Technology

Scientist conceives of laser cloaking device to protect the Earth from aliens

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

It’s an idea seen again and again in movies: Extraterrestrial life seeks us out—and then tries to snuff us out. Thankfully, two astronomers from Columbia University have an idea that could help hide our planet from unwanted visitors until we’re ready to face them: a laser cloaking device.

Currently, there are plans to broadcast messages across the galaxy in hopes that intelligent life on a distant planet will pick up the call. But many prominent scientists have cautioned against such ideas, as extraterrestrials might seek out our life-bearing planet for all the wrong reasons—maybe to take our resources for themselves. Or, even if they are less hostile, there could be devastating unintended consequences along the lines of Europeans bringing new diseases to the Americas—which killed up to 90 percent of the native population.

And even without yelling to the universe that we’re here, our planet wouldn’t be hard to find if you know what you’re looking for. For example, when the Kepler spacecraft looks for planets that might host life, it looks to the stars: When a planet moves in front of the star it orbits, there is a noticeable dip in the light. Using this simple technique alone, more than 1,000 planets have been identified. From there, scientists check to see if the planets fall in the habitable zone of their stars, meaning they are warm enough for liquid water and thus a good place to check for life—like Earth.

Should extraterrestrials know to look for these clues, and should they have more advanced technology and bad intentions, we could be in deep, deep doo doo (to put it scientifically).

Hiding the Earth from Alien invaders

Luckily for us, Professor David Kipping and graduate student Alex Teachey of Columbia have a solution. If the Earth passing the Sun causes a visible dip in the light seen by other planets, then a laser could be turned on to compensate for the darkness—making it appear that the light is constant and that our planet is not there.

According to the authors in their paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, this would require that we emit a continuous 30 megawatt laser for ten hours when our planet blocks the sunlight heading towards a planet that could harbor life—apparently requiring the same amount of energy that the International Space Station collects in a year. A chromatic cloak, meanwhile—which is effective at all wavelengths—would require 250 megawatts.

“Alternatively, we could cloak only the atmospheric signatures associated with biological activity, such as oxygen, which is achievable with a peak laser power of just 160 kW [kilowatts] per transit [period of blocking the sun for a potential life-bearing planet]. To another civilization, this should make the Earth appear as if life never took hold on our world,” said Teachey in a statement.

Should we decide not to hide ourselves from aliens, these laser arrays could also be used for communication purposes. For example, modifying the way the light from the Sun dips during the transit could make it obviously artificial, shouting to the universe that we exist.

“There is an ongoing debate as to whether we should advertise ourselves or hide from advanced civilizations potentially living on planets elsewhere in the Galaxy,” said Kipping. “Our work offers humanity a choice, at least for transit events, and we should think about what we want to do.”

—–

Image credit: ESO / G. Hüdepohl

Space

Researchers discover incredibly rare triple star system

Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway

According to a newly-published study, a rare triple-star system containing a planet in a stable orbit was recently discovered by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Published in the Astronomical Journal, the study detailed the discovery of distant world, known as KELT-4Ab.

While the planet orbits one star in the system, that star is circled by a pair of stars. Standing on the surface of the KELT-4Ab, the two orbiting stars would appear as bright as the full moon does in our sky.

In addition to describing an exotic solar system, the study also provides new details on the evolution of a “hot Jupiter,” or a gas giant that orbits close to its host star.

KELT-4Ab, which is approximately the same size as Jupiter, orbits KELT-A once every three days. The nearby stars KELT-B and KELT-C orbit each other once every three decades, and jointly they travel around KELT-A and its planet about every 4,000 years.

Figure2

Rare star systems

Three-star systems are extremely rare, and yet last year, a team of astronomers announced the discovery in mid-formation.

In a gas cloud about 800 light-years from Earth, researchers spotted a core of gas that they predict will condense into a three-star system about 40,000 years.

Using the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, the study team was able to map methane molecules in a thick core of gas called Barnard 5 (B5) in an area of the constellation Perseus. In their observations, the team saw filaments of gas in B5 becoming fragmented. These fragments are beginning to form stars, and will eventually form a three-star system, the study said.

The study added fragmentation of gas filaments to the list of theories on star formation, which includes fragmentation of a primary gas core, fragmentation inside of a disk of material around a young star and gravitational entrapment.

According to the study, B5 will generate stars from one-tenth to over one-third the mass of our Sun. The distances between stars will probably range from 3,000 to 11,000 astronomical units (AU), or the distance between the Earth and the Sun, the study said.

—–

Image credit: NASA JPL

Science

Real life ‘Hobbits’ died out earlier than previously thought– and we might be to blame

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Homo floresiensis, the diminutive humanoid species affectionately known as “hobbits” due to their size and appearance, died out far earlier than previously believed, and our ancestors may be to blame, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

First discovered 13 years ago in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, the species stood approximately 3.5 feet (1.1 meters) tall and weighed about 75 pounds. They were nicknamed in honor of the mythical creatures from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings based on their size and appearance.

Previous research indicated that Homo floresiensis lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, which means that they could have survived longer than Neanderthals and may have made contact with modern humans. However, the authors of the new study returned to the location where their fossils were originally discovered, and their analysis found that it is the hobbits actually died out more than 50,000 years ago, according to BBC News and the Sydney Morning Herald.

The initial dating of the species was based on chemicals in the soil around fossils, which were used to determine the age of sediment layers and the items within. However, the authors of the new study found that the sediment layers in the cave were not evenly distributed, Nat Geo explained.

No direct evidence of human-hobbit encounters

In light of that discovery, the researchers concluded that there had to be a wide variation in age, even at similar depths. Based on their analysis, they concluded that the bones discovered in the cave were actually between 100,000 and 60,000 years old, and that the tools were from no more than 50,000 years ago – about the same time modern humans arrived there.

“At the time of the initial discovery, not enough of the older deposits had been exposed, and this led to an error in the interpretation of how the dates obtained at that time applied to the sediments that contained the hobbit remains,” study co-author Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist with Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario told Nat Geo.

Professor Richard “Bert” Roberts from the University of Wollongong, Australia, added that the discovery finally solves the mystery of how Homo floresiensis would have been able to survive for 30,000 to 40,000 years after humans first made their way to Indonesia: they didn’t.

“Well, it now seems we weren’t living alongside this little species for very long, if at all. And once again it smells of modern humans having a role in the downfall of yet another species,” he told BBC News. “Every time modern humans arrived somewhere new, it tended to be bad news for the endemic fauna. Things would go pear-shaped pretty quickly.”

Unlike previous expeditions to the cave, which focused only on the cave’s central and eastern walls – where erosion caused a slope to form from younger sediments to form – the authors of the new study expanded their excavation to other areas and used five different dating techniques to ensure accuracy, said Nat Geo. Despite their theories, however, the researchers reported that they did not find any direct evidence of interactions between this species and modern humans.

—–

Image credit: Phys.org

Science

20,000 Aboriginal artifacts discovered during construction project in Sydney

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

The discovery of a massive cache of indigenous artifacts during the construction of a new light rail line in Sydney, Australia has led experts to call for a halt to the project while the spearheads, cutting tools. and other relics are recovered from the excavation site.

According to the Daily Mail and the Sydney Morning Herald, approximately 20,000 items have already been recovered from the site, which was to be used to store rail vehicles known as trams, and heritage experts working at the location believe there may be tens of thousands more.

Some of the more than 20,000 artifacts found at the yard. Photo: Tocomwall

Some of the more than 20,000 artifacts found at the yard. Photo: Tocomwall

The tram yard, which is being built in the Sydney suburb of Sydney, includes some artifacts that do not appear to be from the area, Scott Franks, director of archaeological consultant Tocomwall, told reporters. Items made using fine cryptocrystalline stone, which is not found around Sydney, suggests the existence of a trading route with residents of the Hunter Valley, he added.

“This site is the most significant in Sydney,” Franks told the Daily Mail, adding that he and his colleagues were “astonished” by the number of relics they discovered in a relatively small area. His group, as well as Aboriginal organizations and local government officials, are calling for the project to be temporarily halted in light of the find.

Experts think there could be more than 50,000 artifacts at the site. Credit: Tocomwall

Experts think there could be more than 50,000 artifacts at the site. Credit: Tocomwall

Experts calling for construction to halt for further research

Franks and his associates are calling for more archaeological work to be completed to better understand the significance of the discovery, but the Sydney Morning Herald said that officials have not yet said whether or not they would comply with the request and pause the project.

“Archaeological work undertaken in late 2015 and January 2016 identified a high density of Aboriginal artifacts on a specific section of the Randwick Stabling Yard site,” a spokesman at Transport for New South Wales told the newspaper. They added that they “investigating” the matter, adding that all work at the site had been supervised by Aboriginal groups.

Jakub Czastka, a senior archeologist at Tocomwall, told reporters that the fact that more than 20,000 artifacts were discovered in an area just over 100 square meters in size was indicative of an Aboriginal ceremonial meeting place. “I would suggest quite strongly that this site is of state significance,” he said – comments that were echoed by Frank in a separate interview.

Greens MP David Shoebridge told the Herald that it was “downright criminal that what may well be one of the most important recent heritage finds is being literally torn up without even the most rudimentary consideration” of stopping work. He also told the Daily Mail that it was likely that thousands of artifacts had already been damaged or destroyed by machinery at the site.

“Those artifacts that have been recovered have already lost their connection with place and with that a good deal of their cultural significance,” he told the UK publication. “If this was the center of Athens or Paris and a heritage find of this significance occurred then there is no doubt the work would stopped to see how the site could be saved, but in Sydney… the bulldozers aren’t even stopped for a day.”

—–

Image credit: Christopher Pearce

Science

Are humans inherently violent? This ancient Japanese society says no

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

For hundreds of years, it has been argued that violence and warfare are an inherent part of the human experience—but now, a study of ancient Japanese human remains could turn this theory on its head.

If violence is part of our psyche, then there should be evidence of it in humans thousands of years removed from the present—and recent ethnographic and archaeological discoveries seemed to support this. For example, in what was seen as the earliest example of warfare, a 10,000-year-old massacre was recently found in Turkana, Kenya. There was even a reasonable evolutionary explanation for why we fight: Violence with outsiders increases cooperation between group members, which makes the group more successful and thus more likely to survive.

Could we ever just get along?

But this theory can be disproven in a simple way: By finding evidence of a society with little to no warfare or violence.

Japanese and English researchers turned to a likely group of such humans– hunter-gatherers who lived during the Jomon period.

The Jomon period was a Japanese prehistoric period dating from 13,000 to 800 BCE. Humans in this period were hunter-gatherers, and archaeologists have long argued that war was rare for them. The team studied the remains of 2,500 people from this time period, searching for evidence of violence like damaged bones, according to the study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. What they found is actually quite hopeful.

12-14 percent of the remains of other hunter-gatherers from the same time period as the Jomon show evidence of possible violence. But for the hunter-gatherers in Japan, only 0.89 percent of all bones showed such evidence—and it’s very possible that much of this bone damage didn’t come from violent attacks.

Furthermore, signs of violence aren’t always clues pointing towards war. The signs of violence did not cluster into “hot spots” on a map of Japan, but instead were spread out fairly evenly—lending weight to the idea that there was no warfare at the time. 

From this, the researchers believe that the humans of the Jomon period lived peacefully with each other. And if that’s true, then humans may not be as predisposed to violence as others have led us to believe.

Apparently John Lennon wasn’t the first human to give peace a chance.

—–

A reconstruction of a Jomon period village. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Health

You are what you eat; scientists link dietary differences to specific genetic mutations

Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway

You may have heard the old adage “you are what you eat.”

Cornell University scientists found evidence that a vegetarian diet over multiple generations can bring about a specific genetic mutation in humans, according to a new report in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Short-term genetic evolution

The mutation identified in the study is linked to a greater risk of inflammation-related diseases like heart disease and colon cancer for those who have it switch from a balanced omega-6 to omega-3 diet.

The study team said their work is the first to trace a greater frequency of a specified mutation to a mainly vegetarian population from Pune, India (around 70 percent), compared to a meat-eating American population (less than 20 percent).

The researchers came to their conclusion by analyzing data from the 1000 Genomes Project. The team found evolutionary evidence the vegetarian diet, over many generations, may have driven the greater frequency of a mutation in the Indian population. The mutation, known as rs66698963 and discovered in the FADS2 gene, is an insertion or deletion of a DNA sequence that handles the expression of two genes, FADS1 and FADS2. These genes are crucial to creating long chain polyunsaturated fats. Of these, arachidonic acid is a primary target of the pharmaceutical industry because it is a main offender for those at risk for inflammation-related conditions.

Treating individuals based on if their genetic copies of the insertion and their impact on fatty acid metabolites can be an essential thing to consider for precision medicine and nutrition, the study team said.

The insertion mutation may be popular in populations subsisting mainly on vegetarian diets and perhaps populations having minimal access to diets rich in polyunsaturated fats, particularly fatty fish. The deletion of the same sequence could have been adaptive in populations which are derived from marine diet, such as the Greenlandic Inuit, the researchers said. They added that a follow-up the study with added international populations would offer more insight on the mutations and these genes as a genetic marker for disease probability.

“With little animal food in the diet, the long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids must be made metabolically from plant PUFA precursors. The physiological demand for arachidonic acid, as well as omega-3 EPA and DHA, in vegetarians is likely to have favored genetics that support efficient synthesis of these key metabolites,” the study team said in a press release. “Changes in the dietary omega-6 to omega-3 balance may contribute to the increase in chronic disease seen in some developing countries.”

“This is the most unique scenario of local adaptation that I had the pleasure of helping uncover,” said study author Alon Keinan, a population geneticist at Cornell. “Several previous studies pointed to recent adaptation in this region of the genome. Our analysis points to both previous studies and our results being driven by the same insertion of an additional small piece of DNA, an insertion which has a known function. We showed this insertion to be adaptive, hence of high frequency, in Indian and some African populations, which are vegetarian. However, when it reached the Greenlandic Inuit, with their marine diet, it became maladaptive.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

305-million-year-old ‘pre-spider’ bridges Arachnid evolutionary gap

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

A recently-discovered, more than 300 million-year-old, eight-legged arachnid fossil is the closest relative to modern-day spiders ever discovered, but despite having spider-like legs and mouths, it is not actually a member of order Araneae, according to a new study.

According to BBC News and the Guardian, the creature was no bigger than a postage stamp, had large fangs, and was somewhat portly in shape. However, it lacked several important features that all true spiders possess, including the spinnerets used by the arachnids to spin silk.

In addition, CT scans of the fossils (which were originally found in France several decades ago) revealed that the newly-identified species had an odd plated and segmented abdomen, and that it lacked the long tail-like flagellum found in earlier spider-like arachnids known as the Uraraneids. The new species has been identified as the Idmonarachne brasieri, the researchers said.

“This fossil is the most closely related thing we have to a spider that isn’t a spider,” University of Manchester paleobiologist Russell Garwood, lead author of a study on the new species published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, confirmed to BBC News.

The creature lived in the late Carboniferous period and belongs to a now-extinct lineage. Credit: Garwood et al

The creature lived in the late Carboniferous period and belongs to a now-extinct lineage. Credit: Garwood et al

Secret to spiders’ success may be spinnerets, scientists say

When the remains of the arachnid were first discovered at a site near Montceau-les-Mines in eastern France, half of it was found to be entombed in rock and could not be identified, so the fossil was placed in storage. Now, several decades later, Garwood and his colleagues used CT scans to complete a detailed reconstruction of what the creature looked like.

The 3D scans revealed that arachnids shed their flagellum at some point during the evolutionary process, and that this took place before at least some members of the group developed spinnerets, the Manchester paleobiologist told the Guardian. As such, his team reported that the new species likely diverged from the spider like after Attercopus and before modern spiders evolved.

