The power and danger of a seemingly innocuous commitment
Written By: Christopher Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Do you want to understand more about your own thoughts and motivations? Do you wish you had a better understanding of what motivates other people and drives their decisions? Has psychology always fascinated you, but you’ve been missing a way to apply those lessons practically in your day-to-day life?
“The Science of Success” is redOrbit’s newest podcast, featuring entrepreneur and investor Matt Bodnar, who explores the mindset of success, the psychology of performance, and how to get the most out of your daily life.
With gripping examples, concrete explanations of psychological research, interviews with scientists and experts, and practical ways to apply these lessons in your own life, “The Science of Success” is a must-listen for anyone interested in growth, learning, personal development, and psychology.
This week’s episode: The Power and Danger of a Seemingly Innocuous Commitment
This week we are continuing our new miniseries within “The Science of Success” called “Weapons of Influence”. This is the second episode in a six-part series based on the best selling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. If you loved the book, this will be a great refresher on the core concepts. And if you haven’t yet read it, some of this stuff is gonna blow your mind.
So what are the 6 weapons of influence?
Reciprocation
Consistency & Commitment
Social Proof
Liking
Authority
Scarcity
Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your belt – and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone, each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives and in social situations, but together they can have huge impacts.
Today’s episode covers the second weapon of influence: Consistency & Commitment Bias. We’ll cover:
The powerful application of the “foot in the door” technique
Why hard won commitments are the most powerful
The dangers of seemingly innocuous commitments
How commitment builds its own internal justifications
How you can defend yourself against falling prey to commitment bias
Chinese scientists claim to have genetically engineered monkeys with autism
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
In a new research paper published Monday in the journal Nature, neuroscientist Zilong Qiu from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences and his colleagues explained that they genetically modified more than a dozen monkeys with a genetic error that can cause human children to have a rare condition with symptoms including mental retardation and autistic-like behaviors.
Qiu told the New York Times that the modification caused the monkeys to exhibit behaviors that were “very similar” to “human autism patients, including repetitive behaviors, increased anxiety and, most importantly, defects in social interactions.” He added that they were now imaging the brains of the monkeys to find brain circuit deficiencies responsible for the observed behaviors.
According to the MIT Technology Review, the modified primates were found pacing in circles and spending less time interacting with their fellow monkeys. In addition, they displayed higher stress levels when the scientists stared them in the eyes, frequently responding by grunting and screaming, and two of them even fell ill in ways that “echoed” human children. Monkeys provide better models… but is the research ethical?
As both the Times and the Technology Review pointed out, much of the research into autism has focused on using mice models, largely because they are inexpensive and reproduce quickly. Yet this research has failed to generate many leads on how to address the condition in humans, since the brains of mice are structured differently than ours and lack a prefrontal cortex.
“Mice are not in the same league when you’re talking about doing models of social cognition and interaction. They’re not even close,” Jonathan Sebat, head of the University of California San Diego’s Beyster Center of Psychiatric Genomics, who was not involved in the monkey research, told the Times. In addition to being less complex, the brains of mice provide little opportunity for research due to how quickly the creatures mature.
Qiu explained that the lack of progress in rodent-related studies was one of the primary reasons he and his colleagues decided to create autistic monkeys, as they provide “a very unique model” for studying the disease in humans. He added that scientists should be able to see which brain networks are disrupted by autism, and test out new treatment options, such as deep-brain stimulation.
As the MIT Technology Review noted, “Using any monkey in research, and especially creating ones with psychiatric disorders, is a charged subject that raises animal welfare questions. Even so, a small number of centers in China, Japan, and the US have recently redoubled efforts to create monkeys with human gene errors to see if they can cause psychiatric problems, including versions of schizophrenia.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
Cassini lifting out of Saturn’s rings, prepping for Titan flyby
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is in the midst of evasive maneuvers that will lift it out of Saturn’s ringplane and prepare it for a February 1 encounter with its moon Titan, officials from the US space agency confirmed on Monday.
On Saturday, Cassini underwent the second of five large propulsive maneuvers that will change the spacecraft’s orbit, bringing it to increasingly higher inclination with respect to the equator of the planet and preparing it for the upcoming gravity-assisted flyby of Titan.
Tethys, dwarfed by the scale of Saturn and its rings, appears as an elegant crescent in this image taken by NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft. Views like this are impossible from Earth, where we only see Saturn’s moons as (more or less) fully illuminated disks. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
This weekend’s maneuver started at 5:47pm EST and lasted just 35 seconds, but during that time the orbital velocity of the spacecraft around Saturn changed by roughly 22.3 feet per second (6.8 meters per second). Next week’s encounter with Titan will alter Cassini’s speed by an additional 2,539 feet per second (774 meters per second), according to agency officials.
“Titan does all the heavy lifting,” Cassini project manager Earl Maize from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “Our job is to get the spacecraft to a precise altitude and latitude above Titan, at a particular time, and these large propulsive maneuvers are what keep us on target to do that.”
Getting set for the mission’s September 2017 coup de grace
NASA said that there are no plans for Cassini to return to an orbit near the ringplane. Rather, mission engineers are gradually increasing its orbital tilt relative to Saturn’s equator to prepare for the final year of the mission, which has studied the system for more than a decade.
Cassini has been in an equatorial orbit around Saturn since last spring, when it kicked off its final run of near flybys with the large, icy moons Hyperion, Dione and Enceladus. Just before the start of the new year, the spacecraft started its current program through a burn that changed its speed by 9.8 feet per second (3 meters per second) prior to a January 15 flyby of Titan.
Although the Huygens probe has now pierced the murky skies of Titan and landed on its surface, much of the moon remains for the Cassini spacecraft to explore. Titan continues to present exciting puzzles. This view of Titan uncovers new territory not previously seen at this resolution by Cassini’s cameras. The view is a composite of four nearly identical wide-angle camera images. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
The next main engine maneuver is scheduled for March 25, and will set up an final April 4 flyby of Titan by changing Cassini’s velocity by 26.08 feet (7.95 meters) per second. Before the end of November, Cassini will be on a path that will carry it high above Saturn’s poles, approaching just beyond the planet’s main rings. This phase of the mission has been dubbed “F-ring orbits.”
After completing 20 of these F-ring orbits, the spacecraft will begin the final leg of its mission as it will pass between the Saturn’s innermost rings and the planet’s surface 22 times before it dives into the atmosphere on September 15, 2017. Even though this will culminate in the coup de grace for the mission, Cassini scientist Linda Spilker of JPL noted that NASA has “an exciting year of Saturn science planned” and that “views along the way should be spectacular.”
Space junk could cause World War III, scientists warn
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Odds are, if there’s going to be a Third World War, it won’t be caused by political extremists, religious zealots or power-mad dictators trying to conquer the world – it’ll be because a stray fragment of space junk accidentally collided with a military satellite, according to a new report.
As reported by CNET and The Guardian, Russian scientists have published a new paper in the journal Acta Astronautica, in which they indicate that debris floating in orbit around Earth poses a “special political danger” and could result in all-out armed conflict between nations.
Reports indicate that more than 23,000 pieces of space junk larger than 10 centimeters are being tracked surrounding the planet, but estimates indicate there could be a half-billion fragments that are at least one centimeter and trillions of particles even smaller than that. All of them may pose a potential danger, according to Vitaly Adushkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Space agencies trying to track debris, prevent collisions
As Adushkin and his colleagues explained, even miniscule pieces of space junk contain enough energy to cause damage to, or completely destroy a military satellite. Such an occurrence may be mistaken for a deliberate attack by an opposing country, they added, and could “provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations”.
The country that owns the damaged or destroyed satellite would be unable to “quickly determine the real cause of the accident,” the researchers wrote. Over the past few decades, several defense satellites have suddenly failed for unexplained reasons. In these cases, they added, there are only two possible causes: a collision with space debris, or an attack by an opposing force.
Adushkin and his colleagues cite two examples of unexplained incidents that involved defense probes. Three years ago, a Russian satellite called Blits was disabled by debris believed to originate from an Chinese weather satellite that Beijing had destroyed with a missile. Also, in 2014, the International Space Station needed to move to avoid space junk on five separate occasions.
Space programs are clearly concerned about the threat of space junk, if not specifically about its potential to kick off a global war. NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office constantly attempts to measure and monitor orbiting debris, while Huffington Post UK added that the ESA’s e.DeOrbit project will track large fragments and attempts to prevent future debris-causing collisions.
Remains reveal domesticated cat species arose naturally in China, not imported
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
It’s theorized that humans first began to interact with what would become modern cats as early as the beginning of farming—some 10,800 years ago, around the Levant or Anatolia regions. It seems that cats were either attracted to or brought in specifically to take care of the mice that munched on crop stores.
Fast-forward a few millennia, and cats are the most common domesticated animals in the world, with more than 500 million felines currently available to sleep on laptops and claw your legs.
But the rise of cats in China is a bit more perplexing than this simple timeline. There is evidence of domesticated cats in China as far back as 5,500 years ago—but it’s long been unclear whether these cats were imported from the Near East, or whether they simply arose in China also thanks to the rise of agriculture.
Well, according to a new study published in PLOS ONE, we finally may have an answer.
The answer lies in the bones
A team of scientists principally from the Archéozoologie, Archéobotanique: Sociétés, Pratiques et Environnements laboratory (CNRS/MNHN), working with colleagues from the UK and China, examined sets of feline bones found in what used to be agricultural settlements in the Shaanxi province of China.
The bones date back to around 3,500 BCE, and researchers had previously been unable to identify which type of cats they were. The identity of the bones was key, as there are four kinds of small cat in China, but there has never been evidence of the subspecies from which all modern cats—including those in China—are descended: Felis silvestris lybica.
Showing these ancient bones were indeed F. s. lybica would strongly indicate the cats were “imported”; showing they were of another subspecies would show that cat domestication arose naturally in China.
DNA evidence was lacking in the bones, and the different forms of the four Chinese small cats are so similar in bone structure, it’s often impossible to perceive a difference between them. However, thanks to geometric morphometric analysis, which uses bone landmarks in lieu of linear measurements to define bone features, the team was able to identify the subspecies—and it wasn’t F. s. lybica.
Instead, it appears that the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis)—which is well known for its tendency to frequent areas with a strong human presence in China—gave rise to China’s first domesticated felines. The researchers hypothesized a similar mechanism to what happened in the Near East: Agriculture arose, rodents targeted grain stores, and cats came after the rodents. Eventually, cats decided to harass humans on a more permanent basis.
Oddly, however, it seems that these original cats in China didn’t stay; somehow, in the intervening 5,000 years, F. s. lybica replaced the leopard cat totally. In modern China, domesticated cats are only of the lybica subspecies. As to how or when this happened, the researchers are unsure—but hope it will be answered next.
If you can’t stand people who greet the day at 5AM with a smile and a song, then there’s hope for you on Mars–if we ever get around to colonizing it.
According to researchers out of Manchester University, individuals with short-running body clocks (circadian rhythms), also known as “extreme morning types”, will struggle to live on Mars due to its day lasting 37 minutes longer than Earth’s.
“The rotation speed of Mars may be within the limits of some people’s internal clock,” said lead author Andrew Loudon, “but people with short running clocks, such as extreme morning types, are likely to face serious intractable long-term problems, and would perhaps be excluded from any plans NASA has to send humans to Mars.”
He adds that those with longer running body clocks would probably be better suited for habitation on Mars.
The study to back it up
How Loudon and researchers from Holland and Germany came to these conclusions is actually pretty interesting. Using a gene that alters circadian rhythms from 24 hours to 20 hours, they released two groups of mice–some with the 24-hour gene and some with the 20-hour gene–into outdoor pens (naturally lit conditions), with free access to food, and kept an eye on how the gene pool changed.
What the found was that the frequency of mice with the faster circadian rhythm gene slowly diminished over time until the population was dominated by those with normal, 24-hour body clocks.
“A correctly ticking body clock is essential for normal survival in the wild, and this has to be in phase with the rotation speed of the Earth,” said Loudon. “Animals with clocks that do not run in synchrony with Earth are selected against. Thus, the body clock has evolved as an essential survival component for life on Earth.”
How this will actually shake out on Mars, we’re still not sure. We still have to get there, first.
Why do zebras have stripes? It was a question we thought we had the answer to – because they serve as camouflage to protect the equine species from predators – but new research published in Friday’s edition of the journal PLOS One suggests that this may not be the case after all.
In the new study, lead author Amanda Melin, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Calgary, and colleagues from the University of California-Davis explained that the camouflage hypothesis is flawed because it looks at the issue “through human eyes.”
Melin’s team reframed the issue by performing a series of calculations through which they were able to estimate the distances at which lions, spotted hyenas or other zebras could spot the stripes during the daytimes, at twilight or during a moonless night. They found that the stripes could not help the creatures hide, because they would have already been detected in other ways.
“The results from this new study provide no support at all for the idea that the zebra’s stripes provide some type of anti-predator camouflaging effect,” study co-author Tim Caro, a professor of wildlife biology at UC-Davis, explained in a statement. “Instead, we reject this long-standing hypothesis that was debated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.”
Visual capacity tests reveal that stripes don’t help zebras hide
In previous research, Caro and other colleagues found evidence that the stripes benefit zebras by discouraging biting flies. Now, the new study found that stripes could not be involved in helping the creatures blend into the background of their environment or distorting their outlines, because by the time predators see them, they would have already heard or smelled them.
The study authors reached this conclusion after taking digital field images obtained in Tanzania and running them through spatial and color filters meant to simulate how zebras would appear to lions and spotted hyenas, as well as to their fellow zebras. They measured stripe length and the luminance, or light contrast, in order to determine the maximum distance from which all of these other creatures could detect stripes, based on each individual animal’s visual capacity.
