized new planet, also discovered that the planet has a projected mass 10 times that of Earth, and that it appears to be far brighter in the infrared spectrum than in visible light.

Furthermore, Mordansini and Linder have discovered why Planet Nine had not yet been detected by any telescope. They calculated the brightness of both larger and smaller planets on various orbits and found that such instruments had only a slight chance of detecting objects that have a mass of 20 Earth masses of less, particularly when its orbit is at its most distant point.

On the other hand, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer might have been able to detect a planet with a mass equal to 50 Earth masses or larger, which Linder noted: “puts an interesting upper mass limit for the planet.” Mordasini added that more powerful telescopes currently under construction, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile, should be able to confirm or rule out the existence of Planet Nine, which he called “an exciting perspective.”

In the wake of the Cassini findings earlier this week, University of Michigan cosmologist David Gerdes told reporters that evidence “is mounting that something unusual is out there.” Likewise, Dr. Dimitris Stamatellos, a Guild Research Fellow of Astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire, said that if Planet Nine truly does exist, “it will be discovered in the next 2-3 years.”

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Image credit: Esther Linder, Christoph Mordasini, University of Bern

Space

Comets could have seeded life on Earth, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: April 8, 2016 Last Edited: April 8, 2016

Brian Galloway

Ribose, a simple sugar which serves as the backbone of RNA in living organisms, might have originally formed inside comets, a new experimental analysis by scientists at the Institut de Chimie de Nice (CNRS/Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) has revealed.

The researchers, whose work was published Friday in the journal Science, created an artificial comet with the help of colleagues at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France and found a scenario where the carbohydrate could have formed in cometary ices.

While ribose is a key building block in the genetic material of humans and other life forms, it had previously never been detected in meteorites or comets. By detailing a scenario in which the compound could have formed in cometary ices, the study authors explained that they have come one step closer to fully understanding the origins of RNA, and therefore of life itself.

“Our results suggest that the generation of numerous sugar molecules, including the aldopentose ribose, may be possible from the photochemical and thermal treatment of cosmic ices in the late stages of the solar nebula,” they wrote. “Our detection of ribose provides plausible insights into the chemical processes that could lead to the formation of biologically relevant molecules in suitable planetary environments.”

Many organic molecules were found on Rosetta’s comet 67P (Credit: ESA)

Comets formed from formaldehyde likely contained ribose, other sugars

Nucleic acids such as RNA and DNA comprise make up the genes of all organisms living on Earth, the researchers explained in a statement. RNA, which is considered more primitive than DNA, is believed to have been one of the first molecules characteristic of life to appear on our planet, and experts have long wondered how the nucleic acid originally formed.

One hypothesis suggests that comets and/or asteroids containing the core components needed to form such molecules once bombarded the Earth – a notion supported by the discovery of amino acids (the components of proteins) and nitrogenous bases (a component of nucleic acids) in both meteorites and in artificial, laboratory-produced comets. Attempts to use such methods to detect ribose, however, had proven unsuccessful – until now.

As part of their experiments, the French scientists produced an artificial comet by mixing water, methanol, and ammonia in a high-vacuum chamber at temperatures of -200 degrees Celsius. They began by simulating the formation of ice-coated dust grains, then irradiated these base materials with ultraviolet rays to simulate conditions in the molecular clouds in which these grains formed. The sample was then heated up to simulate the comet model approaching the sun.

Using multidimensional gas chromatography and time-of-flight mass spectrometry, the authors analyzed the composition of the artificial comet, successfully detecting ribose and several other kinds of sugar. They believe the diversity and relative abundance of the molecules indicate that they were formed from formaldehyde, a molecule often found on comets.

While the researchers emphasize that this is not confirmation that ribose exists in actual comets, they explained that their work shows that all of the molecules required for the formation of living organisms can be formed in interstellar ice. Furthermore, they said that the results lend additional support to the notion that the organic molecules that gave rise to life on Earth came from comets.

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Image credit: NASA

Science

Are humans an invasive species? History holds the answer.

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

You may have an intense dislike for invasive species like kudzu, but as it turns out, you may be hating on your own kind. Stanford researchers recently found that some populations of early human settlers behaved just like an invasive species—draining the land dry and killing organisms around them.

When humans first arrived in South America, populations grew exponentially and spread across the continent, followed by a population crash—thanks to humans over-consuming local natural resources until they exceeded the area’s carrying capacity for human life. This was followed by a plateau in population growth.

“The question is: Have we overshot Earth’s carrying capacity today?” said senior author Elizabeth Hadly, the Paul S. and Billie Achilles Professor in Environmental Biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment in a Stanford statement. “Because humans respond as any other invasive species, the implication is that we are headed for a crash before we stabilize our global population size.”

Did we cause extinctions?

Besides issuing this warning about our global future, the researchers believe this new understanding of human population growth can allow us to better understand how the Pleistocene era’s mass extinction of large mammals like ground sloths and horses occurred, according to the paper, which is published in Nature.

After using radiocarbon dating across more than 1,100 archeological sites in South America, the researchers were able to put together a timeline of human population increases. From this, they discovered two distinct phases of growth on the continent.

The first occurred between 14,000 and 5,500 years ago when humans spread rapidly and grew logistically. Like other invasive species, though, this growth could not be sustained forever. Around 5,500, humans over-exploited natural resources necessary for survival, meaning there wasn’t enough left to sustain the entire human population. Many big animals went extinct when the human population plummetted.

The human population leveled out then, presumably matching up with the region’s carrying capacity. But this doesn’t seem to have lasted long, as the second phase—which went from roughly 5,500 to 2,000 years ago—soon led to exponential population growth.

How did humans in South America suddenly get enough resources to grow in population size? While many would probably consider domestication of animals and crops as the defining impetus, the authors believe this only had a minimal effect. Instead, they argue that the shift towards sedentary societies is the most likely cause. As societies grew more sedentary, humans began practices like intensive agriculture and trade between distant regions, which helped grow the population.

“Thinking about the relationship between humans and our environment, unchecked growth is not a universal hallmark of our history, but a very recent development,” said co-lead author Amy Goldberg, a biology graduate student. “In South America, it was settled societies, not just the stable food sources of agriculture, that profoundly changed how humans interact with and adapt their environment.”

Now, as modern populations continue to boom, this study and others grant both hope and alarm for our future as a species.

“Technological advances, whether they are made of stone or computers, have been critical in helping to shape the world around us up until this point,” said co-lead author Alexis Mychajliw, a graduate student in biology. “That said, it’s unclear if we can invent a way out of planetary carrying capacities.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Scholars uncover Isaac Newton’s alchemy recipes

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Best known as a physicist, mathematician, and a father of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton also dabbled in alchemy, the pseudo-science that preceded chemistry and involved such things as transmuting lead into gold and other noble elements.

Now, a handwritten manuscript belonging to Newton has been rediscovered, and it contains the recipes that the renowned scientist hoped to use in his alchemic endeavors, National Geographic and the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Among its contents are the instructions needed to create “sophick mercury,” a substance needed to make the legendary Philosopher’s stone.

According to published reports, the 17th century document has been privately owned for several years, but was recently acquired by a nonprofit Philadelphia-based group known as the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Now, the organization is in the process of uploading digital scans and a set of transcriptions to an online database so they can be seen by scholars all across the world.

While there is no evidence that Newton actually created sophick mercury, Nat Geo reported that the scientist copied the recipe by hand from a text owned by American alchemist George Starkey and added his own notes to the back of the document, which experts said should provide clues as to how he interpreted the complex, enigmatic instructions used by alchemists.

Furthermore, science historian William Newman of Indiana University told the website that the newly acquired manuscript will help scholars understand how alchemy influenced Newton. Not only did he frequently collaborate with alchemists, Newman said, he wrote tens of thousands of words on the topic and hoped it would help him fully understand the properties of matter.

Credit: Chemical Heritage Foundation

Manuscript could reveal how alchemy aided Newton’s work in the field of optics

Newton’s alma mater, Cambridge University, reportedly had the chance to archive these recipes in 1888. Instead, they were sold at a private auction in 1936, and were inaccessible for decades. Now that the Chemical Heritage Foundation has acquired the sophick mercury recipe, it will enable researchers to learn more about the inner workings of this now-dead art.