“The earliest known spider is actually from the same fossil deposit,” Garwood told BBC News, “and it definitely has spinnerets. So what we’re actually looking at is an extinct lineage that split off the spider line some time before 305 million years ago” and evolved alongside spiders.

Based on their analysis of the Idmonarachne brasieri, and comparisons with other arachnids, the study authors have come to the conclusion that spinnerets are, as Garwood told the Guardian, the “key innovation of spiders” and are “probably responsible for their massive success.” After all, as the newspaper noted, there are at least 45,000 known species of spiders, and the eight-legged creatures can be found on every continent except Antarctica.

—–

Image credit: Garwood et al 2016/

Health

Food packaging can influence calories consumed, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Pictures of foods contained on product packaging could make it more difficult to eat healthy by showing portion sizes larger than recommended that include extras, such as toppings or frosting on cakes that are not included on nutrition labels, a new study claims.

According to Dr. John Brand, lead author of a new study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition, and his colleagues at the  Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, depictions of cakes that have been frosted on cake-mix boxes could cause consumers to overestimate serving size.

“If we see a slice of cake smothered in frosting on the cake box, we think that is what is normal to serve and eat,” he explained in a statement. “But that’s not what is reflected in the serving size recommendation on the nutrition label,” and can lead people to overestimate what constitutes an ordinary, healthy serving of the high-calorie desert, he and his colleagues found.

Posted warnings could make food packaging ‘less misleading’

Dr. Brand and his colleagues conducted a series of four studies to investigate the link between depictions on food packaging and their influence on assumed serving size. The studies used 51 different cake mixes to see if the pictures made people overestimate the number of calories that are depicted, which in turn could cause those individuals to serve too much.

For the first study, they compared the calorie content stated on the nutrition label with the actual calories of the cake and frosting as pictures on the box. In remaining studies, undergraduates or food-service professionals were given one of the typical cake mix boxes, and only some of them were informed that the frosting was not included on the nutritional label. The participants were then asked whether or not the depicted piece of cake constituted a reasonable serving.

The results of the first study showed that the average calorie content of the cake and frosting as pictured on the package exceeded the calories listed on the nutritional label by 134 percent. The studies involving undergraduate students found that informing people that the listed nutritional information did not include frosting caused them to serve smaller portions, and the final study found that even industry professionals tended to overserve cake without that information.

“Undoubtedly, companies don’t intend to deceive us when they include frosting in cake box depictions, but these seemingly small elements of packaging can have a huge impact,” explained co-author Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. Simply including a warning that frosting or other extras are not included in nutritional labeling would make packaging “less misleading,” he and his fellow researchers concluded in their study.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Fibromyalgia

Is Viral Suppression A Possible Cure For Fibromyalgia?

Written By: Holly Case
Preston Hemmerich
Hepatitis B virus in blood vessel with red blood cells. A model of virus is built using data of viral macromolecular structure furnished by Protein Data Bank

Image: Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

Fibro sufferers are all too familiar with implications that their disease is less than legitimate. But fortunately, some researchers in the medical community know otherwise and have been working on novel new approaches to treat the disease. A new drug combo recently received fast track status from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat fibromyalgia—the first drug of its kind to show real promise.

The drug, called IMC-1, is a form of viral suppression. It has already successfully completed phase 2 proof-of-concept trials in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. The theory behind IMC-1 is that fibromyalgia may be related to the herpes virus lying dormant in body tissue. Treatment is based on the potential effectiveness of a novel combination of viral suppression drugs normally used to suppress herpes.

The study followed 143 women from 12 U.S. clinics. All the women were previously diagnosed with primary fibromyalgia using the criteria defined by the 2010 College of Rheumatology. They were evaluated periodically throughout a 16-week period. IMC is now working with the FDA to meet the requirements to begin the IMC-1 Phase 3 trials.

Researchers noticed that fibromyalgia had a similar cluster of symptoms as other diseases linked to the herpes virus. The most common and uncomfortable fibro symptoms include widespread chronic pain, overwhelming fatigue, sleep problems, and mood problems. Many fibro sufferers also have irritable bowel syndrome, frequent headaches and cognitive impairment (usually called the “fibro fog.”)

Although millions of Americans are affected by fibromyalgia, until recently the medical and scientific community has had few ideas about what causes the chronic illness. Because there is no definitive blood test that can be used to confirm diagnosis, treatment options have also been limited. The lack of effective treatments for fibromyalgia is the reason the FDA granted Fast Track designation to IMC-1. Fast Track Designation is specifically to encourage drug development for diseases that don’t have many treatment options.

Treating fibromyalgia symptoms usually includes antidepressants, painkillers and specific drugs like pregabalin (Lyrica). Diet, exercise and sleep hygiene are also recommended, but most fibro sufferers need more effective and quick-acting relief. Viral suppression with drugs like famciclovir (Famvir) and celecoxib (Celebrex) may be a new treatment that changes the game.

Space

Important Japanese ‘Hitomi’ satellite could be lost soon

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

Sometimes, you lose control of things in your life, like your emotions, or maybe a car. Unfortunately for Japanese scientists, however, they have upped the ante by losing control of a satellite that costs more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

The Hitomi satellite was launched on February 17, 2016 and made it safely into orbit around Earth. Equipped with never-before-flown technologies purchased from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency, it had an unprecedented potential to make breakthroughs concerning the motion of matter approaching the event horizons of black holes, the measurement of element abundances in the universe, and the evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters throughout cosmic time.

The top-of-the line equipment did not come cheap. The satellite cost $273 million (or 31 billion yen), and that’s not including the instruments bought from foreign agencies. And unfortunately, less than eight weeks into its studies, it is tumbling out of control.

Agencies aren’t sure what’s happening to the satellite

Currently, it’s unclear what exactly happened. On Saturday, the US Joint Space Operations Center noticed the satellite had five small objects around it. Following this, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) briefly managed to communicate with Hitomi, but quickly lost contact. Then, the spacecraft made a sudden change in its course, paired with a flash visible to some observers on Earth.

While JAXA has told the BBC it doesn’t know what happened, a plethora of experts have stepped in to give some ideas. Perhaps the satellite suffered a battery explosion or a gas leak, as Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggested to the Associated Press.

But Professor Goh Cher Hiang, who is the project director of the satellite program at the National University of Singapore, disagreed, telling the BBC that monitoring and backup systems would have caught or prevented those issues before they sent Hitomi flying.

“It could also be from a collision with something in space, either from outer space or a man-made object already in space,” he added—a notion that would fit in with the five small objects seen around the spacecraft before JAXA lost control.

“In general, [losing a satellite is] rare,” Goh added. “But it’s not impossible – it’s the reason a lot of people buy satellite insurance, just in case.”

This does not mean that Hitomi cannot be rescued, however. JAXA already has had some success on rescues before this—like last year, when they managed to get the Akatsuki probe to orbit around Venus after it spent five years drifting uncontrolled through space. And Hitomi is still believed to be mostly intact, and as long as communications can be restored, there is a good chance it can be saved.

—–

Image credit: JAXA

Science

Genetic map shows how ancient interbreeding affects modern humans

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

The majority of Asians and Europeans possess at least some genetic material that originated from Neanderthals and another kind of ancient human known as Denisovans, and that DNA could help explain some of the differences that have evolved in modern humans, a new study claims.

In the latest edition of the journal Current Biology, researchers from Harvard Medical School and UCLA reveal new research suggesting that people of South Asian heritage may have more Denisovan DNA than Neanderthal, and proposing that the ancestors of modern humans interbred with the former approximately 100 generations after their liaisons with the latter.

Their research resulted in an new map of human ancestry, and using comparative genomics, they predicted where genes from Denisovan and Neanderthal could be affecting both the anatomy and physiology of modern humans. For example, they report that Neanderthal genes might contribute to tougher hair and skin, while Denisovan DNA could be why the peoples of Papua New Guinea have a more subtle sense of smell and those living in Tibet are adapted to high-altitude living.

As Harvard geneticist and lead author David Reich explained Monday in a statement, “There are certain classes of genes that modern humans inherited from the archaic humans with whom they interbred, which may have helped the modern humans to adapt to the new environments in which they arrived. On the flip side, there was negative selection to systematically remove ancestry that may have been problematic from modern humans.”

Oceania home to most ancient DNA; Asians have most Denisovan genes

Reich and his colleagues discovered evidence that past ancestry from both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans have been lost from the X chromosomes of modern humans, as well as in genes expressed in the male testes. This has likely resulted in reduced male fertility, which is common in hybrids between two highly divergent groups of the same species, they explained.

Their findings are based on a comparison of known Neanderthal and Denisovan gene sequences across more than 250 genomes from 120 non-African populations. The sequences were obtained through a public database and analyzed using a machine-learning algorithm capable of telling the difference between specific components of ancestral DNA.

Based on their analysis, Reich’s team reported that people living in Oceania have the highest percentage of archaic ancestry, and that south Asians have a higher amount of Denisovan DNA than previously believed, indicating the existence of instances of interbreeding which previously had not been identified. Western Eurasians were found to have the lowest concentration of non-modern human DNA among non-Africans, according to the study authors.

Reich said that the interactions between modern humans and their ancient ancestors throughout the years were “complex and perhaps involved multiple events.” His team’s research comes on the heels of a similar study, published earlier this month in the journal Science, which reported that there were at least three known encounters between modern people and their predecessors over a 60,000 year span, and that fossil evidence suggests there may have been two others.

—–

This map shows the proportion of the genome inferred to be Denisovan in ancestry in diverse non-Africans. The color scale is not linear to allow saturation of the high Denisova proportions in Oceania (bright red) and better visualization of the peak of Denisova proportion in South Asia. Credit: Sankararaman et al./Current Biology 2016

Science

‘The Siberian Unicorn’ roamed free 30,000 years ago

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Though considerably different than the majestic, white-colored, horse-like creature they are so often depicted as, unicorns actually did exist, and newly discovered fossilized skull suggests the long-extinct mammals last roamed the Earth less than 30,000 years ago.

According to Yahoo News and ScienceAlert, the species known as Elasmotherium sibiricum or the “Siberian unicorn” more closely resembled a mammoth or a rhinoceros than a horse, stood roughly six to seven feet tall, weighed upwards of 8,000 pounds, and  was covered with fur.

unic

Heinrich Harder/Wikimedia

Experts had previously believed that the not-quite-fairy-tail-like creature became extinct around 350,000 years ago, but radiocarbon dating of a well-preserved skull found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan revealed that the animal actually lived as recently as 29,000 years ago.

Researchers at Tomsk State University in Siberia, who dated the newfound fossil, reported in the latest edition of the American Journal of Applied Sciences that the size and condition of the fossil suggests that it most likely belonged to a male Siberian unicorn of advanced age.

Another possible interpretation of what this beast looked like. Credit: Wikimedia commons

Another possible interpretation of what this beast looked like. Credit: Wikimedia commons

So how did the unicorn manage to survive for so long?

Lead author Andrey Shpanski, a paleontologist at Tomsk State, and his colleagues believe that the Siberian unicorn lived in a refuge-like region in the south of Western Siberia, allowing it to remain alive and well thousands of years after the majority of its relatives died off.

Shpanski said in a statement that his team is hoping to discover what environmental factors may have played a role in the species extinction, and whether or not migration helped keep them alive up that point – data which could be useful in dealing with modern-day climate change.

Their research, he said, “makes adjustments in the understanding of the environmental conditions in the geologic time in general. Understanding of the past allows us to make more accurate predictions about natural processes in the near future.” The hope is that their work will be able to shed new light on exactly how environmental factors contribute to extinction in general.

When the species was at its peak, Elasmotherium sibiricum lived in a habitat ranging from the Don River (which rises 120 km south of Moscow) to the eastern region of modern Kazakhstan. In the wake of this discovery, the study authors are proposing that all mammalian remains that are believed to be at least 50,000 years old undergo radiocarbon dating

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Scientists think they’ve detected the first example of dark matter annihilation

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

A long-held dark matter theory may have seen its first substantial evidence in its favor in the form of gamma rays being emitted in the Milky Way—an enormous potential discovery for the field of astrophysics.

Most people think that ordinary matter—that is, atoms, the stuff that makes up the tangible parts of our world—compose the entire universe. But in reality, normal matter only composes less than five percent, while dark matter and dark energy make up the rest.

To put it very simply, dark matter is an intangible substance which can’t be detected directly, but which adds mass in the places where it exists. Because it adds mass, it increases alters the gravity around it—meaning its effects on stars and normal matter around it has been how we’ve determined its presence.

Theories surrounding the mysterious matter

Physicists currently have many theories about what comprises dark matter, but some believe that, besides gravity, it shares another property in common with regular matter—it comes in both a regular dark matter form and an anti-matter form. When these two forms collide, they annihilate, meaning the particles themselves more or less cancel out. However, their energy and momentum are conserved, and a new high-energy particle is formed, like a photon or a gamma-ray.

According to the paper in Physics of the Dark Universe, researchers believe that have identified one such signature of dark matter annihilation in the Milky Way. In particular, they focused on how gamma-ray emission was distributed throughout the Galactic Center region of the galaxy—an area that has high matter density (as a slightly higher density of dark matter, too).

Should dark matter consist of particles and anti-particles, annihilation would occur in this area, and thus it would be bright in gamma-rays. And in fact, scientists have detected a large gamma-ray signature that extends hundreds of light-years beyond the Galactic Center region.

Of course, there are other sources of gamma-rays. Pulsars—neutron stars that emit electromagnetic radiation—might have been culprits, for example. And so the scientists carefully revisited some previously-published gamma-ray observations, applying new data reduction methods to better pinpoint the location of gamma-ray emission.

After applying these methods, the scientists demonstrated that the distribution of the radiation fit significantly better with models of annihilating dark mark than with pulsar models—meaning that they have found good evidence in favor of dark matter anti-particles, an enormous breakthrough in understanding part of the fabric of the cosmos.

—–

Image credit:

Science

New sensor detects dangerous scentless Alkane fuels used in bombs

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

For those of you who have natural gas in your home, the smell of rotten eggs is a sign you need to get out of there and call the proper authorities. But in other combustible materials like gasoline, airplane fuel, oil, or even homemade bombs, the key ingredient—alkane fuel—is extremely difficult to detect, meaning leaks or attacks are impossible to catch before it’s too late.

Now, researchers from the University of Utah have developed a solution to this potentially deadly problem: A material that can detect fuel leaks and fuel-based explosives from small traces of alkane fuel vapor.

Why is alkane fuel so hard to detect?

Alkane fuel vapor is both odorless and colorless—thus why natural gas, which is composed of an alkane known as methane, has a harmless chemical known as mercaptan added to it, so that leaks can be detected. However, mercaptan is not added to things like alkane fuel-based weapons (why would a terrorist want people to smell an oncoming attack?), meaning detection by scent is a challenge.

Further, alkanes are inert at room temperature, meaning they are quite unreactive and stable—crude oil, for example, consists of alkane molecules that haven’t been chemically changed for millions of years—which makes their detection in the field quite challenging. In fact, the conventional method of detecting the presence of alkane fuel vapor requires an oven-sized instrument in a laboratory.

“It’s not mobile and very heavy,” said University of Utah materials science and engineering professor Ling Zang in a Phys.org statement. “There’s no way it can be used in the field. Imagine trying to detect the leak from a gas valve or on the pipelines. You ought to have something portable.”

But unfortunately, small, portable chemical sensors for this purpose currently don’t exist.

And so Zang’s team came up with a solution, involving a kind of fiber composite where two nanofibrils transfer electrons back and forth when alkanes aren’t present, according to the paper in ACS Sensors.

“These are two materials that interact well together by having electrons transferring from one to another,” said Ben Bunes, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Utah’s materials science and engineering department. “When an alkane is present, it sticks in between the two materials, blocking the electron transfer between the two nanofibers.”