Melin, Caro and their colleagues found that beyond 164 feet (50 meters) in daylight and 98 feet (30 meters) in twilight, stripes can be easily spotted by humans but are far more difficult for the predators that hunt zebras during these times to detect. It becomes even harder for lions, spotted hyenas or other zebras to see stripes during moonless nights, as they are unable to distinguish the spots at distances greater than 29 feet (9 meters), according to the authors.
As such, this indicates that the stripes do not provide zebras with camouflage in wooded areas, and that the stripes do not protect them from becoming prey. Furthermore, in treeless habitats, the researchers found that lions had no more difficult of a time seeing striped zebras than other, smaller prey with solid-colored hides, indicating that stripes offered no additional protection in these environments either.
The researchers also concluded that there was no evidence to support the notion that stripes had a social benefit, allowing zebras to recognize one another from a distance. While they did find that zebras could see stripes over slightly greater distances than lions or spotted hyenas, they said that close relatives of zebras could also easily recognize other members of their species, despite their lack of stripes.
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Feature Image: A zebra grazing on the grassy plains gazes at the researchers’ chart used for color-calibrating images. (Tim Caro/UC Davis)
British explorer Henry Worsley dies while crossing Antarctica alone
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
British explorer Henry Worsely’s attempt to cross Antarctica on his own has come to a sudden and fatal end, as the 55-year-old former Army officer succumbed to exhaustion and dehydration just 30 miles short of his goal, various media outlets confirmed on Monday.
Worsley, who was attempting to complete the trek as part of an effort to raise funds for wounded soldiers, had covered more than 900 miles in 71 days before calling for help Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal. He was airlifted to a clinic in Punta Arenas, Chile, where his family said that he died after suffering “complete organ failure.” BBC News explained that Worsley was trying to finish the same trek once attempted by Ernest Shackleton, his longtime hero, in order to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that expedition and to raise more than $140,000 (£100,000) for the Endeavour Fund, a charity established to aid wounded service men and women.
Shackelton’s original expedition route. (Credit: Adventure Network International)
The Duke of Cambridge, who co-manages the Endeavour Fund along with Prince Harry, said he was “very sad” to learn of Worsley’s passing, while Prince Harry’s brother Prince William added that the fallen explored was “man who showed great courage and determination,” not to mention a “selfless commitment” to his fellow military personnel. Worsely’s dead a ‘huge loss’ to the adventuring world
In a message published before his passing, Worsely said that “71 days alone on the Antarctic with over 900 statute miles covered and a gradual grinding down of my physical endurance… took its toll today, and it is with sadness that I report it is journey’s end – so close to my goal.”
According to the Associated Press, the day before his death, Worsely had undergone surgery to treat bacterial peritonitis – an infection of the tissue lining the abdomen that can result in septic shock. He had been unable to leave his tent for the two days prior to being airlifted to the Chile hospital, ultimately making the call to end his journey, but not in time to save his life.
Worsley set off on his 1,000-plus mile coast-to-coast journey across Antarctica in November, with only a sled containing his food, tent and equipment, BBC News said. His goal was to make it across the continent “unassisted and unsupported,” with no supply drops, help from sled dogs or assistance from any other source.
In a statement, Endeavour Fund chairman Harry Holt, a friend of Worsley’s, said that he and his colleagues were “devastated” by his passing. “The Endeavour Fund is very proud to have been associated with Henry’s tremendous achievements but we mourn his sacrifice. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends in this dark hour.”
Shackleton’s granddaughter Alexandra told the BBC that his death was a “huge loss to the adventuring world. He was very energetic, very keen on testing himself, seeing how far he could get with his endeavors. The whole point of this one was that Henry was doing it on his own. I suppose you could say he was doing more and more adventurous and interesting things.”
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Feature Image: Henry Worsley holding Shackelton’s compass. (Credit: Adventure Network International)
Conductive concrete could make snowy roads a thing of the past
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
As much of the eastern US continues to recover from a massive winter storm that dumped more than three feet of snow in some places, experts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are touting a technological advance that could make the roads safer during future blizzards.
Chris Tuan, a professor of civil engineering at the university, and his colleagues have developed a type of conductive concrete which could be used in roads, making it easier to keep them free of ice and snow, ideally preventing incidents like the one which left some motorists stranded on the Pennsylvania turnpike for more than 30 hours this past weekend.
As UNL explained in a statement, Tuan’s team added tiny amounts of steel shavings and carbon particles to the established concrete recipe, and while the new ingredients comprise no more than one-fifth of the mixture, they would allow roads to conduct enough electricity to keep roads clear of snow and ice while remaining safe to the touch.
A slab of conductive concrete demonstrates its de-icing capability outside the Peter Kiewit Institute in Omaha during a winter storm in December 2015. The concrete carries just enough current to melt ice while remaining safe to the touch. (Courtesy photo/Chris Tuan and Lim Nguyen)
The conductive concrete has been in use for more than a decade at the Roca Spur Bridge near Lincoln. In 2002, the Tuan and the Nebraska Department of Roads used the material at the 150-foot structure, placing 52 slabs of the concrete on the bridge. The UNL researchers noted that it has been a tremendous success, keeping the bridge from icing up and becoming hazardous.
“Bridges always freeze up first, because they’re exposed to the elements on top and bottom,” Tuan explained. “It’s not cost-effective to build entire roadways using conductive concrete, but you can use it at certain locations where you always get ice or have potholes.”
Substance could reduce costs, help prevent potholes
Since the use of salt or other de-icing agents over the winter is one of the primary causes of potholes, the professor said that the conducive concrete help keep roads from deteriorating and could ultimately help lower operating, maintenance and infrastructure repair costs – while also keeping the chemicals used in those substances from contaminating groundwater.
Tuan said that it currently requires $250 to de-ice the Roca Spur Bridge during a three-day snow storm, which is several times less than using snowplows filled with salt or other chemicals. Also, he believes that the conducive concrete could be used on exit ramps and sidewalks, and his team is currently demonstrating their product’s effectiveness to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Chris Tuan, professor of civil engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, stands on a slab of conductive concrete that can carry enough electrical current to melt ice during winter storms. Tuan is working with the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Strategic Command on multiple applications for his patented concrete mixture. (Scott Schrage/University Communications)
If the FAA is satisfied with the results of the ongoing tests, which run through March, they plan to use the conducive concrete in at a major US airport, the researchers said. Rather than using it on a runway, however, Tuan said that the agency wants to install it at the tarmac surrounding the gates areas where they unload luggage, food service, refuse and fuel service carts.
“They said that if we can heat that kind of tarmac, then there would be (fewer) weather-related delays,” Tuan said. He added that he and his colleagues were “very optimistic” about the tests, and that he could vouch for the conducive concrete on a personal level as well. “I have a patio in my backyard that is made of conductive concrete, so I’m practicing what I preach.”
Astronaut Scott Kelly conducts the first Reddit AMA from space
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Scott Kelly, the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS), conducted the world’s first Ask Me Anything (AMA) from space.
AMAs—which are a sort of online press conference with users on Reddit—have featured hordes of celebrities, thinkers, politicians, and the like, ranging from Psy to Bill Nye. Of course, none of them have been floating in zero gravity before.
Getting down to business in space
The AMA lasted for a little more than an hour before “real but nominal communication loss from the International Space Station” led Commander Kelly to sign off—but that was more than enough time for users to ask the record holder for total days in space and single longest mission some interesting questions.
For example, a five-year-old named Simon asked (via his father, Reddit user chancycat), “Could a rogue spaceship sneak up on the space station without you being aware, and dock?”
To which Commander Kelly replied, “Simon, Maybe an alien spaceship with a cloaking device. But not your normal spaceship, no. Unless it had a cloaking device, which doesn’t exist, the U.S. Air Force would see it coming.”
Of course, he fielded a lot of pretty scientific questions, too. In particular, Reddit users were curious about the health effects of living in space long-term (in Kelly’s case, over 300 days).
“Yeah, there are a lot of changes that happen. Some of them you can’t see, cause [sic] it’s your eyes!” the Commander wrote. In the case of the eyes, changes occur because body fluids—unencumbered by gravity—begin to flow more freely to the head, which affects the intraocular pressure of fluid inside the eyes.
Conversely, blood pressure is lower, because the heart doesn’t have to pump against gravity, Kelly added.
There are changes in other places you might not expect, too. “The calluses on your feet in space will eventually fall off,” Kelly wrote. “So, the bottoms of your feet become very soft like newborn baby feet. But the top of my feet develop rough alligator skin because I use the top of my feet to get around here on space station when using foot rails.”
Shut-eye in the sky
And of course, there’s a big difference in how you sleep in space. When discussing how he goes “to bag” (as astronauts on the ISS sleep in sleeping bags), Kelly described their sleep habits: They get up when it’s 6 am in Greenwich, England and go to sleep when it’s 10 at night there. (As in, they use Greenwich Mean Time to regulate their sleep cycles).
Not that consistency makes it any easier for Commander Kelly, who confessed that he isn’t a great sleeper even on Earth—and space just makes it more difficult.
“Sleeping here is harder here in space than on a bed because the sleep position here is the same position throughout the day. You don’t ever get that sense of gratifying relaxation here that you do on Earth after a long day at work.”
Kelly now also has dreams that “are sometimes space dreams and sometimes Earth dreams”—as in he now dreams in 0-gravity . “And they [the dreams] are crazy.”
Freefallin’
And all of this is thanks to living in what’s more or less zero gravity—which Reddit user emshedoesit asked Commander Kelly to describe.
“It feels like there is no pressure at all on your body,” he responded. “Sometimes it feels like you are just hanging but you are not hanging by anything, just hanging there. If I close my eyes, I can give myself the sensation that I am falling.
Eight museum workers on trial for damaging King Tut’s mask
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Eight museum employees involved with a botched attempt to repair damage to King Tut’s burial mask are being charged with “gross negligence” and violation of the professional rules of the workplace, Egyptian authorities said Saturday.
The 3,300-year-old mask is currently on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where its beard was broken off in 2014—which the staff blamed on an accident during cleaning, but later investigators blamed the damage on old age. Regardless of how it happened, the eight employees involved attempted an extremely hasty repair using epoxy.
A poor coverup
The damage didn’t stay secret for long; there was a noticeable gap between the face and the beard, and the epoxy spread across the face of the mask where the workers used metal tools to scrape the glue away.
“In an attempt to cover up the damage they inflicted, they used sharp instruments such as scalpels and other metal tools to remove traces of adhesive on the mask, causing damage and scratches that remain,” said prosecutors of the case in a statement, according to ABC News.
The damage claims were dismissed by museum officials at the time, but prosecutors opened an investigation last year, where they discovered the workers failed to follow protocol.
“The officials dealt recklessly with a piece of an artifact that is 3,300 years old, produced by one of the oldest civilizations in the world,” the Administrative Prosecution told state-run news site Ahram Online.
The eight employees involved—two restorers, four restoration specialists, and two former heads of the restoration section—face disciplinary measures and fines. According to officials, while a German team removed the epoxy and re-attached the beard using the traditional ancient Egyptian method (beeswax), the employees permanently damaged the mask, leaving visible scratches across the face.
Curiosity implements new sand-sifting technique to study Martian dune formation
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
For the first time, the Curiosity rover is scooping sand and sorting it by size using two different sieves, including a never-before-used coarser sieve that will change how treated samples are put inside the rover for analysis, NASA officials announced in a statementThursday.
According to NASA, Curiosity is searching for an active sand dune at a site called Gobabeb in the Namib Dune area of Mars. This will be the second site where rover will scoop up sand samples since landing on the Red Planet back in 2012, having previously done so at a drift site called Rocknest shortly after its arrival.
Reaching the site proved to be no easy task, according to Michael McHenry, mission campaign rover planner for sample collection at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “It was pretty challenging to drive into the sloping sand and then turn on the sand into the position that was the best to study the dunes,” he said.
The new scooping technique is being used as part of a first-of-its-kind study of active sand dunes on extraterrestrial planets. Namib is one of several dark sand mounds located in the northwestern part of a layered mountain the rover is currently examining. Known as the “Bagnold Dune Field” this region should provide information about how the wind moves on Mars and how it sorts sand particles in an environment with less gravity and atmosphere than there is on Earth.
So how does the rover collect sand samples, anyway?
Since sand grains come in a wide range of different sizes and compositions, sorting it will allow scientists to discern its density and the wind activity it has been exposed to. NASA said that the Gobabeb site was selected to include recently-formed ripples, which should provide new insight into the modern-day conditions on Mars as well as those from the ancient past.
This false-color engineering drawing shows the Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) device, attached to the turret at the end of the robotic arm on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. This device processes samples acquired from the built-in scoop (red) and the drill, which is not shown but is also part of the turret. CHIMRA also delivers samples to the analytical lab instruments inside the rover. Two paths to get material into CHIMRA are shown (the scoop delivers material to the location marked at the bottom, and the drill deposits material to the sample transfer tube shown at top). Also marked are the location of the vibration mechanism used to shake the turret and cause the sample to move inside CHIMRA, and the portion box (yellow) from which the material processed through a sieve is delivered to the analytical lab instruments. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The first sample was collected on January 14 and processed it using a multi-chambered device on Curiosity’s arm, which passed the material through a sieve that filtered out any particle larger than 150 microns (0.006 inch), the US space agency said. In addition, some of the material that passed through the sieve was placed into laboratory inlet ports using a “portioner.”
This “portioner,” is positioned directly above an open inlet port on the rover’s deck and was used to direct samples into said port. In addition to its built-in laboratory tools, the rover also uses a suite of other instruments to examine materials that are released back onto the ground.
The second sand sample was collected on January 19, and this was the first use of Curiosity’s coarser sieve. This sieve allowed particles up to 1 millimeter (1,000 microns or 0.04 inch) to pass through. The collected sand was first fed into the 150-micron sieve, and any material that did not make it through that sieve was then passed through the larger one. The team hopes this new point of analysis will provide insight on how sand dunes form on Mars.