The recipe has been translated by modern scholars, and reveals that in order to create sophick mercury, the alchemist would have to repeatedly distill regular mercury, then heat it with gold. Ultimately, this process would produce an alloy with “delicate, branch-like growths,” Nat Geo explained, which Starkey purportedly believed meant that it had became “animated with life.”

While that might sound absurd, the Post explains that alchemy – also known as “chymistry” during the 17th century – was centered around the belief that metals were made up of several different compounds, including a mercuric or sulfuric principle, and altering one of these principles would alter the metal itself. However, many alchemists also believed that using the Philosopher’s Stone would allow this to happen automatically, James Voelkel, curator of rare books at the foundation’s Othmer Library of Chemical History, told the newspaper.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to the discovery is a series of notes, written by Newton himself on the back of the recipe, describing a process for alchemically subliming lead ore – a process that Nat Geo explained was a key part of his attempts to create the Philosopher’s Stone. Furthermore, Newman said that the document may also detail some of his collaborations with other alchemists, some of which may have influenced his work on optics.

“Alchemists were the first to realize that compounds could be broken down into their constituent parts and then recombined,” the historian told the publication, adding that Newton then took that information and “applied [it] to white light, which he deconstructed into constituent colors and then recombined. That’s something Newton got from alchemy.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Supernova explosions once battered the Earth, changing how life developed

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Multiple supernovae explosions that occurred in the vicinity of our solar system showered the Earth with radioactive debris, an international team led by scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

In the study, ANU nuclear physicist Dr. Anton Wallner and his colleagues explained that they had discovered iron-60 isotopes in sediment and crust samples taken from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Furthermore, they said that the radioactive material had been concentrated between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago – relatively recently, astronomically speaking.

“We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years. It suggests there were a series of supernovae, one after another,” Dr. Wallner explained in a statement. “It’s an interesting coincidence that they correspond with when the Earth cooled and moved from the Pliocene into the Pleistocene period.”

He and his co-authors also found evidence of iron-60 from a supernova that had taken place as much as eight million years ago and coincided with global changes to fauna that occurred during the late Miocene. The findings imply that some of these isotopes were gathered by dust grains and then deposited on Earth, and indicate that multiple supernovae and other massive star events took place during the last 10 million years at distances of less than 300 light years.

Source was likely a star cluster that has since drifted away

If their research is correct, those supernovae would have been close enough to have been seen during the day and would have appeared about as bright as the Moon. The planet’s surface would have been bombarded by cosmic rays, they noted, but the radiation would not have been strong enough to have caused mass extinctions, or any direct biological damage, for that matter.

However, the explosions would have generated heavy elements and radioactive isotopes such as iron-60, which has a half-life of 2.6 million years. These elements and isotopes are spread across the surrounding cosmos, and if any iron-60 did make it to the Earth during the planet’s formation some four billion years ago, it would have disappeared a long time ago, the study authors said.

To find it, Dr. Wallner’s team needed to use extremely sensitive techniques designed to locate and identify atoms of the interstellar material, which he explained is “a million-billion times less abundant than the iron that exists naturally on Earth.” Nonetheless, the researchers collected 120 samples from the three ocean floors, and began by extracting all of the iron from those samples. Next, they separated the interstellar iron-60 from all other isotopes of the element.

They found that the interstellar isotopes were found in all of the samples, and determined the cores to have come from two different periods: one between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, and another about eight million years ago. They believe that the source of the iron-60 was an aging star cluster that has since drifted away from our solar system – a cluster which no longer contains any massive stars, as they all likely already exploded as supernovae.

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Image credit: Greg Stewart, SLAC National Accelerator Lab

Space

Comets and asteroids allowed Mars to host life, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Even if Mars was as cold and barren in the ancient past as it is now, it was likely made habitable following a barrage of asteroids and comets that took place four billion years ago, according to a new paper published this week in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters (EPSL).

The study, which was led by researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, explained that a bombardment such as this would have produced enough heat to melt subsurface ice, producing a number of regional hydrothermal systems capable of sustaining chemically-powered microbes.

These systems would be similar to those currently found in Yellowstone National Park, the study authors explained, and the microbes they support are hardy enough to live in the boiling water of a hot spring or H2O containing enough acid to dissolve nails. It would also help explain evidence of running water found on the Red Planet in the form of ancient river valleys and lake beds.

As Stephen Mojzsis, a professor of geology and geochemistry at the university, and his fellow researchers explained in a statement, massive impacts from comets and asteroids likely would have also caused the planet’s atmospheric pressure to increase temporarily, which in turn would cause its climate to heat up enough for its dormant water cycle to be re-ignited.

Impacts could not keep the Red Planet consistently warm, however

“This study shows the ancient bombardment of Mars by comets and asteroids would have been greatly beneficial to life there, if life was present,” the professor said. “But up to now we have no convincing evidence life ever existed there, so we don’t know if early Mars was a haven for life.”

The majority of this activity would have taken place during the period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, approximately 3.9 billon years ago. While the Earth’s surface has been reshaped by erosion and plate tectonics on multiple occasions since then, Mars, Mercury and the moon still have craters showing the scars of asteroid and comet impact from this era, they said.

Using the university’s Janus supercomputer cluster, Mojzsis and his colleagues created three-dimensional models of the planet to investigate the temperatures below millions of individual craters to analyze heating and cooling. They also studied the results of impacts on the planet’s surface from impacts from various different angles and objects traveling at different speeds.

Their simulations revealed that the ancient Mars would have been heated by asteroid collisions just a few million years before the planet returned to the cold, inhospitable conditions found on the Red Planet today. None of the models were able to keep it warm over a prolonged period of time, Mojzsis said – a sharp contrast to Earth, which research has found has likely been habitable over its entire lifespan, thanks largely to its oceans.

“Studies of Mars provide us with valuable information about our own place in the solar system,” said Mojzsis. “Our next steps are to model similar bombardment on Mercury and Venus to better understand the evolution of the inner solar system and apply that knowledge to studies of planets around other stars.”

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Image credit: NASA

Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia and spring – What you need to know

Written By: Holly Case

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

admin

Many people enjoy the changing of the seasons. Spring is often a favorite season, especially after a long, cold winter. But this is not true for those who suffer from fibromyalgia. Even though some studies claim there’s little official evidence supporting a link between weather symptoms and physical pain, fibromyalgia sufferers know otherwise from their experience. Rapid changes in barometric pressure and temperature are more likely to cause flare ups. Here’s what to watch for with fibromyalgia and spring and how to deal.

Fibromyalgia and Spring: Signals of Change

Most fibromyalgia patients can sense in their bodies when the weather is about to change. Symptoms resemble the early stages of what’s called a flare-up or “fibro flare,” with physical effects including pain and fatigue being especially pronounced. The significant point about weather changes and fibro flares is that the symptoms often occur just before the weather actually changes. Fibro sufferers sometimes joke that their bodies serve as their own personal weather forecast.

Fibromyalgia and Spring: Differences among Seasons

Winter is the season that usually causes the most health complaints for fibromyalgia sufferers. The cold weather seems to cause more pain, especially in the hands, hips, and legs. Based on that logic, it would seem that spring should be better than winter because the weather is starting to warm up. However, spring is not reliably warm every day, and there are more fluctuating temperature cycles between warm and cold. This variation can cause more discomfort.

Rain and Humidity

Spring is the rainy season in most places. The fact that spring rains put more moisture in the air can result in more arthritis-type symptoms, including muscle aches and stiffness. Cold and rainy weather in particular seems to bother many fibromyalgia sufferers. As rainy fronts move in, it causes the changes in barometric pressure that many find bothersome and painful. In general, spring has more extreme weather events, like thunderstorms, tornadoes and heavy rains.

Allergies

One of the prettiest things about spring is the way all the plants come to life again after a dormant winter. However, the downside of fibromyalgia and spring is that when plants begin to bloom again in the spring, they also release pollens into the air. These pollens are a significant source of seasonal allergies for many people – not just people with fibromyalgia—and seasonal allergy symptoms can add to the misery that you may already be feeling due to the changes in the weather.

High Temperatures

Although it’s more common for cold temperatures to bother fibromyalgia sufferers, some react badly to high temperatures instead. For this latter group, fibromyalgia and spring is the start of the season that will cause them the most discomfort and pain. Warm temperatures in spring are the conditions that cause them the most problems.