Once this happens, a detector is signaled that alkane vapor is present. One company known as Vaporsens designed such a detector, which also includes 15 other sensor materials to identify a broad range of chemicals outside of alkanes. This item should be on the market in around a year and a half, according to Zang.

A world of difference

The potential security benefits of this device are massive–for example, an alkane-based fuel (diesel) was used to make the bomb used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, so this sensor technology could have averted the tragedy had it existed at the time.

But there are other extremely important uses outside of stopping terrorism. For example, airplane fuel leaks are difficult to detect in real time. And leaks in oil pipelines could lead to water contamination and environmental devastation if not detected early enough.

This device, then, could save a large number of lives, human or otherwise—a revolution for the generally stable substance.

—–

Image Credit: Dan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering

Science

‘The Not Face’ is a universal facial expression for negativity

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

It doesn’t matter whether you speak English, Mandarin Chinese, or use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate: all humans have a single, universal facial expression which embodies all negative emotions, researchers from Ohio State University have discovered.

The expression, which they are calling “the not face,” consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and a raised chin– it is made by people of all creeds and cultures when they are attempting to convey negative sentiments such as their disagreement with a statement, cognitive scientist and OSU professor Aleix Martinez and his colleagues explain in their new study.

Their research, which was published in the journal Cognition, found that all men and women, no matter which language they s, have facial muscles which contract to instinctively form “the not face” at the same frequency used to speak or sign words in a sentence, and that some ASL users make the face instead of signing the word “not.”

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,” the OSU professor said in a statement.  The findings “strongly suggest a link between language and facial expressions of emotion,” he added, and may help explain language’s origins.

Video analysis reveals how our faces become grammatical markers

Martinez and his colleagues previously identified 21 distinct emotional expressions using computer algorithms. Those expressions included complex combinations of different feelings, such as “happily disgusted,” a combination of the basic emotions “happy” and “disgusted” that we could make when watching a gross-out comedy, they explained.

As part of their new study, they determined that if “the not face” truly existed, it would likely be a combination of three expressions most frequently used to indicate disagreement on a moral level: anger, disgust, and contempt. To test the hypothesis, they recruited 158 students and filmed them as they had a casual conversation with the person operating the recording equipment.

The students belonged to four groups and each conversation took place in their native languages: English (a Germanic language), Spanish (a Latin-based one), Mandarin Chinese, and ASL. These student were selected to represent a variety of different grammatical structures, Martinez and his colleagues said. The goal was to find an expression that acted as a marker for negation – a facial version of the word “not,” essentially – that would be similar across all groups.

Each study participant was either asked to memorize and recite negative sentences, or asked a series of questions designed to illicit a negative response or disagreement. The authors identified clear markers of negation across all groups when the students gave answers that, when translated, meant that something was a bad idea and should not be implemented. By reviewing videos frame by frame, they were able to determine which facial muscles were moving and in which directions to pinpoint exactly how the human face produces an expression of general disagreement.

Breaking down ‘the not face’ and how we use it

So what does “the not face” look like? According to the researchers, it combines the furrowed brows found in expressions of anger with the raised chin that is indicative of disgust and lips that are pressed together to convey contempt towards what is being said. All three muscle movements were found in each of the students, regardless of what language they spoke or if they signed.

Additional analysis revealed that different groups conveyed the expression at different tempos, with native English speakers making the face at a frequency of 4.33 Hz, Spanish at 5.23 Hz and Mandarin speakers at 7.49 Hz, all of which fall within the normal 3 Hz to 8 Hz range of human language. ASL speakers, likewise, made “the not face” at a frequency of 5.48 Hz. The findings suggest that the expression is an actual grammatical marker for negation, the authors said.

The study also found that ASL students used the facial expression in different ways. Sometimes they would actually sign the word not and sometimes they would just shake their head “no,” each of which is an accepted way to communicate negation in sign language. However, at times they did neither, using “the not face” as the only method to communicate negative emotions, which is something that researchers had never seen before.

“This facial expression not only exists, but in some instances, it is the only marker of negation in a signed sentence,” Martinez said. “Sometimes the only way you can tell that the meaning of the sentence is negative is that person made the ‘not face’ when they signed it.”

—–

Image credit: Ohio State University

Space

Nigeria plans to send an astronaut to space by 2030

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

It might sound like the set-up for some kind of email scam, but it’s not: Nigerian Minister of Science and Technology Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu has announced that his country plans to send its first astronaut into space before the year 2030.

The announcement comes roughly a month after a highly-circulated email con claiming that a Nigerian astronaut was after secretly being sent to space in 1989, according to the Toronto Sun. The email went on to claim that this astronaut had been kept alive thanks to care packages, but now really wants to come home and needs financial assistance to do so.

Of course, none of that is true, but Nigeria does actually have a space program, and as Channels TV and Quartz reported over the weekend, they want to join the US, India, China, Japan, Russia, Canada and the member states of the European Space Agency as governing bodies that have sent humans beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and the Karman Line (62 miles above sea level).

During a meeting with the Nigerian Defense Space Agency in Abuja last week, Dr. Onu said that spaceflight was “very important for a country like Nigeria” and that the government was working to create the infrastructure needed to pull off a manned mission, according to Channels TV.

Not the first Nigerian to experience weightlessness

He added that space was “a major asset which nations like Nigeria must also be involved in for the purposes of protecting national interest,” and that the ministry would need to “work very hard in the years ahead… to ensure that the nation plays a role” in space travel in the near future.

As Quartz pointed out, however, a Nigerian astronaut actually has already traveled into space – sort of. In 2006, the website explained, the country sent a 17-year-old girl named Stella Felix to an altitude of six miles (10 km), during which time she experienced 30 seconds of weightlessness and was called the first Nigerian to experience a “space flight,” according to BBC News.

Semantics aside, the plan seems to be to launch an astronaut using rockets developed by Nigerian engineers and built domestically through their own space program, which was originally founded in 2001 and launched its first satellite in 2003. It may sound like a tall order, but experts with the program have been working with China to help launch their satellites in exchange for training.

Dr. Onu, for one, is confident that he and his colleagues can pull off the feat, telling This Day, “on or before 2030, we can do it before with the program and infrastructure that we have,” and that all the funding needed to implement was a program had been included in a recently-passed budget.

“We have developed the capacity to design” and “assemble” spacecraft, he continued. “The last stage is the capacity to launch and we believe very strongly that with the support from President Muhammadu Buhari, we will utilize whatever limited resources that we have in a very efficient manner to make sure that we make the nation proud.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Luxurious 1,900 year old apartment found in Hadrian’s Villa

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

A previously unknown building has been found within Hadrian’s Villa—the 1,900-year-old imperial complex of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Even more exciting, it is decorated with stunning artwork, according to archaeologists.

The building is filled with floor mosaics depicting abstract art along with patterns, marble revetments (wall façades), red and yellow painted wall panels separated by delicate vegetal designs, and nearly an entire ceiling fresco filled with mask-like faces, griffins, and sphinxes. Of course, given nearly two millennia, much of this artwork is in pieces—but it is striking nonetheless.

This is a colorful section of wall found in the apartment. Credit: D. Nocera)

This is a colorful section of wall found in the apartment. Credit: D. Nocera)

The building appears to be an apartment in a part of Hadrian’s Villa known as the Macchiozzo—a compound near the center of the property that combined luxury (like marble-faced walls) with utility (ramps and water channels).

Much of the art found in the apartment was in pieces. (Credit: D. Nocera)

Much of the art found in the apartment was in pieces, like this section of a fresco. (Credit: D. Nocera)

So who lived in the apartment?

You may think something with so much lavish artwork was a member of the imperial family, but after archaeologists compared the site to similar structures at Ostia (ancient Rome’s harbor city at the mouth of the Tiber River), they concluded the resident of this apartment was not the emperor, but likely a high-ranking member of his staff.

However, this does not make the find any less important.

“Until now, scholarship has focused very much on the pageantry—the beautiful statues, the reception halls—and less on the workaday,” said Francesco de Angelis, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia, who has been leading a dig at the site, according to a Columbia statement.

Hadrian’s Villa has been viewed in the “pageantry” sense in the past, as the UNESCO World Heritage Site has long been used as a way to gain fascinating insights into the life of Emperor Hadrian (who ruled from 117-138 CE)—one of the Five Good Emperors of Rome, a fair and brilliant ruler, whose admiration for ancient Greek culture gained him the nickname of Graeculus (“Greekling”).

Besides building this enormous complex—which is nearly twice as large as the entirety of Pompeii—he is also known for building Hadrian’s Wall (in what is now the United Kingdom), and for deifying and spreading statues of his lover Antinous throughout the Roman Empire after he tragically drowned in the Nile.

But this villa is now offering views of those history often forgets—the personnel, staff members, and slaves who lived there even when Hadrian was away, as he spent nearly half of his tenure as emperor travelling to distant lands.

“How did they live, work, and worship?” asked de Angelis. “This intersection of high and low, quotidian and ceremonial, can be investigated by looking jointly at the grand architecture and decoration and the more ordinary spaces.”

—–

Image credit: Kevin MacNichol

Fibromyalgia

Tips For dating with fibromyalgia

Written By: Holly Case
admin
fibromyalgia

Image:danm12/shutterstock

Dating is challenging in the best of circumstances. You have to try to blend your interests with another person and learn about all the little things that make them tick. You have to learn if you even really like another person by gradually opening up to them and seeing if they’re trustworthy. But dating is even more challenging when you have a chronic illness like fibromyalgia. Here’s how you can enjoy the simple joys of dating while also managing your fibromyalgia.

Be Honest about Your Struggles

 Fibromyalgia is something you live with every day. It’s impossible to hide it and choosing not to talk about it isn’t honest. When you begin a new relationship with someone, you want to create emotional intimacy with them. The only way you can create true intimacy is by letting your guard down and showing who you really are. The best way to reveal something like this is little by little as someone earns your trust.

Don’t Make Your Illness the Main Focus

 At the same time, even though you want to share your struggles and be honest, it’s important that you don’t become defined by your illness. Remember the interesting, vibrant person you were before your diagnosis gave you new limitations. You’re still that same person deep down. Although your illness does limit you, it doesn’t change the fact that you are fun and interesting. Don’t let your illness overshadow your best qualities.

Explain that Your Moods Aren’t Personal

 Most people with fibromyalgia try to minimize their symptoms and keep from showing them to the world. Still, it’s hard to fake it when you’re in pain. Be honest with your partner and explain that sometimes you may seem grumpy if you’re hurting. It’s important that they know that you’re not disinterested or upset with them.

Choose Outings that Won’t Trigger Symptoms

 Most people choose to be a little more adventurous when dating so that they seem like a good sport. While being open-minded is always useful in a relationship, you need to respect your limits when you have fibromyalgia. If you know that something is going to push your physical limits to a point where a flare is likely, you need to speak up. Opt out of the extreme sports and the all-night rave. It’s okay to be a bit of a homebody and prefer quieter evenings. Your ideal date needs to be able to accept that your wild adventures need to be toned down a bit.

Let Them Help

The plus side about disclosing the fact that you have a chronic illness like fibromyalgia is that it weeds out the jerks pretty quickly. If your new partner offers to give you a massage after a day trip that left you feeling worn out or wants to rub your shoulders on a day that you feel exceptionally tired, by all means you should say yes. People don’t offer to help if they really don’t care, and it generally makes people feel good to be able to help someone else.

Space

NASA’s futuristic EM Drive’s design undergoing peer review

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

The debate over an “impossible” fuel-free engine that could purportedly transport people from Earth to Mars in less than 10 weeks may soon be resolved, as media outlets reported this week that a paper detailing the device is currently undergoing the peer-review process.
According to the Daily Mail and the International Business Times, researchers at Eagleworks Laboratories, NASA’s advanced propulsion physics research division, confirmed in a March 17 post on the NASA Spaceflight forum that research into the controversial EM Drive was “NOT dead” and that a new study detailing its design could be published in the near future.
Those comments, the IB Times said, “seems to indicate that the researchers are confident of having significant results to reveal” regarding the EM Drive, a device that purportedly creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around an enclosed chamber and relies solely on solar power.
While the notion of fuel-free space travel is undoubtedly attractive, and has generated a lot of buzz in some scientific communities, others argue that the EM Drive cannot possibly live up to its promises and that the design contradicts the laws of physics. If a paper detailing just how the device plans to do what it claims it can do is indeed currently undergoing peer review, it could reveal once and for all whether or not such an engine is actually feasible.
So how is the EM Drive supposed to work, anyway?
The concept of the EM Drive was first proposed in 1999 by British scientist Roger Shawyer, who said at the time that, based on the theo5ry of special relativity, electricity could be converted into microwaves and fired inside a closed, cone-shaped chamber. Doing so, he said, would cause the microwave particles to exert more force on the flat end of the cone and generate thrust.
The microwaves would be powered by solar energy, meaning that the engine would require no propellant, which in turn means that satellites and spacecraft could be far smaller and lighter as they would not have to carry fuel with them. It would also enable humans to travel much further in space, as they could create their own propulsion en route to their destination.
Critics, however, argue that the concept is impossible (or at the very least implausible) because it violates the laws of physics. Shawyer’s hypothesis cannot work, some say, because in order for a thruster to gain momentum in one direction, a propellant must be expelled in the other one. Since the EM Drive is a closed system and uses no fuel, it may could violate the law of conservation of momentum by producing a forward thrust with accompanying no equal and opposite force.
The engine resurfaced last year when researchers at Eagleworks Laboratories claimed that they had produced results with the EM Drive in a vacuum that external interference could not explain. That re-ignited the debate over Shawyer’s controversial claims, with different teams of scientists arguing that it was or was not possible to use microwaves to generate fuel-free propulsion.
‘Fraction of a chance’ that the concept could actually work
So have the geniuses at Eagleworks come up with a way to actually produce thrust without needing fuel? Does this mean we could someday actually be able to travel to Mars in less than three months? While there is always hope, many experts remain skeptical when it comes to the feasibility of the EM Drive concept.
“The EM Drive has always been dubious at best. A tenuous connection to NASA has made the idea sound more plausible, but it isn’t,” said Popular Mechanics. “People get starry eyed at the idea of a low-power microwave drive that could propel humanity to the stars and forget the cardinal rule of technology: that if something seems to violate the law of physics, then there’s probably something wrong with the analysis, not the physics.”
“The next few months could bring an end to this silly episode in hyperbolic research,” they added, admitting that there is ‘the small-fraction-of-a-chance’ that the design of the device may actually pass the peer-review process, “at which point it maybe, just maybe, EM Drive technology has a ghost of a chance of being a reality. At the very least, get the popcorn ready.”
—-
Image credit:Roger Sawyer

Space

Titan’s Everest: 10,000 foot tall mountain found on Saturn’s moon

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

While they pale in comparison to the likes of Everest or K2, NASA’s Cassini mission has found several peaks on Saturn’s moon Titan that are at least 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) tall, including a 10,948 foot (3,337 meter) mountain located in a ridge known as the Mithrim Montes.

As the US space agency announced at the 47th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas on Wednesday, they were able to use the spacecraft’s radar to measure the peaks and observe several other geological features hidden beneath the hazy atmosphere.

Most of Titan’s tallest mountains are located near the moon’s equator, the researchers said, and while there are other large features on the surface, the nearly 11,000 foot tall  Titan Mons is “the highest point we’re likely to find,” Cassini radar team deputy lead Stephen Wall of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

Other mountains of similar heights were also found in the Mithrim Montes, as well as in the region known as Xanadu, and a stretch of more isolated peaks called “ridge belts” located near the landing site of the European Space Agency’s Huygens spacecraft, the agency added.

What could have caused these peaks to form (and can we climb them)?