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Feature Image: Pictured is Curiosity’s current location on Mars in the Bagnold Dunes. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Evidence of African burial ground found beneath Harlem bus depot
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
After nearly a decade of arguing that an African burial ground dating back to the original Harlem settlement was buried beneath the site of the 126th Street Bus Depot in Upper Manhattan, a team of local historians have finally discovered remains that prove they were right all along.
According to the New York Times, city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Rev. Dr. Patricia A. Singletary of Elmendorf Reformed Church, speaking on behalf of the Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force, announced Wednesday that archaeologists had uncovered more than 140 bones and bone fragments while working at the site last summer.
The discovery, which included a skull with an intact cranium likely belonging to an adult African female, backs up historical documents indicating the bus depot had been built on the same grounds as a Reformed Dutch church where New Yorkers of African descent were buried during the 17th through 19th centuries.
Discovery sheds new light on the region’s ‘overlooked’ history
Mark-Viverito told the newspaper that there were “very excited” to discover the remains, and that it was “a way of affirming a part of Manhattan history that has been overlooked.” The next step, she added, was to create a new memorial to honor those who were buried at the site.
The skull, which belong to a woman Dr. Singletary has named Nana – “the African term of respect for an elderly woman,” she explained – was found along with the rest of the bones and bone fragments in a layer of soil deposited outside the known cemetery boundaries, according to A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist at AKRF, the firm which completed the work.
Pappalardo told the Times that the bones were “disarticulated,” or separated at the joints. He also emphasized that “no intact burials were encountered or disturbed,” and that they did not find any funerary objects, although some glass, ceramics, and other household objects were discovered.
While the discovery was made last summer, AKRF and the Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force decided to wait to make a public announcement so they could do so in a ”coordinated” and “respectful” way, the newspaper noted. In light of these revelations, Anthony Hogrebe from the New York Economic Development Corporation, said that any future renovations at the bus depot “must include a memorial” to those interred at the burial ground.
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Image credit: Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force
Cambridgeshire ‘sea monster’ remains could be a new plesiosaur species
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A skull and more than 600 bone fragments discovered at a quarry in the UK likely belong to a new species of plesiosaur: a “sea monster” from the Jurassic period that has anatomical features previously found only in creatures half her size, archaeologists revealed Friday.
According to BBC News and the Daily Mail, the remains were discovered at Must Farm quarry near Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire by researchers at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and belonged to a creature that was 18 feet long and lived 165 million years ago.
The specimen has been nicknamed “Eve,” Dr. Carl Harrington and his colleagues told the British media outlets. They are currently analyzing the fossils, which required 400-plus hours of work to clean and repair, to determine whether or not it represents a new plesiosaur species.
Plesiosaurs, sea creatures which lived alongside the dinosaurs, typically ranged in size from 6.5 feet (2 meters) to 50 feet (15 meters) and had extremely long necks with more than 10 times the number of vertebrae as most mammals. The Oxford archaeologists have estimated that this newfound creature weighed approximately 660 pounds (300 kilograms).
Fossils were found on the site of ‘Britain’s Pompeii’
Dr. Harrington and his colleagues told BBC News that the creature’s “snout” was the first thing that they spotted while digging in the wet clay at the Must Farm quarry, an archaeologically rich tract of land owned by the Forterra manufacturing company.
In fact, the area is also home to the remains of a Bronze Age settlement so well preserved that it has become known as “Britain’s Pompeii.” While hundreds of the creature’s bones have already been excavated, the skull still has yet to be removed from a block of clay and examined. Experts have conducted a CT scan on the block, however, to locate the bones within.
Dr. Harrington called findings the plesiosaur remains “one of those absolute ‘wow’ moments,” adding that he had “never seen so much bone in one spot in a quarry.” The specimen is believed to have had an 8 foot (2.5 meter) long beck, a barrel-shaped body, four flippers and a short tail. However, the hind flippers and part of the fore-flippers have yet to be found, according to BBC News.
Brian Chapman, head of land and mineral resources at Forterra, said that they were “thrilled that such a rare and important prehistoric specimen was unearthed at our Must Farm quarry,” telling the Daily Mail that the firm was “happy to be able to donate it to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where it will be studied by leading paleontologists.”
Blue Origin becomes the first company to re-launch a reusable rocket
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chalk up another win for Blue Origin in their ongoing reusable rocket competition with rival SpaceX, as the aerospace company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has re-launched the same booster that it had successfully launched and landed back in November.
The company announced the feat in a Friday blog post, revealing that the same New Shepard rocket that made it beyond the Karman line and landed vertically at its launch site last year had once again lifted off and reached an apogee of 333,582 feet (101.7 km) before it and its capsule completed another soft landing and were recovered for future use.
According to Gizmodo, New Shepard reached a maximum altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 km) before landing vertically back at the Blue Origin test facility in Texas. In both cases, the rocket made it beyond the Karman line, which is the boundary that officially separates the atmosphere of Earth and space, before making a controlled, horizontal landing back on solid ground.
One month later, SpaceX successfully completed its own successful landing with its Falcon 9 rocket. Unlike Bezos, however, SpaceX head Elon Musk had no plans to reuse the booster and instead said that it was his intention to retire the rocket. That decision opened the door for Blue Origin to become the first to actually use the same booster a second time.
The ‘space race’ between Blue Origin, SpaceX is heating up
In his Friday blog post, Bezos said that data from the November mission had “matched our preflight predictions closely,” which made the company’s preparations for their latest flight “relatively straightforward.” Those preparations included the replacement of the crew capsule parachutes and the pyro igniters, as well as several upgrades to its booster’s software.
Among the software tweaks was one to its targeting systems. Instead of directing the rocket to touch down at the exact center of its landing pad, the program now tells it to initially target the center, but to set the booster down at “a position of convenience on the pad, prioritizing vehicle attitude ahead of precise lateral positioning.”
After stabilizing the crew capsule, the drogue parachutes extract the main parachutes for landing. (Credit: Blue Origin)
“It’s like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway,” Bezos wrote. “If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don’t swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline. Our Monte Carlo sims of New Shepard landings show this new strategy increases margins, improving the vehicle’s ability to reject disturbances created by low-altitude winds.”
The new “space race” between Musk and Bezos shows no signs of slowing down, according to Gizmodo. Blue Origin has already announced plans to continue testing their BE-4 engine, while SpaceX continues to make progress in its efforts to land its Falcon 9 on a floating platform in the ocean. As the website suggests, it will be fascinating to see what the future holds for both firms.
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Feature Image: The same New Shepard booster that flew to space and then landed vertically in November 2015 has now flown and landed again. (Credit: Amazon)
Scientists reconstruct the Black Death from teeth of 18th century victims
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
The plague has decimated Europe across the centuries, with waves of the disease resurging every few hundred years in pandemics—including the third pandemic of the plague, which began in the 19th century and is ongoing to this day.
The most famous wave of the plague, however, was the second—the Black Death, which killed 30 to 50 percent of the European population. And while it began in the 14th century, it resurged time and time again into the 18th century, leaving researchers with many questions: Where did these outbreaks begin? Why did it keep returning? And what happened to the plague in between resurgences?
Disease in hiding
Now, an international team led by the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany may just have found some of those answers, because according to their research, the plague didn’t just die off—but hid somewhere on the European continent in between waves for hundreds of years.
According to the paper published in the journal eLife, the team extracted the plague’s DNA from the teeth of 10 of its victims, all of whom perished in the Great Plague of Marseille between 1720 and 1722. This plague outbreak is believed to be the last wave of medieval plague in Europe.
Marseille during the Great Plague of 1720.
However, it wasn’t an extraordinarily easy process. While the teeth preserved some of the plague’s DNA, each tooth only yielded fragments of the entire genome, leaving researchers to having to reconstruct the code. But it yielded surprising results.
“We faced a significant challenge in reconstructing these ancient genomes,” said computational analyst Alexander Herbig in a statement. “To our surprise, the 18th century plague seems to be a form that is no longer circulating, and it descends directly from the disease that entered Europe during the Black Death, several centuries earlier.”
Thus, it appears that the plague that swept through Marseille is a now-extinct form, whose source is highly uncertain. There are many theories as to how the plague resurged over the centuries, ranging from trading ships bringing in more disease-carrying rats to there being a sort of “Bing Bang” of plague—in which the disease slammed Europe once from Asia and remained on the continent ever after.
The most logical theory
The first theory seems to fit well; the three separate plague pandemics (the Justinian, the Black Death, and the modern one) have been shown genetically to come from separate variations of the disease imported from Asia. And Marseille itself was an enormous trade hub in the Mediterranean, so the first theory—that the later Great Plague of Marseille was the result of a ship bringing the plague around again—would fit logically.
However, the lineage of Marseille’s plague is close to that of the original outbreak in the 14th century—showing that the Black Death didn’t truly die off in Europe in between outbreaks. Rather, the evidence points to the disease lying in wait in some yet-unidentified pool for four hundred years.
“It’s a chilling thought that plague might have once been hiding right around the corner throughout Europe, living in a host which is not known to us yet,” said Johannes Krause, director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the MPI in Jena. “Future work might help us to identify the mysterious host species, its range and the reason for its disappearance”.
The five species of bird that Darwin couldn’t discover
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Five centuries before Charles Darwin arrived at the Azores islands in the North Atlantic Ocean in the 1800s, five now-extinct species of birds called them and nearby Madeira home. Now, a team of researchers has shed new light on these little-known creatures in a new study.
Writing in a recent edition of the journal Zootaxa, Josep Antoni Alcover, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) scientist working at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA-CSIC/UIB), and his colleagues explained that these never-before-seen creatures had lost the ability to fly because of manmade changes to their island habitats.
By the time Darwin made it to the Azores, all of the species had died out, leaving behind only familiar birds such as starlings, wagtails, finches, and blackbirds. However, Alcover’s team has discovered remains of the five rail species on the islands, using their discovery to identify two new types of birds that lived in Madeira and three others that called the Azores home.
“The species of birds very probably disappeared following the arrival of humans and the animals that came with them, like mice, rats and cats,” he explained in a statement, adding that their work has made it possible to “discover new species of birds that very probably disappeared following the arrival of humans and the animals that came with them, like mice, rats and cats.”
Birds were smaller, worse fliers than modern-day rails
Among the new species Alcover and his colleagues discovered are the Rallus lowei or Madeira rail, a flightless bird that had a stout body; the Rallus adolfocaesaris or Porto Santo rail, which the researchers described as a graceful bird; and the Rallus carvaoensis or São Miguel rail, a tiny flightless bird that had a slightly curved beak.
In addition, they reported the discovery of the Pico rail (Rallus montivagorum), a bird that would have been larger than the São Miguel rail but tinier than the continental types of the species, and the São Jorge rail (Rallus ‘minutus’), said to be a diminutive, relatively plump bird that had short legs, was flightless and has not yet been given an official scientific name.
Alcover and his colleagues dated the bones of these birds, as well as remains from other species found alongside them that were related to them, and found that at least one of the birds survived until the 15th century, indicating that they had become extinct relatively recently. The scientists believe that their extinction may be linked to a possible visit or colonization by Vikings.
“The bone remains of native bird species which are now appearing show that if Darwin had been able to study the fossils hidden on these islands, or if he had visited 500 years earlier, he would have found a much more singular ornithofauna, with many indigenous bird species, like that which was found on the Galápagos islands,” said Alcover.
Currently, there are only 13 surviving rail species, and the extinct species were considerably smaller than those modern-day members of the genus, the researchers said. Furthermore, the fossils they discovered allowed them to confirm that all five of the species were at least limited in their flying capabilities, and at least some of them could not take to the air at all.
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Feature Image: The five new species discovered in Madeira and Azores. From left to right: R. carvaoensis, R. adolfocaesaris, R. montivagorum, R. lowei, R. “minutus”. (Credit: José Antonio Peñas (Sinc))
Jerdon’s tree frog rediscovered in India 137 years after going ‘extinct’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Believed to be extinct for more than 150 years, an unusual species of tree frog has been found alive and well by researchers working in India, and research published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One reveals that it actually represents a new genus of amphibian.
According to National Geographic, the 20 inch (50 cm) long creature was originally known as the Polypedates jerdonii, but lead author Sathyabhama Das Biju, a University of Delhi biologist, and his colleagues have since rechristened the long-lost tree frog Frankixalus jerdonii.
The creature’s DNA and anatomy, as well as unusual feeding behavior that involves the mother laying eggs for her offspring to eat, “represents a deep evolutionary split in tree frog evolution,” co-author Ines Van Bocxlae from the Amphibian Evolution Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium told the publication earlier this week.
While most tadpoles eat plants, Das Biju, Van Bocxlae and their colleagues found members of this species hiding in hollow bamboo stems and tree holes and partaking of its unusual diet. The females lay their eggs in these tree hollows, and once tadpoles hatch, they consume unfertilized eggs until they grow larger.
Creatures may be widespread, but still could be in danger
The tree frogs were first spotted as part of an expedition that started in 2007, according to NPR and BBC News, and while they were found in the jungles of India’s West Bengal state, Das Biju believes that they might be living in a vast area ranging that includes China and Thailand.
The tree holes which Frankixalus jerdonii calls home can be up to 19 feet (6 m) above ground, which the study authors believe may help explain why the creatures remained undetected for so long. Each of the tadpoles discovered had between three and 19 eggs in their intestines, and did not have tooth rows like other species of frogs, the researchers said.
While Das Biju called the find “exciting,” he emphasized that this does not mean that the species is safe. In fact, the BBC said that some of the forest areas where his team collected specimens of the amphibians in 2007-08 were cut down and burned for agricultural development back in 2014, and that the rest of the region’s tropical forests were also in peril due to human expansion.