Coping with Weather Symptoms

Regardless of whether you are more bothered by cold temperatures, rain, or heat, it’s fairly likely that the weather will affect your experiences with fibromyalgia. It’s more important for you than for the average person to be prepared for any weather circumstances and to always dress appropriately. Spring is a great time to dress in layers so that you can add or remove layers as you get too warm or too cold. Be sure to always bring a spare pair of shoes as well so that you don’t have to deal with the discomfort of wearing cold, wet shoes all day after b

Technology

Computer creates ‘new Rembrandt’ after analyzing old works

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

Rembrandt van Rijn may have died nearly 350 years ago, but his most recent painting was made this very year.

Well, sort of—because scientists have taught a computer to create its own unique Rembrandt paintings.

Dutch financial group ING kick-started this whole project by approaching an Amsterdam advertising agency in October of 2014, in hopes of figuring out a project that would show innovation in Dutch art. The resulting idea: Teaching a computer to “paint” like the famous Dutch Golden Age painter.

From there, an army of scientists, developers, engineers, and art historians coming from Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, and two Dutch art museums (Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis) spent 18 months working on this project.

Credit: ING

How did the team do this?

The team scanned 346 of Rembrandt’s paintings and, using their own specially-developed software system plus special algorithms and facial recognition technology, they analyzed the works to understand every element of the paintings.

“There’s a lot of Rembrandt data available—you have this enormous amount of technical data from all these paintings from various collections,” said Joris Dik, a professor at TU Delft, in a statement.

From there, the team narrowed down what elements were the most typical of Rembrandt—and came up with portraits of white, bearded men between the ages of 30 and 40, who were wearing black clothes with white collars and a hat—and who all faced to the right.

After telling the computer to create a painting in this vein, it went to work studying traits of these subjects in nearly 170,000 relevant painting fragments—and then came up with a sort of Rembrandt “average” for specific aspects of them. For example, it derived the most typical eye shape, and the normal tilt of the head. The computer also analyzed the depth and texture of the paintings’ surfaces to capture Rembrandt’s brushstrokes.

“We really wanted to understand what makes a face look like a Rembrandt,” Emmanuel Flores, director of technology for the project, told the BBC.

Then, after 500 hours of work, the computer created its very own Rembrandt painting with more than 148 million pixels, and printed the result in 13 layers using a 3D printer and paint-based UV ink. The result: A surprisingly convincing and totally new Rembrandt-style artwork titled “The New Rembrandt,” complete with replicate 3D brushstrokes.

For those worried about computers replacing real artists, do keep in mind that it took more than half the corpus of a true master painter to get to this point—nothing was spontaneous on the computer’s part. Indeed, the goal of this wasn’t to find a way to make a computer into a painter, but rather to celebrate painting through the use of technology.

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Image credit: ING

Health

Vitamin D supplements can heal hearts, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

A five-year study conducted by researchers at the University of Leeds revealed that people suffering from heart disease could benefit from taking Vitamin D supplements, as the pills could help heal damage and improve overall cardiovascular function.

According to BBC News, Dr. Klaus Witte, a consultant cardiologist at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and his colleagues conducted trials on 163 heart failure patients and found that using the vitamin supplement improved their hearts’ ability to pump blood throughout the body.

The findings, which were presented this week during the American College of Cardiology 65th Annual Scientific Session & Expo in Chicago, used cardiac ultrasound to measure changes in the heart function of the participants. The authors found that 80 patients who were given Vitamin D3 supplements instead of placebos experienced a 26 to 34 percent improvement.

In a statement, Dr. Witte called the findings “a significant breakthrough for patients,” noting that this is “the first evidence that vitamin D3 can improve heart function of people with heart muscle weakness” and “could make a significant difference to the care of heart failure patients.”

Experts calling for larger, longer-term studies to verify results

Normally, Vitamin D3 levels in the body are boosted through exposure to sunlight, the Leeds researchers explained. However, heart failure patients often suffer from a D3 deficiency due to the fact that they tend to be older and their bodies aren’t able to produce as much of the vitamin as younger people.

Each of the patients involved in the study were already receiving treatment for their heart failure through proven methods such as pacemakers, ACE-inhibitors, and beta-blockers, the researchers added. They were given either a Vitamin D3 supplement or a placebo for a one-year period, and their heart health was measured using a ultrasound scan (echocardiogram) to measure the amount of blood that is pumped with each heartbeat – also known as ejection fraction.

Dr. Witte and his colleagues believe that their findings indicate that regular use of vitamin D3 supplements may reduce the need for some patients to be fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), a device which can detect irregular heart rhythms and use electrical shock to restore normal function. However, experts at the British Heart Foundation told BBC News that they believed longer trials would be necessary to fully measure the effectiveness of the pills.

In fact, Professor Peter Weissberg from the British Heart Foundation told the UK media outlet that despite the improvement in ejection fraction, none of the patients who received Vitamin D3 seemed to be better at exercise. He added that “a much bigger study over a longer period of time is now needed to determine whether these changes in cardiac function can translate into fewer symptoms and longer lives for heart failure patients.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Did NASA’s Cassini spacecraft just find ‘Planet Nine’?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Scientists searching for Planet Nine, a new ninth-planet believed to exist in the solar system, are now one step closer to pinpointing the location of this mysterious world thanks to evidence from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, a pair of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology who were instrumental in Planet Nine’s discovery back in January, theorized that the world exists based on the gravitational impact is has on multiple Kuiper Belt objects, and are now attempting to find additional proof of its existence, according to Scientific American.

While they have been focusing their efforts on analyzing archived photographs and searching for ways to observe the object using high-resolution, ground-based telescopes, their work received a big boost in recent weeks from Cassini, the NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn.

As Scientific American explained, while the Caltech researchers suggest that Planet Nine would have a gravitational effect on Kuiper Belt object, it could also hypothetically create a pull on the planets, moons and, even spacecraft elsewhere in the solar system. Based on this notion, Agnès Fienga at the Côte d’Azur Observatory and her colleagues set out to determine whether the existence of this ninth planet could explain slight perturbations in Cassini’s orbit.

Location could be confirmed within the next three years

The researchers adapted a decade-old theoretical model to account for Planet Nine, and they used the updated model to see if it could account for the perturbations. Based on a series of tests, Fienga’s team found that a ninth planet located 90 billion kilometers (600 astronomical units) away in the direction of the constellation Cetus would effectively explain Cassini’s orbital irregularities.

While Fienga itself told Scientific American that she is not fully convinced that that Planet Nine is behind the spacecraft’s unusual movements, other researchers have applauded her work, with Lick Observatory astronomer Greg Laughlin calling it “a brilliant analysis” and David Gerdes, a cosmologist at the University of Michigan calling it “a beautiful paper.”

Gerdes, who is also on the hunt for Planet Nine, told the website that evidence “is mounting that something unusual is out there,” and he believes that if the object is indeed located in the vicinity of Cetus, then it could be detected by the Dark Energy Survey. Other researchers believe that this mysterious world could be located by searching for the millimeter-wavelength light it emits from its own internal heat.

If Planet Nine, which is believed to be 10 times more massive than Earth and orbits the sun at an average distance 20 times that of Neptune, truly does exist, “we will discover it in the next [few] years,” Dr. Dimitris Stamatellos, a Guild Research Fellow of Astrophysics with the University of Central Lancashire, told the Cyprus News Agency on Monday. “I am optimistic that if this ninth planet exists, it will be discovered in the next 2-3 years.”

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Image credit: Tomruen/Wikimedia Commons

Science

Scientists uncover Hannibal’s route through the Alps using horse dung

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

In one of the boldest moves in ancient history, Carthaginian general Hannibal marched more than 30,000 troops plus some 15,000 horses and 37 elephants across the Alps and invaded Italia, home of the ancient Romans. And yet, despite being legendary, no one knows exactly where Hannibal crossed, but historians have debated the location for over 2,000 years.

Now, researchers from Queen’s University Belfast and beyond seem to have found the answer—and it’s all thanks to poop.

Hannibal was the Commander-in-Chief of the Carthaginian army during the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE)—the second of three bloody contests between Rome and Carthage. Before this particular war began, Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar, took control of parts of what is now Spain, bringing over the Carthaginian army with him. Following his death, Hannibal took over and invaded a city under Rome’s protection, kicking off the Second Punic War.