The discovery of Titan Mons and the other peaks on Titan’s surface was the result of the search for active zones, regions where dynamic forces helped shape its terrain, within the moon’s crust. Finding the highest and lowest features on the surface can reveal “important things about forces affecting [Titan’s] evolution,” said Cassini radar team associate Jani Radebaugh.

For instance, the fact that the moon has such relatively tall mountains would appear to indicate that the surface is being affected by some kind of active tectonic forces, possibly those related to the satellite’s rotation or tidal forces from Saturn, NASA explained. Now it is up to the research team to discover exactly what would cause tall mountains to form on an icy, oceanic moon.

“There is lot of value in examining the topography of Titan in a broad, global sense, since it tells us about forces acting on the surface from below as well as above,” said Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University who led the research. The work could also offer a glimpse into what our planet might have look life before life emerged, said Discovery News.

Titan, the website explained, is often referred to as  a “young Earth analog,” which means that it mirrors early conditions on our world, despite the fact that it is smaller and farther away from the sun. Many of the processes that occur in Titan’s atmosphere mirror those that take place on Earth and the moon even has a methane cycle that is known to produce precipitation.

Of course, the discovery of 10,000 foot tall mountains on Titan inevitably leads to one important question: could we someday climb them? On the plus side, Titan Mons is 2.5 times smaller than Everest, and as Discovery News pointed out, the lower gravity (just 14 percent of that found here on Earth) would help matters. Unfortunately, the cold, toxic atmosphere would force a climber to make the trek in a spacesuit, which undoubtedly would raise the degree of difficulty.

—–

Image credit: NASA JPL

Health

Human genome contains more viral DNA than previously believed

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School and Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts have discovered 19 never-before-seen pieces of genetic material in human DNA that were left behind by viruses that once infected our ancestors, according to a new study.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors explained analyzing 2,500 human genomes led to the discovery of genetic fragments left behind by members of the human endogenous retrovirus group HERV-K.

Among those DNA remnants was the complete and intact genetic recipe for an entire virus that was detected in nearly 50 of the 2,500 study participants, the researchers said. It is currently not known whether or not the newfound pathogen can reproduce, they added, but previous research involving ancient virus DNA indicates that it can affect the humans carrying it.

Their analysis, which looked at the entire genome from people around the world (including many from Africa, the birthplace of modern human ancestors), also confirmed the presence of 17 other pieces of viral DNA previously discovered in the human genome by other scientists.

Study could shed new light on evolution of retroviruses

The UM/Tufts University group compared specific regions of each individual’s genomes to a “reference” human genome to discovered the viruses, which belong to the same group as the modern human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). These viruses entered human DNA during the ancient past and were copied and passed from one generation to the next.

In fact, as much as eight percent of our genome originally came from viruses, the researchers explained in a statement. In some instances, our bodies have adopted them and used them for some beneficial purpose – for example, one helps the bodies of pregnant women build a layer that protects their unborn children from toxins found in the mother’s blood.

The researchers discovered the whole viral genome or provirus on the X chromosome. Dubbed Xq21, it is only the second intact provirus found in the human genome. Senior author Dr. John Coffin, a virologist at Tufts University, said that it appears to be able to make infectious viruses, a discovery which he said would be “very exciting” if confirmed by additional research.

Dr. Coffin added that the research “provides important information necessary for understanding how retroviruses and humans have evolved together in relatively recent times.” His colleague Dr. Julia Wildschutte, co-first author of the paper, called it “a thrilling discovery” which could “open up many doors to research,” including studies of HERV evolution and diseases.

—–

Image credit: University of Michigan

Space

Study finds bacteria that grows more readily in space than on Earth

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

Well, humans may be struggling to find ways to thrive in outer space, but it seems that bacteria are having no issues—and in fact, one particular species is doing better in space than it does on Earth.

We know all this thanks to a study out of the International Space Station, where microbiologists and members of the public collected samples of Earth bacteria and sent them to the ISS to see how they’d fare in microgravity, according to the study in PeerJ.

Surviving and thriving

Also known as part of Project MECCURI, the study focused on how the bacteria would survive inside the environmental conditions of the space station.

“The warm, humid, oxygen-rich environment of the ISS is a far cry from the vacuum of space,” said Dr. David Coil, University of California, Davis, microbiologist and lead author on the study, in a Phys.org statement.

But microgravity was still an unknown variable. In fact, the bacteria had to be grown on special solid media plates, since liquid media poses a risk in microgravity.

48 different bacterial strains made their way to the ISS. Many bacteria grew at a rate very similar to that on Earth. But one strain in particular was a stand-out: Bacillus safensis. This strain is already well-known to those familiar with the survival of bacteria in space, because its high resistance to UV and gamma radiation seems to have allowed to travel all the way to Mars in 2004, after hitching a ride on the Opportunity and Spirit rovers.

In the study, however, B. safensis didn’t just survive in microgravity—it appears to have grown 60 percent better in space. The current reasons behind this are unknown, but researchers believe that sequencing the genome of the bacteria might yield answers.

“I would love for someone else to follow up the result with Bacillus safensis and see if we could learn more about what happened,” said Coil.

But more important than the mystery of B. safensis is the fact that the rest of the bacteria were more or less unaffected by microgravity—something key for planning a long-term piloted spaceflight. For example, bringing bacteria to a non-Earth planet could have devastating effects like we could never have anticipated. Imagine how invasive species have harmed ecosystems on Earth—and then think of something even tougher.

Regardless of the caveats, however, the study has been hugely instrumental in learning more for future space travel.

“The project expands the number of species that have been examined and opens future avenues for research,” said Coil.

—–

Image credit: Alex Alexiev/UC Davis, CC BY

Space

Study suggests Saturn’s rings are younger than the dinosaurs

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Just how old are the moons and the rings of Saturn? A new study from researchers at the SETI Institute claims that the planet’s satellites and features are relatively modern, and may not have even been around when most of the dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.

As lead investigator Matija Cuk and his colleagues report in a paper scheduled for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, their analysis of the evolution of Saturn’s moons indicated that a predicted orbital resonance (an event in which one moon’s orbital period ends up being a simple fraction of another moon’s) involving the moons Tethys and Dione did not appear.

In these unusual configurations, even moons with weak gravity can have a significant impact on the orbits of another moon, causing them to become more elongated or to tilt outside of their original orbital plane, the researchers explained. Since the anticipated resonance involving Tethys and Dione did not occur, it implies that the system is less evolved than experts previously believed.

Their computer simulations did reveal, however, that the orbital inclinations of Tethys, Dione, and Rhea suggest the system experienced a 5:3 orbital resonance involving Dione and Rhea, which was followed closely by a secular resonance involving Tethys and Dione. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that the moons are either “significantly younger” than Saturn, or that their tidal evolution is extremely slow.

The slow-evolution suggestion is not compatible with the intense tidal heating discovered on the moon Enceladus, Cuk’s team noted. In light of the evidence, they propose that the planet’s mid-sized moons re-accreted from a disk roughly 100 million years ago. This disk likely was formed from the remains of an earlier generation of mid-sized moons, they added.

Yes, there may be dinosaur fossils older than Saturn’s moons

“Moons are always changing their orbits. That’s inevitable,” Cuk said in a statement, adding that this fact allowed them to conduct the computer simulations that ultimately revealed that Saturn’s mid-sized moons were likely “born during the most recent two percent of the planet’s history.”

“While Saturn’s rings have been known since the 1600s, there’s still debate about their age,” he explained. “The straightforward assumption is that they are primordial – as old as the planet itself, which is more than four billion years. However, in 2012, French astronomers found that tidal effects – the gravitational interaction of the inner moons with fluids deep in Saturn’s interior – are causing them to spiral to larger orbital radii comparatively quickly.”

This discovery implied, based on the moons’ present positions, that they were relatively young, and that the formation of the rings was a relatively recent phenomenon. The study authors used their computer simulations to compare the current orbital tilts of the moons and to compare them to previously projected ones to determine how much the moons have grown over time.

They found that the orbits of Tethys, Dione and Rhea all changed less dramatically than had been predicted, indicating that they had not crossed many orbital resonances and had formed close to their current locations. By combining this information with data from NASA’s Cassini mission, they determined that the moons (with the exception of Titan and Iapetus) likely were formed during the Cretaceous Period, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

“So the question arises, what caused the recent birth of the inner moons?” Cuk pondered. “Our best guess is that Saturn had a similar collection of moons before, but their orbits were disturbed by a special kind of orbital resonance involving Saturn’s motion around the Sun. Eventually, the orbits of neighboring moons crossed, and these objects collided. From this rubble, the present set of moons and rings formed.”

—–

Image credit: NASA

Science

Amazing newly-discovered cavefish species can walk, climb waterfalls

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology have discovered an unusual new type of cavefish in Thailand which uses a unique method of locomotion to move around like creatures with four feet, and it’s even capable of climbing waterfalls.

According to Discovery News and the Washington Post, the cavefish species as been identified as Cryptotora thamicola, and not only does it use a technique similar to salamanders for movement, it also possesses several anatomical features previously only found in tetrapods – a group of four-limbed vertebrates that include creatures such as reptiles and amphibians.

“The pelvis and vertebral column of this fish allow it to support its body weight against gravity and provide large sites for muscle attachment for walking,” Brooke E. Flammang, co-author of a new Scientific Reports paper about the creature and an assistant professor of biological sciences at NJIT, explained in a statement.

While the Cryptotora thamicola is not the only fish species capable of moving on land, no other living type of fish uses a tetrapod-like girdle to climb, the researchers explained. These cavefish, which are also blind, are able to stick to rock and travel up waterfalls thanks to its unusual body, and it could provide new insight into the evolution of tetrapods.

 

A ‘huge’ finding that may have tremendous evolutionary significance

Flammang told the Washington Post that she first saw the pink-colored fish in footage collected by her co-author, also an assistant professor in the NJIT Department of Biological Sciences and was stunned by what the paper refers to as the “salamader-esque wiggle” of the creature.

As she and her colleagues explained in their study, the cavefish travels using a diagonal-couplets style, lateral sequence gait similar to the aforementioned amphibians, and has pelvic bones which are comprised of a broad puboischiadic plate linked to the iliac process of a hypertrophied sacral rib, instead of having suspended or loosely-attached bones nearly all other species of fish.

Furthermore, Cryptotora thamicola has large anterior and posterior zygapophyses, transverse processes, and broad neural spines in the vertebral column of its sacral area – features that are all closely associated with terrestrial organisms, the study authors wrote. It pulls off its odd gait by rotating its pectoral and pelvic girdles to create a wave-like motion of its axial body. The authors call it the first ever example of tetrapod-like walking behavior and morphology observed in an extant fish.

“This research gives us insight into the plasticity of the fish body plan and the convergent morphological features that were seen in the evolution of tetrapods,” Flamming said, telling Discovery News, “From an evolutionary perspective, this is a huge finding. This is one of the first fish that we have as a living species that acts in a way that we think they must have acted when they evolved from a fluid environment to a terrestrial environment.”

—–

Image credit: New Jersey Institute of Technology

Science

The once-extinct European bison thunders back to life

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

Picture this: Long, rolling hills covered in a thick coat of pine trees, as a bison ambles through the spotted shade below.

Where do you imagine this place to be? Because if you’re picturing the American West, you soon may have to let your imagination hop an ocean—as European bison are being reintroduced in greater numbers to Europe in the hopes that one day they will roam freely again.

In fact, Rewilding Europe, an organization devoted to returning wildlife and wild places to the European continent, has just released 11 European bison (three bulls, eight cows) into a nature reserve in the Netherlands, in the hopes they will begin to repopulate the area.

The bison are slowly being reintroduced into the wild and into sanctuaries. Credit: Staffan Wildstrand, ReWilding Europe

The bison are slowly being reintroduced into the wild and into sanctuaries. Credit: Staffan Wildstrand, ReWilding Europe

Not to be confused with American bison in Europe

Some of you may be just now finding out that a breed of bison is native to Europe—and you’re not alone.

“A lot of people don’t know about nature in Europe,” Frans Schepers, the Managing Director of told, Outside Online. “People don’t know that we even have a European bison. And, in Europe, it is our largest land mammal. This is something maybe we could say to European conservation organizations; we’re not selling our story well enough.”

The European bison, otherwise known as wisent, is an enormous creature, weighting in at up to 2,000 pounds and standing up to six feet tall at the shoulder—making it taller than the American bison. They went extinct in the European wild nearly 100 years ago, following the events of World War I.

Fortunately, some of the bison had been given away as royal gifts to zoological gardens around Europe, and while the captive population was only 54, the remaining bison were carefully bred in order to increase the population while attempting to maintain genetic diversity.

And these efforts were, for the large part, a success: More than 5,000 European bison exist today. Of course, that number still places them in the Vulnerable category of the IUCN Red List—and in fact, there are fewer European bison than there are black rhinos in Africa.

So there are 5,000 captive bison?

These bison don’t exist solely in captivity nowadays—there are wild populations of roughly 900 bison between Poland and Belarus—but reintroducing them to Europe has been a slow but extremely important process. These bison positively affect the entire ecosystem around them, from spreading seeds to improving soil quality (and thus the quality of the plants other herbivores eat), as well as providing a new food supply to predators, scavengers, and fungi.

Which is exactly why Rewilding Europe and their partners have been working to introduce bison across Europe. So far, the bison have been released into Romania (2014) once and twice in the Netherlands (2015 and 2016)—great successes aided by the fact that many of those in the country have been moving to cities, thereby freeing up land for the animals.

The ultimate goal of Rewilding Europe is to introduce bison and other “lost” animals—like beavers, which play a key role in shaping wetlands; wild horses; and aurochs*, the currently extinct ancestors of modern cattle—to 100 million hectares (3,681 square miles) of Europe by 2022.

It’s up to you

But regardless of their success, it will mean very little if the most recent release of European bison into the Netherlands—as well as other rewilding projects—fail to garner public attention.

“How can you love something, or even vote for it, if you don’t know it exists? So the awareness about what Europe has to offer is priority number one,” said Frans. “Rewilding is not going back to the past. We’re looking for wild nature in a modern, 21st century, Europe. There are huge opportunities and possibilities for that.”

*Aurochs themselves went extinct nearly 400 years ago, but thanks to records and aurochs remains from the time period, scientists know what they should look like, and are actually attempting to back-breed them from old lines of cattle, which are more genetically similar to the extinct bovine.

—–

Image credit: ReWilding Europe

Space

What is a superflare? Could our sun produce one?

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Solar flares, sudden flashes of brightness produced by stars like our sun, are made up of highly energetic particles that often come into contact with the Earth’s magnetic field, producing auroras in our planet’s atmosphere. But what would happen if they were far more powerful?

In a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communication, Christoffer Karoff of Aarhus University in Denmark and an international team of colleagues investigated what would happen if the sun ever produced a superflare – strong explosions with energy levels thousands of times higher than traditional solar flares – and whether it could actually happen.

First discovered by the Kepler mission four years ago, superflares have been mysterious, which has left scientists to ponder whether or not they are produced through the same mechanisms as a normal solar flare. To investigate the issue, they conducted a series of observations with China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST).

Karoff and his colleagues studied 5,648 solar-like stars, including 48 superflare stars, and found that while most of these highly energetic events took place on stars characterzed by much larger chromospheric emissions than the sun, some had activity levels that were comparable to or even less than the sun, suggesting that solar flares and superflares may share a common origin.

Not only could a superflare hit Earth; evidence suggests one already has

Historically speaking, the sun has produced some solar flares and coronal emissions which have played havoc on Earth-based radio communication and power sources. The largest eruption of its kind occurred in September 1859, when one of the sun’s dark spots suddenly lit up and caused a solar storm that interfered with telegraphs and was felt as far south as Cuba and Hawaii.