Frankixalus jerdonii was originally named Polypedates jerdonii in honor of Thomas Jerdon, the British zoologist who had collected the first known specimens of the creature in 1870, according to BBC News. Also known as Jerdon’s tree frog, the behavior of the frog and DNA analysis has led to it being renamed for Das Biju’s former advisor, herpetologist Franky Bossuyt.
Record number of US military drone crashes reported in 2015
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Due largely to an unexplained increase in mishaps involving its most advanced “hunter-killer” drone, the US Air Force reported a record number of crashes involving unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) in 2015, BBC News and the Washington Post have revealed.
Statistics published by the two media outlets indicated that at least 20 large drones had either been destroyed or sustained at least $2 million in damages last year, led by a number of sudden and catastrophic electrical failures that have caused several of the 2.5-ton, $14 million Reaper drones to lose power and fall from the sky.
The problem has been traced back to a faulty starter-generator, the Post said, but experts have yet to discern exactly why this component fails or how the issue can be permanently fixed. Officials at the Pentagon have not disclosed the extent of the problem, not have they revealed details about most of the crashes, according to the newspaper’s report.
The Reaper is used for surveillance and for airstrikes not only by the US, but by its allies in the UK as well, during counterterrorism operations involving the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, BBC News said.
Number of qualified drone on the decline, report indicates
Documents disclosing the UAV crashes, obtained by the Post through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that 10 Reapers were badly damaged or destroyed in last year, at least twice as many as the previous year. The drone’s mishap rate (the number of major crashes per 100,000 hours flown) was also at least twice what it was in 2014.
Furthermore, the Reaper’s predecessor, the Predator, was found to be involved in 10 accidents in 2015 – the most since 2011, when American troops were engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan – and less than half of the accidents involving both types of drones were reported to the public, the Post said. Five incidents were only confirmed after initial reports were released.
The military records indicate that only one drone was downed by hostile forces: a Predator that was hit by Syrian air defenses near Latakia on March 17. Nineteen of the 20 incidents occurred overseas, including six crashed in Afghanistan, four near a US instillation in Djibouti and three in Iraq. Crashes were also reported in Kuwait, Turkey, Syria and Libya, the Post added, and two of the incidents took place in countries that were not identified by the USAF.
The documents also showed that the USAF had to reduce the number of drone combat missions by 8 percent due to a shortage of pilots qualified to fly the remote-controlled vehicles. In fact, the Air Force is now reportedly offering drone pilots retention bonuses of up to $125,000 to keep them on board and to meet what one top military official called “a virtually insatiable appetite” for airborne surveillance data among commanding officers.
Alien life is likely already extinct, scientist says
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Scientists have spent countless years and millions of dollars searching for life on other planets – efforts that have been all but fruitless thus far, and possibly for a very good reason, according to new research appearing in this week’s edition of the journal Astrobiology.
Alien life, Dr. Aditya Chopra from the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences and his colleagues explain in their study, would likely become extinct shortly after first appearing due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling habitable planets.
“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” Dr. Chopra said Thursday in a statement. However, he points out that life, in its earliest stages, “is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”
The majority of early planets have unstable environments, the researchers said. In order for a planet to be considered truly habitable, living beings would have to be able to regulate water, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to keep its surface temperatures stable.
Biological regulation of the environment may be key to survival
Earth was probably not the only habitable planet in the solar system four billion years ago, Dr. Chopra and his fellow researchers claim. Venus and Mars may have also been habitable during this time. However, that changed about one billion years after they first formed.
Ultimately, Venus became too hot and Mars too cold, and any microbial life that may have been on those planets failed to stabilize conditions and died out. Life on Earth persisted at least in part because it was able to help stabilize the planet’s climate, according study co-author and associate professor Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Planetary Science Institute.
“The mystery of why we haven’t yet found signs of aliens,” Dr. Chopra said, “may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces.”
Even though there seems to be no shortage of water-filled, rocky planets that possess all of the basic ingredients and energy sources needed to support living organisms, no signs of surviving extraterrestrial life have yet been discovered. The reason may lie in what the study authors have dubbed the “Gaian Bottleneck” – a nearly 100 percent early extinction rate.
“One intriguing prediction of the Gaian Bottleneck model is that the vast majority of fossils in the universe will be from extinct microbial life, not from multicellular species such as dinosaurs or humanoids that take billions of years to evolve,” said Lineweaver.
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Feature Image: CSIRO Parkes radio telescope is in the search for alien civilisations. (Credit: Wayne England)
North Korea claims to have developed a hangover-free alcoholic beverage
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
For a country with sporadic electric power, North Korea sure can get a lot done – according to its state media.
An article in the DPRK’s Pyongyang Times recently declared that a factory in the Hermit Kingdom has developed an alcoholic beverage that people can drink without getting a hangover.
The article said the Taedonggang Foodstuff Factory was able to create the miracle tipple by substituting scorched rice for sugar in a fermented ginseng beverage. The process, reportedly, removes all bitterness and risk of hangovers,
“Koryo Liquor, which is made of six-year-old Kaesong Koryo insam (ginseng), known as being highest in medicinal effect, and the scorched rice, is highly appreciated by experts and lovers as it is suave and causes no hangover,” the article in state media declared.
Those following North Korean food science breakthroughs will remember that back in August, state media announced Koryo Songgyungwan University was developing an improved version of Kaesong Koryo Insam Liquor. No such thing?
Andray Abrahamian, who performs business education in North Korea, recently told the NK News he hadn’t tried and didn’t plan to try the miracle beverage.
“There are some high quality liquors made in North Korea, though in my experience there is no such thing as hangover-free booze anywhere in the world,” he said.
While ginseng is widely used for medicinal purposes across the Korean Peninsula, South Koreans haven’t been making the same claims about the herb as their noisy neighbors to the north. Last year, DPRK state media said the country had developed ginseng-based products capable of curing MERS, SARS and AIDS.
One thing is for certain – if you’re living on the Korean Peninsula, you’re probably going to want to drink a lot of alcohol, and the South Koreans do. According to a 2012 report from the World Health Organization, South Koreans consume around 3.2 gallons of alcohol a year, the highest average in Asia.
As for North Koreans, the grueling conditions they typically live under would drive anyone to drink. About half of the country’s population lives in “extreme poverty,” according to the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
CSIRO astronomer Dr. Keith Bannister and his colleagues, who published a paper detailing their findings Thursday in the journal Science, explained that these structures look like “lumps” in the thin interstellar gas found throughout the galaxy. For the first time, they were able to observe one of these lumps, which has enables them to predict its shape.
Thanks to a new technique, Dr. Bannister’s team was able to use the Compact Array telescope in eastern Australia to monitor a quasar known as PKS 1939-315 in the constellation of Sagittarius. While observing PKS 1939-315, they witnessed a lensing event that continued for an entire year, and which involved lenses roughly the size of Earth’s orbit around the sun.
These lenses are believed to be approximately 3000 light-years away, or 1000 times more distant than the closest star, Proxima Centauri. Previously, their shape was unknown, but thanks to these new observations, they know that it could not have been a solid lump or a bent sheet.
Lumps could be gravitationally-bound gas clouds
The first signs of these mysterious objects were detected by astronomers three decades ago, as they noticed radio waves from a quasar that fluctuated significantly in terms of strength. It was determined that the behavior was due to the Milky Way’s so-called “invisible atmosphere,” the thin gas of electrically charged particles that makes up the space in between stars.
“Lumps in this gas work like lenses, focusing and defocusing the radio waves, making them appear to strengthen and weaken over a period of days, weeks or months,” said Dr. Bannister. Such observations were difficult to come by, causing many researchers to abandon the search, but the CSIRO team realized that they could pull them off using the Compact Array.
In light of their observations of PKS 1939-315, they believe that the shape of these lenses could be like looking at “a flat sheet, edge on,” like “looking down the barrel of a hollow cylinder like a noodle,” or like “a spherical shell like a hazelnut,” CSIRO team member Dr. Cormac Reynolds explained. Additional observations will “definitely sort out the geometry,” he added.
In addition, Dr. Bannister and his colleagues observed the lensing event with other optical and radio telescopes, and found that there was little to no variation in the optical light from the quasar during that time. This indicates that previous optical surveys searching for the dark lumps would not have spotted this one, which the CSIRO team believes could be cold gas clouds held together by the force of their own gravity.
It remains unclear how these invisible lenses form, but Dr. Bannister said that these structures “are real, and our observations are a big step forward in determining their size and shape.” He added that the discovery “could radically change ideas about this interstellar gas, which is the Galaxy’s star recycling depot, housing material from old stars that will be refashioned into new ones.”
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Feature Image: CSIRO’s Compact Array in Australia is shown under the night lights of the Milky Way. (Credit: Alex Cherney)
Doctor claims to have successfully performed a head transplant on a monkey
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Dr. Sergio Canavero, the man who wants to perform the first ever human head transplant, has announced that he has successfully performed the full procedure on a monkey.
This comes after he has spent some time perfecting his technique using monkey and human cadavers, or so he told New Scientist. His team also worked with mice, severing their spinal cords and sticking them back together—the key process for a successful human head transplant.
The team has a video (Warning: NSFW) showing that the mice whose spines they severed were able to regain limited use of their limbs after a few weeks—apparently thanks to their use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) to cleanly cut the spine. PEG can be used to preserve nerve cell membranes, and helps the spinal connections re-fuse after the fact.
“These experiments prove once and for all that simply using PEG, you can see partial recovery,” Canavero said.
Canavero’s team claims that the live monkey head transplant was equally successful, publishing this (potentially graphic) photo of a monkey with a transplanted head:
Credit: Surgery/Ren/HEAVEN-AHBR
Canavero reports that the surgery was performed at Harbin Medical University in China, and that the monkey survived the procedure “without any neurological injury of whatever kind”—as cooling the head to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit prevented brain damage.
However, the monkey was killed 20 hours following the surgery for “ethical reasons”.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Obviously, there is a lot of room for skepticism here—especially because Canavero has made a lot of claims that other scientists haven’t been able to personally review for veracity, whether in person or through peer review in journals. Because of this, some scientists believe that Canavero’s claims are “science through PR”—attempts to create a lot of buzz and distract people from more reliable science.
Canavero did add, though, that he will publish details of his work in the journals Surgery and CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics in the upcoming months. And a monkey head transplant isn’t something completely out of left field—in fact, the first successful monkey head transplant was performed more than 35 years ago by Robert J. White. Unfortunately, that monkey only lived for nine days, as the body rejected its new addition.
And now that he claims to have worked with a living monkey, Canavero believes the procedure for humans could be ready some time before the end of 2017—and may be the cure for complete paralysis down the line. One major milestone he must first achieve, however, is acquiring the funds necessary to carry out the surgery on Valery Spriridonov, the 31-year-old the Russian man who has volunteered for the procedure.
Canavero said that he intends to ask Mark Zuckerberg for help in funding the surgery, and emphasizes it’s feasible.
“I would say we have plenty of data to go on,” said Canavero. “It’s important that people stop thinking this is impossible. This is absolutely possible and we’re working towards it.”
‘Dragon thief’ fossil found on Scottish beach is oldest-known Jurassic species
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth, University of Manchester and National Museum Wales have discovered a new species of dinosaur believed to be the oldest known Jurassic-period creature of its kind ever discovered in the UK, a new PLOS One study has revealed.
The new species, which was discovered in southern Wales, was named Dracoraptor hanigani, a name selected to honor the country’s national symbol, the dragon, the research team explained in a statement. The first part of the name, Dracoraptor, means “dragon robber,” while the hanigani part was selected to recognize the men who discovered the fossils, Nick and Rob Hanigan.
Lead author and Portsmouth paleobiologist Dr. David Martill and his colleagues reported in their study that they had recovered approximately 40 percent of the new dinosaur’s skeleton, including its cranial and postcranial remains, and that it was a new kind of basal neotheropod dinosaur.
Analysis of the bones, which were originally discovered in 2014 on a beach near Penarth, Wales, found that Dracoraptor hanigani was likely a carnivorous theropod, and since its bones were not yet fully formed or fused, it is probable that it was a juvenile. The creature would only have been about 28 inches tall and 79 inches long, with a long tail for balance, the authors said.
Authors hope discovery will shed new light on dinosaur evolution
Based on their analysis of the fossils, Dr. Martill and his colleagues have placed Dracoraptor hanigani at the beginning of the Jurassic Period, about 201 million years ago. These fossils are the most complete theropod ever discovered in Wales, according to the researchers, and could even be among the oldest known Jurassic dinosaurs in the UK, or even the world.
“The Triassic-Jurassic extinction event is often credited for the later success of dinosaurs through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, but previously we knew very little about dinosaurs at the start of this diversification and rise to dominance,” said co-author Steven Vidovic, Dr. Martill’s colleague at the University of Portsmouth. “Now we have Dracoraptor, a relatively complete two meter long juvenile theropod from the very earliest days of the Jurassic in Wales.”
According to the Telegraph, one of the fossils, a foot bone, was discovered in part due to a case of good timing, as the paleontology student that found it did so shortly after it was exposed by a cliff fall but before it was washed away by tides. Any sooner, and it is unlikely that the student would have spotted it; any later, and it likely would have been lost to the River Severn.
“[Student Sam Davies’] discovery of the foot of Dracoraptor on the Severn estuary really was the most remarkable and serendipitous discovery,” Dr. Martill said to the newspaper on Wednesday. He added that the foot bone, as well as the rest of the newfound specimen, is currently on display at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff.
“It’s pretty rare to discover a completely new dinosaur species – in fact this is only the fourth one to be discovered in the UK since 1980, so it’s very special,” co-author Dr. John Nudds, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, told the Telegraph. “The fact that it comes from so early in the Jurassic Period, when theropod dinosaurs were evolving rapidly, makes it even more valuable to science, and will hopefully tell us a lot about dinosaur evolution at this time.”
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Feature Image: An artist’s impression of Dracoraptor hanigani. (Credit: Bob Nicholls)
Lack of microbes in Antarctic permafrost dims hopes for life on Mars
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
The search for living microbes in the permafrost of Antarctica’s University Valley, a region that has been persistently cold and dry for more than 150,000 years, has thus far proven unsuccessful – and that could spell bad news for the search for life on Mars, according to a new study.
Jackie Goordial, a post-doctoral fellow in the McGill University Department of Natural Resource Sciences, analyzed more than 1,000 petri dishes worth of samples collected over a four-year span at University Valley, which is located in the high elevation of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
In University Valley, high in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, there is a layer of dry permafrost soil overlaying ice-rich permanently frozen ground. The ice in the permafrost of is formed not by liquid water, but by frozen water vapour; the absence of liquid water, makes the soil less likely to be able to sustain life. (Credit Jackie Goordial)
She and her fellow scientists hope to find signs of life in this region, as it is thought to be the one place on Earth most similar to the conditions found in the northern polar region of Mars, home to the Phoenix landing site. Thus far, however, they have been unable to find any such evidence.
In a statement, Lyle Whyte, Goordial’s supervisor and co-author of a new ISME Journal paper detailing the McGill team’s research, admitted that it was “hard for both of us to believe that we may have reached a cold and arid threshold where even microbial life cannot actively exist.”
“Going into the study, we were sure that we would detect a functioning and viable microbial ecosystem in the permafrost soils of University Valley,” he added. “If conditions are too cold and dry to support active microbial life on an analogous climate on Earth, then the colder dryer conditions in the near surface permafrost on Mars are unlikely to contain life.”
Results make it ‘unlikely’ that activity can be found on the Red Planet
Goordial, Whyte and their colleagues initially travelled to University Valley as part of a NASA ASTEP (astrobiology science and technology for exploring planets) project that involved testing a new permafrost drill designed for use on Mars, the IceBite auger. Using the auger, they drilled 42 and 55 centimeter deep boreholes in the permafrost, then collected samples.
Denis Lacelle of University of Ottawa (left) and Alfonso Davila of NASA/SETI (right) operate a motorized ice drill to obtain cores in ice-cemented ground in University Valley. (Credit NASA/Chris McKay)
Those samples were then run through a battery of tests both in the field and at laboratories back at the Quebec-based university. No evidence of carbon dioxide or methane, a gas used by every kind of living creature on Earth, were found in the soil. DNA testing found no matches to genes found in microbes or fungi, and other examinations similarly found no signs of active life.
“We couldn’t detect any microbial activity within these samples. Any, very limited traces we were able to find of microbial life in these samples are most likely the remnants of microbes that are dormant or are slowly dying off,” said Whyte. “Given the continuous dryness and subfreezing temperatures, and the lack of available water, even in summer, it is unlikely that any microbial communities can grow in these soils.”
“If conditions are too cold and dry to support active microbial life on an analogous climate on Earth, then the colder dryer conditions in the near surface permafrost on Mars are unlikely to contain life,” he added. “Additionally, if we cannot detect activity on Earth, in an environment which is teeming with microorganisms, it will be extremely unlikely and difficult to detect such activity on Mars.”
Archaeologists uncover the remains of a community brutally murdered, ten thousand years ago. The bones of men, women and children have emerged from the bed of an ancient lake, providing evidence of a violent massacre in prehistoric Kenya.
Astronomers have found evidence of a new ninth planet in our solar system
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
For decades, the solar system was home to nine planets – that is, before Pluto’s demotion to “dwarf planet” status – and it not may be again, thanks to the discovery of a new, larger than Earth-sized world by Caltech researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown.
Batygin and Brown, whose findings were published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, discovered the possible existence of the world informally dubbed “Planet Nine” though a series of mathematical models and computer simulations, but have yet to directly observe it.
Nonetheless, their research indicates that the new world has approximately 10 times the mass of Earth and orbits the sun at an average distance of 20 times that of Neptune. In fact, the duo states that it would take “Planet Nine” between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete a single orbit.
The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Also, when viewed in three dimensions, they all tilt nearly identically away from the plane of the solar system. Batygin and Brown show that a planet with 10 times the mass of the earth in a distant eccentric orbit anti-aligned with the other six objects (orange) is required to maintain this configuration. The diagram was created using WorldWide Telescope. (Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))
“Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there,” Batygin said in a statement. “For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system’s planetary census is incomplete.”
At an estimated 5,000 times the mass of Pluto, “Planet Nine” would be “a real ninth planet” and not another dwarf planet, added Brown, a planetary astronomy professor at Caltech. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third.”
The hunt is on to locate this purported new world
Furthermore, unlike dwarf planets, “Planet Nine” gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system, the study authors noted. Not only that, but Brown said that it dominates more of its surroundings than any of the known planets, which he said makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system.”
According to NBC News and National Geographic, the size of the proposed new planet would make it either a super-Earth or mini-Neptune, both of which have been scarce in our own cosmic backyard despite how efficiently the galaxy can produce them. In addition, Batygin and Brown believe that “Planet Nine” could help explain several unusual features of the Kuiper Belt.
The discovery was born out of research that started in 2014, as the Caltech scientists launched an investigation into 13 objects in the Kuiper Belt, the area of the solar system located past Neptune and which is filled with comets, dwarf planets and other icy entities. Six of those objects wound up having orbits indicating that they were likely orbiting some distant, yet-undiscovered body.
That body, Batygin and Brown now believe, is likely “Planet Nine,” which they hypothesize was first formed closer to the sun before being launched to the outskirts of the solar system during the earliest days of the cosmic neighborhood, when the sun was still part of its native star cluster and the surrounding stars kept it from completely escaping the reach of its gravitational pull.
The Caltech team plans to refine their simulations and hope to learn more about the orbit of the newfound planet. They also hope they or one of their fellow astronomers can ultimately observe the world from telescopes or observatories. While Brown said he would “love to find it,” he also said that he would be “perfectly happy” if someone else located it. “That is why we’re publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching.”
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Feature Image: This artist’s rendering shows the distant view from Planet Nine back towards the sun. The planet is thought to be gaseous, similar to Uranus and Neptune. Hypothetical lightning lights up the night side. (Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))
10,000-year-old smashed skull remains offer oldest evidence of human warfare
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
In west Turkana, Kenya, where an ancient lagoon once provided life to those around it, a gruesome massacre of 27 prehistoric hunter-gatherers has been unearthed—extending the timeline of human warfare back to 10,000 years ago.
The find was made by researchers from Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Human Evolution (LCHES), in a place in Kenya called Nataruk.
It seems this group of 27 may have been members of an extended family; eight were women and six were children, all interestingly under the age of six.
This skeleton was that of a man, found lying prone in the lagoon’s sediments. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and on the left side, consistent with wounds from a blunt implement, such as a club. (Credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr)
Only 12 skeletons were relatively complete—allowing more knowledge to be drawn from those remains—and of these, 10 demonstrated clear signs of having been killed violently. Their cheeks and heads showed signs of blunt-force trauma, possibly from wooden clubs; hands, knees, and ribs were broken; several had wounds left by arrows in their necks; and the tips of stone projectiles were discovered lodged in the skull and chest of two men.
These tips were made from obsidian—a black volcanic rock easily sharpened to make cutting tools and weapons—which is unusual for the region.
“Obsidian is rare in other late Stone Age sites of this area in West Turkana, which may suggest that the two groups confronted at Nataruk had different home ranges,” said Mirazon Lahr.
Four skeletons were found is positions indicating that their hands had been bound, including a woman who was six to nine months pregnant—as evidenced by the fetal bones recovered.
This skeleton was that of a young woman, who was pregnant at the time of her death. She was found in a sitting position, with the hands crossed between her legs. The position of the body suggests that the hands and feet may have been bound. (Illustration by Marta Mirazon Lahr)
The bodies were found in what seems to have been a marshland surrounded by forests, at the edge of a lagoon, which was likely a coveted location for groups—it would have been an ideal location for access to drinking water and fish. Pottery has been found nearby, too, hinting that foraged food items were held in storage.
“The Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources – territory, women, children, food stored in pots – whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of life,” said Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr, from Cambridge’s LCHES, who directs the IN-AFRICA Project and led the Nataruk study, in a statement.
However, this idea is uncertain, as it appears no one was spared—including the women and children. It is equally likely, then, that such a massacre was a standard sort of response between two distinct human groups at the time.
This skeleton was that of a woman, found reclining on her left elbow, with fractures on the knees and possibly the left foot. The position of the hands suggests her wrists may have been bound. She was found surrounded by fish. (Credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr)
The latter theory seems even more possible as the entire group was left unburied in this idyllic location—suggesting a high level of violence and perhaps a disregard for the other group.
Which has led the researchers to believe that this is the earliest scientifically-dated evidence of human conflict—and a precursor to human warfare. In fact, using radiocarbon dating on the skeletons, soil layer samples, and shells found surrounding the skeletons, the team managed to push the date of human warfare to between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago—in the epoch following the last Ice Age, the Holocene.
This makes the finding especially important, as the origins of war are hotly debated. As the authors mention in the paper, which is published today in Nature, violence between different groups is prevalent in chimpanzees—but whether or not it was humankind’s evolutionary destiny (and thus has haunted us since our species emerged), or whether it later came about when the notion of ownership developed from humans settling on land as farmers is unclear.
Detail of the hands of skeleton KNM-WT 71259 in situ. This skeleton was that of a woman, found reclining on her left elbow, with fractures on the knees and possibly the left foot. The position of the hands suggests her wrists may have been bound. She was found surrounded by fish. (Credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr)
The group at Nataruk was nomadic, however—they were not agrarians by any means—so a massacre of this scale suggests that warfare is not a learned behavior, but something more inherent.
“The deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war,” said Mirazon Lahr.
“These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial, and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers.”
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Feature Image: This skeleton was that of a man, found lying prone in the lagoons sediments. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and on the left side, consistent with wounds from a blunt implement, such as a club. (Credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr)
New IVF technique may spell the end of ‘test tube babies’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Good news for parents who have trouble conceiving, but don’t want their future children to be born out of a laboratory: Scientists have developed a new kind of in vitro fertilization (IVF) that makes it possible for doctors to implant an embryo directly into the mother’s womb.
The method uses an IVF device called AneVivio, and as BBC News and the Telegraph reported on Tuesday, it involves placing egg and sperm cells into a silicone capsule roughly the same size as a grain of rice. The capsule containing the healthiest embryo is then placed in the uterus.
“The introduction of this device signals a real breakthrough in IVF treatment, as it enables women to care for an embryo in its earliest stages of development for the first time,” Professor Nick Macklon, medical director at Complete Fertility Centre Southampton, told the Telegraph.
“That is important psychologically as it involves parents-to-be directly with the fertilization process and early embryo development, but, perhaps more importantly, it also could provide many potential health benefits for babies born following fertility treatment,” he added.
Macklon and his Complete Fertility colleagues are the first doctors to use the AneVivio device, which was previously tested in clinical trials involving approximately 250 women, according to reports. Those trials found that it achieved a success rate similar to that of conventional IVF.
New method could reduce genetic disorders in IVF children
The AneVivio capsule is just one centimeter long and one millimeter wide, and it was designed to reduce the amount of time that a growing embryo is artificially grown in a dish of culture fluid outside of the mother’s womb. Professor Macklon explained that the overall goal is to maximize the amount of time that a growing baby is able to spend in its mother’s body.
“The immediate benefit is reducing exposure at this very vulnerable time of human development when genes are being switched on and off,” he told BBC News. Previous research has reportedly suggested that growing embryos in a dish increases the risk of genetic or other health defects. It remains unclear if AneVivio will reduce those issues, but its developers are optimistic.
“Babies born following IVF treatment have been shown to have lower than normal birth weight and, although not initially a problem, we know there is a link between low birth weight and long-term health and the laboratory environment could play a part in this,” Macklon said. By using the new device, he and his colleagues believe that they can “reduce exposure to the synthetic culture fluids used in the laboratory and help to determine precisely what effect this may have.”
AneVivio has been approved by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HEFA), the UK body governing such devices, who found no evidence that it was ineffective or unsafe. However, it is currently only being used in private patients, as it has not yet been approved by the NHS because the nearly $1,000 (£700) technique has yet to be proven to be cost-effective.
A mirror universe where time runs backwards could actually exist, scientists say
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
We’re born, we get older and eventually die. That’s just how time works in our universe. But could there be a mirror universe out there where time runs backwards and everyone is essentially Benjamin Button? Surprisingly, the answer is apparently ‘yes’ – theoretically, at least.
According to Quartz and The Daily Star, scientists note that there are no laws of physics that say that time has to move in a forward direction. So what causes it to happen? Most physicists point towards continually-increasing entropy, the lack of order and predictability in the universe.
Yet two groups of scientists decided to take a closer look at the matter, and in both cases, their research came to the same conclusion – time appears to move in two different directions, which suggests that when the Big Bang created our universe, it also created a second, mirror universe where, from our perspective anyway, time would appear to be moving backwards.
Discovering the ‘Janus point’ that divides parallel universes
One of those studies, published last year in the journal Physical Review Letters, explained that Newton’s theory of gravity permits the conditions for time to move in a specific direction, and that for any confined system of particles (such as a self-contained universe), gravity attempts to minimize the distance between said particles.
When those particles expand outwards, they do so in two different directions – something that the authors of the study demonstrated using a simplified model of the universe. Ultimately, the way in which we experience time is based on increasing entropy. Essentially, the compared the flow of time to the point of a river where it splits and flows in opposite directions.
Speaking in terms of time, that point where time splits and flows in opposing directions has been dubbed the “Janus point” in honor of the two-headed Roman deity. According to the authors, if their theory is correct, another universe exists on the opposite side of the Big Bang, and there, the flow of time is the complete opposite of ours.