Rome initially was more or less unworried, thinking that the barrier of the Alps would protect the main part of the empire from the Carthaginians—and they were very wrong. Hannibal did what was seen as impossible, losing many men and animals along the way—but arriving in Italia with enough left to bring the Roman army to its knees. He actually ended up occupying parts of Rome for 15 years before a Roman invasion in North Africa forced him to return to Carthage.

Hannibal was eventually defeated in the Third Punic War at Zama in 202 BCE, but nonetheless he achieved one of the finest military campaigns in antiquity—and his story has fascinated historians ever since.

Where’s the poop, Robin?

Up until now, no physical evidence—like belt buckles or bones—have been found to indicate where Hannibal made his crossing. However, an international team of microbiologists have finally found something…solid. According to the two papers (first and second) in Archaeometry, the researchers believe Hannibal crossed the Alps via the Col de Traversette pass (~1.9 miles or 3000 meters above sea level), which spans between Grenoble, France, and Turin, Italy.

The Col de Traversette pass was first proposed as an option about fifty years ago, but did not gain much traction in the academic community. But using a variety of techniques like microbial metagenome analysis, environmental chemistry, geomorphic and pedological investigation, and pollen analyses, the researchers have shown that a “mass animal deposition” event dating to about 218 BCE occurred near the pass.

“The deposition lies within a churned-up mass from a 1-meter thick alluvial mire, produced by the constant movement of thousands of animals and humans,” said Dr. Chris Allen, from the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, in a statement.

“Over 70 percent of the microbes in horse manure are from a group known as the Clostridia, that are very stable in soil – surviving for thousands of years. We found scientifically significant evidence of these same bugs in a genetic microbial signature precisely dating to the time of the Punic invasion.”

Or in other words, the researchers found evidence of poop—a lot of it. Certainly enough to belong to the thousands of horses Hannibal had with him, and it’s dated to the right time period. And if this discovery should prove to be the discovery of Hannibal’s route, this find is enormous.

“If confirmed, the findings presented here have far-reaching implications for solving the Hannibalic route question and, more importantly, for the identification of a site that might be expected to yield significant archaeological data alongside artifacts related to the Punic invasion,” wrote the authors in the first paper.

“If the site was affected by human–animal traffic, as the evidence indicates, there is every possibility that artifacts such as coins, belt buckles, daggers, equestrian fasteners and so on might have been buried in the mire. If such archaeological evidence can be found and definitively linked to Hannibal, it would answer the question of which route Hannibal and his army took into Italia.”

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Image credit: Wikimedia commons

Science

‘Cursed’ tablets found in 2,400 year old Greek tomb

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Competition between modern business owners may seem cutthroat at times, but the discovery of five 2,400 year old lead tablets from Greece, shows these tendencies are hardly anything new.

According to Live Science and the Daily Mail, a team of researchers led by Jessica Lamont of Johns Hopkins University recovered the tablets from the final resting place of a possible tavern owner and found that they contained curses against the owners of four rival establishments.

Four out of the five tablets contained curses that involved the name of “chthonic” (underworld) deities like Hekate Chthonia, Artemis Chthonia, and Hermes Chthonios. The curses called upon the deities to “cast hate” upon their rivals, Lamont’s team explained in a paper published earlier this week in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (ZPE).

They were discovered, folded, and pierced with an iron nail, along with the cremated remains of the woman, as well as libations and other religious offerings, and date back to the fourth century BCE, according to reports. The researchers said that their content reveals much about the rituals and social practices prevalent during the era.

Curses meant to target victims’ businesses and property

As LiveScience explains, ancient cultures believed that placing the tablets in the grave would have enabled the curses to reach the underworld gods, who would then act upon the requests. Each of the curses on the four tablets was intended for a different pair of married tavern owners, while the fifth was blank and likely had an incantation recited orally over it.

In the study, Lamont and her colleagues said that one of the tablets, when translated from Greek, asked the aforementioned chthonic gods to “cast your hate upon Phanagora and Demetrios, and their tavern and their property and their possessions” and to “smite down a kynotos,” a term that translates to “dog’s ear” and was an ancient gambling term for the lowest possible outcome on a pair of dice), “on [your] tongue.” The other three curses were similar in nature.

According to the study’s authors, Hermes is commonly called upon in such curses, and the Daily Mail noted that the goddess Hekate was “dangerous and liminal.” Artemis, on the other hand, is typically linked to the protection of women, but the curses were meant to appear to the goddess’s “destructive side,” which was associated with “the realm of the sinister and the threatening.”

The curses were designed to target the victim’s businesses and property, and by all accounts, completing such rituals would have been a taxing process likely born from the desperation of the person or persons performing them, the researchers said. The text appears to indicate that each of the tablets were carved by an experienced scribe, and while it is not 100 percent certain that these curses were the result of a business rivalry, the authors call that the most likely scenario.

The tablets were found in a classical grave located beyond the Athenian Long Walls northeast of Piraeus, Greece – a site that was excavated by archaeologists in 2003. Once they were recovered, the tablets were moved to the Piraeus Museum, which is where Lamont began studying them. As for the woman in the grave, it is unclear if she was the one who wanted the curses to be cast or if she just happened to pass away at the same time that another member of the community wanted revenge on a business rival.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Fibromyalgia

Foods That Can Cause Fibro Flares

Written By: Holly Case

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

Preston Hemmerich

Healthy food in heart and cholesterol diet concept on vintage boards

Image: udra11/Shutterstock

Fibromyalgia flares are the worst part of the disease. One day you’re functioning at your normal levels, then the next day you’re down and out with all the pain and fatigue of a full-blown flare-up. While it may not be possible to completely prevent flares, you’ll want to avoid certain things can definitely trigger them. Like most health conditions, diet plays a major role. Here are some of the foods you should avoid because they might cause a fibro flare.

Sugar – Who among us doesn’t love a sweet treat? Even babies show preferences for sugar shortly after birth. When you deal with the frequent misery of fibromyalgia, it’s understandable why you might want to indulge in the simple pleasure of a bowl of ice cream. However, sugar raises insulin levels, which has been linked to more pain.

Caffeine – When you live with fatigue and chronic exhaustion, caffeine seems like a necessary pick-me-up just to get through the day. But caffeine signals the adrenal glands to make more of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. When the caffeine buzz wears off, it can result in a crash and make it hard to bounce back. Best advice: you can still get that latte, but make sure you order it decaf.

Aspartame – You know you’re supposed to avoid sugar, but you’ll be fine if you get sugar-free, right? Maybe not. In a cruel twist of irony, artificial sweeteners are also bad for your health if you have fibromyalgia. Aspartame, better known by the brand names NutraSweet and Equal, seems to cause more pain symptoms in many individuals. Since there’s little definite proof about the downside of aspartame, try cutting it out for a couple weeks and see if your symptoms improve. If you simply can’t go without artificial sweeteners, the sucralose-based Splenda might be a better choice.

Gluten – There’s a reason so many people are avoiding gluten, and it’s not just because it’s trendy. Although many fibro sufferers have trouble with digesting carbohydrates due to overburdened adrenal glands, gluten may be a particular problem. Many people find that the proteins in gluten are more likely to cause inflammation, which leads to more pain. To really benefit from eliminating gluten, don’t just switch to gluten-free products with other refined grains. Try to cut down on grains altogether.

Processed foods – It can be difficult to avoid processed food. Our busy modern lifestyles make it more necessary to find convenient meals, almost all of which are heavily processed. The problem isn’t just the fact that processed food is far removed from its natural state, though. Most processed “junk” foods are high in chemical additives like sodium, artificial flavors, and MSG, and contain large amounts of refined sugar and flour and trans fats.

Fibro patients have to be more careful than most people about the quality of what they eat. It’s ultimately a blessing because everyone should be eating a healthy diet. But the food/pain cycle is undeniable for fibro sufferers. If you keep your diet clean, you should eventually be able to tell which foods cause you the most pain.