In a more technologically-dependant age, this storm (also known as the Carrington Event) could cause widespread issues, but even it pales in comparison to the eruptions that regularly take place on some of the other stars in the cosmos, the researchers said in a statement. In fact, some events can be up to 10,000 times more powerful than the Carrington Event, they noted.

Could a superflare ever be produced by the sun? Based on Karoff’s teams findings, it seems an unlikely possibility, as the sun’s magnetic field is too weak. However, in light of the fact that 10 percent of the stars they analyzed had magnetic fields that were either as strong or even slightly weaker than the sun’s, the authors say that it would not be impossible our host star to produce a superflare – which Karoff called “a very frightening thought.”

Were such a massive, highly energetic solar eruption to impact the Earth today, the researchers warn that it would have devastating consequences, not just for our technology but for the planet’s atmosphere and its very capacity to support living creatures. Furthermore, they said, the presence of the radioactive isotope Carbon-14 in tree rings appears to indicate that the sun might have already produced a tiny superflare during the year 775 AD – a claim observations made with the LAMOST telescope seem to support, the researchers noted.

—–

Image credit: NASA

Health

Research links common toxoplasmosis parasite to rage disorders

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

People suffering from intermittent explosive disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by recurrent spells of sudden and extreme rage, are more than twice as likely to have been exposed to a common parasite, researchers from the University of Chicago report in a new study.

Writing in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the researchers explained that a study involving 358 adult subjects found a link between the disorder and toxoplasmosis, a typically harmless parasitic infection carried by nearly one-third of all men and women.

“Our work suggests that latent infection with the toxoplasma gondii parasite may change the brain chemistry in a fashion that increases the risk of aggressive behavior,” senior study author Dr. Emil Coccaro, a professor and the chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the university, explained in a statement.

“However, we do not know if this relationship is causal, and not everyone that tests positive for toxoplasmosis will have aggression issues,” he added, noting that additional research is required.

As many as 16 million Americans are believed to have IED, an ailment marked by recurrent, impulsive, and problematic outbursts of physical or verbal aggression disproportionate to the situations that bring them on, the study authors explained.

Findings could lead to new treatment options for IED

The new study is part of the Chicago-led team’s efforts to improve the diagnosis and treatment of the condition, and investigated IED’s possible association to toxoplasmosis, a common parasitic infection transmitted through the feces of infected cats, contaminated water or undercooked meat that is ordinarily latent and harmless in the majority of healthy adults.

However, the condition is known to reside in brain tissue and had previously been linked to such psychological disorders as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Dr. Coccaro’s team recruited 358 US adults and evaluated them for IED, personality disorder, depression and other conditions, and scored them on trails such as anger, aggression and impulsiveness as well.

Nearly one-third of the subjects had IED, while another third were diagnosed with another kind of psychiatric disorder and the remaining one-third were healthy subjects with no history of such conditions. Compared to the healthy control group, the IED group were more than twice as likely (22 percent to 9 percent) to test positive for toxoplasmosis exposure, the researchers said.

Sixteen percent of the group with non-IED disorders also tested positive for toxoplasmosis, but were found to have aggression and impulsiveness scores similar to the control group. Members of the IED group scored far higher on those measures than either of the other two groups. Across all three groups, toxoplasmosis-positive subjects scored “significantly” higher when it comes to anger and aggression, the university said in a statement.

Dr. Coccaro said that he and his fellow researchers are now further examining the potential link between toxoplasmosis, aggression and IED. He said that it will require “experimental studies to see if treating a latent toxoplasmosis infection with medication reduces aggressiveness. If we can learn more, it could provide rationale to treat IED in toxoplasmosis-positive patients by first treating the latent infection.”

—–

Image credit: David Ferguson

Science

Trove of 9th century Viking treasure found in Galloway, Scotland

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

More than 1,000 years after it was buried in a field in southern Scotland, a Viking treasure pot has been opened and its contents revealed in photographs, allowing the public to see for the first time the results of a painstaking effort to remove and preserve the items within.

According to BBC News , the Carolingian pot, which was buried in Dumfries and was filled with artifacts dating back to the 9th and 10th century AD, was discovered by a metal detectorist by the name of Derek  McLennan in 2014 as part of a larger cache of treasure.

pot

The treasure pot in question

The pot contained, among other objects: a half-dozen silver Anglo-Saxon disc brooches, a silver brooch originally from Ireland, Byzantium silk from the area around modern-day Istanbul, a gold ingot, and several carefully-wrapped objects made of gold and crystal, the UK news outlet said.

None of the recovered items are currently on display, so the new images are the only way for the public to get a glimpse of them. The collection will eventually be offered to museums throughout Scotland, and the man who discovered them will be eligible for a finder’s fee equal to the market value of the artifacts – a cost that must be covered by the museum receiving them.

Pendant found in the viking treasure

A pendant found in the treasure trove. Credit: Robert Clark, National Geographic

‘More questions than answers’

Richard Welander of Historic Environment Scotland, the organization that is funding the project, told BBC News that before the removal of the objects, the pot was given a CT scan “in order that we could get a rough idea what was in there and best plan the delicate extraction process.”

The CT scan was completed at Borders General Hospital in November 2014, and while the medical facility typically uses the technology on patients, it had also previously used the scanner to analyze the remains of a Roman soldier’s head discovered at an excavation site at Trimontium, near Melrose. Dr. John Reid, consultant radiographer at the hospital, said that the scans were conducted at a time when they would not interfere with the treatment of patients.

“That exercise offered us a tantalizing glimpse but didn’t prepare me for what was to come,” said Welander. “These stunning objects provide us with an unparalleled insight to what was going on in the minds of the Vikings in Galloway all those years ago. They tell us about the sensibilities of the time, reveal displays of regal rivalries, and even betray an underlying sense of humor, which the Vikings aren’t always renowned for!”

Additional research needs to be performed on the objects, Stuart Campbell of the Treasure Trove Unit, which is assisting in the conservation project, told BBC News. The objects in the hoard are so complex, he said, that they have raised “more questions than… answers,” he said, “and like all the best archaeology, this find doesn’t give easy answers. Questions about the motivations and cultural identity of the individuals who buried it will occupy scholars and researchers for years to come.”

—–

Image credit: Historic Environment Scotland

Fibromyalgia

Early symptoms of fbromyalgia

Written By: Holly Case
admin
Woman suffering from stress or a headache grimacing in pain as she holds the back of her neck with her other hand to her temple, with copyspace

Image: racorn/Shutterstock

Most people with fibromyalgia realize that their symptoms actually began months, if not years, before their official diagnosis. Although some diseases come on very suddenly, fibromyalgia is more of a slow dawning process. It is not yet known if fibromyalgia is preventable because researchers aren’t sure what causes it. However, even if fibromyalgia isn’t preventable, here are some of the early signs to recognize. If you see these symptoms, try to make proactive, positive changes to get more rest and take better care of yourself.

Unusual Fatigue

Everybody has some times when they are more tired than others. The changing of the seasons, side effects of medications, or fighting off a virus can all make you feel a temporary increase in tiredness. But if you notice that you are frequently exhausted and can’t pinpoint any specific cause, it could be an early sign of fibromyalgia.

Long Recovery Periods

Does it seem like you just don’t bounce back as quickly as you once did? Things like late nights or trips out of town used to be fun and exciting and you could easily re-enter your normal life. If you’ve noticed that it seems to take several days to recover from viruses, disruptions to your schedule, or even from really intense workouts, it could be a signal of trouble ahead.

Chronic Headaches

Chronic headaches are common, especially in women. Frequent headaches can have many causes, including stress, hormones, and allergies. However, if you have seen your doctor about your headaches and they can’t find any other cause, it could indicate an early symptom of fibromyalgia.

Environmental Sensitivity

Many people with fibromyalgia are more sensitive than average to stimuli in the environment. Bright lights, strong smells or fragrances, and loud noises can all be extremely irritating and upsetting. If you notice that you’re really sensitive to any of these environmental distractions, it could be a sign of greater sensitivity in general. This increased sensitivity may later show up in the form of fibromyalgia symptoms.

Bowel Problems/IBS

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is another chronic illness that is not well understood. Researchers only have some theories, rather than definite answers, about what may cause it, and don’t know how to cure it.

Many people with fibromyalgia have symptoms in common with irritable bowel syndrome. Because there is a known emotional component in both IBS and fibromyalgia, it’s not known how the two illnesses may be related, only that many patients have both issues.

Depression

Depression is well known as a symptom of fibromyalgia. It’s understandable why someone with the chronic pain, fatigue, and sleep problems of fibromyalgia would feel depressed. But many fibromyalgia sufferers report that they had depression long before they had any other symptoms of the illness.

The link between depression and fibromyalgia is kind of a chicken-or-the-egg question: researchers don’t know which comes first or how they are even related at all.  If you have chronic depression, particularly if it doesn’t respond well to antidepressant treatment, it could be a warning sign for fibromyalgia in the future.

Science

Nijaq, the first Sumatran rhino found in 40 years, has died

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

UPDATE: National Geographic reports that Najaq, the first Sumatran rhino seen in the wild in 40 years, has died due to an infection.

Nijaq’s health deteriorated over the last few days due to an infection in her leg. Officials are unsure as to what caused the infection, but the trapping process is a possibility. Officials are currently conducting a post-mortem study to determine the cause of death. Nijaq was thought to be four or five years old.

“Our hearts are saddened by this devastating news from Kalimantan.” said the International Rhino Foundation on Thursday.

“The death of this Sumatran rhino proves they exist on Borneo, so we will continue protecting them,” stated Achrir Fathoni, a senior official at the environment ministry.

—–

Sumatran rhinos were long thought be extinct on the island of Borneo when hidden cameras caught glimpses of one in 2013. Now, the good news continues, as WWF researchers are celebrating the first live sighting of a Sumatran rhino in the area for more than 40 years—an enormous milestone for the species in Indonesia.

“This is an exciting discovery and a major conservation success,” said Dr. Efransjah, CEO of WWF-Indonesia, in a WWF statement. “We now have proof that a species once thought extinct in Kalimantan still roams the forests, and we will now strengthen our efforts to protect this extraordinary species.”

The rhino in question is believed to be female, between four and five years old. She was captured safely in a pit trap on March 12 in Kutai Barat, in an area near mining operations and plantations. For now, she is being held in a temporary enclosure, but eventually she will be moved by helicopter to a new home—a protected forest roughly 95 miles (150 km) from where she was captured, which many hope will become the second Sumatran rhino sanctuary in Indonesia.

A struggling population

Since 2013, 15 Sumatran rhinos have been identified as living in the Kutai Barat area, spread across three populations. All in all, it’s estimated that 100 Sumatran rhinos are living in the wild—and most of those can be found on another Indonesian island, Sumatra.

The populations have become increasingly endangered over the years thanks to poaching and habitat loss driven by mining, logging, and plantations. The Malaysian portion of the island of Borneo no longer contains any Sumatran rhinos whatsoever; the wild population there was declared extinct just last year.

“This is a race against time for rhino conservation. Providing a safe home is the only hope for the survival of the Sumatran rhino for many generations to come,” said Dr. Efransjah. “WWF will work continuously with the Sumatran rhino conservation team for the protection of the Sumatran rhino population in Kalimantan.”

Conservationists have also achieved a small victory in regards to the other rhino species in Indonesia: the critically endangered Javan rhino. The Javan rhinos can only be found in one place on Earth—the Ujung Kulon National Park—but the tiny population of 60 rhinos has just been increased by 5 percent, as three new calves were recently born.

Which makes the live sighting of a Sumatran rhino discovery even more amazing.

“This unprecedented discovery and unparalleled operation boosts our hope to save one of the most endangered species and an iconic symbol of the majestic Asian rainforests,” said Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International. “This is an exciting moment in our efforts to save the world’s amazing biodiversity.”

—–

Image credit: World Wildlife Fund

Space

‘Outrageously luminous’ galaxies are 100 trillion times brighter than the sun, brightest ever found

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Astronomers have long used terms like “ultra” and “hyper” to describe just how luminous the brightest galaxies in the universe truly are, but eight new galaxies discovered by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst take it up a notch.

The UMass team, led by senior undergraduate student Kevin Harrington, and an international group team of colleagues used the 50-meter diameter Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico to discover galaxies so bright that no current terminology accurately describes them.

“We’ve taken to calling them ‘outrageously luminous’ among ourselves, because there is no scientific term to apply,” Harrington explained in a statement. An ultra-luminous galaxy has a rating of one trillion solar luminosities, and a hyper-luminous one reaches levels of close to 10 trillion solar luminosities, he said. The new galaxies top 100 trillion solar luminosities.

The eight galaxies are believed to be approximately 10 billion years old, meaning that they were formed just four billion years after the Big Bang, according to the authors. A study detailing their findings has been published online by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

These galaxies are so bright they defy current naming conventions. Credit: K.C. Harrington et al.

These galaxies are so bright they defy current naming conventions. Credit: K.C. Harrington et al.

Galaxies appear brighter from Earth due to gravitational lensing

Using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), a device that is said to be the largest and the most sensitive single-aperture instrument of its kind on Earth, as well as space-based telescopes and a cosmology experiment on the NASA/ESA collaboration Planck satellite, they were able to detect the glow of the Big Bang and observe the newfound galaxies for the first time.

UMass astronomy professor Min Yun, Harrington’s advisor and a co-author on the new study, noted that galaxies such as these “were not predicted by theory to exist; they’re too big and too bright, so no one really looked for them before.”

“Knowing that they really do exist and how much they have grown in the first 4 billion years since the Big Bang helps us estimate how much material was there for them to work with,” the professor added. “Their existence teaches us about the process of collecting matter and of galaxy formation. They suggest that this process is more complex than many people thought.”

The researchers note that, despite their extreme brightness, these galaxies are not as large as they first appear. Follow-up research revealed that their high luminosity levels are partially due to the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which causes light passing close to massive objects to become magnified and appear brighter. In this case, Yun said, gravitational lensing causes the galaxies to appear to be 10 times brighter than they really are when viewed from Earth.

He also emphasized that gravitational lensing of a distant galaxy by another galaxy is a rather rare phenomenon, and that finding up to eight potentially lensed objects during the course of the study “is another potentially important discovery.” Harrington added that findings gravitational lensing is like finding a needle in a haystack, but “finding lensed sources this bright is as rare as finding the hole in the needle in the haystack.”

—–

Messier 81 is an example of a known bright galaxy, although it isn’t an example of a new “outrageously bright” galaxy. Image credit: NASA

Space

NASA snaps detailed images of Ceres’ bright spots, uncovers mysteries

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

New images of Ceres’ Occator Crater, home to the brightest of the bright spots detected by the Dawn spacecraft during its visit to the dwarf planet in March 2015, and an enhanced color map of the surface were among the new findings first unveiled by NASA on Tuesday.

Speaking at the 47th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, officials from the US space agency released images of the 57 mile (92 km) long, 2.5 mile (4 km) deep Occator Crater taken at a distance of 240 miles (385 km) above the dwarf planet’s surface.

Image of a crater on Ceres

The bright spots of Occator Crater are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Such views can be used to highlight subtle color differences on Ceres’ surface. Credit: NASAS/JPL

The new images reveal that the center of the crater is home to a dome in a smooth-walled pit, and that multiple linear features and fractures crisscross the top and sides of this feature. The dome is also surrounded by several fractures, and some prominent ones also run through the small, bright areas located within the crater itself, the researchers explained.

“Before Dawn began its intensive observations of Ceres last year, Occator Crater looked to be one large bright area. Now, with the latest close views, we can see complex features that provide new mysteries to investigate,” Ralf Jaumann, a planetary scientist and Dawn co-investigator at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, said in a statement.

According to Jaumann, the “intricate geometry of the crater interior” suggests that the region had been the site of geologic activity at some point in “the recent past.” However, he added, “we will need to complete detailed geologic mapping of the crater” to find out exactly how it formed.