Even if such a time flow exists, however, they said that we would never be able to experience it. As study co-author Flavio Mercati from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics explained to Quartz, “We’re on one side of the Janus point. On one side you get your arrow of time and can never experience the other one. It’s in your past.”
‘The two-headed arrow of time’
Building upon that research, two other physicists – Sean Carroll from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and Alan Guth from Massachusetts Institute of Technology – have now developed a new, similar particle model that shows a pair of parallel universes where time flows in two opposite directions, according to New Scientist and The Daily Mail.
Like their predecessors, Carroll and Guth used entropy as the starting point for their model, and found that the direction in which time flows does not matter. To us, the future is the direction of time in which entropy increases, while entropy would be much lower in the past, they explained. While we believe one event ultimately leads to another, this is not necessarily the case.
The researchers developed a model in which they inserted a fixed number of particles, each with a randomly assigned velocity, into an infinite universe. Eventually, they said, arrows of time that flowed in a specific direction spontaneously developed. Half of the particles moved towards the center of the model, decreasing entropy, while the other half moved to the edges, increasing it.
Once the particles passed through the center, they continued on towards the edges, a concept the study authors refer to as the “two-headed arrow of time.” In short, if an arrow of time emerges in one direction, the same will happen in the opposite direction, regardless of its starting point. The model, they claim, reveals that particles all ultimately move outward, that entropy grows without limit and that the initial direction of the arrows is essentially irrelevant.
“The point that Alan and I are trying to make, is that it’s very natural in those circumstances that almost everywhere in the universe you get a noticeable arrow of time. Then of course, you do the work of making it realistic, making it look like our universe,” Carroll told New Scientist. While the model has yet to be published, he noted that it could be applicable to the multiverse.
Global disaster will likely happen before we establish space colonies, says Stephen Hawking
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
The next 100 years will be one of the most tenuous for the human race, the renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist cautioned in a radio interview earlier this week, as advances in science and technology will outpace our ability to escape Earth in case of an apocalyptic emergency.
Hawking, who was speaking with Radio Times prior to a scheduled BBC Reith Lecture on black holes, said that advances in research are set to create “new ways things can go wrong” during the years ahead, while it will be at least a century before we can establish a human colony in space.
As a result, he said, chances are that a global disaster will happen before we have a home among the stars to which we can flee. Such a disaster, Hawking explained, would probably be caused by nuclear weapons or genetically-engineered viruses, The Guardian said.
“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,” he said, according to BBC News. “By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”
“However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period,” Hawking added. “We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognize the dangers and control them.”
Despite a decade of warnings, Hawking isn’t all doom-and-gloom
Hawking went on to call himself “an optimist” and said that he was confident that humanity would be able to make the changes needed from destroying itself through its own inventions. However, as Gizmodo noted, this is far from the first time that the 74-year-old professor and author has warned of impending doom and gloom caused by our own inventions.
In 2006, he asked a question online wondering how the human race could survive another 100 years “in a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally,” later admitting that he did not know the answer, and that was why he asked the question. The following year, while speaking in Hong Kong, he warned of global nuclear war or other man-made disasters.
Since then, he has cautioned that artificial intelligence could be the “worst mistake” that people have ever made, and that while AI had tremendous benefits, that the behavior of such a system would become unpredictable once it become exponentially more powerful. Hawking has called for increased AI oversight and has called for a ban on “autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.” Finally, he has expressed concerns over our attempts to contact aliens.
In spite of such concerns, Hawking also said that it was “a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics” and that nothing could match “the Eureka moment of discovering something that no one knew before.” That said, he added, “it’s important to ensure that these changes are heading in the right directions,” according to BBC News.
How to triple the rate of your success with one simple question
Written By: Christopher Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Do you want to understand more about your own thoughts and motivations? Do you wish you had a better understanding of what motivates other people and drives their decisions? Has psychology always fascinated you, but you’ve been missing a way to apply those lessons practically in your day-to-day life?
“The Science of Success” is redOrbit’s newest podcast, featuring entrepreneur and investor Matt Bodnar, who explores the mindset of success, the psychology of performance, and how to get the most out of your daily life.
With gripping examples, concrete explanations of psychological research, interviews with scientists and experts, and practical ways to apply these lessons in your own life, “The Science of Success” is a must-listen for anyone interested in growth, learning, personal development, and psychology.
This week’s episode: How to triple the rate of your success with one simple question
This week we are kicking off a new miniseries within “The Science of Success” called “Weapons of Influence”. This is the first in a six-part series based on the best selling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. If you loved that book, this will be a great refresher on the core concepts. And if you haven’t yet read it, some of this stuff is gonna blow your mind.
So what are the 6 weapons of influence?
Reciprocation
Consistency & commitment
Social Proof
Liking
Authority
Scarcity
Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your belt – and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone, each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives and in social situations, but together they can create huge impacts.
Today’s episode covers the first weapon of influence – Reciprocation Bias – and you’ll learn:
How reciprocation creates unequal exchanges, and in one experiment by a factor of more than 500%
Why reciprocation is powerful regardless of how much someone likes you
How giving away flowers help build a powerful religious movement
What made the “rejection and retreat” technique triple the success of an experiment
How to defend against reciprocation bias from negatively impacting your decisions
Sorry Marvel fans: Spider-Man is physically impossible, and here’s why
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
The exploits of Spider-Man have been well documented in the pages of comic books as well as on the silver screen, but could there ever actually be a such a super hero? Obviously, the answer is no, but the reason why his existence is impossible might not be what you’d expect.
Even in the implausible instance that somebody like Peter Parker actually did gain superhuman strength and agility from the bite of a radioactive spider, he still would not be able to pull off the feats credited to the fictional Spider-Man, according to a new study from Dr. David Labonte and his colleagues in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
As Dr. Labonte’s team explained in a paper published this week in the journal PNAS, in order to scale up a wall like Spider-Man, a person would need to have adhesive pads covering roughly 40 percent of their body surface, or approximately 80 percent of the front of their bodies.
Even then, such a feat would be impossible without significant anatomical changes, senior author Walter Federle, also from Cambridge, explained in a statement. “If a human… wanted to walk up a wall the way a gecko does, we’d need impractically large sticky feet – our shoes would need to be a European size 145 or a US size 114,” he said.
Geckos are the largest possible wall climbers, study claims
The study authors examined 225 different species of climbing animals of different sizes, and found the area of the adhesive pads required to climb walls scaled along with their weight. In other words, geckos needed adhesive pads on 200 times more body area than mites, and larger creatures would have to have “impossibly big feet” in order to scale walls.
Thus, Dr. Labonte’s team concluded that there is a limit to the size of animal capable of using this strategy, and that the geckos are the largest possible adhesion-based climbers. In addition to crushing the dreams of comic book enthusiasts everywhere, their findings could have a profound effect on the development of biologically-inspired, wall-climbing adhesive technology.
“As animals increase in size, the amount of body surface area per volume decreases,” explained Dr. Labonte. “An ant has a lot of surface area and very little volume, and a blue whale is mostly volume with not much surface area. This poses a problem for larger climbing species.”
When such creatures are larger and heavier, “they need more sticking power to be able to adhere to vertical or inverted surfaces, but they have comparatively less body surface available to cover with sticky footpads,” he pointed out. “This implies that there is a size limit to sticky footpads as an evolutionary solution to climbing – and that turns out to be about the size of a gecko.”
One possible solution to the problems involving the development of artificial adhesives would be to find a way to enhance their ability to fasten to the wall – in other words, to make them stickier. Dr. Labonte acknowledged such a possibility, saying “there is a lot of interesting work still to be done” and that such advances “would likely have very useful applications in the development of large-scale, powerful yet controllable adhesives.”
Explosive underwater volcanoes played key role in ending Snowball Earth, study says
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Explosive underwater volcanoes played a key role in “Snowball Earth,” the hypothesized period of deep freeze that engulfed the planet approximately 640 to 720 million years ago, according to new research led by scientists from the University of Southampton in England.
During this period of glaciation, the majority of the Earth’s surface was covered in ice for several million years, and while many aspects of this hypothesis remain enigmatic, many experts believe that the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia increased river discharge into the oceans.
This, in turn, altered the chemistry of the oceans and reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, ultimately causing global ice coverage to increase and covering the land surface in a deep freeze that effectively brought an end to continental weathering. This “Snowball Earth” state remained until CO2 released through volcanic activity warmed the atmosphere enough to melt the ice.
However, as the Southampton-led team of researchers pointed out, the current models failed to adequately explain one of the most mysterious factors of this rapid deglaciation: the formation of hundreds of meters worth of cap carbonates, a type of carbonate rock with distinctive textures, in the warm, post-Snowball Earth waters.
Volcanic processes may have also helped kick-start animal life
In a study published in Monday’s edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, lead author Dr. Tom Gernon, a lecturer in Earth science at the university, and his colleagues explained that the drastic changes in ocean chemistry were the most likely the result of underwater volcanism.
“When volcanic material is deposited in the oceans it undergoes very rapid and profound chemical alteration that impacts the biogeochemistry of the oceans,” Dr. Gernon said in a press release. “We find that many geological and geochemical phenomena associated with Snowball Earth are consistent with extensive submarine volcanism along shallow mid-ocean ridges.”
When the supercontinent Rodinia split apart, thousands of kilometers of mid-ocean ridges were formed over a several-million year span. Explosive volcanic eruptions taking place in the shallow waters caused significant amounts of hyaloclastite, a kind of glassy pyroclastic rock, to be produced. As the quantity of hyaloclastite deposits increased, rapid chemical changes took place, releasing copious amounts of calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus into the ocean.
“We calculated that, over the course of a Snowball glaciation, this chemical build-up is sufficient to explain the thick cap carbonates formed at the end of the Snowball event,” said Dr. Gernon. “This process also helps explain the unusually high oceanic phosphorus levels, thought to be the catalyst for the origin of animal life on Earth.”
The five bright planets to align, be visible starting on Wednesday
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
For the first time in more than a decade, the five bright planets – Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter – will align in such a way that they can easily be seen from Earth with the naked eye, a phenomenon that will last from Wednesday through the morning of February 20.
According to EarthSky and the Huffington Post, the bright planets will appear in a diagonal row just before dawn on Wednesday for the first time since appearing together from December 15, 2004 to January 15, 2005. Jupiter will rise first during the evening hours, followed by the red-hued Mars shortly after midnight, then gold-colored Saturn, Venus and Mercury in order.
A bright planet, by definition, is any world in our solar system that can easily be viewed without a telescope or a pair of binoculars. The reason that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are so easy to spot is because their disks reflect sunlight, as well as the relatively close worlds tend to shine with a steadier light than more distant stars or planets, explained EarthSky.
Some stargazers to get a second chance starting in August
Exactly where the planets will appear in the sky depends upon your location, but for those in the DC area, The Washington Post said that by Sunday, January 24, Mercury will appear to be close to the eastern horizon while Mars will rise in the east and Jupiter in the west-southwest. Consult your favorite astronomy website or app to find their respective relative positions.
If you miss the appearance of the bright planets over the next month, we have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is that you only have to wait until August 13 to get another crack at spotting them. The bad news, at least for those living in the northern hemisphere, is that Venus and Mercury will sit low and be hard to view.
After this year, the next time that the bright planets are in this alignment will be in October of 2018, Dr. Tanya Hill, senior curator at the Melbourne Planetarium, told Australian Geographic. While this somewhat rare phenomenon is, in the words of Swinburne University research fellow Dr. Alan Duffy, is “essentially a quirk” of the universe, it is nonetheless “well worth seeing.”
The website recommends holding your arms up in a straight line from the horizon to the moon, explaining that the planets should fall along that line. They also suggest trying to find a flat area with a dark, cloud-free sky for optimal viewing – and if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, as it could take several mornings before you get a good glimpse of all five planets.
Hungry, rampaging elephants force Myanmar villagers to live in trees
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Hordes of hungry elephants searching for their next meal have started encroaching on farm land in Myanmar, forcing the residents of one village to seek shelter in tree houses while their homes and rice paddies are trampled by the animals, according to AFP reports.
Families living in Kyat Chuang, a farming town located about 100 kilometers north of Yangon, have had to cobble together new shelters made out of wood and bamboo in the treetops—seeking higher ground to avoid being injured or killed by the onrush of stampeding elephants.
“We have had to move our huts into the trees, so we are safe,” San Lwin, who said that he seeks refuge in a thatch-roofed shelter when the elephants are nearby, told the news agency. He and his fellow residents said that the stampedes started three years ago, and take place several times each week, foretold when the thundering sound of their feet can be heard in the distance.
Myanmar’s population of wild Asian elephants is believed to be among the largest in the region, the World Wildlife Fund told AFP, but experts warn that the country’s rapid rate of deforestation due to logging and commercial agriculture has caused the endangered creatures to become more aggressive in their search for food.
Newly-elected officials will attempt to address the problem
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Myanmar lost nearly one-fifth of its forest cover between 1990 and 2010, and the creatures also face threats for poachers seeking to hunt the creatures for ivory, and those who trap and smuggle them into Thailand for tourism.
Soe Nyunt, vice chairman of the newly-elected National League for Democracy’s Environmental Conservation Committee, told AFP that the group would try to address the problem and “restore the environment in Myanmar that has been ruined for many decades,” but added that it “will not be easy” to do so. The NLD committee will officially take office later on this year, the media outlet said.
Last March, in more pleasant elephant-related news in the area, officials from Myanmar’s forest department confirmed that they had captured a rare, seven-year-old female white elephant in the jungles of the western Ayeyarwaddy region. It was just the ninth creature of its kind to be found and placed in captivity—joining eight others in zoos in Naypyitaw and Yangon.