Health

‘Groundbreaking’ stem cell treatment could regrow limbs, repair bones

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

In the pages of comic books and on the silver screen, superheroes like Wolverine and Deadpool have a “healing factor” that allows their bodies to regenerate and recover from injuries or illness at an amazing rate – but certainly nothing like that is possible in real life, right?
Amazingly, a team of scientists led by John Pimanda, a hematologist and associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, published a study in Monday’s edition of the journal PNAS reporting that they had successfully reprogrammed bone and fat cells into induced multipotent stem cells (iMS) – the first step to making such a repair system a reality.
As they explained in a statement, stem cell therapies using iMS cells could theoretically repair a fractured bone or fix injured spinal discs, using a technique similar to how salamanders are able to regenerate lost limbs. These treatments could radically alter the field of regenerative medicine, and perhaps most surprisingly, the authors believe they could be available in just a few years.
The technique, which has been successfully tested in mice, “is a significant advance on many of the current unproven stem cell therapies, which have shown little or no objective evidence they contribute directly to new tissue formation,” Pimanda said.

Human trials could begin by the end of 2017

He added that their discovery is “ground-breaking” because, unlike other types of stem cells, iMS cells can regenerate multiple types of tissue. Pimanda noted that he and his colleagues are “currently assessing whether adult human fat cells reprogrammed into iMS cells can safely repair damaged tissue in mice” and that they expect to begin human trials “in late 2017.”
The technique utilized by the UNSW-lead team involves extracting fat cells from human adults, then treating them with a compound known as 5-Azacytidine (AZA), which is known to induce cell plasticity and is essential for reprogramming the cells, and platelet-derived growth factor-AB (PDGF-AB) for a period of about 48 hours.
Afterwards, the cells are treated with just the growth factor for an additional two to three weeks. Pimanda explained that this process essentially switches off the memory of the cells, converting them into iMS cells. The stem cells are then inserted into the damaged tissue site where they start to multiply, promoting growth and healing different types of cells in the process.
“Embryonic stem cells cannot be used to treat damaged tissues because of their tumor forming capacity,” said Dr. Vashe Chandrakanthan, first author of the study and the scientist that came up with the new technology. “The other problem when generating stem cells is the requirement to use viruses to transform cells into stem cells, which is clinically unacceptable. We believe we’ve overcome these issues with this new technique.”
The forthcoming human trials will begin once the method has proven safe and effective in mice. Those trials will be led by Dr. Ralph Mobbs, a neurosurgeon and conjoint lecturer with UNSW’s Prince of Wales Clinical School who said that the treatment “has enormous potential for treating back and neck pain, spinal disc injury, joint and muscle degeneration.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Researchers discover ‘The Kite Runner’, a crazy new 430 million year old arthropod

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

If you think pregnancy is rough, just imagine having bearing multiple offspring at once—and having them tethered in capsules to your spine. That apparently was the reality of a newly-discovered ancient animal, which carried its young in capsules attached to its body, looking like tassels or little kites.

The tiny creature is about 430 million years old and is an arthropod—an animal lacking a backbone but covered in an exoskeleton with its body in segments. It has now been named Aquilonifer spinosus—a play off of the title of the 2003 bestselling novel The Kite Runner. “Aquila” is the Latin word for eagle or kite (the bird), and “fer” is a Latin suffix meaning carrier or bearer. Discovered in Herefordshire, England, it is the only known fossil of this animal ever found.

Making discoveries by studying fossils

This unique find was studied by researchers from Yale, Oxford, the University of Leicester, and Imperial College London. According to their paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they examined the animal by creating a 3D reconstruction of the fossil.

“Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators — attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released — but this example is unique,” said lead author Derek Briggs, Yale professor and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, in a statement.

“Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface.”

In fact, the “kite carrier” animal fossil has 10 juveniles—all at different stages of development—attached to the adult. The scientists believe that this means the adult wouldn’t be able to molt until its young were old enough to hatch—elsewise, it would accidentally cast off the young as it shed off its exoskeleton.

Some may be wondering if these ten juveniles are in fact parasites on Aquilonifer, but Briggs and his colleagues have ruled this out as the place where the juveniles attach isn’t the best for accessing nutrients from the host. Instead, it truly appears to be a parent “Kite Runner” with its offspring.

“We have named it after the novel by Khalid Hosseini due to the fancied resemblance of the juveniles to kites,” Briggs said. “As the parent moved around, the juveniles would have looked like decorations or kites attached to it. It shows that arthropods evolved a variety of brooding strategies beyond those around today — perhaps this strategy was less successful and became extinct.”

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Image credit: D. Briggs, D. Siveter, D. Siveter, M. Sutton, D. Legg

Science

Contraceptive chemical runoff causes sex changes in frogs, study finds

Written By: Brett Smith

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

0

Brian Galloway

The hormones found in female contraception pills often male their way into the environment, and those hormones are wreaking havoc on amphibians, according to a new study in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study looked at the effects of estrogen ethinylestradiol (EE2) in three amphibians and found significant evidence they affect the hormonal systems and sexual development in these animals.

Contraceptives harming the environment

EE2 is a man-made estrogen, a commonly used active component of female contraceptive pills that does not appear in nature. It is only partially removed in sewage plants, and it can get to water bodies in biologically-important levels, the study team noted in a press release.

“Amphibians are almost permanently exposed to such threats,” said study author Matthias Stöck, an amphibian researcher at the IGB research institute in Berlin. “Only, if we will be able to actually access these risks, we will be able to eliminate them in the long term.”

The researchers noted that sensitivity towards hormonally active substances, like EE2, is not the same in all amphibians, studies have found. Some species have undergone quite a few hundred million years of independent evolutionary history and have developed various mechanisms of genetic sex determination.

In the new study, researchers tested the impact of EE2 on the development of three amphibian species: the African clawed frog, tadpoles of the European tree frog, and the European green toad. All three were raised in water that contained various levels of EE2 and their development was compared to control groups.

Researchers established the genetic sex of all species using most recent molecular approaches.The scientists also studied the phenotypic progression of the sexual organs.

The study tram found a sex reversal occurred from 15 to 100 percent of the time in the animals exposed to EE2.

“In addition to other threats, the feminization of populations may contribute to the extinction of amphibian species,” Stöck said.

“EE2 is also part of our water supply and, together with other estrogen-like substances, it presents a serious risk not only for amphibians but also for humans. Our study shows that the clawed frog as model species is well-suited to study the effects of hormonally active substances in the environment,” added study author Werner Kloas, an eco-toxicologist from IGB. “The effect established in this species, however, cannot be extrapolated to other amphibian species without caution.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

Obese adults now outnumber underweight people, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

More adults worldwide are classified as obese than underweight, according to new research that reveals that the number of obese people in 186 countries has risen from 105 million to more than 640 million over the past four decades.

According to BBC News and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, scientists at Imperial College London and a team of colleagues compared body mass index (BMI) among nearly 20 million adult males and females between 1975 and 2014, and found what lead author Professor Majid Ezzat referred to as an “epidemic of severe obesity” that required action from regulators.

The researchers found that obesity rates in men had more than tripled, from 3.2 percent in 1975 to 10.8 percent in 2014, while they had doubles in women, from 6.4 percent to 14.9 percent. That means that 266 million men and 375 million women were obese as of 2014, and if these trends continue, more than 20 percent of all adults will be clinically obese by the year 2025.

“Our research has shown that over 40 years we have transitioned from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” Ezzat, whose paper detailing the findings was published last week in The Lancet, told BBC News. “Global obesity has reached crisis point.”

Affordable fruits, veggies, grains could help solve the problem

The study found that the average weight of the world’s population has grown an estimated 3.3 pounds per decade since 1975, and the Ezzat said that unless things change, there is “close to zero” chance of meeting the World Health Organization’s global obesity target of returning to 2010 global obesity levels by 2025.

The researchers believe that the increased access to cheaper but less healthy food in some parts of the world is one of the major reasons for the world’s growing waistline. As Ezzati explained to the Post-Gazette, as more country emerge from poverty, they find it easier to consume highly processes carbohydrates, with are often less expensive than whole grains or fresh fruit and vegetables.

“We hope these findings create an imperative to shift responsibility from the individual to governments and to develop and implement policies to address obesity,” Ezzati told BBC News. “For instance, unless we make healthy food options like fresh fruits and vegetables affordable for everyone and increase the price of unhealthy processed foods, the situation is unlikely to change.”

The research also discovered that China and the US have the highest numbers of obese adults in the world. China has 43.2 million obese men and 46.4 million obese women, while there are 41.7 million obese men and 46.1 million women in America. Nearly one-fifth of the all obese adults in the world live in six high-income, English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Researchers discover first evidence of new state of matter

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Four decades after it was first predicted to exist, evidence of a new state of matter known as a quantum spin liquid has been discovered in an actual material, physicists from the University of Cambridge and their colleagues reported Monday in the journal Nature Materials.