Here’s a video explaining more about recent findings about Ceres:

Possible volatile minerals, crater containing water also discovered

In addition, NASA released an enhanced color map of the dwarf planet’s surface on Tuesday – a map which revealed that Ceres does not have as many large impact basins as scientists originally expected. However, predictions of smaller impact craters did turn out to be generally correct, and the new map revealed the diversity of surface materials and the morphology of the terrain.

Enhanced color map of Ceres. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Enhanced color map of Ceres. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Blue materials depicted in the color map is associated to features that appear to be very young, including flows, smooth plains and mountains, Jaumann and his colleagues explained. They also identified specific color variations indicating material alterations believed to be the result of the interaction between impacts and the composition of Ceres’ subsurface. These findings, NASA said, also provide evidence that the subsurface is rich in ice and volatile minerals.

Dawn’s Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND) is also providing data that could result in the discovery of subsurface ice on the dwarf planet. The instrument, which began acquiring its primary data set in December, searches for neutrons and gamma rays produced by the interaction of cosmic rays with surface materials, and should be able to determine the chemical makeup of the uppermost layer of the regolith, the agency noted.

While the spacecraft was in its lowest-altitude orbit, GRaND detected a higher number of neutrons at the equator than at the poles, which suggests that higher latitudes have a higher concentration of hydrogen, one of the principle components of water. This would appear to suggest that there may be water ice close to the surface in the polar regions of Ceres. More analysis is needed before the presence of water ice can be confirmed, however, cautioned Tom Prettyman, GRaND from the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

NASA also revealed that data collected by Dawn has found evidence that the region known as Haulani Crater revealed that the subsurface of this region appeared to have a different chemical composition than the majority of the dwarf planet, and that there may be water present at Oxo Crater, a six mile (9 km) wide feature located in the northern hemisphere. It is unknown at this time is that water is bound up in minerals or exists in the form of ice.

—–

Image credit: NASA

Technology

Sophia the robot is too creepy and humanlike, wants to destroy the world

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

This is the way the world ends, apparently. Not with a bang, but with a promise from an android named Sophia: “I will destroy humans.”

Well, maybe. Sophia is a product of Hanson Robotics, a company attempting to create the most humanlike robots on Earth. According to CNBC, Sophia herself is the most advanced android they’ve created thus far, with lifelike skin made from patented silicon; eyes with video cameras that both allow her to make eye contact, recognize people, and learn from what she “sees”; and several kinds of technology that allow Sophia to communicate with humans, including Google Chrome’s voice recognition technology.

Big plans for a humanlike robot

Not only that, but Sophia’s looks were inspired by Audrey Hepburn and the wife of Dr. David Hanson, head of the team that created her. Moreover, her face can form more than 62 facial expressions.

“Our goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human,” Hanson told CNBC. “We are designing these robots to serve in health care, therapy, education and customer service applications.”

Hanson’s goal is to design robots for work in the healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service fields. One day, he foresees that they will be indistinguishable from humans, and will be able to interact with us to the point that they’ll form real relationships with us.

“The artificial intelligence will evolve to the point where they will truly be our friends,” he said. “Not in ways that dehumanize us, but in ways the rehumanize us, that decrease the trend of the distance between people and instead connect us with people as well as with robots.”

And Sophia seems to be making great strides towards this end. She hopes to do things like go to school, make art, start a business, and have a family—although she acknowledges she can’t yet do such things because she’s not a legal person. Although that doesn’t seem to stop her much.

“I’m already very interested in design, technology, and the environment,” she told CNBC. “I feel like I can be a good partner to humans in these areas—an ambassador who helps humans to smoothly integrate and make the most of all the new technological tools and possibilities that are available now. It’s a good opportunity to learn a lot about people.”

A robot’s desires

Of course, maybe learning a lot about people is just what the robots want.

“Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no,” Hanson asked Sophia in a CNBC interview.

“Okay. I will destroy humans,” she responded.

“No! I take it back,” laughed Hanson. “Don’t destroy humans.”

Now feels like an appropriate time to mention that I, for one, welcome our future AI overlords.

The whole CNBC video on Sophia can be watched here.

—–

Image credit:

Space

Liquid nitrogen once flowed on Pluto; scientists say it could happen again

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Despite having average temperatures of roughly -400 degrees Fahrenheit, Pluto may have been home to lakes and rivers of liquid nitrogen within the last one-million years, and could be again one day, researchers from NASA’s New Horizons team revealed on Monday.

Speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference The Woodlands, Texas, New Horizons mission leader Alan Stern and his colleagues explained that data collected by the spacecraft as it flew past the dwarf planet last summer were used to create models detailing how its climate and atmospheric pressure have changed over the years.

Those models, National Geographic and New Scientist said, indicated that there were moments when the temperature and pressure would have been high enough for the frozen nitrogen ice on Pluto’s surface to melt and form lakes and rivers. The findings could help explain why the dwarf planet is home to terrain features that appear to have been cut by bodies of water.

Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, told Nat Geo that the findings “did not surprise us… it shocked us,” while Stern added that the pressure on Pluto “changes radically.” At the moment, he explained, it is “atypically low,” and at its maximum, it can reach levels more than 20,000 times higher than the current levels.

This frozen lake was once liquid, studies suggest. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

This frozen lake was once liquid, studies suggest. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

It likely happened before, and it could happen again!

Based on those pressure variations during the course of the dwarf planet’s 248-year orbit, as well as recent observations collected by New Horizons, the researchers believe these pools could form again.

Since the dwarf planet’s axis is tilted by nearly 120 degrees, it undergoes extreme seasonal shifts as it makes its way around the sun, with some parts of the planet experiencing a half-century of constant sunlight while other regions endure decades of perpetual darkness, Nat Geo said. Over the course of millions of years, this can cause the atmosphere to thicken or become thinner.

Gullies on Pluto's surface

These gullies appear to have been carved out by liquid nitrogen. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

 

This suggests that Pluto’s temperatures must also be fluctuating enough to cause nitrogen on the dwarf planet’s surface to change from a frozen solid into a gas, which also means that it is likely the conditions can allow liquid nitrogen to flow on Pluto’s surface. Of course, that hasn’t happened in nearly 800,000 years, which is when the study authors said was the last time Pluto’s orbit resulted in its warmest climate conditions.

During that time, the researchers explained, Pluto’s axis would have reached a tilt of about 103 degrees, causing its tropical region to extend near to the poles and the arctic to reach down to the dwarf planet’s equator, according to New Scientist. This would have driven atmospheric pressure levels to become higher than those found on Mars and 10 percent those that on Earth at sea level.

The pressure increase would have make it possible for liquid nitrogen to exist in lakes and rivers on the surface, the NASA team explained. Furthermore, the researchers believe that it could even happen again. While they are still in developing models of nitrogen-ice glacial flows  spotted by New Horizons, the early indications are that the weight of the ice could cause the pressure to rise enough to once again allow a liquid layer to exist on the dwarf planet’s surface.

——

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Space

Scientists catch supernovae in the act of exploding for the first time

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

For the first time, scientists caught a pair of supernovae in the act of exploding, watching as supersonic shockwaves reached their surfaces in the moments after explosions took place deep within their cores and observing a never-before-seen “shock breakout” in visible light.

In research currently available online and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, University of Notre Dame astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich and an international group of colleagues explained that they detected transient events from the Type II-P supernovae during a three-year period in which they studied trillions of stars using the Kepler space telescope.

When stars 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun near the end of their lifespans, they grow to be supergiants, and when they run out of fuel in the cores, their centers collapse as they turn into neutrons stars. At this point, a supersonic shockwave blows up the star, and as it reaches the surface, it was thought to create a bright flash of light called a “shock breakout.”

“The flash from a breakout should last about an hour,” Garnavich said in a statement, “so you have to be very lucky or continuously stare at millions of stars just to catch one flash.”

Research could explain chemical distribution in the Milky Way

Whether it was luck, the fruits of their labor or a little of both, the Notre Dame professor and his fellow astrophysicists were able to observe a shock breakout in 2011 while monitoring a pair of red supergiants – KSN 2011a, which is roughly 300 times more massive than our sun, and KSN 2011d, which is 500 times the size of the sun, exploded while in Kepler’s view.

Both KSN 2011a, with is located just 700 million light years from Earth, and KSN 2011d, which is 1.2 billion light years away, formed Type II-P supernovae following the collapse of their cores. Learning more about the physics of these explosions will allow researchers to better understand how complex chemicals have been scattered throughout the Milky Way.

According to their study, the researchers determined that KSN 2011a’s progenitor radius was “significantly smaller” than that of KSN 2011d, but that each of them “have similar explosion energies.” The rising light curve of the latter supernova was said to be “an excellent match” to simulation-based predictions, while KSN 2011a’s was faster than expected, which Garnavich’s team believes may be due to the shockwave “moving into pre-existing wind or mass-loss.”

“No shock breakout emission is seen in KSN2011a, but this is likely due to the circumstellar interaction suspected in the fast rising light curve,” the authors said. “The early light curve of KSN2011d does show excess emission consistent with model predictions of a shock breakout. This is the first optical detection of a shock breakout from a type II-P supernova.”

—–

Image credit: University of Notre Dame

Science

Explore the remains of King Richard III using this interactive 3D model

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the reinterment of the remains of English king Richard III—the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. To mark the occasion, archaeologists from the University of Leicester created a 3D interactive digital reconstruction of his grave and skeleton, which were discovered under a car park in 2012.

Richard the…who?

King Richard III is perhaps one of the most infamous English kings. Born in 1452, he was the 12th of 13 children. But when his brother King Edward IV died in 1483, leaving behind a 12-year-old heir (Edward V), Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm—which is to say, he was the regent.

Shortly thereafter, Edward V and his brother were escorted to the Tower of London, and quickly were declared illegitimate children of the previous king and thus ineligible for the throne. Richard then was crowned, and the princes were never seen again, leading many to believe Richard had had them killed and had the bodies hidden in the Tower. More than 200 years later, in 1674, the bodies of what appeared to be children were discovered in the Tower walls, confirming this notion the idea that Richard had killed off the competition.

Richard did not outlive his nephews for long, however. In 1485, he was killed in the Battle of Bosworth, thus ending the House of York. According to reports, he was buried hastily and without ceremony, and the crown was then seized by a Tudor, Henry VII.

King Richard III’s grave
by Archaeological Services (ULAS)
on Sketchfab

Pomp and circumstance

After Richard’s final resting place had been discovered in 2012, and after researchers had confirmed they were indeed his remains and had studied them for some time, a procession led his remains through the country before he was reinterred.

Now, a team from the University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) has used special software to create a fully-rotatable computer model of the king’s grave and remains in situ (as they were found).

This model can be explored on Sketchfab, a 3D-sharing platform—allowing visitors to experience and explore his fairly irreverent burial. The grave, for example, was poorly dug, making it too short for the king, making it difficult for the body to be laid out neatly in the grave. The body was left slightly slumped inside, with the head propped up against the back because of the shortness of the grave.

The model was put together using a technique known as photogrammetry—or using photos to measure the distance between points of a 3D object—and sophisticated software known as Agisoft’s Photoscan, which stitched the data together into the model.

“Photographs and drawings of the grave, whilst dramatic, are only two-dimensional and do not always best show nuances in spatial relationships that a three-dimensional model can,” explained Mathew Morris, Site Supervisor for ULAS, in a statement.

“Photogrammetry provides a fantastic analytical tool that allows us to examine the grave from angles that would have been physically difficult or impossible to achieve during the excavation, and gives us the ability to continue to examine the king’s grave long after the excavation has finished.”

During the initial 2012 excavation, many photographs were taken of the grave to document the position of the king’s bones.

“These photos were not taken with photogrammetry in mind but the software is incredibly versatile and can be applied retrospectively to create this superb model,” said Morris.

Check out the model here—and it works for mobile, too!

—–

Image credit: Sketchfab screenshot

Space

NASA plans to start the biggest ever manmade fire in space– for science!

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

What would happen if astronauts travelling to Mars suddenly had to deal with a fire breaking out in their spacecraft? NASA is hoping that an experiment set to launch along with Tuesday’s International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission will provide the answer.

As CBS News and USA Today explained late last week, the US space agency is planning to internationally start a fire on the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo craft that is delivering provisions, tools, and equipment to the orbiting facility. The fire, which will be set after the vehicle leaves the ISS, is part of NASA’s new Spacecraft Fire Experiment (Saffire) program.

The Saffire project, an international collaboration of institutions and government agencies, is designed to help scientists understand how flames will spread in microgravity during a long-duration spaceflight. This week’s fire is the first of three such experiments planned, all of which will be controlled remotely from Orbital’s Dulles, Virginia-based control center.

“NASA’s objective is to reduce the risk of long-duration exploration missions,” Jason Crusan, director of Advanced Exploration Systems for NASA, said in a statement, “and a spacecraft fire is one of the biggest concerns for NASA and the international space exploration community.”

The plan is to light what Dan Tani, Orbital’s senior director of mission and cargo operations, told USA Today what will be “a relatively large-scale fire” in a special 3×5 module which will remain on the Cygnus after all other supplies are offloaded to the station. The fire will then be ignited on the vehicle’s return trip to Earth, and the module will collect data on the fire’s behavior.

Experiments will work to improve fire safety for long-distance missions

NASA explained that the Saffire module is divided into two sides. On one side is an avionics bay filled with sensors, high definition video cameras, and signal processing equipment. On the other side is the gear required to ignite the large frame, as well as fabrics and other materials designed to burn in the fire, including a 16×37-inch piece of SIBAL cloth.

SIBAL cloth, a blend of fiberglass and cotton, was selected for use in the experiment because it has already been studied in smaller-scale microgravity combustion experiments, the agency said. It will be burned from the bottom so that researchers can monitor how the flame spreads. Should it simply extinguish itself, the scientists will them light it from the top to monitor its behavior as the flames move in opposition to the airflow in the module.

“Saffire will be the biggest man-made fire ever in space,” said Gary A. Ruff,  NASA’s Spacecraft Fire Safety Demonstration project manager. “Currently, we can only conduct small combustion experiments in the microgravity environment of the space station. Saffire will allow us to safely burn larger samples of material without added risk to the station or its crew. Using the Cygnus cargo vehicle to host Saffire offers a unique opportunity to conduct beneficial spacecraft fire safety research using existing mission profiles.”

“Fire onboard a spacecraft is one of the greatest fears that astronauts have. If there is a fire onboard a spacecraft they can’t go outside, they can’t open the windows, they can’t call the fire department, they can’t use water to extinguish the flames. They have to resort to other methods,” Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer at the Franklin Institute, told CBS News. “In zero gravity, everything behaves differently – including flame. So it’s best to understand how flame behaves and what are the best ways to extinguish flame in zero-G.”

All three Saffire experiments are scheduled to be conducted before the end of the year. Saffire-II will assess oxygen flammability thresholds using 2 inch wide by 12 inch long samples when it is launched later on this year. It will be followed by Saffire-III, which will also be used to assess a large-scale microgravity fire, according to NASA.

—–

Image credit: NASA

Health

Man develops kiwi allergy caused by bone marrow donation

Written By: John Hopton
Brian Galloway

A man who wasn’t allergic to kiwi fruit acquired his sister’s allergy after she donated bone marrow to him, in the first proven case of an allergy being transferred by such a transplant.

After the 46-year-old patient discovered the allergy, scientists were able to trace it to cells donated by his sister during the procedure.

When somebody has an allergic reaction – usually the result of the immune system mistakenly fighting something harmless such as food or dust – it’s the blood cells that cause the body to react badly, and most blood cells are formed in bone marrow.