As reported by the Associated Press at the time, white elephants have long been revered by the citizens of Myanmar. The animals, which are usually pinkish in color, are viewed as symbols of royal power, prosperity, and good luck. Previously discovered white elephants were welcomed in lavish ceremonies in which they were sprinkled with scented water laced with gold, silver, and precious gems, according to the wire service.
Cosmic muon particles give us definitive clues as to how Egypt’s pyramids were built
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
We may finally get definitive clues as to how the Pyramids of Giza were built, thanks to cosmic particles known as muons.
According to the Associated Press, an international team of researchers has been collecting data on these particles in the 4,600-year-old Snefru Pyramid, and will soon begin analyzing the data in hopes of discovering new information on how the pyramid was built and how it’s structured.
“For the construction of the pyramids, there is no single theory that is 100 percent proven or checked,” explained Hany Helal, the vice president of the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, to the AP. “They are all theories and hypotheses.
“What we are trying to do with the new technology, we would like to either confirm or change or upgrade or modify the hypotheses that we have on how the pyramids were constructed.”
In hopes of doing just that, the team planted special plates inside the pyramid last month, and have been collecting data on muons since, Mehdi Tayoubi, president of the Institute, told the AP.
So what the heck is a muon?
Muons are elementary particles—as in, they aren’t believed to be composed of any simpler particles. They are similar to electrons, but weigh roughly 200 times more, and originate from the collisions of cosmic rays (like protons given off by stars). And while they exist for only two microseconds, they rain down quickly from the atmosphere, passing freely through open space and are either deflected or absorbed by harder surfaces.
Which means that, by studying how the particles accumulate across the Snefru Pyramid, scientists may be able to figure out details about its structure and construction that no previous methods were able to detect.
The Snefru Pyramid, meanwhile, which was built by the eponymous pharaoh, is also known as the Bent Pyramid for the angled slope of its sides. Found right outside Cairo, it’s thought to have been the first Egyptian attempt to build a smooth-sided pyramid—as its planar sides were originally covered in smooth limestone, in sharp contrast to the step pyramids prior.
A step pyramid, the Pyramid of Djoser. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
What the future holds
The Scans Pyramid Project is coupling thermal technology with muon analysis to learn more about the pyramids—and already has detected a few thermal anomalies in the largest pyramid at Giza, the 4,500-year-old Khufu Pyramid. Preparations for muon testing in this pyramid is slated to being within a month.
But even if no huge discoveries are made in the Khufu and Snefru pyramids, every little bit matters.
“Even if we find one square meter void somewhere, it will bring new questions and hypotheses and maybe it will help solve the definitive questions,” said Tayoubi.
Groundbreaking study reveals brain waves may be spread via electrical field
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
Neuroscientists have only described the passing of electrical signals through the brain via direct connections like synaptic transmission or diffusion processes. However, a groundbreaking new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has found the brain can also send signals via electrical field.
The study team said their find might lead to determining potential new targets to examine brain waves linked with memory and epilepsy as well as to better comprehend good brain physiology.
They documented neural spikes moving at a speed too slow for recognized mechanisms to flow throughout the brain. The only possibility, the researchers said, is that the wave is propagated by a mild electrical field they could recognize. Computer modeling and in-vitro experiments supported their theory, according to the team’s report.
“Researchers have thought that the brain’s endogenous electrical fields are too weak to propagate wave transmission,” study author Dominique Durand, from Case Western University, said in a statement. “But it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions, or diffusion.”
“Others have been working on such phenomena for decades, but no one has ever made these connections,” Steven J. Schiff, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at Penn State University, commented on the study. “The implications are that such directed fields can be used to modulate both pathological activities, such as seizures, and to interact with cognitive rhythms that help regulate a variety of processes in the brain.”
How these fields may work
Using mouse hippocampi, the study team found that the electrical field switches on its immediate neighbors, which, subsequently, trigger more immediate neighbors, and so on over the brain at a pace of around 0.1 meter per second.
Obstructing the endogenous electrical field in the mouse hippocampus and growing the distance between cells in a computer simulation both slowed the pace of the wave.
Since sleep waves and theta waves—which are connected with developing memories during sleep—and epileptic seizure waves move at approximately 1 meter per second, the scientists are now looking into if the electrical fields are a part of normal physiology and play a role in epilepsy. If that’s the case, they will attempt to discern what information the fields might be transporting. The study team is also looking into where the endogenous spikes originate from in the brain.
The mystery of that ‘alien megastructure’ just got a little bit weirder
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Remember KIC 8462852, that odd little star that was observed inexplicably dipping in brightness and which people though might have been some sort of advanced alien megastructure? Scientists may be sure advanced extraterrestrial civilizations aren’t responsible, but what is?!
According to new research posted last week to the arXiv server, researchers still aren’t sure. The star’s output has been seen dipping by as much as one-fifth—which is too much to be caused by a transiting planet—and now Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University has crossed comets off the list of possible explanations after an in-depth review of historical observations.
The comet explanation, proposed in September by Yale University’s Tabetha Boyajian and her colleagues, said that dust from a large cloud of comets was the likely cause of the star’s changes in brightness. Now, Schaefer reviewed photographic plates of the sky dating back to the late 19th century and found that, over the past century, KIC 8462852’s light output has steadily faded by about 19 percent, according to Gizmodo and New Scientist.
That’s “completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star,” Schaefer said. Boyajian added that the new study “presents some trouble for the comet hypothesis,” telling New Scientist that they “need more data through continuous monitoring to figure out what is going on.”
Flickering would have required too many comets, study finds
Previously, a study published by Jason Wright of Penn State University and his colleagues said that it was possible that “alien megastructures,” such as satellites developed to gather light from the star, could potentially have been the cause of the unusual signal. However, the ensuing search for evidence in the form of radio signals or laser beams came up empty.
While Schafer is not convinced that comets are the cause of the phenomenon, he also does not believe Wright’s alien megastructure hypothesis, which he told New Scientist “runs wrong with my new observations.” Not even the most advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be able to create something capable of covering that much of a star in just 100 years, he said, and an object that light should be radiating light absorbed from the star as heat. KIC 8462852’s does not.
“I don’t know how the dimming affects the megastructure hypothesis, except that it would seem to exclude a lot of natural explanations, including comets,” Wright said. “It could be that there were just more dimming events in the past, or that astronomers were less lucky in the past and caught more dimming events in the 1980s than in the 1900s. But that seems unlikely.”
Schaefer’s findings saw that the dimming effect observed around the star would have needed nearly 650,000 comets, each nearly 125 miles (200 kilometers) wide, to have passed by the star. That, he said, is extremely implausible, and his research is “refutation of [that] idea, and indeed, of all published ideas.”
So the mystery of KIC 8462852 deepens. Scientists are convinced that aliens, comets, and transiting planets aren’t to blame for its flickering behavior, but what is? It may be some time before researchers can provide an answer to that question.
Women ‘guard’ their men when they sense other women are ovulating, study shows
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
Hey guys—has your wife or girlfriend ever shot you “a look” after a seemingly innocent conversation with another woman?
A new study may clear the air a bit, as a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found women can sense when another woman is ovulating and tends to react by “guarding” her man.
In the study, researchers carried out four analyses with nearly 480 heterosexual engaged or married women. All volunteers were pulled from Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing tool. In each part of the study, the women saw photographs of a number of women, and were asked how inclined they would be, on a seven-point scale, for the women to become friends with their partner.
The researchers said volunteers were much more prone to want to put distance between the woman pictured and their partner when the woman in the photograph was ovulating. Volunteers were not informed which women were ovulating and, most likely, they didn’t take the idea into account. However, other studies have shown humans are subconsciously alert to various physical cues that reveal when women are more fertile.
“Research across species demonstrates that social perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors do temporarily shift in response to ovulation, and that these shifts may enhance individuals’ reproductive fitness,” the report said. “Similarly, psychological research on humans has demonstrated that (a) women’s perceptions and behaviors shift across their own cycles and (b) men respond to these cyclic shifts.”
Women with hot partners were even more guarded
The other parts of the study confirmed female volunteers were particularly guarded when they considered their mate as desirable, and when the woman in the photograph was physically appealing.
“Specifically, women with desirable partners reported that they would show increased sexual interest in their partners after viewing a high-fertility target, regardless of how attractive that target was,” the researchers wrote.
Despite this apparent impulse to guard one’s mate, the study authors noted there is very little evidence showing this strategy is effective in maintaining a relationship. The study team also pointed out that the picture used in the study were of women unfamiliar to the subjects, and different outcomes might result in scenarios involving friends or acquaintances.
Latest New Horizons image shows Pluto’s layered atmosphere
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Another day, another mind-blowing image from New Horizon’s flyby of Pluto last summer. This time, the spacecraft captured a high-resolution photograph which NASA scientists said reveals a series of never-before-seen layers in the atmosphere of the dwarf planet.
The image is a mosaic of four panchromatic images and was captured by New Horizons using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument and enhanced by Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) four-color filter data. It sheds new light on the atmosphere of the dwarf planet, and in particular, how it is organized, according to Gizmodo.
The US space agency explains that the blue haze observed in the image is likely photochemical smog caused by the action of sunlight on methane and other molecules found it the atmosphere. This phenomenon produces a mixture of hydrocarbons like acetylene and ethylene which gather into sub-micrometer sized particles and scatter sunlight to create the blue hue.
As they settle, these haze particles form a series of intricate, horizontal layers which extend out around Pluto to altitudes of up to 120 miles (200 km). Also featured in the photo are mountains on the dwarf planet’s limb and dark finger-like shadows known as crepuscular rays.
Image comes on the heels of possible ice volcano photographs
The new atmospheric images come just days after NASA released the first pictures of Wright Mons, an enormous structure believed to be one of two ice volcanoes on the dwarf planet. The mountain was named in honor of aviation pioneers the Wright brothers, and is said to be more than 90 miles (150 km) across and 2.5 miles (4 km) high.
If confirmed to be an ice volcano (also known as a cryovolcano), Wright Mons would be the largest feature of its kind ever discovered in the outer solar system. It, along with Piccard Mons, the other suspected cryovolcano on Pluto, are believed to have played a role in forming the heart-shaped region of the dwarf planet known as Tombaugh Regio, the US space agency explained.
“These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing – a volcano,” New Horizons scientist Oliver White told the Daily Mail last Thursday. Previously, his colleague Jeff Moore said the team was “not yet ready” to confirm that the two mountains were ice volcanoes, but added that they “sure look suspicious”.
Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons was the first mission ever to be sent to the Pluto, having completed a six-month long flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons during summer 2015. It is currently en route to a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) named 2014 MU69 where, pending approval, it will continue its mission.
China to send lander to the dark side of the moon in 2018
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Having successfully launched its first lunar lander more than two years ago, China on Friday announced an ambitious plan to become the first nation to have a probe touch down on the far side of the moon, and they apparently plan to accomplish this by the end of 2018.
Gizmodo and Ars Technica, citing reports published by the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, explained that the officials involved with the country’s space program are preparing a new rover known as Chang’e-4 for use in the mission. Its predecessor, the Chang’e-3, is the lander which successfully soft-landed on the near side of the moon back in December 2013.
Research based on findings from the Chang’e-3 mission’s Yutu rover, which were published last month, found that the moon had a far more complex geological history than previously thought, the websites explained. With the Chang’e-4 project, China hopes to collect lunar materials from the thicker crust found on the dark side of the moon and bring it back to Earth for analysis.
Liu Jizhong, chief of the China State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) lunar exploration center, told Xinhua that Chang’e-4 would be the first mission to ever explore the far side of the moon, which always faces away from Earth due to a phenomenon known as gravitational or tidal locking.
Chang’e-4 to study the dark side’s geology, composition
Liu also explained that Chang’e-4 is similar in design to its predecessor, but will be capable of handling a much larger payload. Like Chang’e-3, it will be designed to make a soft landing, and then it will begin collecting samples and analyzing the composition of the dark side’s crust.
Chang’e-4 is the next phase of China’s three-step program to study the moon by orbiting, landing, and returning spacecraft to the orbiting satellite. The probe which will be used in the final step of the program, the Chang’e-5, is currently in development by Chinese scientists, said Liu.
President Xi Jinping has made advancing China’s space program a top priority, and emphasizes that the research will be used solely for peaceful purposes, according to Reuters. Back in March, his administration said that it would open up its lunar exploration to non-state operated, private sector companies, and it has vowed to cooperate with foreign nations on its space program.
While no man-made spacecraft has successfully landed on the dark side of the moon, the region has been photographed, as the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft snapped a handful of grainy images of its surface in 1959, said Ars Technica. Those photos revealed a far more mountainous terrain than had been spotted on the near side, with only a pair of dark, low-lying regions.
Microscopic Tardigrade revived after being frozen for 30 years
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
After being frozen for more than three decades, a microscopic organism known as a tardigrade has been revived by researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research and has successfully reproduced, according to research published in the journal Cryobiology.
Tardigrades, also known as water bears because of their chunky bodies and claws, are among the toughest creatures on Earth, BBC News and the Wall Street Journal explained. They can survive extreme heat, cold, pressure, and radiation because of a biological mechanism called cryptobiosis, which enables them to slow down metabolic activity for extended periods of time.
In fact, in 2007 tardigrades became the first creatures to survive exposure to space when officials at the European Space Agency launched 3,000 of them into orbit for 12 days as part of their Foton-M3 mission. The creatures involved in the recent NIPR study were found along with moss plants collected near Showa Station in Antarctica in November 1983, published reports indicate.
The samples were kept frozen at temperatures of negative 20 degrees Celsius (negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit) and taken to Japan. Two tardigrades and one egg were found in the moss, researchers said. One of the creatures and the egg were successfully thawed in May 2014, and the tardigrade was able to begin moving and consuming food after approximately two weeks.
Successful reproduction after the freeze
The revival of the tardigrades shattered the previous record for the longest time that one of the creatures was successfully revived from cryptobiosis, the NIPR scientists explained. Previously, the longest a water bear had spent in this state before being resuscitated was nine years.
Furthermore, the revived tardigrade was able to lay a total of 19 eggs, 14 of which hatched, the Wall Street Journal and BBC News reported. While the researchers said that the first eggs took a bit longer than later ones to hatch, they found no anomalies amongst the newborn water bears.
The institute is hoping to learn exactly how tardigrades can survive such extreme conditions for such a long period of time. They hope to discover the biological mechanisms responsible for the hardy nature of the features by examining the DNA of these cryptobiotic creatures.
“The long recovery times of the revived tardigrades observed is suggestive of the requirement for repair of damage accrued over 30 years of cryptobiosis,” lead author Megumu Tsujimoto and her colleagues wrote. “Further more detailed studies will improve understanding of mechanisms and conditions underlying the long-term survival of cryptobiotic organisms.”
However, as amazing as it is that the water bear was able to be revived after three decades, it is not the longest that a frozen creature has gone before being successfully revived, Gizmodo noted. That honor belongs with “a plant-parasitic nematode worm, Tylenchus polyhypnus, that survived after nearly 39 years in a frozen state.”
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Image credit: Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research
NASA releases image of potential ice volcano on Pluto
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Having established the possibility of ice volcanoes on Pluto, NASA released the first images on Friday of what appears to be the first sighting of an ice volcano– an enormous structure named in honor of the Wright brothers.
According to CNET and EarthSky, the feature known as Wright Mons is a gargantuan 90 miles (150 km) across and 2.5 miles (4 km) high. If confirmed to be an ice volcano, also known as a cryovolcano, it would be the largest feature of its kind ever discovered in the outer solar system.
Wright Mons was spotted by the New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Pluto in July 2015, and it is one of two mountains on the surface of the dwarf planet thought to be a cryovolcano, the space agency said.
NASA believes that the cryovolcanoes, which eject a mix of ice, nitrogen, ammonia, and methane instead of the molten rock spewed out by volcanoes here on Earth, may have recently been active and may have played a role forming in the heart-shaped region of the dwarf planet.
Volcano may have been active relatively recently, NASA says
Scientists studying the images obtained by New Horizons said that they are “intrigued” by the red material sparsely distributed throughout the picture, and are curious as to why it is not more widespread throughout the landscape, the agency noted in a statement.
Furthermore, they are puzzled as to why there is only one confirmed impact crater on Wright Mons. This could indicate that the surface and a portion of the mountain’s underlying crust was formed relatively recently, suggesting that Wright Mons was an active volcano fairly late in Pluto’s geologic history.
“These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing – a volcano,” New Horizons team member Oliver White told the Daily Mail Thursday. Previously, his colleague Jeff Moore had said that they were “not yet ready” to confirm that the two mountains were volcanoes, but added that they “sure look suspicious.”
Genes play huge role in determining country’s happiness, study says
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills
While exercise gives you endorphins, endorphins make you happy, and happy people just don’t shoot their husbands, scientists from the Varna University of Management and Hong Kong Polytechnic University have discovered a much more direct route to happiness: your genes.
The team looked at data from three separate waves of the World Values Survey from the years 2000 to 2014, and calculated the average percentage of respondents from each country who reported themselves as being “very happy”. They then compared the happiness levels with a database maintained by Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale that tracks gene variations across populations, along with information concerning the harshness of summers and winters, the prevalence of pathogens, and World Bank economic data.
According to the paper, which can be found in the Journal of Happiness Studies, they discovered that the happiest and least happiest nations had different percentages of what is known as the A allele of the fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) gene variant rs324420—the specific version of the gene that helps prevent the breakdown of a pain-lowering and sensory-pleasure increasing substance known as anandamide.
It’s not all in the A allele
The nations that perceived themselves as being happiest—which included Ghana, Nigeria, Sweden, and northern Latin American nations like Mexico and Colombia—had the highest prevalence of the A allele. Meanwhile the nations where people were least likely to rate themselves as “very happy”—Iraq, Jordan, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and Taiwan—had the lowest presence of the A allele.
However, the authors also added that they think other issues impact happiness as well. For example, they posit that the economic and political issues facing Eastern European nations like Russia and Estonia have resulted in their very low happiness scores—despite the fact that such Eastern European nations actually have a fairly high prevalence of the A allele.
Moreover, climactic differences strongly linked to national happiness.
“We cannot fail to notice the high occurrence of the A allele in equatorial and tropical environments in the Americas and Africa and the lower occurrence of that allele around the Mediterranean Sea than in Northern Europe,” said co-author Michael Minkov of Varna University in a statement. “It seems that some equatorial and tropical environments select for a higher occurrence of the A allele as a counterbalance to environmental stressors.”
And if you’re from a country with low prevalence of the A allele—like Spain or Germany—or live in a country with a less than ideal climactic situation, the researchers stress that genes aren’t the only key to happiness.
“In other words, we have not shown that a nation’s genetic and climatic heritage doom a particular country to a specific happiness score, but that it can still rise and fall because of situational factors,” explained co-author Michael Bond of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
US sees record number of organ donations, transplants in 2015
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
Driven by rising donations, the number of US organ transplant in 2015 topped 30,000 for the first time, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).
In statement, the organization said the 30,000 mark was passed in mid-December and a total of 30,973 transplants were performed last year.
“This landmark achievement is a testament to the generosity of the American public to help others through donation, and their trust in the transplant system to honor their life-saving gift,” said Betsy Walsh, OPTN president. A three-year trend of record-breaking numbers
The record-breaking figure represents a rise of almost 4.9 percent over the previous year, and it continues a three-year trend of record numbers. Around 81 percent of the transplants included organs from deceased donors, who can donate several organs, while 19 percent were from living donors.
Multiple months in 2015 had all-time monthly records for organ donation from deceased individuals, with July having highest-ever total at 848 donors. Furthermore, the ratio of African-American and Hispanic deceased donors rose from 2014 to 2015. In 2015, more than 16 percent of deceased donors were African-American and more than 13 percent were Hispanic. Caucasian donors were greater over the previous year, but fell as a percentage of all donors from 66.5 percent in 2014 to 65.8 percent in 2015.
The number and percentage of African-American and Hispanic transplant recipients rose considerably. Last year, nearly 22 percent of transplant recipients were African-American and almost 16 percent were Hispanic. African-American and Hispanic candidates account for a substantial percentage of the national waiting list for kidney transplants, which is the most often needed organ type. The number and percentage of Caucasian transplant recipients dropped somewhat in 2015 when compared to 2014.
“We work every day to give as many people as possible an opportunity for renewed life and health through transplantation,” Walsh said. “These trends are encouraging, and they make a huge difference not only for transplant recipients but for many more people whose lives they touch. But we have much more work to do to meet the needs of more than 121,000 men, women and children who continue to wait for a transplant.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft crushes distance record
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Juno, the massive solar-powered NASA spacecraft en route to Jupiter, has broken the distance record for solar-powered spacecraft—surpassing the Rosetta orbiter’s previous best by reaching the 493 million mile mark on Wednesday.
The spacecraft, which boasts a 30-foot-long array and more than 18,000 solar cells, is currently five times further way from the sun than Earth, according to Engadget. However, unlike Rosetta, the ESA probe that made history by traveling 492 million miles to orbit around a comet, Juno’s journey is far from over, as it is still more than 20 million miles away from Jupiter.
“Juno is all about pushing the edge of technology to help us learn about our origins,” principal investigator Scott Bolton from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said earlier this week in a statement. “We use every known technique to see through Jupiter’s clouds and reveal the secrets Jupiter holds of our solar system’s early history. It just seems right that the sun is helping us learn about the origin of Jupiter and the other planets that orbit it.”
“It is cool we got the record and that our dedicated team of engineers and scientists can chalk up another first in space exploration,” he added. “But the best is yet to come. We are achieving these records and venturing so far out for a reason – to better understand the biggest world in our solar system and thereby better understand where we came from.”
Spacecraft set to surpass the 500 million mile mark
Only eight spacecraft, all of which traveled using nuclear power, have ever made it more than 500 million miles from Earth. Juno is just the second solar-powered vehicle to ever make it past the asteroid belt, and as it moves closer to its July 4 rendezvous with Jupiter, it will be collecting just 1/25th as much energy from the sun has it did at the start of its journey, Gizmodo said.
Fortunately for NASA, Juno’s massive solar power arrays—which were nearly too big for the spacecraft to launch back in 2011—are extremely efficient at converting sunlight into energy. They have a 28-percent conversion rate, or enough to generate 500 watts of power after it reaches Jupiter. That’s not a ton of power, but it’s enough to keep it fully operational.
Once the spacecraft reaches its destination this summer, it will spend the next year orbiting the planet 33 times. Juno will come to within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops every two weeks, the US space agency explained, during which time it will be studying the planet’s auroras to learn more about its origins, atmosphere, magnetosphere, and structure. Once it reaches its maximum distance from the sun, Juno will have traveled 517 million miles.
Salem witch trials execution site finally found, and it’s behind a Walgreens
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
After centuries of debate and six years of work by researchers trying to pin down the exact site, scholars have confirmed that they have indeed found the precise location where the Salem witch trials took place— and as it turns out, you can buy cough syrup after checking it out!
According to CBS Boston and the New York Daily News, the infamous witch trials, at which 19 innocent people were hanged in 1692, are located at Proctor’s Ledge, a wooded grove located in between Proctor and Pope Streets in the Massachusetts town.
Specifically, the site is at the base of a hill near the current location of a Walgreens drug store, Salem State University professor Emerson Baker and his colleagues told members of the media. They used a combination of solar technology and ancient documents to confirm the location.
“We are happy to be able to bring years of debate to an end. Our analysis draws upon multiple lines of research to confirm the location of the executions,” Baker said. Town officials said that they planned to put a memorial plaque at the location to mark its historical significance.
No victims buried on the site, according to researchers
In 1936, Salem acquired the land at the base of Gallows Hill and declared that it would “be held forever as a public park” known as “Witch Memorial Land,” according to CBS Boston. The area was never marked, however, leading many to believe that the executions took place at the top of the hill, not its base.
Baker and a team of scholars known as the Gallows Hill Project team investigated, and found that the hangings actually occurred at a rocky ledge closer to the base of the hill. Included among the evidence they studied was the research of early 20th century historian Sidney Perley, as well as eyewitness accounts from trial documents, several different maps and sonar technology.
“This is part of our history, and this is an opportunity for us to be honest about what took place,” Salem mayor Kimberley Driscoll told the Boston Globe. She went on to tell CBS Boston that it was “important” to known the history of the trials, as it was “a pivotal part of American history” and that it “definitely feels like something we make… we honor.”
At the time of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge was public land where residents could allow their sheep to graze, Baker told the newspaper. It was named for Thorndike Proctor, the descendant of a witch trial victim (John Proctor) who purchased the land in the 1700s. The Gallows Hill Project research also concluded that no victims of the witch trials are buried on the land.
Mammoth carcass reveals humans roamed the Arctic earlier than we thought
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Humans may have roamed the Arctic up to 10,000 years earlier than previously believed, as the newfound carcass of a prehistoric mammoth shows evidence that the creature had been attacked by spears or arrows, according to a new study published Friday in the journal Science.
A team of Russian scientists working in the Siberian Arctic found the mammoth remains, which have been dated to 45,000 years ago, according to the AFP. Previously, most researchers thought that mankind had not started living in the region until between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago.
Vladimir Pitulko, an archaeologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, wrote that the mammoth carcass his team discovered showed indications of both pre- and post-mortem injuries that had been inflicted by weapons—including gouges and dents on the ribs and damage to the right tusk and mandible consistent with a spear or arrow attack.
“Advancements in mammoth hunting probably allowed people to survive and spread widely across northernmost Arctic Siberia at this time,” they wrote, adding that this would have marked “an important cultural shift—one that likely facilitated the arrival of humans in the area close to the Bering land bridge, providing them an opportunity to enter the New World.”
Early Arctic peoples relied upon mammoth ivory for weapons
According to ScienceNews, the remains belonged to a 15-year-old male mammoth were recovered from a frozen coastal bluff in the central part of the Siberian Arctic at about 72 degrees North latitude (more than 1,500 km north of previously found human habitation sites in the area). A leg bone and nearby sediment were carbon dated to 45,000 years old.
People who lived in the unforgiving Arctic conditions at this time likely were hunter-gatherers, Pitulko told Reuters. Since mammoths were the largest land creatures in the area, they proved to be an important source of food, as well as fuel (from their dung, fat, and bones) and materials for tools (from their bones and ivory).
The ivory was particularly important, he explained to Popular Archaeology, because it “became a substitution for materials used for shafts and points long and strong enough for killing large animals, not necessarily the mammoth. Such tools are found elsewhere in the Upper Paleolithic, and this includes even full-size spears of ivory which are known from [the sites of] Sunghir, European Russia or from Berelekh, Siberia. This innovation became a really important discovery for humans and finally helped them in surviving and settling these landscapes.”
Breakthroughs in mammoth hunting may have made it possible for humans to survive and spread throughout Arctic Siberia during this time, the researchers noted, and could have helped facilitate the arrival of humans in territory near the Bering land bridge—meaning early humans could have had the opportunity to cross over into the New World prior to the Last Glacial Maximum.
“This is especially important for questions related to the peopling of the New World, because now we know that the eastern Siberia up to its arctic limits was populated starting at roughly 50,000 years ago,” Pitulko explained. “Until 15,000 years ago, sea-level (though changing) still remained low, which is clear from appropriate dates on terrestrial animals in the New Siberian islands. This presumes that the Bering land Bridge existed probably most or part of this time, so the New World gate remained open.”
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Feature Image: V. PITULKO ET AL/SCIENCE 2016
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