Quantum spin liquids have long been thought to cause electrons, the invisible building blocks of nature, to become fragmented, the researchers explained in a statement. Now, the first signatures of the mysterious particles created by this process (also known as Majorana fermions) have been detected in a series of experiments involving a two-dimensional, graphene-like material.

The results of these experiments were a close match to one of the primary theoretical models for a quantum spin liquid – a model known as a Kitaev model. While researchers have predicted that this state of matter was present in some magnetic materials, it had not been conclusively spotted in nature, and the discovery could greatly benefit the development of quantum computers.

“This is a new quantum state of matter, which has been predicted but hasn’t been seen before,” co-author Dr. Johannes Knolle from the Theory of Condensed Matter group at the university’s Cavendish Laboratory, explained in a statement. “This is a new addition to a short list of known quantum states of matter.”

‘Important step forward’ in the field of quantum computing

Now that Dr. Knolle and his colleagues have observed the phenomenon of fractionalization (or electron splitting), there is a possibility that the Majorana fermions produced as a result of this process could be used as the foundation of quantum computing technology that would be much faster and capable of completing calculations beyond the scope of conventional systems.

In most magnetic materials, the electrons behave in a manner similar to regular bar magnets, the study authors explained. When a material is cooled to a low-enough temperature, the electrons in the magnets order themselves so that all of the similar poles point in the same direction. In those containing a spin liquid state, however, the magnets do not align. Instead, they become entangled due to quantum fluctuations.

“Until recently,” said co-author Dr. Dmitry Kovrizhin, also at the Cavendish Laboratory, “we didn’t even know what the experimental fingerprints of a quantum spin liquid would look like. One thing we’ve done in previous work is to ask, if I were performing experiments on a possible quantum spin liquid, what would I observe?”

The Cambridge researchers, along with colleagues from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, used neutron scattering techniques to search for signs of electron splitting in crystals of ruthenium chloride (RuCl3). They illuminated the RuC13 crystals with neutrons to test their magnetic properties, and found signatures matching the theoretical Kitaev model.

Their research provides the first direct evidence of a quantum spin liquid and electron splitting in a two-dimensional material – a breakthrough that Dr. Kovrizhin called “an important step for our understanding of quantum matter.” He added that it was “fun to have another new quantum state that we’ve never seen before – it presents us with new possibilities to try new things.”

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Image credit: Genevieve Martin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Space

Blue Origin successfully launches and lands third reusable rocket

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

In an enormous success for the future of commercial spaceflight, Blue Origin has successfully launched and landed its reusable rocket, New Shepard, for not its first, or its second, but third time since November.

The spacecraft—consisting of a booster and an unmanned capsule—completed this successful test flight on Saturday. After separating from the booster, the capsule soared high, hitting a maximum altitude of 339,138 feet (about 103,400 meters), which is about two miles above the cutoff point for atmospheric flight. After what would be about four minutes of weightlessness for humans onboard, a parachute deployed, and it landed safely back at the West Texas launch site.

Parachutes deploy to bring the capsule back to Earth. Credit: Blue Origin

The booster, meanwhile, began falling much sooner, reigniting at an altitude of 3,635 feet (1,108 meters), or six seconds before it would have impacted the Earth—a maneuver attempting to push the envelope of the engine’s performance, according to Blue Origin’s founder and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. With its four landing legs deployed, it settled gently back on the ground. Bezos, who live-Tweeted the occasion, described the engine restart as “flawless” and “perfect”:

Flawless BE-3 restart and perfect booster landing. CC chutes
deployed. @BlueOrigin

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) April 2, 2016

The capsule also contained two science experiments, according to Space.com. One was a box of rocks logically titled the “Box of Rocks Experiment,” which aimed to investigate how rocks move in weightlessness—which will hopefully help clarify how rocky soil on small asteroids moves.

The second experiment involved a marble being dropped into a bed of dust (also logically titled, the “Collisions in Dust Experiment”), which attempted to get information that will help scientists understand how collisions between particles in the early solar system worked.

Luxury in 0G?

Before this test flight, two others were successfully completed: one on November 23, 2015 and another on January 22. According to Bezos, crewed flights of New Shepard—which can hold six people—will begin next year. And, should all go right, flights for paying passengers would begin in 2018. As of yet, there is no word about how much such a flight might cost. Although it seems the capsule is fairly “luxurious” when compared to its predecessors. Not only does it have “the largest windows in spaceflight history,” but it’s, well, roomy.

“The New Shepard capsule’s interior is an ample 530 cubic feet — offering over 10 times the room Alan Shepard had on his Mercury flight,” says the Blue Origin web page. “It seats six astronauts and is large enough for you to float freely and turn weightless somersaults.”

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Image credit: Blue Origin

Science

Could tiger populations recover? These scientists say yes.

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

In perhaps what might be considered cautiously optimistic news, forests in critical parts of the world haven’t been destroyed as much as anticipated, meaning enough of them remain to achieve an international goal of doubling world tiger populations.

Fewer than 3,500 tigers are left in the wild, making them the most endangered big cat of all. Much of this is because only 7 percent of the tiger’s territory remains in Asia. In the last century alone, wild tiger numbers have plunged by 95 percent.

What’s killing the tigers?

The big problems are the usual culprits: habitat destruction (from logging, development, and agriculture) and poaching (partially because certain tiger body parts are used in traditional Asian medicine).

By 2010, the crisis had grown to the point that government officials from the 13 Asian countries where tigers still roam, including four heads of state, convened a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. There, they agreed on a global recovery goal: By 2022, the wild tiger population would be double what it was at the time—a motion known as the Tx2 goal.

And so far, there have been some exciting successes towards achieving it. Nepal reports its tiger population has increased by 61 percent, while India reports a 31 percent growth. At the same time, though, habitat loss has only continued to eat away at the remaining areas where tigers can live. This caused some to become concerned that the Tx2 goal would be impossible to achieve—because too little habitat would be left to support a wild tiger population of that size.

How much space is left?

And so, Anup Joshi of the University of Minnesota in St Paul led a study that attempted to determine just how much area was left for tigers, according to a paper in Science Advances. Using Google Earth Engine’s cloud computing platform, the team processed enormous amounts of satellite imagery data from 2001 to 2014 from Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring system that aims to provide information to empower people across the globe to manage and conserve forests.

With this technology, they were able to estimate changes in forests to the level of about 100 feet (30 meters) in some areas. According to Joshi, this is a huge change from before, as access to this kind of technology was extremely limited.

And the results are surprisingly promising. The forest loss in the areas of concern was 7.7 percent—much less than had been estimated, especially considering that the 13 tiger range countries have some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

“Most encouraging was that loss was less than expected in the 51 tiger reserves,” wrote the authors in the paper. “This suggests that if future habitat loss is prevented, the tiger recovery in some range states will accelerate. In these promising locales of enhanced protection, a doubling of the tiger population could be attainable by 2022.”

However, of the 7.7 percent of forest destruction, 98 percent was lost in 10 of the areas considered most critical for doubling the tiger population. The greatest losses were in Malaysia and Sumatra, where palm oil business is booming. Palm oil is the world’s most popular vegetable oil, and shows up everywhere from shampoo to Nutella. Plantations for the plants have resulted in massive forest loss in these regions, which is not only a danger to tigers, but to Sumatran and Bornean orangutans and Sumatran and pygmy elephants.

The impact in these 10 regions are naturally being described as “devastating”.

“There are three important things for the conservation of tigers,” said Joshi. “Habitat, anti-poaching efforts and maintaining tiger prey species. We want this study to encourage people to think that doubling numbers is possible but we don’t want to paint too rosy a picture.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Fibromyalgia

Are Opiates Right For Treating Fibromyalgia?

Written By: Holly Case

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

Preston Hemmerich

Fibromyalgia is a syndrome that may have a variety of causes and symptoms. Few cases of fibromyalgia are exactly alike. However, widespread pain is one thing that is common in almost all cases of fibromyalgia. This pain may vary from day to day or constant, mild or intense. For those who have more intense and constant pain, it can be extremely difficult to live with every day. Because the cause is unknown, doctors aren’t always sure how to treat this extreme pain. Some prescribe opiate painkillers as treatment, but is this the best option?

Who is Using Opiates and Why?