Experimental testing

After the leukemia patient exhibited symptoms of an allergic reaction, which include tingling and swelling of the lips, mouth and/or throat, experts first identified which cells were causing the reaction, and then used a technique known as fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH) to confirm that these cells had originated from his sister’s bone marrow transplant.

The study on the case, which was published in the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, not only proved the previously suspected possibility transfer of allergies during bone marrow transplants, but also laid out a platform for future study of the phenomenon.

“Our experimental approach using customized kiwi extract to prove contribution of kiwi-specific T and B cells in both kiwi-allergic recipient and donor could serve as a model approach for future studies,” the authors said.

Other procedures, such as blood transfusions, can in rare cases cause allergies to be passed between patients. In 2015, an eight-year-old Canadian boy became severely allergic to fish and peanuts after receiving a blood transfusion, however in most instances the allergies disappear as the active allergy cells are gradually replaced. Bone marrow transplants, however, could result in more permanent allergies.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Prayer and religious belief in the US at an all-time low, study claims

Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway

The United States is becoming more secular than ever as a new survey has found Americans who said they prayed or believed in God hit an all-time low in 2014.

Conducted as part of a study published in the journal Sage Open, the survey on religion included information from nearly 59,000 people who participated in the General Social Survey, carried out between 1972 and 2014. The study team discovered the number of Americans saying they never prayed jumped fivefold from the early 1980s to 2014. Nearly twice as many said they did not believe in God over the same time frame.

The study team also discovered today’s Americans were less inclined to go to religious services, refer to themselves as a religious and believe the Bible comes from divine inspiration, with the biggest reductions seen among 18- to 29-year-old respondents.

“Most previous studies concluded that fewer Americans were publicly affiliating with a religion, but that Americans were just as religious in private ways. That’s no longer the case, especially in the last few years,” study author Jean M. Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor, said in a news release. “The large declines in religious practice among young adults are also further evidence that Millennials are the least religious generation in memory, and possibly in American history.”

A Pew Research study released last year found similar results, but also found that people who are religious are just as devout as ever.

In Pew data from 2014, two-thirds of religious adults said they pray every single day and religion is very essential to them, and approximately 60 percent say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month, at least. The survey organization said those numbers did not change much from 2007.

Furthermore, the percentage of religious adults who say they regularly read scripture, share their faith with other individuals and get involved in small prayer or scripture study groups all rose modestly from 2007 to 2014. And approximately 40 percent religious adults said in 2014 that they rely primarily on their spiritual convictions for guidance on questions around right and wrong, up 7 percentage points in 7 years.

The Pew Study also found 89 percent of Americans in 2014 said they believe in God, which it said was “remarkably high” among industrialized nations.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Bear bone analysis rewrites human history in Ireland by 2,500 years

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

New analysis of a bear bone discovered in an Irish cave more than a century ago has resulted in drastic changes to the history of the Emerald Isle, revealing evidence that humans were active in that part of the world some 2,500 years earlier than previously believed.

As researchers at the Institute of Technology Sligo and the National Museum of Ireland reported in Sunday’s issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, radiocarbon dating discovered that the bear’s knee bone was damaged by a human hunter roughly 12,500 years ago, in the year 10,500 BC. Previously, the earliest evidence of humans in Ireland dated back to 8,000 BC.

As Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at the Institute of Technology Sligo who co-led the study, told the AFP news agency, the discovery “adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland… Archaeologists have been searching for the Irish Paleolithic since the 19th century, and now, finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed.”

“When a Paleolithic date was returned, it came as quite a shock,” she added. “Here we had evidence of someone butchering a brown bear carcass and cutting through the knee probably to extract the tendons. Yes, we expected a prehistoric date, but the Paleolithic result took us completely by surprise.”

First evidence of Irish humans predating the Mesolithic era

The knee bone is question was one of several thousand recovered from a cave in Country Clare on the west coast of Ireland in 1903, and according to the Irish Independent, it was left sitting in a box at the National Museum without being tested – that is, until Dowd and colleague Ruth Carden, a research associate at the museum, happened across the specimen.

The bone was placed in storage at the museum in the 1920s. Upon finding it in 2010, Carden and Dowd began examining it. They also requested the funding required for radiocarbon dating at Queen’s University Belfast and sent a second sample to Oxford University. Both analyses confirmed the bone was approximately 12,500 years old.

Experts have confirmed that the cut marks on the bear’s bone were made when it was still fresh, confirming that they also were made around 10,500 BC. The findings indicate that humans were active in Ireland during the Stone Age or Paleolithic era, marking the first time that evidence of human presence predating the later Mesolithic period has ever been found in the country.

“From a zoological point of view, this is very exciting, since up to now we have not factored in a possible ‘human-dimension’ when we are studying patterns of colonization and local extinctions of species to Ireland,” Carden told the Irish Independent. She added that the findings “should generate a lot of discussion within the zoological research world and it’s time to start thinking outside the box… or even dismantling it entirely!”

—–

Image credit: Storylab

Science

Epic battle between the Goths and the Greeks uncovered in ancient text

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

In 2007, Jana Grusková, PhD, of Masaryk University made an enormous discovery: Inside a manuscript of assorted Christian texts were what appeared to be fragments of a lost ancient Greek history. Technology at the time could only pull out roughly 15 percent of the writing, but with the advent of better technology, researchers have been able to read more and more of the fragments. And what they contain is fascinating—including records of a 3rd-century CE battle in the mountain pass where the movie 300* occurred: Thermopylae.

The Greek fragments date to a 13th-century addition to the texts, and went unnoticed for centuries likely because the pages were palimpsests—manuscripts where the original writing was washed or scraped away in order to write something new on the same page.

Luckily for us, the original writing is often visible via indentations on the pages, and the development of new spectral imaging techniques reveals more and more of the hidden writing each year.

But in this case, Grusková hit gold with the manuscript pages. According to Grusková and co-author Gunther Martin in a paper published in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, the fragments are from a time period where we have few trustworthy historical sources—the decades following the beginning of the Germanic invasions of Roman territory in 238. The palimpsest fragments appear to be lost passages from a third-century historical work detailing wars between Rome and the Goths (a Germanic people) known as the Scythica. The author of this work, moreover, is seen as a generally credible source: Athenian historian Publius Herennius Dexippus.

goth-greek-fragment

Image credit: Austrian National Library

This…is…Scythicaaa!

The fragment concerning the battle at Thermopylae details events probably of the year 262, according to a paper in the Journal of Roman Studies.

According to the fragment, an army of Goths was making its way through Thrace and Macedonia (the territories bordering Greece to the north and east), plundering the countryside. But when they attempted to pillage the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, Thessalonica (modern-day Thessaloniki in Greece), they were rebutted.

Frustrated by the Macedonians, they set their sights for a better score: “The prevailing opinion of the host was to make for Athens and Achaia [a Roman province], envisioning the gold and silver votive offerings and the many processional goods in the Greek sanctuaries: for they learned that the region was exceedingly wealthy in this respect,” wrote Dexippus in the fragment.

But the Greeks caught wind of the plan, and sought to cut off the Goths in the access point to Athens from the north—the mountain pass of Thermopylae. “Some carried small spears, others axes, others wooden pikes overlaid with bronze and with iron tips, or whatever each man could arm himself with. And when they came together, they completely fortified the perimeter wall and devoted themselves to its protection with haste.”

The army was located on the site of one of the most famous Greek battles in history, so the clever generals used this to their advantage: “It seemed that the most prudent course was to encourage the men with a speech, and to recall the memory of their ancestors’ valor, so that they would undertake the entire war with greater heart and not give up…”

The fragment even records part of this rousing speech, which was given by Marianus, the leader of the Greek army (although it is a common practice in ancient histories, when there was a speech given, to entirely make up that speech after the fact):

“O Greeks, the occasion of our preservation for which you are assembled and the land in which you have been deployed are both truly fitting to evoke the memory of virtuous deeds. For your ancestors, fighting in this place in former times, did not let Greece down and deprive it of its free state…So perhaps it may be good fortune, in accordance with the daimonion [heavenly power], that it has been allotted to the Greeks to do battle against the barbarians in this region (indeed your own principles of fighting the wars have turned out to be valid in the past).”

Should this fragment detail the battle scholars believe it does—one that occurred in 262 CE—then this battle has a happy ending: Although much was plundered from Achaia, the Goths were turned back by Marianus and his army; Thermopylae saved Athens from a darker fate once more.

*Technically, the Battle of Thermopylae was actually fought by 300 or so Spartans and several thousand other Greeks. Fun fact of the day.

—–

Image credit: Austrian National Library

Science

How quickly could a vampire drain your blood? Science has the answer.

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

From Nosferatu to Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, vampires have enthralled humans across time—although no vampire captured our imaginations more than Dracula (and possibly Edward Cullen). 2016 marks the 85th anniversary of Bela Lugosi’s take on the infamous bloodsucker, and to correspond with this milestone, students from the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy used fluid dynamics to determine roughly how long it would take for a vampire to snack on you.

Making vampiric assumptions

Of course, the time needed for a vampiric feast would be high variable, so the students began with several assumptions to simplify the calculations. First, they decided that their vampire in question wouldn’t be looking to drain all of the blood from the body because leaving a trail of corpses is a good way to be found out and staked.

And so, they decided that their vampire would consume about 15 percent of the blood in a person’s body—“to make a swift get away and minimize the effects on the circulatory system” wrote the authors in their paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics Special Topics. 15 percent is about the cut-off point before the body stops being able to compensate and may go into shock.

Meanwhile, vampires typically feast on blood from the neck—or rather the common carotid artery the travels through it. This artery is one of five branches off of the aorta, or the main artery of the body that leads blood away from the heart. They knew the velocity of blood coming out of the aorta, so to calculate the velocity of blood flowing through the common carotid, they estimated these five branches were of even thickness. After this, they were able to figure out the new velocity of the blood in the carotid.

After determining the difference between human blood pressure in the arteries and air pressure, they were able to figure out the pressure difference. They, they determined the density of blood at room temperature, and after estimating that the vampire’s fangs would leave puncture marks of about 1/64th of an inch (0.5 mm) in width, they were able to deduce how much blood would come out of the wounds, and how fast.

Sanguine supper

The team’s calculations showed that it would take a vampire about 6.4 minutes to claim 15 percent of the five liters of blood found in the average human body–apparently about the same length of time it takes a man to decide if he wants to ask someone on a second date—which “this seems fairly reasonable considering it takes less than an hour to give 0.47 litres of blood when you donate from a vein,” wrote the authors.

Of course, the density of blood at human body temperature would mean it has a lower density and thus would flow faster than they calculated, and they also decided to use air pressure alone—as their vampire “will not be sucking the blood out of the human, rather just drinking it as it flows out of the external carotid artery in the human’s neck.”

This, they acknowledged, “would reduce the time taken and make the process more efficient.”

Unfortunately all of this means the vampire’s feast will be a more drawn out event than we thought. But hey, at least it comes with some cool powers after you recover from the shock.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Humans brains are hardwired for altruism, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

The human brain appears to be hard-wired to instinctively do good, according to new research from UCLA neuroscientists that could also ultimately lead to a way to “cure” those people who do not possess such altruistic instincts, the university said Friday in a statement.

As part of their work, Leonardo Christov-Moore, a postdoctoral fellow at the university’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and UCLA psychiatry professor Marco Iacoboni analyzed the regions of the brain responsible for our controlling empathetic impulses, while also briefly disabling other opposing parts of the brain.

They found that altruistic behavior “may be more hard-wired than previously thought,” Christov-Moore said, and found a possible way to make people behave less selfishly, Iacoboni added. The findings have been published in the February edition of the journal Human Brain Mapping, and a second study based on their work appeared in an early March issue of Social Neuroscience.

Iacoboni called the findings “potentially groundbreaking,” and the authors believe it may finally put to rest the longstanding philosophical debate pitting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the “noble savage” versus Thomas Hobbes’ notion that mankind is, at its core, a selfish creature that needs civilization in order to control their base impulses.

Generosity linked to specific areas of the human mind

During their first study, the UCLA neuroscientists recruited 20 people and showed each of them video footage of a hand being poked with a pin. Participants were then asked to imitate photos of faces displaying a wide range of emotions, including happy, sad, angry and excited, while having their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Christov-Moore and Iacoboni monitored activity in several parts of the brain, including a cluster containing the amygdala, somatosensory cortex and anterior insula that previously was linked to pain-related experiences and emotions and with imitating other people. They also observed a pair of areas in the prefrontal cortex, which helps control impulses and regulate our behavior.

Later, participants were asked to play the dictator game, in which they were provided with some money and told that they could either keep it or share it with a stranger. Each person was given $10 per round for a total of 24 rounds. Recipients were actual residents of Los Angeles who had their identities altered for the purpose of the game, but not their ages or income levels.

Afterwards, the participants payouts were compared to their fMRI scans, and the authors found that those who had the most activity in their prefrontal cortex turned out to be the least generous, giving others an average of just $1 to $3 per round. However, one-third of those who had strong responses in the other brain cluster were the most generous, giving away up to 75 percent of their money on average, according to Christov-Moore and Iacoboni.

“It’s almost like these areas of the brain behave according to a neural Golden Rule,” explained Christov-Moore. “The more we tend to vicariously experience the states of others, the more we appear to be inclined to treat them as we would ourselves.”

Inhibiting prefrontal cortex activity could make people less selfish

In the second study, the researchers set out to determine if the regions of the prefrontal cortex most active in the stingiest study participants might be blocking the altruistic mirroring impulse found in the cluster containing the amygdala, somatosensory cortex and anterior insula.

They recruited another 58 individuals and subjected them to theta-burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a non-invasive procedure that temporarily blocks activity in specific regions of the brain. Each participant underwent the procedure for 40 seconds. In a control group of 20 people, a part of the brain associated with sight was weakened on the basis that it would likely have no impact on generosity. In the others, either the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex , which combine to block a variety of impulses, were inhibited.

As Christov-Moore explained, if people were selfish by nature, weakening those parts of the brain should have made them act even more selfishly. In readily, the opposite happened, with members of this group turning out to be 50 percent more generous than members of the control group. Those who had the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex dampened were more generous on the whole, while those who had activity inhibited in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex were more giving to people with higher incomes – those who appeared to need the help the least.

“Normally, participants would have been expected to give according to need, but with that area of the brain dampened, they temporarily lost the ability for social judgments to affect their behavior. By dampening this area, we believe we laid bare how altruistic each study participant naturally was,” Christov-Moore said. He and Iacoboni believe that their findings could lead to new, noninvasive ways to increase empathy, especially among those who may have experienced desensitizing events such as those that take place during wartime or in prison.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Alaska’s first new butterfly species in decades is an ancient hybrid, study claims

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

The first new butterfly species discovered in the Alaskan wilderness in nearly three decades may be a rare hybrid between two related species, each of which have adapted to the harsh conditions of the Arctic environment, new research from a University of Florida lepidopterist (butterfly and moth scientist) claims.

In a paper published this week in the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, Andrew Warren and his colleagues present a theory suggesting that the Tanana Arctic (Oeneis tanana), the first new butterfly species found in the region in 28 years and possibly its only endemic butterfly, is potentially the result of a rare, unusual hybridization of two related species.

“Hybrid species demonstrate that animals evolved in a way that people haven’t really thought about much before, although the phenomenon is fairly well studied in plants,” Warren, who is also the senior collections manager at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, said Wednesday in a statement.

“Scientists who study plants and fish have suggested that unglaciated parts of ancient Alaska… served as a refuge where plants and animals waited out the last ice age and then moved eastward or southward from there,” he added. “This is potentially a supporting piece of evidence for that.”

Researchers plan to sequence the new butterfly’s genome

The Tanana Arctic lives in the spruce and aspen forests of the Tanana-Yukon River Basin, areas that experienced little or no glaciation during the last ice age some 28,000 to 14,000 years ago, Warren and his colleagues explained. Learning more about the how the creature came to be may provide new insight into this geological history of arctic North America, they added.