About 30 percent of fibromyalgia sufferers regularly take opiate painkiller medications, which is a similar percentage as those who take opiates for other pain disorders like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. In many cases, those who take opiates have previously tried other treatments to alleviate their pain or may currently be using other treatments, such as pregabalin (Lyrica).

Opiates May Make Fibromyalgia Pain Worse

It’s understandable why doctors would prescribe opiate painkillers to their patients with fibromyalgia. An estimated 80 percent of fibromyalgia sufferers reported being in pain in the past week, and the amount of pain they feel is greater than that of people with muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis. Doctors feel compassion when their patients are suffering, so it makes sense that many would try to alleviate it.

However, one study suggests that using opiates to treat fibromyalgia could actually make pain worse. In a condition called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, long term use of opiates changes the neural pathways in the brain that cause pain. Ironically, long term use of opiates can actually cause more sensitization to pain, which leads to a feedback loop in which you need to take higher dosages because of the tolerance you build to lower doses but you actually feel more pain as your medication dose increases.

Overall Outcomes for Opiate Use

Other research has shown that fibromyalgia sufferers who take opiates for pain relief have worse overall outcomes, including higher rates of disability, unemployment, unstable psychiatric symptoms and history of suicide attempts. Opiate use appears to be effective in lower dosages for short term courses of treatment.

Risks of Opiate Use

The question about whether fibromyalgia sufferers should be prescribed opiate pain relievers is a controversial one. Those who are suffering are understandably upset when public health advocates talk about restricting access to opiates, especially because the public health figures are generally not dealing with the pain of fibromyalgia themselves.

However, it can’t be denied that regular, long-term opiate use has its own risks. Such opiate use can cause the following serious side effects:

Opiate pain relievers are addictive and many patients build up a tolerance to them, requiring greater amounts of the medication to get the same relief. This can lead to criminal activity to illegally obtain more drugs.
Constipation
Disordered breathing
Risk of accidental overdose, especially when combined with other medications like anti-anxiety or anti-nausea drugs
Greater risk of death from all causes

Making the decision to treat fibromyalgia with opiate medications is one that should be made by a doctor and patient together with careful consideration of all factors. Because it may have unintended side effects, it’s important to revisit the issue on occasion to make sure the treatment being used is the most appropriate one.

Science

Ancient DNA confirms European settlers wiped out Native Americans

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

The arrival of the first Europeans in the New World had a devastating impact on the indigenous American population, leading to the extinction of the genetic lineage of pre-Columbian men and women that originally called that part of the planet home, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and their colleagues reconstructed a genetic history of indigenous Americans by analyzing the genes of 92 pre-Columbian skeletons and mummies dated between 500 and 800 years old.

As they reported in this week in the journal Science Advances, they found that not one of those early genetic lineages was present in modern indigenous Americans, indicating that the arrival of the Spaniards and other Europeans spelled the end of the line for these ancient populations.

“Surprisingly, none of the genetic lineages we found in almost 100 ancient humans were present, or showed evidence of descendants, in today’s Indigenous populations,” Dr. Bastien Llamas, co-lead author of the study, said in a statement. He added that this separation appeared to take place “as early as 9,000 years ago” and was “completely unexpected” by the research team.

Study also provides more precise date for arrival of first Americans

According to Dr. Llamas, he and his colleagues “examined many demographic scenarios to try and explain the pattern” and were only able to come up with one scenario that fit the data: soon after the initial colonization of the New World, “populations were established that subsequently stayed geographically isolated from one another.”

A significant portion of these populations later became extinct following contact with travelers arriving from Europe, he added. This scenario matches closely with historical records indicating that there was a major demographic collapse in the late 1400s – a collapse which coincided with the arrival of the first Spaniards, the study authors explained.

Dr. Llamas and his colleagues then sequenced whole mitochondrial genomes that were extracted from bone and teeth samples belonging to 92 pre-Columbian mummies and skeletons. The goal was to trace the maternal genetic lineages of these primarily South American humans, while also establishing a more precise timeline for the arrival of the first humans in America via the former Beringian land bridge that once connected Asia to northwestern North America.

“Our genetic reconstruction confirms that the first Americans entered around 16,000 years ago via the Pacific coast, skirting around the massive ice sheets that blocked an inland corridor route which only opened much later,” said ACAD director and study co-author Professor Alan Cooper. “They spread southward remarkably swiftly, reaching southern Chile by 14,600 years ago.”

“Our study is the first real time genetic record of these key questions regarding the timing and process of the peopling of the Americas,” added Dr. Wolfgang Haak, a former ACAD researcher who is now with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “To get an even fuller picture, however, we will need a concerted effort to build a comprehensive dataset from the DNA of people alive today and their pre-Columbian ancestors, to further compare ancient and modern diversity.”

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Image credit: Huaca Pucllana research, conservation and valorisation project

Health

Scientists develop breakthrough artificial skin treatment

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

In a breakthrough that could make skin transplants to burn victims or other patients in need of new skin, Japanese researchers have successfully reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) into a functional integumentary system, according to a new study.
The research, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, also involved implanting these 3D tissues into living mice, scientists from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) and their colleagues explained. Once implanted into the creatures, the bioengineered tissues were able to connect to the nerve, muscle and other organ systems.
The bioengineered skin tissue even included hair follicles and sebaceous glands, and could open the door for replacement therapy in human victims requiring new skin. Their work marks a new breakthrough in the development of lab-created skin, as prior attempts to create epithelial tissue lacked the oil-secreting and sweat glands necessary for normal function.
“Until now, artificial skin development has been hampered by the fact that the skin lacked the important organs, such as hair follicles and exocrine glands, which allow the skin to play its important role in regulation,” lead author Takashi Tsuji of the RIKEN Center’s Laboratory for Organ Regeneration explained in a statement.
“With this new technique, we have successfully grown skin that replicates the function of normal tissue,” he added. “We are coming ever closer to the dream of being able to recreate actual organs in the lab for transplantation, and also believe that tissue grown through this method could be used as an alternative to animal testing of chemicals.”
Inclusion of hair follicles, sebaceous glands a big step forward
Tsuji and his fellow researchers started by taking cells from the gums of mice, then they used special chemicals to transform them into iPS cells. Those cells were then converted into a mass of cells known as an embryoid body through the use of Wnt10b signaling before being implanted into immune-deficient mice, where they gradually changed into other types of tissues.
After the tissues differentiated, the study authors removed them from the mice, then implanted them into another group of older mice, where they developed into integumentary tissue, or the tissue between the outer and inner layers of skin responsible for fat excretion and the eruption of the hair shaft.
More importantly, Tsuji’s team found that these tissues were able to connect with surrounding nerve and muscle tissue to enable normal function within the body. Furthermore, because these cells were treated with the signaling molecule Wnt10b, they were able to produce a significant amount of hair follicles, thus making the bioengineered integumentary system closer to natural tissues, the researchers said.
“The bioengineered hair follicles in the 3D integumentary organ system also showed proper hair eruption and hair cycles, including the rearrangement of follicular stem cells and their niches,” the authors wrote in their paper. “Potential applications of the 3D integumentary organ system include an in vitro assay system, an animal model alternative, and a bioengineered organ replacement therapy.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

NASA’s Opportunity Rover tackles its steepest slope to date

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

After more than a decade on the Red Planet, you would think that there would be little that the folks at NASA would ask the Mars Rover Opportunity to accomplish, but you would be wrong, at the agency recently attempted to have the vehicle climb its steepest slope yet.

According to Space.com and Spaceflight Now, Opportunity was directed to a 32 degree slope on March 10 and attempted to scale a hill near the crest of the area known as Knudsen Ridge. While it would have been the steepest climb ever successfully scaled by a rover, it did fall a bit short of its goal and had to be rerouted after spilling its wheels and slipping.

While officials at the agency prepared for potential slippage by increasing the number of wheel rotations during the attempted climb, the slippage would up being to great and they were forced to abandon the attempt. While the wheels had turned enough to carry Opportunity 66 feet (20 m) without slippage, in reality it was only able to make it roughly 3.5 inches (9 cm) up the hill.

It was the third attempt to scale Knudsen Ridge, NASA said in a statement, and following this latest failure, the rover team made the difficult decision to abandon this part of the mission and to re-route the rover to another target. Even so, Opportunity was able to break its own record for the steepest slope ever driven by a Mars rover, according to the agency.

‘Three-month’ mission entering its 12th year with no end in sight

In the days and weeks that followed, Opportunity was sent backwards down the hill, then went approximately 200 feet (60 m) to the southwest, towards a different rock target in the region of Mars known as Marathon Valley. Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest that both rock targets contain clay minerals, which only form in the presence of water.

Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004, was sent to the Red Planet to search for evidence that its surface once contained liquid water, according to Space.com. Its mission was originally supposed to only last three months, but over the past 12 years, it has found plenty of evidence of water on Mars, breaking the off-world distance driving record in the process.

It shows no signs of stopping, either. As NASA explained, the rover has been investigating the western edge of the 14 mile (22 km) wide Endeavor Crater since 2011, and agency officials see no end in sight. “We are looking forward to completing the work in Marathon Valley this year and continuing onward with Opportunity,” said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Science

How closely related are gorillas and humans? Closer than you might think.

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

A new effort to sequence the gorilla genome has filled in many of the gaps from the first attempt to map the primate’s DNA while revealing that they may be more closely related to humans than previously believed, according to research published Friday in the journal Science.

University of Washington professor of genome sciences Evan Eichler and his colleagues used an 11-year-old Western lowland gorilla named Susie as the subject for their sequencing efforts, and found that human and gorilla genomes diverge by just 1.6 percent, Reuters reported on Thursday. Only bonobos and chimpanzees are more closely related to humans, they added.

Among the area of genetic divergence are the immune and reproductive systems, the areas that control sensory perception, those governing the production of the protein keratin (which is used by the body to build hair, skin and fingernails) and those that regulate insulin. Their research has also resulted in the discovery of thousands of new protein and peptide-encoding segments.

The differences between the species “may aid researchers in identifying regions of the human genome that are associated with higher cognition, complex language, behavior and neurological diseases,” study author Christopher Hill, a genetic researcher at UW, told the news agency.

Study could shed new light on evolutionary history of gorillas, humans

The sequencing effort is part of the university’s efforts to compile a comprehensive catalog of genetic differences between humans and all of the great apes, including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, Reuters said. A blood sample from Susie, who now lives at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio, was taken when she was at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

Eichler, Hill and their fellow researchers used Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) technology and the assembly tools Falcon and QUIVER as part of their sequencing attempts. In a statement, they explained that these methods allowed them to generate long sequence reads more than 100 times the length of many other, commonly used technologies.

By doing so, they were able to reduce the number of fragments from 400,000 to just 1,800 and increasing the size of those pieces by 800 times. Furthermore, they were able to close 90 percent of all the gaps in the original sequencing effort, discovering several segments and regulatory elements that had been missed as part of the earlier attempt. The goal, they said, is to learn how humans evolved to be so vastly different than their great ape relatives.

“My motivation in studying human and great ape genomes is to try to learn what makes us tick as a species,” Eichler explained. “I’d like to see a re-doing of all the great ape genomes, including chimpanzee and orangutan, to get a comprehensive view of the genetic variants that distinguish humans from the great apes. I believe there is far more genetic variation than we had previously thought. The first step is finding it.”

In addition to providing new insights about humans, the improved genome assembly provides an enhanced look at the evolutionary history of the lowland gorilla, the authors said. Earlier studies revealed that the gorilla population experienced a bottleneck in the relatively recent past, but this new effort shows that this event was more severe than previously thought. Genetic patterns in the creatures could also show how the gorilla population was effected by pathogens, climate change, and human activity, they concluded.

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Image credit: Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens

Space

BREAKING: ‘The Earth is flat’ says Neil deGrasse Tyson

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

America’s favorite astrophysicist has just come clean about a dirty secret.

“I had to tell someone,” Neil Degrasse Tyson told ZNN in a startling new interview. “It’s been eating me up. NASA paid me to say it—they didn’t want anyone to know. But you ask any airline pilot and they’ll tell you: Flights to the other side of the Earth actually fly off the edge and around its underside. Just like what the Sun does every single day.” Just look at this tweet:

When pressed for details, the whole lurid truth came out. “It all started with the ancient Greeks,” he confessed. “They realized that a flat Earth was too much knowledge for the human mind to comprehend. No one man should have all that power.”

From there, many tried to spread the lie to save us from ourselves, according to Tyson. Pythagoras, Plato, Erastothenes, Dante, Megallan…all were part of a secret organization—the Illuminati—that worked to hide the truth from all. They wrote books, made globes, photoshopped images, stole, murdered, bribed, pillaged, and more to spread this horrible falsehood.

NASA is the head of the modern iteration of this nefarious plot, said Tyson. It takes all the money from the alleged “space” programs and uses it to bribe thousands of scientists yearly, as well as to give NASA employees a nice vacation to the place where it all began—Athens, Greece—in order to pay homage to those brave whistle-silencers of 2500 years ago. The remaining money is spent on those little umbrellas for drinks at the bar where employees hang out while pretending to work on space things.

“If it weren’t for truth warriors like B.o.B, I would never have told anyone. But he was right. He was right,” Tyson sobbed. “Just look at the horizon. Where’s the curve???”

Tyson reportedly spent the hush money on what appears to be videos faking the Mars landings, as well as on a new bowtie for his best friend and Illuminati president, Bill Nye.

“Oh, and heliocentricity?” he continued. “Forget about it. Our flat Earth is the center of the universe. Case closed.”

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(In case it wasn’t obvious enough–April Fools)

Science

Satellite images discover site that could rewrite history of Vikings in North America

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Thanks to satellite technology and the efforts of an intrepid group of archaeologists, evidence of a second Viking settlement has been discovered in North America, documentaries set to air next week on PBS in the US and BBC One in the UK will reportedly reveal.

According to BBC News and National Geographic reports, University of Alabama-Birmingham archaeologist Sarah Parcak, Douglas Bolender from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and their colleagues discovered a stone hearth used for ironworking at a remote peninsula in Canada, several hundred miles from the only confirmed Viking settlement in the New World.

Evidence of human activity at the site, a remote peninsula that runs from southern Newfoundland to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, was originally discovered last summer thanks to satellite data, which uncovered signs of previous human activity in the region. After a long and dangerous hike across bogs and bear-infested forests, Parcak and Bolender turned to more traditional techniques such as the use of trowels and brushes to make what the BBC calls a potentially “seismic” discovery.

While digging at Point Rosee, hundreds of miles south of the only previously known Viking outpost known as L’Anse aux Meadows, the researchers found the iron-working hearth partially covered by what appears to have been a wall made from turf. The artifacts found indicate the use of metal working that is not associated with the native people of the region, the New York Times reported, and radiocarbon dating places them firmly during the Norse era.

Childs and Parcack dig at the site in question. Credit: Greg Mumford

Discovery ‘has the potential to change history’

National Geographic noted that the archaeologists do not yet have enough evidence to confirm that the location was home to a second North American Viking settlement, and plan to return to the site for additional research this summer. They noted that experts are “cautiously optimistic,” however, that they have found what the Times called “a long-elusive prize in archaeology.”

The settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, located at the northernmost point of Newfoundland, was discovered in 1960, confirming that Vikings were the first Europeans to arrive at the New World. Yet in the years that follow, the hunt for additional evidence of Viking activity in North America has proved fruitless, leaving scholars in the dark about how far inland they might have traveled.

The Point Rosee site is some 300 miles further south than L’Anse aux Meadows, according to the Times, which would suggest that the Vikings did indeed travel further inland after their arrival on North American shores. It was spotted by Parack’s team thanks to a satellite technique which she had previously used to ancient sites in Egypt and Rome, according to BBC News.

The satellite images used to discover the site

The satellite image used to discover the site. Credit: DigitalGlobe inc.

The images revealed soil irregularities that suggested that man-make structures had once stood on the ground – possibly Viking longhouses, the researchers explained. She, Boldender and their fellow archaeologists then took to the field, where they discovered the possible hearth, as well as the wall surrounding it. She then checked with local historians, who confirmed that there were no other groups native to the area that roasted bog iron.

If confirmed, the discovery “has the potential to change history,” Boldender told the BBC. “Right now the simplest answer is that it looks like a small activity area, maybe connected to a larger farm that is Norse,” he explained, adding that he is excited about the find and hopeful that the team will be able to discover seeds or other organic matter than can be carbon dated.

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Image credit: Greg Mumford