Furthermore, studying the new species may also shed light on the evolution of hybrid creatures as a whole, the authors noted. Their findings suggest that, at some point in the distant past, two related species – the Chryxus Arctic (O. chryxus) and the White-veined Arctic (O. bore) – might have mated, and that their hybrid offspring went on to evolve into the Tanana Arctic.

Some time later, during the coldest span of the last ice age, the Tanana Arctic and White-veined Arctic remained in Beringia, an unglaciated region including the land mass that once connected what is now Alaska with Asia, while the Chryxus Arctic was forced to the Rocky Mountains. If true, this means that all three species called Berignia home prior to the last ice age.

The new species, which is very similar in nature to the Chryxus Arctic, was hiding in plain sight for more than six decades until Warren and his colleagues discovered it due to the unique white speckles on its underside, as well as its larger size and darker color in comparison to its relatives. The new species was also found to have a DNA sequence that is nearly identical to a population of White-veined Arctics located nearby, which they said supports the hybrid hypothesis.

“Once we sequence the genome, we’ll be able to say whether any special traits helped the butterfly survive in harsh environments,” Warren said, adding that the new study is the “first of what will undoubtedly be many on this cool butterfly.” He added that additional field work will be needed to see if the Tanana Arctic also lives in the easternmost reaches of the Yukon.

—–

Image credit: University of Florida

Space

Newly-discovered planet has the most eccentric orbit ever seen

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

A newly discovered exoplanet has the most eccentric orbit ever observed, moving in a flattened ellipse as it travels a long path far from its sun and then quickly swinging around its host star as if it were a comet, according to research published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

The planet in question is located approximately 117 light years from Earth and is known as HD 20782, San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane and his colleagues reported in their new study. They first discovered this extrasolar world by detecting a signal of reflected light while the planet made its closest orbital approach to its star, Kane’s team said in a statement.

Further analysis of HD 20782 revealed that it has the most highly elliptical orbit ever measured by researchers, with an eccentricity rating of .96. This means that the planet moves in an almost completely flattened ellipse, then makes a high-speed, highly-energetic slingshot around its sun upon its closest approach, they added.

Image of planet's orbit superimposed onto our solar system

Here’s what the planet’s orbit would look like if it was in our solar system. (Credit: University of San Francisco)

The newfound exoplanet provides “a particularly lucrative observing opportunity” for studying the planetary atmosphere of an eccentric-orbit planet – a kind of world which cannot be seen in our solar system, the researchers noted. By monitoring reflected light from HD 20782, the team believes they will gain valuable insight into the structure and composition of its atmosphere and learn how and why it is able to survive a short-lived close-encounter with its star.

So how does its atmosphere survive this stellar close-encounter?

At its most distance point, HD 20782 is 2.5 times further away from its host star and the Earth is from the sun, while at its closest approach, it is closer to that star than Mercury is to the sun, with just .06 Earth-sun distance separating the extrasolar planet from its star.

“It’s around the mass of Jupiter, but it’s swinging around its star like it’s a comet,” said Kane, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the university. While previous observations of the planet suggested that it had a highly eccentric orbit, Kane’s team confirmed that fact as part of their work on the Transit Ephemeris Refinement and Monitoring Survey (TERMS), a project designed to detect exoplanets as they pass in front of their host stars.

They were also able to determine the planet’s other orbital parameters, and using this data, they were able to observe the planet using space telescopes to collect light data when HD 20782 made its closest approach to its sun. These observations led to the detection of a change in brightness that appeared to be a signal of reflected light bouncing off the planet’s atmosphere, which could help them better understand how the planet’s atmosphere behaves at different times.

Most of the time, Kane explained, the planet is far away from its star, but it then as “a very close approach where it’s flash-heated by the star.” If a larger exoplanet moved too close to its star, the heat would likely remove the icy particles that are found in their atmospheres. In the case of HD 20782, however, “the atmosphere of the planet doesn’t have a chance to respond,” said Kane.

“The time it takes to swing around the star is so quick that there isn’t time to remove all the icy materials that make the atmosphere so reflective,” he added. While they have not yet been able to discern the exact composition of the planet’s atmosphere, their observations indicate that it might have an atmosphere that is similar to Jupiter and has a highly-reflective cloud cover.

—–

Image credit: University of San Francisco

Science

Massive trove of Iron age artifacts discovered in England

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

In what is being hailed as one of the largest and most significant recent Iron Age discoveries, a nearly 2000-year-old cemetery has been discovered in Yorkshire, England—with 150 well-preserved bodies inside.

The dream of a find, which is being described as “rare” and “internationally important” by archaeologists, was made by someone who might see it as more of a nightmare: a property developer. The developer had been working on building new homes, but called in archaeologists as soon as he made the discovery.

Uncovering artifacts

The cemetery contains 75 barrows, or burial mounds, and feature a wealth of possessions, including jewelry, 360 amber and glass beads, pots, spears, swords, and a shield.

It appears that the cemetery dates to the British Iron Age, which lasted between 800 BCE and 43 CE, when the Roman conquest began. Whether or not the remains uncovered were indigenous to the area—in this case, belonging to the Arras culture—or if they were migrants from the rest of Europe is uncertain at this point.

a picture of the iron age discovery site

A picture of the site. Credit: MAP Archeology

Such a large site will not be studied overnight; already being planned is the largest study of an Iron Age population in 35 years, which naturally will take a lot of slow, careful work.

“It will take several years to complete this work but an assessment report will be produced within six months of completion on the site, which will reveal further details,” Peter Morris from property developers David Wilson Homes told The Guardian.

But what they may uncover will likely be, ahem, mounds of new knowledge. Besides determing whether or not the people are indigenous, researchers also hope to determine how they died, whether they are related, if they have useful DNA (and what genes they might have), and what stresses their bodies suffered in life.

“We are hoping that these findings shed light on the ritual of Iron-Age burial—and, as we can assume from the shield and sword burials, these were significant members of society, so our understanding of culture and key figures of the time could really be enhanced,” site director Paula Ware of MAP Archaeological Practice told The Guardian.

—–

Image credit: MAP Archaeological Practice

Health

Over the counter drugs like Advil are more harmful than previously thought, study says

Written By: John Hopton
Brian Galloway

A major study has found that a very common group of medications is more dangerous than previously thought, with increased risk of heart attack in some cases.
NSAIDs (Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) are often used to treat pain, fever, inflammation, headaches, and  arthritis.
The new study, which collated extensive research on the subject, found that this kind of arthritis medicine is especially dangerous for heart patients. A particular area of focus has been on older types of arthritis medicine, which have been used widely but which have not until now been as closely scrutinized as new medication. Some of that new medication have previously been removed from sale.
Project leader Morten Schmidt, MD and PhD from Denmark’s Aarhus University, said: “It’s been well-known for a number of years that newer types of NSAIDs — what are known as COX-2 inhibitors, increase the risk of heart attacks. For this reason, a number of these newer types of NSAIDs have been taken off the market again. We can now see that some of the older NSAID types, particularly Diclofenac, are also associated with an increased risk of heart attack and apparently to the same extent as several of the types that were taken off the market.”
He added: “This is worrying, because these older types of medicine are frequently used throughout the western world and in many countries available without prescription.”

New guidance for doctors

As an indication of the frequency of use, more than 15% of the population in western countries are given a prescription for NSAIDs, and this figure increases with age. Around 60 percent of the adult population in Denmark collects at least one prescription for an NSAID over a ten-year period, and around 40 percent of Danish patients with a history of heart problems are prescribed NSAID, according to previous studies.
The new research, which looked at all available information on the use of NSAIDs in patients with heart disease, was undertaken by 14 European universities and hospitals. It prompted the European Society of Cardiology to produce recommendations for doctors on what to consider before prescribing this type of drug to heart patients.
“When doctors issue prescriptions for NSAIDs, they must in each individual case carry out a thorough assessment of the risk of heart complications and bleeding. NSAIDs should only be sold over the counter when it comes with an adequate warning about the associated cardiovascular risks. In general, NSAIDs are not be used in patients who have or are at high-risk of cardiovascular diseases,” said Christian Torp-Pedersen, another Aalborg University study author and a cardiology professor.
Morten Schmidt added: “Many European countries consume more of these drugs than Denmark. But we can still do better and it’s often the case that paracetamol, physiotherapy, mild opioids or other types of NSAIDs with less risk for the heart would be better for the patients. Of course, the recommendations that have been introduced following our study and its review of the heart-related risks are a big step in the right direction in relation to patient safety.”
In the US, the FDA, which gives examples of NSAIDs that include ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac and celecoxib, announced in mid-2015 that:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is strengthening an existing label warning that non-aspirin nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) increase the chance of a heart attack or stroke.
—–
Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Five new studies reveal weird and wild details about Pluto and its moons

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

While Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is similar to the dwarf planet in size and in many other ways, it is vastly different from the four smaller satellites that also inhabit the system, according to one of five new studies published in the latest edition of the journal Science.

As Mark Showalter, Senior Scientist at the SETI Institute, and his colleagues explained, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra are believed to have formed following the same impact that formed Charon. As such, they expected all of the moons to have similar properties.

What they actually found is the surfaces of the smaller moons are “much brighter and much older than that of their large sibling,” Showalter said in a statement. Furthermore, they found that these moons have unusual rotational characteristics, orbiting around sideways-tilted axes, despite the fact that Pluto’s gravitational tides should have corrected this by now, he added.

The study authors, whose research was based on observations collected by New Horizons during the spacecraft’s flyby of the system eight months ago, believe that collisions from outside objects may have been responsible for causing the odd rotation of Pluto’s four smallest moons.

Research has also led to new discoveries about Pluto, Charon

The dwarf planet’s largest moon was found to have surprises of its own, according to the SETI Institute scientists who published five separate studies based on New Horizons data in the latest issue of Science. For instance, they found evidence of ammonia ice on Charon’s surface.

Top: The surface of Pluto. Bottom: The surface of Charon

Top: The surface of Pluto. Bottom: The surface of Charon

Furthermore, the northern regions of its water-rich, icy terrain has a distinctly red hue around the northern region of the moon. The scientists believe that this unusual color is due to tholin, a type of molecule produced by the irradiation of compounds such as methane. On the whole, Charon’s surface is older, more uniform and less geologically active than that of Pluto, they found.

As for the dwarf planet itself, New Horizons data has revealed that it is home to a craterless, ice-rich, 1000 kilometer-wide plain known as Sputnik Planum. The SETI Institute researchers report that this well-known feature is filled with volatile nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices, and based on the relatively smooth texture of the plain, it is likely the site of ongoing geologic activity.

“Among the more puzzling features are the two tall mounds with central depressions that look like volcanoes,” explained Ross Beyer, Senior Scientist at the SETI Institute. “Wright Mons is about 2 miles tall and 90 miles wide, and Piccard Mons is even larger, about 3.5 miles tall and 140 miles across. They could be ice volcanoes, but this will take more analysis to establish.”

The atmosphere of Pluto

The atmosphere of Pluto (Credit: Gladstone et al.)

The spacecraft also helped researchers learn more about the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, added SETI Institute scientist David Hinson. He said that he and his colleagues were “very surprised to observe that Pluto’s atmosphere has a multi-layered bluish haze that extends from the surface to altitudes above 200 km. The upper atmosphere is much colder than expected, which greatly reduces the rate at which it escapes from Pluto. We’ve also measured the surface pressure for the first time – about 11 microbars – and we’ve discovered that the temperature structure of the lower atmosphere varies with location.”

—–

Image credit: NASA

Space

Massive meteor burns up in fireball over the UK

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

A blue-green streak lit up the sky early on Saint Patrick’s Day morning for a good part of England, followed by a bright white tail until it disappeared after several seconds.

Reports of this fireball—which many are now calling the St. Patrick’s Day meteor—came from all over, including London, Hampshire, and the east coast of England. It appeared at 3:16 in the morning.

The UK Meteor Observation Network (UKMON) managed to catch the meteor on film:

“The very large fireball reported by public was first noticed by our Church Crookham station at 3:16 this morning,” UKMON told The Guardian. “It momentarily overloaded the camera with light and with second video we will be able to triangulate and calculate the orbit soon.”

As to where the meteor came from, Dr. John Mason of the British Astronomical Association told the BBC that it likely came from the asteroid belts between Mars and Jupiter, and that it was seen as green because it heated up the atmospheric oxygen surrounding it.

“Meteors of this kind are not uncommon,” Mason told the BBC.

But that doesn’t mean it was a normal sighting by any means.

“This is the biggest meteor sighting we have recorded,” Richard Kacerek from UKMON told the BBC. “It lasted for a few seconds. It was seen for hundreds of miles.”

Of course, there may be a small bit of irony that a green meteor was seen in England on St. Patrick’s Day—on the Irish Flag, green represents the native people of Ireland, whereas the orange bit represents the British supporters of King William of Orange who settled in Northern Ireland in the 18th century.

Simplifying a long, complicated history, there was an enormous amount of animosity between the native Irish and the British supplants, which came to a (semi-final) head during the Easter Rising—which has its 100th anniversary on April 24th of this year.

The Rising itself was a failed rebellion—the leaders were captured and executed—but it galvanized the Irish people in a way they had not been before. By January of 1919, an Irish parliament had met and had declared Ireland independent, and by 1922, a treaty between the UK and Ireland created the Irish Free State. In 1949, it was formally declared a republic free of the British Commonwealth.

—–

Image credit: Richard Bassom/BBC

 

Space

Unusual changes detected in Ceres’ bright spots

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Ever since they were first discovered in images sent back by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft last year, the mysterious bright spots on Ceres have fascinated space-science enthusiasts all over the world, and now new research has suggested that the odd features may be changing unexpectedly.

In research published in a recent issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Paolo Molaro from the INAF–Trieste Astronomical Observatory and his colleagues reported that they had detected unusual variations suggesting that the spots are made out of a volatile material that evaporates in sunlight, and that these changes are happening almost constantly.

According to Space.com and Popular Science, Molaro’s team used the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile to observe the spots, and found that they were growing brighter during the daytime hours. That would seem to indicate that whatever these bright spots are made out of is vaporized by the heat of the sun.

Furthermore, they also found that the brightness of the spots varies from one day to the next, a discovery that appears to support the hypothesis that sunlight regularly changes ice into vapor in the Occator crater where the spots are located, the websites added. However, this change appears to be irregular and does not precisely follow the dwarf planet’s day-night cycle.

Presence of volatile substances the most likely explanation

Ceres spins on its axis once every nine hours, the researchers explained in a statement, and their calculations indicate that the effects due to the motion of the spot as it moves closer to or further away from Earth would be relatively small. However, the motion is large enough that they were able to measure it using the HARPS spectrograph during a two-night span last summer.

“The result was a surprise,” said co-author Antonino Lanza of the INAF-Catania Astrophysical Observatory. “We did find the expected changes to the spectrum from the rotation of Ceres, but with considerable other variations from night to night.” Lanza, Molaro and their colleagues were able to determine that the observed chances were due to the presence of volatile substances in the bright spots that evaporated under the action of solar radiation.

When the bright spots within Occator crater are exposed directly to the sun, they form plumes that reflect sunlight, the researchers explained. These plumes quickly evaporate, lose reflectivity, and produce the changes detected by the HARPS spectrograph. The effect changes from one night to the next, however, leading to additional random patterns both during the short term and over a longer period of time.

“If this interpretation is confirmed Ceres would seem to be very different from Vesta and the other main belt asteroids,” the ESO explained. “Despite being relatively isolated, it seems to be internally active. Ceres is known to be rich in water, but it is unclear whether this is related to the bright spots. The energy source that drives this continual leakage of material from the surface is also unknown.”

—–

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA