‘Back door’ into the brain may be linked to cocaine addiction
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Drug addiction is a devastating disease that tends to rip lives apart, and often people find it’s easiest just to blame an addict for their own problems—but a new study out of Cambridge has added to the growing pile of evidence that addiction is far more complicated than someone’s willful lack of self-control. In fact, the researchers discovered a sort of “back door” in the brain that completely skips over self-control in the first place.
The study, which is published in Nature Communications, sought to explain why, in the case of relapses, only four out of ten people who do so felt actual cravings for the drug—meaning that six out of ten people who relapse do so for reasons other than “needing” it.
“Most people who use cocaine do so initially in search of a hedonic ‘high’,” said David Belin, from the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge, in a statement. “In some individuals, though, frequent use leads to addiction, where use of the drug is no longer voluntary, but ultimately becomes a compulsion. We wanted to understand why this should be the case.”
The researchers looked to the brains of rats addicted to cocaine for answers.
Previously, research by Barry Everitt from the Department of Psychology at Cambridge showed that, in the case of rats being allowed to self-administer cocaine, the rats who sought the drug showed activity tied to dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with happiness) in a brain region known as the nucleus accumbens—which is associated with “goal-directed” behavior. As in: The goal was to continue pleasurable feelings.
But this brain activity quickly shifted following prolonged exposure to cocaine. Dopamine activity began to occur now in the dorsolateral striatum, a brain area associated with habitual behavior—suggesting that the rats had lost control, and had developed a drug-taking habit.
At the same time, chronic exposure to drugs also alters a region known as the basolateral amygdala, which is associated with linking a stimulus to an emotion. In this way, the basolateral amygdala actually ties cocaine (a stimulus) to pleasurable feelings, and then stores them as memories.
Or, in short, the rats soon developed an automatic habit by way of cocaine use, and the basolateral amygdala strengthened the habit by storing positive associations and memories in connection to the drug.
Decisions, decisions
The prefrontal cortex, or the control center of the brain, was thought to ultimately decide whether or not an addicted person continues their habits. To do so, it recalls the memories stored in the basolateral amygdala, but does not just take into account the good feelings found there when deciding whether or not a person should take a drug.
Instead, it manipulates such information, weighing in other factors to help it come to a choice. A common thought was, in the brains of addicts, the other factors (like cravings) overwhelmed the prefrontal cortex’s ability to decide, leading to further drug abuse.
However, for the six out of ten people who relapsed while feeling no cravings, this model didn’t quite fit—and that’s where the new research undertaken by the Cambridge team entered.
They have discovered that in rats chronically exposed to the drug, the decision-making prefrontal cortex isn’t overwhelmed by information while trying to decide—because it’s actually skipped over entirely, granting it no chance to stop the behavior.
In actuality, the pleasurable-memory storing basolateral amygdala indirectly links to the habit-associated dorsolateral striatum, avoiding the prefrontal cortex. Which means that an addicted individual might not be aware of their desire to relapse.
“We’ve always assumed that addiction occurs through a failure of our self-control, but now we know this is not necessarily the case,” explained Belin. “We’ve found a back door directly to habitual behaviour.
“Drug addiction is mainly viewed as a psychiatric disorder, with treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy focused on restoring the ability of the prefrontal cortex to control the otherwise maladaptive drug use. But we’ve shown that the prefrontal cortex is not always aware of what is happening, suggesting these treatments may not always be effective.”
‘Green pea’ galaxies may have reheated the universe after the Big Bang
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
In research that could help solve a longstanding mystery about the evolution of the universe, a team of University of Geneva researchers believe they have discovered why the period of post-Big Bang cooling ended after about one billion years and things began to heat up again.
After the Big Bang first caused the universe to heat up, atoms started forming and the universe began to expand. As it cooled down, matter condensed, forming stars and galaxies over the next several hundred thousand years. At one point, however, things started to once again heat up, and the element hydrogen returned to an ionized state, as it was shortly after the Big Bang.
This took place in a period known as “cosmic reionization”, and according to Gizmodo, it has long puzzled scientists. What could have caused it to happen? How was this transformation even possible? Now, as they reported in a recently-published Nature study, the Geneva team believes it has found the answer: a class of high-energy galaxies known as “green pea galaxies”.
First discovered in 2007, green pea galaxies are extremely compact, but for years experts have suspected that they emitted enough energy to re-ionize hydrogen, the website explained. In an attempt to determine whether or not this was the case, the study authors analyzed data pertaining to green pea galaxies and found one actively ejecting ionized hydrogen.
Anomalies detected at galaxy J0925 could solve the mystery
The astronomers, led by Yuri Izotov of the Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, located the galaxy in question, J0925, using the Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy, which is roughly three billion light-years away, was found to be intensely “ejecting” ionizing photons, the research team said, thus demonstrating that these galaxies may explain cosmic reionization.
In a statement, the scientists noted that J0925 also has an unusual signal: one of the spectral lines of hydrogen it emits (its Lyman-alpha spectrum) is far stronger and more narrow than most other galaxies, which will enable them to search for other galaxies that may have been responsible for the cosmic reionization and the reheating of the universe some 13 to 14 billion years ago.
These observations could be a big step forward in the research of the early universe, according to the researchers. They plan to conduct further observations using the Hubble telescope to confirm their findings, and to help better understand the unusual photon ejection mechanisms responsible for cosmic reionization.
More detailed analysis should be possible once the NASA James Webb Space Telescope is launched in 2018. That instrument will “allow astronomers to discover and study in detail the first galaxies and sources of cosmic reionization,” the university added. “Largely unknown so far, the early Universe starts to be revealed.”
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Feature Image: Ivana Orlitová, Astronomical Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague)
Ancient pre-Roman burials reveal strong social hierarchy
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
You can tell a lot about a civilization by how they bury their dead, and University of Cincinnati researchers recently examined the bereavement practices of pre-Roman peoples living in the Central Apulian region of Italy and learned much about their culture.
In her investigations, Bice Peruzzi, a doctoral student in the university’s Department of Classics, looked at the burial logistics, the treatment of deceased bodies, and the contents of graves dating between 525 to 200 BC. She found evidence that a strong social hierarchy existed at the time.
“After going through volumes of collected material, I realized that there was so much more that could be said about what was happening in the development of this particular culture. In spite of having no written history, I was able to distinguish three different periods and then connect them to the larger Mediterranean history to see how their society changed,” said Peruzzi.
Tracking the changes in burial customs from 525 to 200 BC
She also found that the number of tombs increased exponentially over a period of 50 years in the mid- to late-4th century, indicating that new social groups had started to adopt ceremonial burials complete with a brief ceremony that featured dancing and a banquet to honor the dead.
Greek vases and artifacts were discovered among the contents of Apulian tombs dating from 525 to 350 BC, some of which depicted women courting, participating in wine offerings, or being part of a procession. Wine cups, feasting sets, and weapons were among the other finds, with all of the items purposefully selected to represent the deceased’s role in the community, she noted.
Tombs dating from 350 to 300 BC showed a continued emphasis on battle, banquets, and women, but the increased number of tombs indicates that additional social groups had started to adopt the banquet-style funeral by this time. However, she also found evidence that the upper classes started to change their burial practices to distinguish themselves from the commoners.
Finally, in those dating from 300 BC to 200 BC, Peruzzi observed a marked shift away from the use of individual tombs to larger, more elaborate burial chambers that often housed the bodies of entire families. Graves from this era also showed a change to less ornate vase designs, as well as the replacement of weapons as grave ornaments with other, smaller personal artifacts.
“By looking at artifacts in their archaeological and social context, I was able to illustrate changes never before recognized,” Peruzzi said. “From the emergence of new social groups at the end of the 6th century BC to the gradual urbanization and separation of ‘ethnic’ groups during the 3rd century BC, the evolution of funerary practices can be successfully used to highlight major transformations in the social organization of Central Apulia communities.”
Water ice found on Rosetta’s comet sheds light on comet’s origins
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Yes, there is water ice on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Observations conducted by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft shortly after its arrival in 2014 have confirmed.
The ESA announced the finding Wednesday in a press release, explaining that while water vapor can be seen flowing from the comet, the vast majority of the ice appears to be beneath the comet’s crust. Precious few samples of exposed water ice have been detected on the surface.
As New Scientist explained, this doesn’t exactly come as a shock, as previous comet fly-bys had spotted microscopic grains of ice on the surface. The new research, published earlier this week in the journal Nature, used Rosetta’s infrared detector to find exposed ice grains on cliff faces.
That infrared detector, dubbed the VIRTIS instrument, analyzed the topmost layer of Comet 67P and found that it is coated primarily in a dark, dry, and organic-rich material, the ESA said. There is a tiny amount of H2O mixed into that material, however, the organization added.
Discovery sheds new light on the comet’s composition
Lead author Gianrico Filacchione of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Italy, and his colleagues reviewed observations conducted by the VIRTIS instrument between September and November 2014. They found two areas, tens of meters long, in the comet’s Imhotep region that appear as bright patches in visible light and contained significant amounts of water ice.
The pure water ice was found to make up approximately five percent of each pixel sampling area and had an average temperature of around -120 degrees Celsius when detected, the ESA said. By comparing these infrared measurements to models evaluating how various-sized ice grains could be mixed together in one pixel, they calculated the abundance of the frozen water.
They found two different types of grains: one that is several tens of micrometers in diameter, and another that is much larger (nearly two millimeters in size). The latter ones are much bigger than any that had been previously detected, New Scientist explained, which indicates they likely grew more slowly. The researchers believe the ice formed when the comet was far away from the sun.
Co-author Murthy Gudipati, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Los Angeles Times that the discovery was “exciting because now we are starting to understand the upper dynamic layers of the comet and how they evolved… We knew water ice made up the majority of the comet, but we didn’t know how deep or in what condition it was. This shows that it not very deep at all – perhaps just a few feet beneath the surface.”
Australian environmentalists want to use herpes virus to kill invasive carp
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Australian fishers, farmers, and environmentalists have taken enough crap from carp—and they’re calling for deadly measures. According to the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), they’re aiming for a virus to be released that will wipe out most of the carp population.
Carp is a species that was introduced to Australia around 1859, although they didn’t really take off in terms of population until the early 1900s. Since then, they have become a growing problem, as they feed on the bottoms of rivers, making the water cloudy. This harms native fish’s ability to reproduce, and also stunts plant growth. Besides this, carp also are direct competitors with other native species for habitats, and have even been known to feed on their young.
Because of this, there have been huge declines in the populations of native fish across freshwater ecosystems—especially in the Murray-Darling Basin, an inland waterway that encompasses around one-seventh of Australia’s landmass.
Now, some of Australia’s largest fishing, farming, and environmental groups—such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, National Farmers’ Federation, Invasive Species Council, and the National Irrigators’ Council—are calling for carp annihilation.
Koi herpes virus to annihilate crappy carp
Their hope rests on the koi herpes virus (KHV), a DNA-based virus that is of the same family as (you guessed it) herpes simplex virus. The first recognized case of the virus occurred in the UK in 1996, and it has been known to kill up to 100 percent of all carp while ignoring other fish species—which would have obvious benefits.
According to Allan Hansard, the head of the Australian Recreational Fishing Foundation, should the virus prove effective, inland waterways would return to almost the same condition they were in before the carp were introduced.
“People say inland waterways like the Murray-Darling used to be clear, wouldn’t it be great to see that?” Hansard said to the SMH.
Long-studied, clean bill of health
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, has been testing the koi herpes virus since 2007. The head of the research project, Ken McColl, told the SMH that it could potentially kill 70 to 90 percent of carp.
McColl also said that the research has shown no ill effects in regards to the native fish, and that testing done on invertebrates, mammals, and birds showed no negative results either. In Europe, the virus has not spread to other species or humans either.
“It’s potentially a white knight for removing, or at least reducing, carp numbers significantly in the Murray-Darling Basin,” McColl said.
Didn’t they do this in a Michael Crichton book?
Of course, killing off a species that accounts for 90 percent of the fish biomass in the Murray-Darling Basin would be pretty messy; millions of tons of dead fish would have to be cleaned from rivers and other freshwater regions. The groups proposing the virus’ release have concluded that community engagement and clean-up efforts would have to follow the release.
But more than that, herpes viruses have spread from animals to humans before—from mice and macaques. While the koi herpes virus currently shows no signs of making this leap, mutations could theoretically make it possible.
Further, while koi herpes virus mainly infects carp, it also infects and kills koi—meaning anyone with an ornamental pond is at risk of losing their fish. The route of transmission here would be more indirect, as transmission requires things such as direct contact with an infected fish; with fluids from infected fish; or contact with water, mud, or other vectors (like birds) that have come into contact with contaminated systems. Still, the risk is there, and koi can be very expensive.
But perhaps the last problem: While there is a vaccine for the virus, it is not approved for broodstock (breeding fish) or fish smaller than 100 grams—meaning baby fish are out of luck. Worse, there is no treatment for koi herpes virus, so if something goes wrong, there is no way to stop it. This could especially become a problem since the carp that survive the virus may become carriers, spreading it further throughout the ecosystem.
A spokesman for Australia’s Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, told the SMH that any proposals to help eradicate carp would be considered “exclusively on the basis of science, and against the most rigorous standards.”
While it may have sounded absurd at first, doctors are increasingly taking a serious look at using feces to treat everything from diseases of the digestive tract to obesity.
In a new clinical trial, scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital will be using pills of freeze-dried fecal material to determine “the impact of gut bacteria on weight”.
The concept behind administering feces as medicine is that a person’s ailment or health issue is being supported by an unhealthy balance of the gut’s symbiotic bacteria. The technique has been used to successfully treat a deadly hospital superbug, Clostridium difficule.
In the new MGH trial, volunteers will get weekly fecal pills for six weeks, and their weight and health will be taken at three, six, and twelve months from the start of the study. The volunteers will continue with their regular consumption and health habits throughout the study.
“The pills are odorless, tasteless and double-encapsulated to ensure they will not release until they reach the right location in the large intestine,” study leader Dr. Elaine Yu, a clinical research at MGH, told the New York Daily News.
Yu said volunteers won’t be capable of telling if they’re ingesting fecal pills or the placebos because they are being so cautiously created and tightly controlled with the Food and Drug Administration. The Massachusetts researcher admitted to Ars Technica, “We have no idea what the result will be.”
The new trial builds on a study from several years ago, where scientists extracted the gut microbes from a pair of twins—one thin, one obese—and transplanted them into two sets of microbe-free mice. Despite the fact that all the mice were on the same diet, the rodents that acquired the obese twin’s microbes became fat. The mice that received the lean twin’s mix remained slim, indicating the microbes were indeed playing a role in the mice’s weight.
Furthermore, a woman recently received a fecal matter transplant (FMT) to help remedy a chronic infection from Clostridium difficile. The donor was the woman’s daughter, who was overweight. After the operation, the woman was relieved of her infection, but strangely gained weight.
Yu said she hopes microbe treatments become part of a suite of interventions for obesity and metabolic disorders.
Forty-five whales die after becoming beached in India
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Dozens of short-finned pilot whales have washed ashore in southern India, and while 36 of the disoriented creatures have been rescued and taken back to sea, another 45 have died.
According to theGuardian and the New York Times, local fishermen first reported seeing a pod of whales swimming near the shores of Tiruchendur beach in the state of Tamil Nadu on Monday evening. They contacted police, who then informed officials at the local Fisheries Department.
Authorities and fishermen set out in boats attempting to guide the creatures back out to sea, one member of that department told the Times, but 81 of them still ended up beaching themselves on a nearly six-mile stretch of the beach. It is unclear what attracted them to the area, but the matter is being investigated by the district Veterinary Department.
Lack of a leader may have caused disorientation, experts say
More than 100 local volunteers joined members of the Fisheries Department in their efforts to rescue the whales and return them out to sea. As for those whales that did not survive the ordeal, local authorities are bringing in tractors and bulldozers to help bury them, the Times said.
“This is the first time this has happened in the area,” Tuticorin district forest officer S.A. Raju said. “The whales were being constantly pulled toward the sea but they kept coming back. The local fishermen helped. If they had not sounded the alarm, all 81 of them would have died.”
Ravi Kumar, the head government official in the port town, told the Associated Press that pilot whales typically travel in pods, and since the creatures appeared to be disoriented, the lack of a leader may have caused them to become confused, thus causing the incident.
“It appears the whales are in shock,” an unidentified scientist affiliated with the Central Marine Fisheries Institute noted, according to the Hindustan Times. A forest department worker who did not identify himself also told the publication that there were signs of injuries on the dead whales which likely came from “high intensity” underwater activity.
This activity “may have happened hundreds of kilometers away”, with tides washing the whales onto the beach, he added. The last time local residents reported seeing this many beached whales was more than 40 years ago, when 140 washed ashore in 1973, the newspaper noted.
NASA’s new space rovers could be soft blobs with fluid-filled bladder sacs
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A patent awarded to NASA last week details plans for a new amorphous robot that suggests that the US space agency is planning to move away from its traditional “lab-on-wheels” type of rover in favor of a radical redesign inspired by worms and amoebas.
According to Gizmodo and Motherboard, the proposed new rover design would ditch wheels or treads as the preferred form of locomotion in favor of a method in which it would slither around like a blob. The vehicle, which would be soft, could alternately use electromagnets or a sac that would alternately expand and deflate in order to slink like a slug, the patent indicated.
NASA has dubbed the proposed rover the “amorphous surface robot”, and reports indicate that it was designed to overcome several of the issues that face large, heavy traditional rovers which are susceptible to the harsh conditions of the planets they explore. The new design could help NASA explore terrain that would cause current rovers to become bogged down or stuck.
The patent also said that the rover would include “a compartmented bladder containing fluid, a valve assembly, and an outer layer encapsulating the bladder and valve assembly. The valve assembly draws fluid from a compartment(s) and discharges the drawn fluid into a designated compartment to displace the designated compartment with respect to the surface.”
Four designs being considered by NASA researchers
In addition to being better equipped to handle potentially hazardous terrain, NASA’s new rover concept would also purportedly be better protected from harsh conditions on planets it explores—making it less susceptible to damage than conventional rovers, Motherboard explained.
“Amorphous robots are useful in dusty and sandy environments in which greater mobility, passive shape changing, and immunity to dust and contamination are important. This includes both surface and subsurface robotic exploration” the agency said on its official project website, adding that the machines would also be “useful in emergency and industrial activities, such as search and rescue… and inspection of oil pipelines or sewage systems.”
Four different possible designs are being considered at the Langley Research Center in Virginia: the Bladder Bot, which uses a fluid-filled blatter and circulating high-viscosity fluid to move; the Inchworm Robot, which has a tube-like design and uses electromagnets to move like a worm; the Electromagnetic Sphere Robot, which uses electromagnetic spheres in a flexible, fluid filled bladder to move; and the Polymer Cell Robot, which is a shell that contains polymeric cells which swell or contract in order to make the rover roll.
“Traditional rovers like the Curiosity on Mars or the Yutu on the Moon have defined planetary exploration for the past half-century, and remain powerful symbols of our off-Earth reach,” said Motherboard. “But future explorers may resemble blobfish, worms, ants, or even locust swarms more than the remote-controlled cars that made the first inroads on other worlds.”
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Feature Image: NASA/United States Patent and Trademark Office
Scary ancient crocodile discovered in Tunisia was the size of a bus
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Researchers conducting an expedition in the Tunisian desert have made a colossal discovery: the largest sea-dwelling crocodile ever found—a creature previously unknown to scientists that grew to lengths of more than 30 feet and weighed as much as three tons.
The new creature, discovered by a team led by Federico Fanti from the University of Bologna in Italy and detailed in a paper published Monday in the journal Cretaceous Research, was found in 120 million year old rock and named Machimosaurusrex, according to National Geographic.
While the fossils they found have been described as fragmented, Fanti’s team discovered enough remains to identify the new species as the largest-ever reptile of its kind. Included among the fossils was a skull that was five-feet long, and a handful of other bones, the Washington Post reported.
While Machimosaurus rex was not as large as freshwater-dwelling crocodiles, it was the biggest ocean-dwelling one ever to roam the Earth. Fanti described the creature as “massive”, telling the Post that it was “almost the size of a bus” and was likely the area’s dominant predator.
Nope. Credit: Marco Auditore
Creature was an ambush predator that survived a mass extinction
However, as National Geographic pointed out, the study authors, whose work was supported by the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration, plan to wait until they are able to find a more complete skeleton before they determine precisely how large the creature was.
The Machimosaurus rex remains were found buried below a few inches of sediment on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and while the size of the creature is noteworthy, paleontologists are just as excited, if not more, about when the creature is believed to have lived, as the group which it was a part of was thought to have died out in a mass extinction 145 million years ago.
As the researchers explained, the discovery of this new creature indicated that if there was indeed a mass extinction at the end of the Jurassic period, it did not kill off creatures everywhere—at least some members of the group known as the teleosaurids survived the event, as the newfound Machimosaurus rex specimen lived approximately 130 million years ago.
As for this massive, ancient crocodile, Fanti and his colleagues explained that it was probably an ambush hunter, using its powerful jaws and its round, short teeth to target several different types of prey, including large marine turtles. It had a “remarkable” bite force, thanks to the tremendous size of its skull, and likely waited in shallow water for its victims to come too close to the shore.
Archaeologists discover world’s oldest tea buried with Chinese emperor Liu Qi
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
In a bit of a brewed awakening, the world’s oldest tea has been discovered inside the tomb of a Chinese emperor by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Up until now, the oldest unambiguous text reference to tea being consumed as a beverage dates back to 59 BCE, during the Western Han Dynasty. Meanwhile, the oldest physical evidence of tea was from 960-1127 CE, during the Northern Song Dynasty.
But, according to the paper, which is published in the journal Nature, new physical evidence places tea in China are 141 BCE—or around 2,150 years ago.
It was discovered in the Han Yangling Mausoleum, which was built for the Jing Emperor Liu Qi. Liu Qi died around 141 BCE, and was buried with weapons, pottery figurines, ceramic animals full-sized chariots, and various plants: Millet, rice, and chenopod (a flowering plant of the amaranth family), which were identifiable by shape and chemical analysis. Also found was a dark brown brick that seemed to have been composed of leaves—although their shape had long been lost.
The Emperor only drank the best brews
Using mass spectrometry, the researchers were able to examine the leaves for their caffeine content (as caffeine is an uncommon plant alkaloid) and theanine (an amino acid only found in certain plants of the family Theaceae, especially Camellia sinensis, the tea plant). Further, the researchers detected high levels of calcium oxalate crystals that fit the morphological shape of crystals in modern tea leaves.
Taken together, all three—theanine, caffeine, and crystals—pointed to the brown brick containing tea leaves. But not just any tea leaves: The composition showed that the tea was mostly composed of tea buds, granting it the distinction of being “fine plucked” or “Imperial” tea. Naturally, the Emperor only drank the best.
“The discovery shows how modern science can reveal important previously unknown details about ancient Chinese culture,” Professor Dorian Fuller, Director of the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology, told the Independent.
“The identification of the tea found in the emperor’s tomb complex gives us a rare glimpse into very ancient traditions which shed light on the origins of one of the world’s favourite beverages.”
Scientists finally figure out how to make concrete on Mars
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Mankind may still be many years away from making it to Mars, but the list of things that we will be able to do once we get there keeps growing, as a team of Northwestern University researchers has come up with a way to make concrete out of materials native to the Red Planet.
As Engadget and the MIT Technology Review explained, Lin Wan, a chemistry professor in the Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Science, and her colleagues devised a method which involves heating sulfur until it melts, mixing it with Martian soil, and then allowing it to cool.
The method would enable astronauts to build permanent structures to replace the temporary ones they would bring with them upon their departure from Earth. Furthermore, their technique would not require the use of any water—which is certain to be in short supply at a new Mars colony.
While Wan’s team has only tested their so-called Martian concrete formula in lab conditions on Earth, their research could go help ensure that the transition to life on the Red Planet is a little bit easier for the first colonists, while also allowing them to lighten their load by limiting the amount of construction materials they need to bring with them when they depart from Earth.
This probably would have made Matt Damon’s life a lot easier
To make the Martian concrete, the Northwestern researchers heated sulfur to about 240 degrees Celsius, which turned it into a liquid. They then mixed it with simulated Martian soil made from primarily silicon dioxide and aluminum oxide, and allowed it to solidify, according to MIT.
As the sulfur cooled, it served to bind the soil-based aggregate to create concrete. They also used particles of various sizes and experimented with different mixtures to find the optimal version of the Martian concrete. Following a series of tests, they concluded that the best mix was 50 percent sulfur and 50 percent Martian soil with a maximum aggregate size of one millimeter.
“The optimal mix developed as Martian Concrete has an unconfined compressive strength of above 50 MPa, which corresponds to a roughly 150 MPa concrete on Mars due to the difference in gravity between Mars and Earth,” Lin and her colleagues wrote. For the sake of comparison, MIT noted that residential building standards on Earth only require concrete with a compressive strength of roughly 20 MPa— indicating that the Martian concrete is strong stuff, indeed.
Furthermore, the study authors noted that their concrete is quick-setting, relatively easy to use, cheap in comparison to materials transported from Earth, and easily be recycled and reused by heating it until the sulfur melts. A paper detailing their research is now available on the arXiv prepublication server.
Smoking hookah is substantially worse for you than smoking cigarettes, study says
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
While cigarette smoking rates may be falling, statistics have been showing a rise in the popularity of smoking tobacco with communal water-pipes called hookahs.
According to a new research review published in the journal Public Health Reports, hookahs are not a harmless alternative to cigarettes, as the water pipes unleash a large load of toxicants into users’ lungs.
In the study, scientists examined more than 540 scientific articles relevant to cigarette and hookah smoking and narrowed them down to just 17 scientific studies that included sufficient information on toxicants inhaled when smoking cigarettes or hookahs.
The study team saw that one hookah session provides about 125 times the smoke, 25 times the tar, 2.5 times the nicotine, and 10 times the carbon monoxide compared to a single cigarette.
“Our results show that hookah tobacco smoking poses real health concerns and that it should be monitored more closely than it is currently,” Dr. Brian A. Primack, assistant vice chancellor at the Univertisy of Pittsburgh’s Schools of the Health Sciences, said in a statement.
“For example, hookah smoking was not included in the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey System questionnaire, which assesses cigarette smoking, chewing tobacco, electronic cigarettes and many other forms of substance abuse.”
The study team admitted contrasting a hookah smoking session to smoking a single cigarette is a delicate comparison due to the variances in smoking patterns. For example, a regular cigarette smoker may smoke 20 cigarettes per day, while a regular hookah smoker may only take part in a few sessions each day.
Not a perfect comparison
“It’s not a perfect comparison because people smoke cigarettes and hookahs in very different ways,” Primack said. “We had to conduct the analysis this way—comparing a single hookah session to a single cigarette—because that’s the way the underlying studies tend to report findings. So, the estimates we found cannot tell us exactly what is ‘worse.’ But what they do suggest is that hookah smokers are exposed to a lot more toxicants than they probably realize.
“After we have more fine-grained data about usage frequencies and patterns, we will be able to combine those data with these findings and get a better sense of relative overall toxicant load,” he added.
Steven Hawking’s new paper could finally solve the black hole information paradox
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Last August, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking revealed that he and two colleagues were working on a paper that could finally resolve the black hole information paradox, a controversial phenomenon which essentially states that physical information is destroyed by black holes.
The paradox exists because information about physical matter should not permanently disappear—not even in these dense, gravitationally-strong regions of space time—based on fundamental rules of science that state that the data should, in principle, be fundamentally conserved.
Now, Hawking and co-authors Malcolm Perry from the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Andrew Strominger from the Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature at Harvard University, have at long last published their highly anticipated paper online at the arXiv prepublication server and provided details about their new hypothesis.
The paper is extremely technical in nature, but as ScienceAlert and ScienceNews explained, the possible solution to the information paradox lies in so-called “hairs” believed to form on a black hole’s event horizon. These “hairs” could form a kind of two-dimensional hologram that would essentially preserve an object’s blueprint—even if its physical parts are destroyed.
How Hawking radiation can transmit an object’s information blueprint
More than four decades ago, Hawking first proposed that the universe was filled with so-called “virtual particles” that, based on scientists’ knowledge of quantum mechanics, come in and out of existence and annihilate each other on contact—unless they appear on either side of an event horizon, that is. In this case, one is consumed and the other radiates into space.
As that radiation escapes, it takes some of the energy of the black hole with it, causing the black hole to slowly lose mass and eventually vanish altogether. Based on Hawking’s original proposal, the information swallowed up by a black hole should be lost forever, which should be impossible according to the theories of quantum mechanics. Thus, the information paradox was born.
In 1973, theoretical physicist John Wheeler first made reference to a black hole’s “hair” when he said that they had none, by which he meant that they were featureless. This launched a debate: if black holes had no hair, it mean that there was no discernible difference between any of them, no matter how much information they had consumed, ScienceAlert explained. But if they have hair, as Hawking argues, there should be slight deformities that make each one distinct.
These deformities could then potentially be used to determine what information a black hole had consumed during its lifetime, and in their new paper, Hawking and his colleagues assert that they have made progress towards proving that these hairs do actually exist. As Strominger noted in an interview with Scientific American, they demonstrate that when a charged particle enters, it adds a soft photon, a “hair”, to the black hole, allowing it to act like “a recording device”.
Then, as the black hole ejects photons (a phenomenon called Hawking radiation), light particles could collect the information blueprint from the black hole’s event horizon and transport it back into the universe, resolving the paradox. Now that the paper has been published online, it will be able to undergo a peer review, and if Hawking is correct in saying that the existence of the hairs can be proven, his would could ultimately earn him a Nobel Prize.
Unidentified space balls—large metallic spheres, that is, not Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis—fell from the sky and landed in northern Vietnam on Saturday, various media outlets have reported.
According to CBC News, a total of three metal spheres were spotted in the sky by witnesses who also reported hearing noises similar to thunder before the objects crash-landed. Two balls, one of which weighed 250 grams and the other weighing six kilograms, landed in Yen Bai province.
The smaller of those two spheres hit the roof of a house, while the larger one landed in a garden, they added. A third, much larger one weighing up to 45 kilograms landed in a stream near a corn field in nearby Tuyen Quang province. All three have scorched surfaces, according to Mashable.
The balls, which are believed to have been Russian in origin due to the Russian writing on their sides, were seized by the Vietnamese government and are being investigated by defense officials. Their findings will be reported to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
So where did these space balls come from, anyway?
There was some initial speculation that the metallic spheres came from the Vietnamese Army, but reports indicate that those theories have been disproven, largely due to the Russian writing found on their sides—although the orbs still might have been sold to another country.
Investigators have determined that the objects are actually compressed air tanks, possibly from a rocket or a satellite, and are in essence space junk. Nguyen Khoa Son, a professor at Vietnam’s State Space Science and Technology Program, told VietnamNet Bridge that they likely fell from an altitude of less than 100 kilometers, since they were still intact after impact.
Furthermore, the investigators have confirmed that the balls are pure metal, are not radioactive, and contain no explosive materials. Son and experts from the Vietnam Space Center believe that the objects might have been from a liquid gas tank from a satellite’s control engine. However, no official conclusions have been reached and the investigation is still ongoing, government officials emphasized.
The incident is similar to one that occurred last November, when similar strange metal orbs were reported in Spain and Turkey. Those orbs, where were up to 45 kilograms large, were also said to be space junk, most likely from an aerospace vehicle or a satellite, The Express reported.
Roman toilets and bathhouses were actually bad for public health, study says
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Romans have long been viewed as one of the more cleanly ancient societies. They had heated public baths which people visited regularly, public multi-seat latrines, sewage systems, and laws crafted to keep their towns free from garbage and excrement, among other things.
But new archaeological research out of Cambridge indicates that, despite all these sanitary measures, the Romans weren’t as clean as we had thought. In fact, their levels of parasites were actually higher than members of the preceding Iron Age.
According to the paper, which is published in Parasitology, researcher Piers Mitchell collected evidence from various excavations: ancient latrines, human burials, combs, textiles, and coprolites (fossilized feces). After studying the materials for the presence of parasites, Mitchell discovered that the Romans had a large increase in their numbers of intestinal parasites, like whipworm, roundworm, and Entamoeba histolytica, which causes dysentery.
He also made another surprising discovery: Despite a culture centered on bathhouses, ectoparasites like lice and fleas were as ubiquitous among the Romans as the Viking and medieval populations—where bathing was much less frequent. In fact, given the fact that special Roman combs seemingly for the removal of lice have been uncovered, delousing may have been a daily practice across the Empire.
A medical mystery
“Modern research has shown that toilets, clean drinking water and removing faeces from the streets all decrease risk of infectious disease and parasites,” said Mitchell in a statement. “So we might expect the prevalence of faecal oral parasites such as whipworm and roundworm to drop in Roman times – yet we find a gradual increase. The question is why?”
Mitchell himself offered several viable reasons. First, the bathhouses themselves could have been the culprit. Depending on the bathhouse, the water was not changed frequently, allowing layers of human dirt and cosmetics to cling to the surfaces—and easing the spread of parasites.
“Clearly, not all Roman baths were as clean as they might have been,” said Mitchell.
Another possibility: The Roman use of human fertilizer on crops. If the feces wasn’t composted for many months before being spread on fields, and parasite eggs could have been transferred to plants, in which they could survive until they were consumed by humans.
“It is possible that sanitation laws requiring the removal of faeces from the streets actually led to reinfection of the population as the waste was often used to fertilise crops planted in farms surrounding the towns,” Mitchell added.
The third possible source was a popular Roman sauce and medicine known as garum. Garum was made from fish, herbs, salt, and other flavorings, which was then set in sunlight to ferment. However, fish tapeworm likely hid inside garum—which was traded widely across the empire.
“The manufacture of fish sauce and its trade across the empire in sealed jars would have allowed the spread of the fish tapeworm parasite from endemic areas of northern Europe to all people across the empire. This appears to be a good example of the negative health consequences of conquering an empire,” he said.
Fresh as a summer’s breeze
Either way, the effects were clear: “This latest research on the prevalence of ancient parasites suggests that Roman toilets, sewers and sanitation laws had no clear benefit to public health,” said Mitchell. “The widespread nature of both intestinal parasites and ectoparasites such as lice also suggests that Roman public baths surprisingly gave no clear health benefit either.”
But there was an upside.
“It seems likely that while Roman sanitation may not have made people any healthier, they would probably have smelt better.”
Archaeologists uncover ancient Maya burial tomb in Guatemala
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Archaeologists from the University of Southern California (USC) have reportedly discovered a burial tomb at the remains of a Maya city in Guatemala that they believe could contain remains of a former member of the Mesoamerican civilization’s royalty.
As the researchers announced late last week, they had uncovered the burial chamber in the Five Temples section of El Zotz—an isolated site located deep within the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala said to have been inhabited by the indigenous peoples some 1,500 years ago.
Tom Garrison, and assistant professor USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and his colleagues reportedly found the tomb days before the end of the excavation season, and they had to work quickly to try and unearth and investigate the tomb before time ran out.
El Zotz, a roughly two square kilometer site in the heart of the jungle, features a massive palace and a large temple on a hill overlooking groups of smaller temples and other dwellings resting in the valley below. During the Maya era, it was called “Pa’chan”, which means “fortified sky”.
Search for a second tomb leads to surprising results
Six years ago, Garrison and his team discovered the intact tomb of a Maya king buried under one of the Temples, a 40-foot-tall pyramid that was the highest point in the city. The tomb was found at the very end of a trail dug by looters, and was hailed as one of 2010’s top discoveries.
Using their knowledge of other Maya temples from the era, the USC team theorized that another tomb may have also been built in front of the original chamber, but exhaustive search of the area believed to be the most likely place came up empty. Ultimately, however, they found the location of the second chamber when a low platform that was being cleaned simply gave way.
They found a small area that had been overtaken by tree roots and looted—not by humans, but by rats—who used those roots to enter the burial chamber. The rodents managed to destroy all of the organic material in the tomb, but Garrison’s team did find four polychrome bowls, including one that bore the name of a king, Bakab K’inich (“The sun god who is first in the land”).
Despite the tight deadline, the USC team managed to document the burial chamber and preserve its contents, completing their work just before the end of the field season. Garrison, who plans to return to the site next field season, said, “You never know… what you’re going to find in any given year. That’s the mystery, and part of the appeal, of archaeology.”
Mountain lion found with extra set of teeth coming out of its head
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A mountain lion killed earlier this month after attacking a dog near Preston, Idaho has sparked a bit of a biological mystery. Local Fish and Game officials examined the corpse of the creature and found that it had a second set of fully-formed teeth and whiskers on top of its head.
Idaho Fish and Game
According to the Associated Press and KTLA News in Los Angeles, the mountain lion had been legally killed by an unidentified hunter near the Utah border after it attacked his dog a week ago. When conversation officials inspected the animal’s carcass, they discovered the anomaly.
Photos of the deformity were sent to Zach Lockyer, a regional wildlife biologist at the Idaho Fish and Fish and Game’s Southeast Regional Office in Pocatello. He explained to reporters that there were teeth protruding from hard tissue on the left side of the creature’s forehead.
Lockyer said that that the hunter who shot and killed the mountain lion said that he plans to take the carcass to a taxidermist, according to the Idaho State Journal, but he and his fellow biologists have asked him to bring it in for X-rays and further analysis of its “bizarre” cranium.
So what might have caused this deformity?
Biologists have three theories as to what might have caused the mountain lion to grow teeth and whiskers on top of its forehead. The first suggests that the growth may actually be the remains of a conjoined twin that died in the womb and was absorbed into the other fetus.
Alternatively, Lockyer’s team and veterinarians told the AP and other media outlets that it could be a teratoma, or rare type of tumor known to contain hair, teeth, and bones. Both conjoined twins and teratomas are rare in nature, but the latter has been documented in canines and horses.
A third, less-likely theory submitted to the Idaho State Journal by Lockyer is that the mountain lion might have suffered an injury to its jaw, and its teeth healed in an unusual way, causing the abnormality to appear. However, the newspaper noted that the photos of the animal’s body show no evidence of any such injuries, and reveal that the teeth in its mouth appear to be healthy.
If Fish and Game officials can convince the hunter to bring the body in for further study, experts may be able to determine exactly what caused this bizarre feature. If not, Lockyer said, “we may never know why those teeth are there.”
Largest-ever galactic age map shows data of 70,000 stars
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
By measuring the ages of 70,000 stars throughout the Milky Way and using that data to create the largest-ever map of its kind, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and their colleagues have confirmed that the galaxy formed in the middle and grew outward.
Lead investigator Melissa Ness from the Heidelberg, Germany-based space research center, and her colleagues calculated the age of each individual star using data from both the Apogee Project and NASA’s Kepler space telescope, according to BBC News and the Daily Telegraph.
The instruments allowed them to first establish each star’s chemical composition, then establish their respective masses, which could then be used to determine how old they were, Ness told the BBC. That information was then used to construct a map showing the stars’ age and mass based on their place in the color spectrum, with the youngest appearing blue and the oldest red.
Their findings, which were presented during the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida last week, confirm the long-held belief that the oldest stars in the Milky Way formed near the center of the disc—meaning that the galaxy originally formed in the center.
Innovative new method uses spectra to determine stellar age
Ness called the research “somewhat revolutionary” due to the fact that “ages have previously been considered very hard to get, particularly from stellar spectra. They’re important, but they’re difficult.”
“This is really the first time that we’ve been able to infer ages for such a large number of stars, rather than relying on this small subset of stars with special observations,” she continued. “Our galaxy started out as a small disc, and it’s grown from the inside out. That’s something we very much suspected, but now we have the details that confirm all of this.”
They did so by first sampling stars in batches of 300 in a variety of different wavelengths using data from the Apogee project, which is part of the ground-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey, BBC News explained. This spectra enabled them to work out the chemical composition of these stars, which was combined with the Kepler data to establish their masses, and thus their ages.
The map takes this information and relates the age and mass to the color spectrum of the stars, as previously determined through the Apogee data. The end result was an innovative new model that could be used to calculate the ages for the rest of the galaxy’s stars by using only their place in the color spectrum.
Researchers claim human activity forced Earth into a new epoch
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Mankind’s impact on the oceans, atmosphere, and wildlife on the planet is so significant that it has caused Earth to enter a new epoch, an international group of scientists has concluded after more than six years of analysis on the matter.
Dr. Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey, and colleagues from the US, UK, France, Poland, Spain, Austria, Australia, Norway, China, and Kenya reported Friday in the journal Sciencethat the Holocene, which began about 12,000 years ago, is now over.
After weighing the evidence, they found that humans had changed Earth’s systems and geologic processes significantly enough to warrant designating the start of a new epoch, the Anthropocene epoch. Their recommendations must still be officially approved by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is expected to happen later on this year, according to The Guardian.
“We could be looking here at a stepchange from one world to another that justifies being called an epoch,” Dr. Waters told the British newspaper. “What this paper does is to say the changes are as big as those that happened at the end of the last ice age. This is a big deal.”
So what are scientists basing these claims on?
Dr. Waters and his colleagues examined humanity’s impact on several different ways our existence has changed the world, including the growth of the global population, the increases used of industrial resources, and the burning of fossil fuels.
According to Bloomberg, their research revealed that humans had invented more new kinds of minerals than the Earth had seen since the evolution of oxygen-producing bacteria approximately 2.4 billion years ago. In addition, industry now produces nearly 300 million tons of plastic every year.
Furthermore, their activities have filled lakes, rivers, and other geologic features with new types of chemicals, and coated the planet in organic polymers found in microbeads, plastic, and synthetic fibers. Over half of the Earth’s surface has been transformed into cities, farms, or other uniquely human structures, and the oceans are “increasingly” becoming effected, they wrote.
Wildlife currently occupies just 25 percent of ice-free land, less than half as much as it did 300 years ago, which has helped the rate of species’ extinction soar above long-term averages, the researchers reported, according to The Guardian. Isotopes left behind by nuclear weapons testing and increasing CO2 emissions have also drastically altered the planet’s ecosystems, and experts believe that the sixth mass extinction is “probably already underway.”
Dr. Waters emphasized that the study should not be viewed as a “conclusive statement” that the Anthropocene had indeed arrived, but said that the evidence indicates that mankind is “becoming a major geological force.” Based on the evidence, he and his fellow researchers believe that the new epoch likely started around the mid-20th century, sometime around World War II.
Upgraded Fermi telescope discovers new gamma ray sources
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills
A new census of the sky at extreme energies has led to the discovery of 12 new gamma ray sources that have energies exceeding one trillion times that of visible light, and it’s all due to recent improvement made to NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Using the telescope, members of the Fermi team were able to discover hundreds of high-energy sources, including four dozen that could not be detected at any other wavelength, the US space agency announcedThursday at the 227th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“What made this advance possible was a complete reanalysis, which we call Pass 8, of all data acquired by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT),” said Marco Ajello, a researcher at Clemson University. “The end result is effectively a complete instrument upgrade without our ever having to leave the ground.”
Ajello and his colleagues, who will detail their findings in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, re-examined every particle and gamma-ray detected by the telescope since it launched about eight years ago and found several that had previously been missed.
Blazars, pulsar wind nebulae among newly-discovered objects
Their efforts enhanced the LAT’s ability to determine the directions of incoming gamma rays while also widening its useful energy range, according to NASA. They constructed a new sky map at energies ranging from 50 billion (GeV) to 2 trillion electron volts (TeV) using 61,000 Pass 8 gamma rays collected over an 80 month span.
“Of the 360 sources we cataloged, about 75 percent are blazars, which are distant galaxies sporting jets powered by supermassive black holes,” Fermi team member Alberto Domínguez from the Complutense University in Madrid, explained. “The highest-energy sources, all located in our galaxy, are mostly remnants of supernova explosions and pulsar wind nebulae, places where rapidly rotating neutron stars accelerate particles to near the speed of light.”
These extremely high-energy gamma rays, including those produced by the Crab Nebula (which topped 1 TeV in energy output) are believed to be produced following collisions between lower-energy light and accelerated particles, the US space agency said. The net result is a slight energy loss for the particle and a large gain for the light, which transforms it into a gamma ray.
Thanks to the tweaks to Fermi, it can now collect data previously only detectable by telescopes on the ground. The new study discovered more than 280 candidates for future research by ground based observatories, as well as 25 identified objects that include three new pulsar wind nebulae and a pair of never-before-seen supernova remnants.
“An exciting aspect of this catalog is that we find many new sources that emit gamma rays over a comparatively large patch of the sky,” said Jamie Cohen, a graduate student at the University of Maryland working with the Fermi team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Finding more of these objects enables us to probe their structures as well as better understand mechanisms that accelerate the subatomic particles that ultimately produce gamma-ray emission.”
SpaceX will give the barge landing another shot on January 17th
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Now that they have proven that they can land their reusable rocket on land, SpaceX plans to once again try and have their Falcon 9 booster return safely to a mobile platform floating in the middle of the sea – something that they have already attempted to do, and failed, on two occasions.
Perhaps thinking that the third time may be the charm, the Elon Musk-owned aerospace firm will once again attempt the platform landing following the launch of NASA’s Jason-3 probe later this month, according to Popular Science. The launch is scheduled for January 17, 2016.
SpaceX successfully returned its Falcon 9 first-stage rocket on December 21, having it land close to its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida following a failed at-sea landing attempt earlier in the year. Musk recently confirmed that the booster suffered no damage during the December landing and was already in good enough shape to be used again, although the company has no plans to reuse the historic booster.
As with previous attempts, the first stage of the rocket will separate approximately two minutes after liftoff, then change position and fire its engines in order to slow its fall, Reutersexplained. Afterwards, it will deploy its landing legs and attempt to touch down on the floating landing pad in the Pacific Ocean.
Why try another sea landing after success on the ground?
Given that the last time SpaceX tried an at-sea landing the Falcon 9 fell over at the last moment and exploded, and the success of the ground-based landing, why bother even attempting to land on the floating platform? Because, as NBC News explained, it provides “more flexibility.”
Using mobile landing platforms can help the aerospace outfit avoid potential logistical issues by having a place to land without needing access to a launch pad or a suitable open space on the ground. In addition, the mobile landing site could be moved as needed based on safety or fuel-related concerns.
Ultimately, reports indicate that Musk would like to develop reusable second-stage rockets as well, but for now his company is focusing on its first stage Falcon 9s. The rockets cost around $61 million, according to Reuters, with just $200,000 for fuel. Musk believes that his reusable rockets could “reduce the cost of access to space by probably two orders of magnitude.”
Climate change uncovers two 19th-century American whaling ships
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archaeologists recently reported the discovery of two 19th-century whaling ships that sank off the Arctic coast of Alaska nearly 150 years ago – and climate change may be largely to thank for the find.
According to CNNand ABC News, the ships were two of 33 sailing vessels that went down in the Chukchi Sea approximately 144 years ago, and remained missing until they were recovered by a team of divers during the fall of 2015.
NOAA officials explained that the ships likely became stuck in the ice during the September of 1871, leaving more than 1,200 crew members stranded. The whalers were saved eventually , but their vessels remained trapped, slowly deteriorating until they ultimately sank. The agency claimed the incident was one of the main reasons the US whaling industry died.
In a statement, NOAA archaeologist and project co-director Brad Barr explained that “no one had found definitive proof of any of the lost fleet beneath the water” – until now, that is.
So what role did global warming play in all of this?
As Barr and his colleagues explained, archaeologists have greater access to potential shipwreck sites than in the past due to the melting of ice in the Arctic, a direct result of climate change. The team likely would not have been able to make it to the site had warming not cleared a path.
Last September, the NOAA team conducted an exhaustive search of coastline near the shore of the Chukchi Sea, near the city of Wainwright, Alaska. Previous searches for the lost ships led to the discovery of gear salvaged from the wrecks by the locals, as well as timbers strewn along the beaches in the area, but the sunken ships themselves remained elusive.
During the latest expedition, Barr’s team used solar and sensing technology to plot the so-called magnetic signatures of the two wrecks, including the outline of their flattened hulls. Furthermore, they found anchors, ballast, fasteners and pots used to turn whale blubber into oil.
“This exploration provides an opportunity to write the last chapter of this important story of American maritime heritage and also bear witness to some of the impacts of a warming climate on the region’s environmental and cultural landscape, including diminishing sea ice and melting permafrost,” the NOAA archaeologist said in a statement.
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Pictured is a closeup of some of the ships’ anchors. Image credit: NOAA
ESA racing the clock in attempt to wake-up Philae lander
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Philae made history by landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014, and it collected data used to analyze the surface of a comet for the first time, but time may be running out for the European probe, ESA officials warned on Friday.
Philae, which was transported to the comet by the Rosetta spacecraft, is resting on the surface of Comet 67P as it moves further and further away from the sun. As a result, temperatures on the comet’s surface are falling drastically. Conditions will be too harsh for the lander to function properly by the end of the month, officials at the space agency explained.
The Philae team plans to make one last-ditch attempt to communicate with the probe on Sunday. They will send a command to the lander through Rosetta in an effort to activate Philae’s momentum wheel. If successful, they hope that this will enable them to change Philae’s position and collect more solar energy.
“Time is running out, so we want to explore all possibilities,” explained Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). He and his colleagues believe they may be able to clear off accumulated dust from the spacecraft’s solar panels using this command, and maneuver it into better alignment with the sun, thus possibly extending its lifespan.
There is ‘a small chance’ that the lander will wake up
However, there is every possibility that the command will fail and that there will be no response from Philae, the ESA cautioned. The status of the lander is unknown, as it last sent an update on its health in July 2015, but DLR scientists believe that at least one of the its transmitters and one of its receivers have failed, and the second transmitter is not at 100 percent either.
Ulamec and his colleagues hope that Philae has not fallen over or become covered with dust over the past few months. By the end of January, Comet 67P will be more than 300 million kilometers away from the sun, which will drop the surface temperature to below -51ºC and end the lander’s operation.
This command is essentially ESA’s “Hail Mary” play – a last ditch effort to try to elicit a response from the lander. Philae operations manager Cinzia Fantinati said that there is “a small chance” of success and that they want to “leave no stone unturned,” but Ulamec is less optimistic, noting that the silence “does not bode well” for Philae.
Beliefs about God could be the answer to solving religious conflicts, study says
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
A famous John Lennon song calls for us to imagine a peaceful world without religion, but according to a new study out of Carnegie Mellon, religion may actually be the key to bringing peace.
According to their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers posed a moral dilemma to 555 Muslim-Palestinian teenagers: Would you allow a Palestinian man to be killed if it saved the life of five Muslim-Palestinian children? What about for five Jewish-Israeli children?
The teenagers were asked to consider the dilemma from their own perspective, and then from Allah’s.
When viewing the issue from their own perspective, the Muslim-Palestinian participants valued their own lives over the Jewish-Israeli lives. But when considering it from Allah’s perspective, they believed that Allah wished them to value the lives of both groups equally—decreasing the preference toward their own group by nearly 30 percent.
“Our findings are important because one precursor to violence is when people believe that the lives of members of their group are more important than the lives of members of another group,” said Jeremy Ginges, associate professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research at Carnegie Mellon University, in a statement.
“Beliefs about God seem to encourage an application of universal moral rules to believers and non-believers alike, even in a conflict zone,” added Nichole Argo, a research scientist in engineering and public policy and social and decision sciences. “Thus, it does not seem to be beliefs about God that lead to outgroup aggression.
“There may be other aspects of religion that lead to outgroup aggression. For instance, other work done in conflict zones has identified participation in collective religious rituals and frequent attendance at a place of worship to be associated with support for violence. This study, however, adds to a growing literature on how religious belief can increase cooperation with people from other faiths.”
600-million-year-old random mutation responsible for multicellular organisms, study finds
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Using what they call “molecular time travel,” researchers from the University of Oregon, the University of Chicago Medical Center, and elsewhere have found that multicellular life formed largely as the result of a single, random mutation more than 600 million years ago.
Writing in the latest edition of the journal eLife, the study authors explained that experiments conducted using “resurrected” ancient proteins revealed the mechanisms through which single-celled ancestral organisms transitioned into animals capable of forming organized tissue.
“Our experiments show how biological complexity can evolve through simple, high-probability genetic paths,” co-senior author Dr. Joe Thornton, professor of human genetics and ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. “Before the last common ancestor of all animals, when only single-celled organisms existed on Earth, just one tiny change in DNA sequence caused a protein to switch from its primordial role as an enzyme to a new function that became essential to organize multicellular structures.”
The research, which also involved experts form the Medical College of Wisconsin and Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, is said to be the first to detail molecular mechanisms involved in the evolution of multicellular organisms. The findings could also solve the mysteries of evolution and shed new light on diseases such as cancer.
Mechanisms of cell orientation play a key role
Dr. Thornton and his colleagues focused on mitotic spindle orientation, which uses a structure in an organism’s cells that governs the direction in which those cells divide relative to other, nearby cells—an essential part of maintaining organized tissues. This structure, the mitotic spindle, is a network of protein filaments that separates chromosomes prior to division.
In most types of creatures, a protein scaffold known as the guanylate kinase protein interaction domain (GK-PID) rotates the spindle relative to the cells around it by binding to a pair of partner molecules: an “anchor” protein on the inside of the cell membrane which indicates the positions of nearby cells, and a motor protein that pulls on mitotic spindle filaments.
After they are linked by GK-PID, the motors pull chromosomes towards the anchors, ensuring that new daughter cells are oriented correctly. To study how this function originally evolved in multicellular creatures, Dr. Thornton and his colleagues used a technique called ancestral protein reconstruction to reverse-engineer the evolution of different genes and proteins.
Using gene sequencing and computational methods, the researchers were able to see molecular changes and infer how proteins behaved in the ancient past. They sequenced the genomes of more than 40 types of organisms and found that the anchor protein first appeared in the lineage leading to complex animal development, essentially replacing another molecule which served a similar purpose in GK-PID and setting the groundwork for the formation of tissues.
While the findings provide the first in-depth explanation of how this function first evolved in complex multicellular lifeforms, Dr. Thornton emphasized that there are still many other parts of the evolution of spindle orientation that remain poorly understood, as well as the possibility that other functions could have helped in the transition away from single-celled organisms.
Tomb of Queen Khentakawess III discovered in Egypt
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A team of Czech archaeologists have discovered the tomb of a previously unknown Egyptian queen in the Pharaoh Neferefre’s funeral complex at Abu-Sir, a necropolis southwest of Cairo that’s home to several pyramids dedicated to pharaohs from the Fifth Dynasty.
According to BBC News and AFP reports, the queen’s name, Khentakawess (also spelled Khentkaus) was discovered on a wall in the necropolis. This would make her Khentakawess III, Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said, and it is believed she was Neferefre’s wife and the mother of Pharoah Menkahur.
Pharaoh Neferefre ruled 4,500 years ago, and his wife’s name had not previously been known, al-Damaty told reporters. Based on the location of the tomb, it is believed that Khentakawess III was probably his spouse, noted Miroslav Barta of the Czech Institute of Egyptology.
Discovery could shed new light on the Fifth Dynasty
Barta’s team also discovered approximately 30 utensils, including two dozen made out of copper and limestone. Officials at the antiquities ministry said the tomb had been dated to the middle of the Fifth Dynasty, which lasted from 2994 BC to 2345 BC, the AFP noted.
The discovery “will help us shed light on certain unknown aspects of the Fifth Dynasty, which along with the Fourth Dynasty, witnessed the construction of the first pyramids,” el-Damaty said, adding that this marked the “first time we have discovered the name of this queen who had been unknown before the discovery of her tomb.”
“The unearthed tomb is a part of a small cemetery to the south east of the pyramid complex of King Neferefre (Raneferef) which led the team to think that Queen Khentkaus could be the wife of Neferefre hence she was buried close to his funerary complex,” Barta told the Luxor Times.
“The tomb is very similar to the rest of the burial in the cemetery which was unearthed by the Czech mission in the ’90s,” added Giza Antiquities director Kamal Wahid. “The upper part is a mastaba [a rectangular tomb with sloping sides and a flat roof] and a small offerings chapel and the burial chamber in the lower part which is reached through a shaft.”
Dinosaurs danced to attract lovers and scare off enemies, scientists say
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Don’t be surprised if the sequel to Jurassic World features a couple of carnivorous dinosaurs cutting a little rug, according to the authors of a new study which claims that dinos danced both to impress potential mates and as a way scare off their enemies.
What evidence is there to support these bizarre claims? Well, in the latest edition of the journal Scientific Reports, University of Colorado, Denver professor and paleontologist Martin Lockley explained that they discovered large scrapes, some two meters long, at several Cretaceous sites located throughout Colorado.
The scrapes were discovered at “leks”—or areas where dinosaurs would gather in search of mates, according to Gizmodo, leading Lockley’s team to conclude that they were made by theropods, a group of large, bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs that included raptors and tyrannosaurs. Given that dinosaurs eventually gave rise to birds, and that birds are well-known for their courtship dances, the authors believe it likely that the behavior originated in their predecessors.
“They’d get out there in the open and start showing off to their peers or their competitors or their girlfriends,” Lockley told USA Today. He and his colleagues noticed the similarity between these marks and those made by courting birds, and said it was like finding a “fossilized… disco floor.”
Scars might have been the result of a “threat display”
According to reports, this marks the first time that paleontologists have found physical evidence of courtship displays among dinosaurs. Some of the scrapes were five feet long and a food wide, while others were said to be far smaller. One of the sites discovered had roughly 50 of the marks, which the authors speculate were left behind by a group of at least 12 theropods.
Luis Chiappe, a dinosaur expert at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County who was not involved in the research, told USA Today that the researchers’ interpretations of the markings was reasonable. As he noted, the link between birds and dinosaurs has been well established, and it was “very cool” to find evidence of bird-like behaviors in the fossil records of dinosaurs.
University of Alberta paleontologist Scott Persons, who like Chiappe was not among the authors of the Scientific Reports study, added that while it was likely that dinosaurs had courtship rituals, it is also possible that the scrapings were made as part of a “threat display” to ward off potential threats.
Ötzi’s gut bacteria reveal stomach problems, new human migration timeline
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Around 5,300 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman was a man on the run. Showing signs of having been in a fight earlier, he seems to have been fleeing across the Italian Alps when he was brutally attacked, ending with Ötzi bleeding out in the snow—as an arrow had pierced a major artery in his left arm.
But the ice preserved his body, until glacial melting exposed the corpse in 1991. From that point on, the mummy of the Iceman has been a human history goldmine. Evidence shows Ötzi had a host of health issues, like Lyme disease, gallstones, and worn joints; his DNA has helped scientists understand human evolution and population movements (and shows he has living relatives today); and he has the world’s oldest known tattoos.
Now, a new team of international scientists working with paleopathologist Albert Zink and microbiologist Frank Maixner from the European Academy (EURAC) have managed to uncover some new interesting information: Ötzi might have suffered from gastrointestinal issues, and modern Europeans may have been more influenced by “recent” immigrations than previously though.
Gut bacteria
Ötzi’s stomach contents revealed that, at the time of his death, he was fighting off an infection of Helicobacter pylori. H. pylori is a bacterium thought to have been present in humans for some 100,000 years—and since it’s shared between families, it can be used to trace the movement of human populations across the millennia.
This discovery came as an unexpected (but welcomed) surprise to the researchers.
“Evidence for the presence of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is found in the stomach tissue of patients today, so we thought it was extremely unlikely that we would find anything because Ötzi’s stomach mucosa is no longer there,” explained Zink in a statement.
“We were able to solve the problem once we hit upon the idea of extracting the entire DNA of the stomach contents,” added Maixner. “After this was successfully done, we were able to tease out the individual Helicobacter sequences and reconstruct a 5,300 year old Helicobacter pylori genome.”
And this genome came with some other surprises, too. The modern European H. pylori genome seems to be a blend of African and Asian genetic material—and it was believed that this combination of the genes happened between 10,000 and 52,000 years ago, according to the paper in Science. But Ötzi put a hitch in this hypothesis.
“We had assumed that we would find the same strain of Helicobacter in Ötzi as is found in Europeans today,” explained Thomas Rattei from the University of Vienna, a colleague of Zink and Maixner. “It turned out to be a strain that is mainly observed in Central and South Asia today.”
In other words, the mixture of Asian and North African genes didn’t happen until sometime after 5,300 years ago—and not 10,000 or more. To the researchers, this suggests that there was likely an influential human migration around Ötzi’s time period that added more of the North African genes to H. pylori’s genome.
“The recombination of the two types of Helicobacter may have only occurred at some point after Ötzi’s era, and this shows that the history of settlements in Europe is much more complex than previously assumed,” said Maixner.
99 problems and ulcers might have been one
H. pylori has another claim to fame, though. It’s found in some 50% of all modern humans (usually in more impoverished populations), and was somewhat recently discovered to be the root cause of most gastric ulcers. In fact, roughly 10% of those infected with the bacterium develop diseases thanks to it, such as ulcers or gastric carcinoma.
In Ötzi’s case, the specific H. pylori found in his system is associated with inflammation of the stomach lining, and the body showed signs of waging battle against an active infection of the bacteria.
“We showed the presence of marker proteins which we see today in patients infected with Helicobacter,” said Maixner.
However, it’s uncertain of whether this was a one-time problem or an issue he had faced for some time.
“Whether Ötzi suffered from stomach problems cannot be said with any degree of certainty,” said Zink, “because his stomach tissue has not survived and it is in this tissue that such diseases can be discerned first. Nonetheless, the preconditions for such a disease did in fact exist in Ötzi.”
18th century ship hull uncovered at Virginia hotel construction site
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Archaeologists working on a construction site in Alexandria, Virginia have discovered part of a scuttled 18th century sailing vessel that was used as the framework for a landfill build along the city’s waterfront into the deep channel of the Potomac River, according to reports.
City researchers, along with a team from Thunderbird Archaeology, discovered about one-third of the 50-foot ship’s hull at the Indigo Hotel construction site, which is located at 220 S. Union Street, city officials announced on Wednesday. The vessel was described as “sturdily built” and “well preserved”, and its discovery could shed new light on ships of that era.
Excavation crews are using 3D laser scanning equipment to record the hull, Archaeology noted. They plan to dismantle it and store in a wet environment while experts study it. Further research could shed new light on how ships were built in the 1700s, and reports suggest the vessel might represent a type of ship yet to be fully documented through archaeological study.
“It’s very rare,” Thunderbird Archaeology field director Dan Baicy told the Washington Post. “This almost never happens. In [the] 15 years that I’ve done this work, I’ve never run into this kind of preservation in an urban environment where there’s so much disturbance.”
Ship’s identity is currently unknown
According to the Post, naval archaeologists arrived at the scene on Monday to help city officials and the Thunderbird Archaeology crew dismantle the timber. As they take the hull apart, they’re also looking for artifacts or markings that could identify the currently unknown vessel, revealing where it sailed and what it might have carried during its voyages.
City officials reported that the find was not totally unexpected, as archaeologists had indicated that the remains of ships used as part of the waterfront filling process could be uncovered during construction on the hotel. The hull, which was open for public viewing on Tuesday, was also to be documented through pictures, drawings, and measurements before being dismantled.
No documentation of the ship existed in the city’s records, according to the Post, and principal archaeologist John Mullen said that the discovery was “like the jewel in the crown for us right now.” He also speculated that the ship was used either as a military ship, or to transport heavy cargo, and officials are hopeful that they will be able to eventually re-assemble the craft.
The vessel is just the latest in a long line of recent archaeological finds in the area. Two months ago, the foundation from an 18th century warehouse believed to have been the city’s first public building was discovered on the same block, the newspaper said. A six-foot long privy, ceramics, glass, bones, and other debris have also recently been found in the same area.
Archaeological digs yield fascinating new details about Europe’s oldest city
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
Recent fieldwork on the Greek isle of Crete in the ancient town of Knossos revealed that during the Iron Age, from 1100 to 600 BC, the city was rich in imports and was almost three times bigger than what was believed from earlier excavations.
The discovery, presented at the 117th annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and Society for Classical Studies, indicated that not only did this spectacular location in the get better from a Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC—it also quickly grew and flourished as a cosmopolitan hub of the Mediterranean Sea.
Study team leader Antonis Kotsonas, from the University of Cincinnati said in a statement that Knossos was “renowned as a glorious site of the Greek Bronze Age, the leader of Crete and the seat of the palace of the mythical King Minos and the home of the enigmatic labyrinth.”
Scholars have researched the city’s Bronze Age ruins for over a hundred years, but a more recent study has centered on the urban development of the city after it came into the Iron Age and after the Bronze Age fall of the Aegean palaces.
Over the last decade, the Knossos Urban Landscape Project has recovered a large collection of artifacts going back to the Iron Age. The relics were distributed over an extensive region that was prior unexplored. Kotsonas said their work exposed substantial growth in the size of the settlement during the early Iron Age and an increase in the quantity and quality of its imports originating from around the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
“No other site in the Aegean period has such a range of imports,” Kotsonas said.
The project has found imports made from bronze and other metals, such as jewelry and other adornments. Kotsonas said the artifacts offer a glimpse of the wealth in the community because status symbols were buried in tombs during this period.
“Distinguishing between domestic and burial contexts is essential for determining the size of the settlement and understanding the demographic, socio-political and economic development of the local community,” Kotsonas said. “Even at this early stage in detailed analysis, it appears that this was a nucleated, rather densely occupied settlement.”
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Feature Image: The palace at Knossos. Credit: Thinkstock
Astronomers find ‘twins’ of massive star Eta Carinae
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Best known for a massive, unexplained eruption in the 1840s that sent debris ten times the mass of the sun hurtling through space, Eta Carinae is said to be the brightest and heaviest star system within 10,000 light years of our galaxy—and the only object with an expanding dust veil.
However, a new an analysis of data from the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes has revealed that Eta Carinae might not be quite so unique after all. In fact, scientists at the US space agency have now identified five new objects with properties similar to the star in other galaxies.
“The most massive stars are always rare, but they have tremendous impact on the chemical and physical evolution of their host galaxy,” lead scientist Rubab Khan, a postdoctoral researcher at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement Wednesday.
“We knew others were out there. It was really a matter of figuring out what to look for and of being persistent,” added co-investigator Krzysztof Stanek, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. Together, Khan, Stanek and colleagues from OSU and Goddard used a new technique to identify possible Eta Carinae twins—“Eta twins” for short.
Future research needed to fully flesh out their properties
Eta Carinae is located approximately 7,500 light-years from Earth and is five million times more luminous than our sun, according to NASA. It is a binary system featuring two stars in a 5.5-year orbit. One star is said to be 30 times larger than the sun, and the other is 90 solar masses.
In addition to being studied because it’s one of the closest high-mass stars, Eta Carinae has been a extensively analyzed by researchers trying to learn why it erupted during the 19th century, and how that behavior is related to the evolution of massive stars. In order to better understand what happened, however, additional examples need to be researched.
It is no easy feat spotting stars following such a massive outburst, and previous efforts to locate an Eta Carinae twin had proven unsuccessful. However, Khan’s team were able to develop a new type of infrared and optical fingerprint which they used to find the five candidate Eta twins.
The nearby spiral galaxy M83 is currently the only one known to host two potential Eta Carinae twins. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and R. Khan (GSFC and ORAU)
Two of the candidates were located in the galaxy M83, located 15 million light-years away. The third was found in NGC 6946, while the other two were detected in M101 and M51—all of which are located between 18 and 26 million light-years away, according to NASA.
Each of the stars had optical and infrared properties said to be similar to Eta Carinae, indicating that each is likely a high mass star surrounded by a gas and dust cloud between five and 10 solar masses in size, the study authors reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last month. Future studies are expected to reveal more precise information about their physical characteristics.
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Feature Image: The eruption of Eta Carinae in the 1840s caused the Homunculus Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
Researchers have discovered a new fundamental property of quantum mechanics
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A newly-discovered fundamental property of electrical currents in extremely small metal circuits demonstrates how negatively-charged particles can wash over said circuit like waves, generating interference in parts of the circuit where no current is delivered.
This characteristic, discovered by researchers at the University of Twente’s MESA+ institute and detailed in a recent Scientific Reports paper, is due largely to the circuit’s geometry as well as the quantum mechanical wave character of electrons, according to the study authors.
As part of their research, the MESA+ team demonstrated electron interference—a phenomenon in which propagating waves interact coherently—in a gold ring with a 500 nanometer diameter. One side of the ring was connected to a tiny wire through which an electrical current could be driven, while the other side was connected to a different wire attached to a voltmeter.
When they applied the current, sending a varying magnetic field through the ring, they detected electron interference on the other side of the ring, even though no net current passed through the ring. Their experiment revealed that electrons can bleed into the ring, thus altering the electrical properties in parts of circuit not expected to be affected by the current.
Findings could help shape future quantum computers
Despite the fact that the gold ring was diffusive (its electron mean free path was much smaller than the ring itself), the authors said that the effect was surprisingly pronounced. It shows that electrons must be considered waves in nanoscale circuits at extremely low temperatures, since this behavior is said to be a prime example of quantum mechanical wave-particle duality.
Specifically, the MESA+ team explained, the outcome of their research is directly due to the fact that quantum equations of motion are nonlocal. Their work helps explain one specific type of nonlocality known as dynamical nonlocality, which is a large part of all experiments that involve quantum interference.
Quantum interference, they said, is affected by a phenomenon known as decoherence, in which the physical environment causes loss of phase memory, as well as by performing a “which-path-measurement,” which removes dynamical nonlocality and terminates the interference pattern. In their experiments, the University of Twente researchers discovered that the geometry of a circuit can also affect dynamical nonlocality, which could help shape future quantum computers.
“We have thus shown a new aspect of the dynamical nonlocality of electrons in a quantum nanoscale circuit that is solely governed by geometric aspects and not by external measurement. Understanding this geometrical constraint is essential for the optimal design of any quantum circuit based on the dynamical nonlocality of the electron,” the authors wrote.
“Moreover, as deduced from our model, the specific link found between geometry and nonlocality is not limited by the diffusive transport regime of our experiment, nor by the specific quantum wave-particle used (in our case electrons) but, as other important geometrical constrains4, is a universal property of quantum dynamics,” they added. “We believe that these results will trigger further investigation of the fundamental properties of quantum dynamics and of its application in nanoscale quantum circuits.”
Globular clusters could be home to interstellar civilizations
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
The hunt for extraterrestrial life could be well served by investigating globular clusters, or the tightly-packed spheres that house millions of stars in an area averaging just 100 light-years in size, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said on Wednesday.
CfA astrophysicist Rosanne DiStefano, who led the team of scientists conducting the research and presented their findings at the 227th meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Florida, explained that globular clusters could very well be “the first place in which intelligent life is identified in our galaxy.”
There are approximately 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way, with most of them orbiting at the edge of the system and many dating back to the birth of the galaxy roughly 10 billon years ago. For this reason, the stars found in these clusters contain fewer of the heavy elements required to create new worlds—leading many to believe that they are less likely to contain planets.
The fact that only one planet has ever been found in a globular cluster would seem to support those claims, but DiStefano and her colleagues believe that it is “premature to say there are no planets in globular clusters,” as exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars containing less than 10 percent as many metals as our sun.
We have the capability to find such civilizations (if they exist)
Since the stars found in globular clusters tend to be faint red dwarfs, any potentially habitable planets forming around them would have to have close orbits to be in the so-called Goldilocks zone and be capable of supporting life. This would be a good thing, the researchers say, because it would protect them from stellar interactions from other stars in the dense cluster.
“Once planets form, they can survive for long periods of time, even longer than the current age of the universe,” DiStefano explained. If a habitable planet were to form in a globular cluster and survive for several billion years, there would be plenty of time for any life existing there to grow and evolve. Such life could theoretically develop intelligence and form civilizations.
These civilizations, were they to exist, could be surprisingly easy to find. The closest star found in a globular cluster is just one trillion miles away from Earth, which may sound like a lot, but is 20 times closer than the nearest non-cluster star. Communicating with and exploring such a place would actually be easier, the research team said.
“Sending a broadcast between the stars wouldn’t take any longer than a letter from the U.S. to Europe in the 18th century,” said DiStefano. “Interstellar travel would take less time too. The Voyager probes are 100 billion miles from Earth, or one-tenth as far as it would take to reach the closest star if we lived in a globular cluster. That means sending an interstellar probe is something a civilization at our technological level could do in a globular cluster.”
Parasitoid wasps force ‘zombified’ host caterpillars to load up on carbs
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills
Carb loading: It’s not just for runners anymore—because apparently parasitic wasps are able to force their host caterpillars to seek out the sweet stuff.
This research comes out of the 2016 annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, where a team from Wesleyan University presented their findings.
The researchers were interested in how parasites and parasitoids might influence feeding behavior and diet of their hosts—as a parasite might need different nutrients than its host, it seems only logical they would manipulate the host’s feeding patterns to suit their needs. Up until now, though, the topic has been little-studied, and there is nothing conclusive regarding its existence.
“There hasn’t been much evidence,” said Melissa Bernardo, a PhD student at Wesleyan University who studies how parasites and parasitoids manipulate their hosts, in a statement.
Bernardo and the rest of the Wesleyan team may have found just the proof they were looking for for their hypothesis, though. They decided to put their focus on the wooly bear caterpillar—which, unlike most other kinds of caterpillars, grazes on more than 80 plant species. That amount of variety gives a parasitoid the potential to force any number of different diet changes, meaning it’s a good place to search for diet manipulation.
In the case of the caterpillars, it usually lives 14 days after the wasp lays eggs inside of it. After that, the wasp larvae emerge, killing the wooly bear, and usually consuming it. In between the egg-laying and the hatching is where things got interesting for the team.
After a series of experiments in which the team granted caterpillars access to both a protein- or carbohydrate-rich diet, they discovered that the unparasitized caterpillars selected the protein diet, whereas the egg-burdened caterpillars went for a…sweeter fare.
“The wasps are making their hosts carb-load,” said Bernardo.
Carb-loading caterpillars have much bigger larvae
And the more carbs the caterpillars ate before day 14, the larger the larvae were that emerged. Apparently, though, the carbs aren’t exactly what the larvae want.
“When these parasitoids are older larvae living in the host, they switch from feeding on host blood to feeding on specific host tissue,” explained Bernardo.
And the emerging larvae grow in size thanks to the tissue they eat in order to emerge—and grow even larger in carb-loaded caterpillars, as the ingestion of carbs leads the caterpillars to store them as lipids (fat). The more carbs the caterpillars eat, the more lipids accumulate in their tissues, and the more the larvae eat on their way out. This serves the wasps nicely, as they cannot produce lipids themselves—so they need to get it elsewhere.
And there is evidence a similar process could happen in humans, too. “There are hypotheses out there that predict that our feeding behavior would be altered depending not only on the parasites in our gut, but our gut microbiome in general,” Bernardo said. Lovely.
NuSTAR discovers 40 X-ray binary stars within Andromeda galaxy
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Forty X-ray binaries—a class on binary star in which a black hole or neutron star consumes matter from its companion—have been discovered by the NASA Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) in new, high-energy observations of our neighboring galaxy Andromeda.
The discovery, which was made following new, high-energy X-ray views of Andromeda believed to be the best captured to date, could help determine whether or not these binaries play a key role in the formation and evolution of galaxies, NASA said in a statement.
X-ray binaries, NASA explained, may be involved in heating the gases from which the very first galaxies formed—and Andromeda is the only large spiral galaxy where individual X-ray binaries can be observed in detail, noted Daniel Wik of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Wik, who presented his team’s findings at the 227th meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Florida earlier this week, added that the data gathered through these observations could be used “to deduce what’s going on in more distant galaxies, which are harder to see.”
Findings could shed new light on how galaxies originally formed
Like the Milky Way, Andromeda is a spiral galaxy, but it is slightly larger than the galaxy that we call home and is located 2.5 million light-years away from our solar system. Although other NASA missions, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, have obtained clearer images of the galaxy, they were at lower X-ray energies than those provided by NuSTAR.
The NuSTAR images will be used along with those obtained by Chandra and other spacecraft to provide the best possible look at the spiral galaxy’s X-ray binaries. Wik and his colleagues hope to use the new observations to identify what percentage of the binaries are home to neutron stars and which house black holes.
“We have come to realize in the past few years that it is likely the lower-mass remnants of normal stellar evolution, the black holes and neutron stars, may play a crucial role in heating of the intergalactic gas at very early times in the universe, around the cosmic dawn,” explained Ann Hornschemeier, principal investigator of the NuSTAR Andromeda studies.
“Observations of local populations of stellar-mass-sized black holes and neutron stars with NuSTAR allow us to figure out just how much power is coming out from these systems,” she added. The findings could also provide new insight as to how Andromeda is different from the Milky Way, according to NuSTAR mission chief Fiona Harrison.
Mystery of what’s happening to Earth’s missing atmospheric electrons may finally be solved
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Meteor showers like the Quadrantids are best known for lighting up the skies and putting on spectacular shows for stargazers, but recent research suggests that they could also be responsible for a decades-old mystery involving missing electrons in Earth’s atmosphere.
During a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union last December, MIT atmospheric scientist Dr. Earle Williams and his colleagues explained that they had found evidence suggesting that dust from passing meteors were absorbing electrons located high in the atmosphere, according to Tech Times and the Daily Mail.
This results in the creation of an insulating region that is low in electrons, and which radio waves can bounce off of, known as a “D-region ledge,” the study authors added. Their work could solve the long-standing puzzle of what causes sudden, drastic changes in the electrical properties of the ionosphere, and it could lead to a better understanding of the D-region ledge itself.
The electrons in our atmosphere are produced when ultraviolet light, X-rays, and other types of high-energy radiation come into contact with nitric oxide atoms, removing the negative particles and turning those atoms into ions. However, in the 1960s, scientists discovered the drastic drop in electron concentration at an altitude of about 52 miles above the Earth’s surface.
How the ‘most dramatic’ part of the atmosphere forms
This sudden decrease was discovered when rockets were sent into the upper atmosphere as part of a mission to measure electron density, among other things. The root cause of this phenomenon remained a mystery over the past 50 years, however, until the MIT-led team found that an undetectable layer of meteor dust could be to blame.
As meteors pass through a portion of the upper atmosphere called the sodium layer, they become heated through interactions with molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. The space rocks then collide with other atoms as they continue traveling through the atmosphere, ultimately reaching boiling point and leaving behind dust that is vaporized through a process known as ablation.
When this occurs, the dust left behind bind to free electrons in the atmosphere, Williams and his colleagues explained. The D-region ledge is likely more eminent at night because the sun’s UV rays are 100 times stronger during the daytime, meaning that a greater amount of free electrons are produced at this time, diminishing the region’s effect.
The researchers calculate that space rocks less than one millimeter in size traveling at speeds of approximately 33,500 miles per hour would achieve the temperature required to bond with those free electrons at an altitude of 52 miles, generating a steady supply of dust that winds up forming the D-region ledge, which Williams calls “the most dramatic gradient” of the ionosphere.
Kepler has discovered 234 new exoplanet candidates just tens of lightyears away
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Proving that the planet-hunting probe’s best days are not behind it, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft detected a stunning 234 new exoplanet candidates in 2014, astronomers announced today at the 227th meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Florida.
According to Gizmodo, the new planetary candidates were discovered by a team led by Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and are spread throughout 208 different star systems. They have yet to be officially confirmed, but Vanderburg is confident they will be.
Furthermore, the website notes that each of the planets is located just tens of light years from the Earth, meaning that the odds are good that our little corner of the universe will out to be home to several previously undiscovered, multi-planet systems. All 234 of the planets were found during the first 12 months of Kepler’s K2 star-scanning mission, the researchers noted.
Kepler, which launched in 2009, has found a reported 4,600 candidate worlds and 1,918 verified new planets, including a handful that are close to the same size and are located roughly the same distance from their home stars, suggesting that they may be habitable.
More than 100 validated planets discovered
Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, the K2 mission had only discovered just over 100 planetary candidates and 32 confirmed new worlds. Now, Vanderburg and his colleagues have confirmed that it has more than doubled the number of potential planets detected to date.
At the conference, the Harvard astrophysicist said that the new planets were essentially as large and roughly the same in terms of orbital distance as those discovered during the first phase of the Kepler mission. He also hinted that there is “more to come” from the space telescope.
In July, NASA confirmed that a planet discovered by Kepler was the first planet that was about the same size of the Earth, and was located in the “habitable zone” of a sun-like star—meaning it orbited its host star at the right distance for liquid water to pool on its surface.
“We’ve been able to fully automate our process of identifying planet candidates,” Jeff Coughlin, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in California, said at the time, “which means we can finally assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset quickly and uniformly.”
In all, a total of five K2 campaigns have discovered more than 100 validated planets, University of Arizona astronomer Ian Crossfield said Tuesday during a presentation at the AAS conference, according to NBC News. He called that “a a validation of the whole K2 program’s ability to find large numbers of true, bona fide planets.”
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Feature Image: An artist interpretation of a planet encircling Gliese 667Cb. Credit:ESO/L. Calçada
‘Starving’ black hole found in extremely rare double black hole galaxy
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder announced an extremely rare discovery at the 227th meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS) on Tuesday: a galaxy with a pair of black holes, one of which appears to be on some sort of intergalactic diet.
According to the Associated Press, Julie Comerford, an assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the university, discovered the double-black hole system in a galaxy approximately one billion light years away.
That alone is a rare enough discovery, as thus far there have only been 12 galaxies confirmed to contain two black holes, but Comerford’s system is even more unusual, as one of the black holes is “significantly” smaller than the other and appears to be devoid of stars.
She discovered the unusual double-black hole galaxy—officially identified as SDSS J1126+2944—last year using the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. While this is the fourth such galaxy discovered by Comerford, it’s by far the most unusual.
So what caused this unique double-back hole system?
Comerford believes that the thinner of the two black holes went on a crash diet of sorts, if you will: It lost its mass when two separate galaxies merged into one. If this is indeed the case, odds are that one of the galaxies involved was a dwarf galaxy, she explained to BBC News.
Alternatively, it may be a rare example of an intermediate-sized black hole that could eventually become supermassive. Intermediate black holes are between 100 and one million times the mass of our sun, and scientists have yet to confirm that such a black hole exists, the AP noted.
“Maybe this small sphere of stars is actually appropriate for an intermediate-mass black hole,” the Colorado professor told BBC News. “There are very few of these known—they are very rare and hard to find—but they’re interesting because we think they may be an evolutionary stopover in the process of building supermassive black holes.”
If it turns out not to be an intermediate black hole, then “the answer may lie in the galaxy merger itself,” Comerford continued. “When two galaxies merge, there are very strong gravitational and tidal forces that can strip away the stars from around the black hole.” A paper detailing her work was published in a recent edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
Pluto’s weird, icy plains likely caused by Manhattan-sized asteroid
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
The vast and craterless ice plain discovered on Pluto by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft this summer was likely created by a massive space rock approximately the same size as Manhattan, researchers involved with the US space agency’s mission have revealed.
The icy region, unofficially known as Sputnik Planum, is “a large impact basin,” New Horizons lead investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado reportedly said earlier this week at the 227th meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS).
According to Gizmodo, Stern was presenting the science data collected by New Horizons during its 2015 visit to the Pluto system when he presented the latest theories on how the dwarf planet’s smooth, frozen expanses might have originally formed. He explained that Sputnik Planum was likely the result of an asteroid roughly 6.2 miles (10 km) in size.
A space rock that large would have been comparable in size to Manhattan, the website noted, and it could have collided with Pluto’s surface several million or even billions of years ago. In fact, it is distinctly possible that the plain was located elsewhere when the impact took place.
Frozen terrain likely shifted position following collision
Currently, Sputnik Planum is located near Pluto’s equator, in the area of the dwarf planet known as Tombaugh Regio—but it might not have always been there. As Stern reported during the AAS conference, the size and volume of the plain is such that the “negative mass anomaly” caused by the Manhattan-sized asteroid’s impact caused it to shift positions to its current location.
Such an event, he added, would be similar in nature to the polar wander observed by geologists here on Earth, and the unusual jagged mountain ranges surrounding it could have also been made by the impact of the massive space rock, Gizmodo said. The lack of craters and the evidence of glacial flows indicate that Sputnik Planum is a relatively young, geologically active region.
These new findings are just scratching the surface of what scientists may learn about Pluto and its moons, as New Horizons collected such a massive amount of data that it will be downlinking information at least through the summer. Meanwhile, the probe is continuing outwards towards the Kuiper Belt, where it is preparing to study a new target starting in 2019.
“Three quarters of (the recorded data) is still up on the spacecraft, and no one has seen it,” Stern said at the AAS meeting, according to CBS News. “So we expect to be having presents continue to rain down throughout most of this year, probably into October or November.”
Researchers use DNA to trace first European farmers to Anatolia
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Western children take note: Turkey is to blame for vegetables.
Well, sort of.
As it turns out, the first European farmers seem to have come from Anatolia around 8,000 years ago—at least according to a new study from a team spread between Sweden, Anatolia, and Iran.
Researchers compared the DNA of two subjects from Kumtepe, an ancient town in northwestern Turkey that was the precursor to the Iliad’s Troy, to the DNA of ancient farmers across Europe, as well as to modern Europeans. The two subjects from Turkey are believed to be Neolithic farmers who were among the first to settle in Kumtepe.
After comparing the genetic material, the researchers have drawn the conclusion that the first farmers who spread into Europe indeed came from Anatolia. Getting the DNA was no easy task, though.
“I have never worked with a more complicated material. But it was worth every hour in the laboratory,” said co-author and doctorate student Ayca Omrak from the Archaeological Research Laboratory Stockholm University in a University statement.
“It is complicated to work with material from this region, it is hot and the DNA is degraded,” added Jan Storå, associate professor in osteoarchaeology at Stockholm University. “But if we want to understand how the process that led from a hunter-gatherer society proceeded to a farming society, it is this material we need to exhaust.”
Thanks to diligent work, the team was able to make a fascinating discovery, as reported in their paper in Current Biology.
DNA traces European farmers to Anatolia
“I could use the DNA from the Kumtepe material to trace the European farmers back to Anatolia,” said Omrak. Meaning: Those ancient farmers from Turkey brought forth the agricultural revolution.
Interestingly, one of the subjects from Kumtepe shows a remarkable genetic similarity to populations from Sardinia. Previous research has revealed that modern-day Sardinians are actually more closely related to the farmers who drove the agricultural revolution in Europe than modern-day Anatolians. It now appears that this is because Anatolia’s geographic location made it a sort of highway between the Near East and Europe—hence why the ancient Turkish populations who brought in farming had a lot of genetic mixing, causing modern descendants to be so genetically different.
Prior to this research, it was widely believed that farming emerged from the Levant region in what is now Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. But the new findings suggesting that Anatolia was actually the hub for this movement doesn’t negate the Levant region’s importance.
“Our results stress the importance Anatolia has had on Europe’s prehistory,” said Anders Götherstörm, who heads the archaeogenetic research at the Archaeological Research Laboratory. “But to fully understand how the agricultural development proceeded we need to dive deeper down into material from the Levant.”
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Feature Image: DNA from the Kumtepe material traced the European farmers back to Anatolia. Credit: Project Troia, thanks to Peter Jablonka
ESA announces plans to build manned lunar village by 2030
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
The European Space Agency is planning to build a lunar village that could house astronauts for months at a time, and construction on the facility could start as early as 2021, officials from the organization announced last month at a conference held in the Netherlands.
According to ScienceAlert and the Daily Mail, the ESA revealed their plans to a group of 200 scientists, engineers, and industry experts at their International Symposium on Moon 2020-2030 event in December, noting that the facility could serve as a pit stop on the way to Mars.
The moon colony would feature 3D-printed structures made out of regolith, or lunar soil, and could be able to house astronauts within the next 15 years, reports indicate. As part of the ESA’s plan, robots would be sent to the moon to begin constructing various buildings in the early part of the 2020s, and the first human inhabitants would follow a few years later.
While NASA is focusing on sending astronauts to an asteroid, and then on to Mars, the ESA’s new director general, Jan Woerner, has for months expressed his desire to send humans back to the moon.He also wants to establish a lunar colony to replace the International Space Station (ISS) as a center for scientific research, mining, and space tourism operations.
Lunar colony could reduce the cost of going to Mars
During the December conference, ESA officials and their colleagues started to lay the foundation for the proposed village, discussing new technologies essential to support a human colony on the moon. Those advancements include improved spacesuits, habitats, and greenhouses which would be used to grow vegetables and other plants, according to the Daily Mail.
Laurent Pambaguian from the ESA’s materials technology division noted that his team has been experimenting with additive manufacturing equipment that could print blocks out of the regolith for use in buildings Their 3D printers can produce between 6.5 feet and 11 feet of material every hour—meaning that it would take a week to produce enough blocks for one building.
According to ScienceAlert, NASA’s Kathy Laurini recently told reporters that the ESA’s plan to establish a lunar colony had “generated a lot of positive energy in Europe. The timing is right to get started on the capabilities which allow Europe to meet its exploration objectives and ensure it remains a strong partner as humans begin to explore the solar system.”
The website added that NexGen Space LLC, a consultant for the US space agency, said that a moon-based refueling station would cut the costs of sending American astronauts to Mars by as much as $10 billion per year. Such a facility would allow spaceships to launch with an estimated 68 percent less mass, as it would require to carry less heavy propellant into space since it would be able to fill up its tanks at the lunar surface facility.
Hillary Clinton plans to investigate Area 51 if she’s elected
Written By: Brett Smith
Christopher Pilny
UFOlogists just got a powerful ally in their corner, as presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has promised to get to the bottom of all this Area 51 business if elected to the top office in the United States.
Seemingly unable to access information on the top secret site as both First Lady and Secretary of State, a President Hillary Clinton would fully investigate if aliens have indeed visited Earth, she told a New Hampshire newspaper on a recent campaign stop.
“Yes, I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” Clinton told the local paper ‘with enthusiasm.’
Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill, the former US president, have been discussing the topic of alien invaders over the past couple of Democratic Presidential nominating processes.
In 2007, while campaigning against then-Senator Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton said the No. 1 reason for Freedom of Information Act requests at the Clinton presidential library was regarding UFOs. Last year, Bill Clinton told late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel he wouldn’t be shocked if Earth is visited by aliens.
“I just hope it’s not like ‘Independence Day,'” he said, referring to the blockbuster movie starring Will Smith.
When Hillary Clinton was asked about her husband’s talk show comments regarding aliens, she said “I think we may have been (visited already). We don’t know for sure.”
Area 51 is an unofficial name given to an Air Force base in the Nevada desert. When Clinton was most recently asked about the legendary location, she first referred to the site as Area 54, but then corrected herself.
In that same Jimmy Kimmel interview, the former president said he had looked into the Nevada base, and said it is simply a place when stealth military technology is developed.
“There are no aliens there,” he said.
In talking to the New Hampshire paper, Hillary Clinton, said the chairman of her campaign, John Podesta, is a huge follower of UFO lore. Podesta has served directly under the current and last Democratic presidents.
“He has made me personally pledge we are going to get the information out,” Hillary Clinton said. “One way or another. Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51.”
As stars age, their rotation stops slowing down, researchers claim
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
As stars age their surface rotation slows down due to a loss of mass and angular momentum, but contrary to current theory, the phenomenon does not continue throughout the lives of these aging stars, according to new research published Monday in the journal Nature.
The rotational slowdown observed in older stars, which is the result of a loss of mass and angular momentum, was long thought to have continued unabated throughout their later years. In the new study, however, an international group of astronomers found that there comes a time in the life of every star when its rotation stops slowing down.
Take the sun, for example. As the study authors explained in a statement, it is beginning to slow down as its magnetic field interacts with particles flowing away from its surface. Researchers use a technique known as gyrochronology to estimate its age, and the age of other, similar stars.
Previous studies involving gyrochronology had indicated that the rotational rates of aging stars continued to slow down as they grew older and older, but the authors of the new study found that they stop slowing once they reach a certain age. This discovery could alter our understanding of how low-mass stars like the sun influence planets and other nearby objects as they age.
Changes in the sun could lessen impact on technology
According to study co-author Dr. Guy Davies from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, the slowdown in stellar rotation stops once a star reaches middle age. The sun, which is 4.5 billion years old, is nearing this point in its lifespan, which means that it should stop slowing down within the next few hundred million years, he added.
Once this change takes place, it will likely affect the way that the sun interacts with the Earth, Dr. Davies and his colleagues explained. For one thing, changes in the magnetic field expected to occur will likely result in a the emission of fewer high-energy particles and a reduction in the frequency of solar storms, reducing space weather-related risks to technology. Furthermore, this terminated slow down could make human space travel safer, they noted.
“This research has major implications for how we see the Sun in the wider context of other Sun-like stars in our Galaxy, some of which will harbor planets like our own,” Professor Bill Chaplin, head of solar and stellar research at Birmingham, said in a statement.
“Our findings might suggest a fundamental change in the nature of ageing stellar dynamos, with the Sun being close to the critical transition to much weaker magnetized winds. This weakened braking limits the diagnostic power of gyrochronology for those stars that are more than halfway through their main-sequence lifetimes,” he and his colleagues added in their study.
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Feature Image: The sun is nearing the point in its lifespan when it should stop slowing down within the next few hundred million years. Credit: NASA.
CRISPR gene editing tool could theoretically create real-life dragons
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Four years ago, a California researcher developed a gene editing technique called CRISPR/Cas9, and since then it has been featured in more than 400 research papers and has been used in efforts to address a number of different human conditions. But is that all that it’s capable of?
Hank T. Greely from the Stanford School of medicine and R. Alta Charo from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine don’t believe so. In a essay published last month in the American Journal of Bioethics, Greely and Charo explain that the method could resurrect extinct species—or perhaps even create beasts straight out of mythology and fantasy novels.
Yes, as BBC News and the International Business Times explain, do-it-yourselfers with rather vivid imaginations could, theoretically at least, use CRISPR/Cas9 to create real-life dragons or unicorns. While such possibilities undoubtedly seem far-fetched, Greely and Charo believe that using genome-editing tools to create fantastical creatures is within the realm of possibility.
While biological limitations and the laws of physics will help “prevent the creation of flying dragons or fire-breathing dragons,” the bioethicists explained that some experts could consider creating massive reptiles similar in nature to Asian or European dragons. Alternatively, scientists could use CRISPR to make “dwarf elephants, giant guinea pigs, or… a real unicorn.”
Dragons? Unicorns? That can’t happen… can it?
While some scientists are moving to ban the use of genetic editing tools due to potential threats to the human race, Greely and Charo explained that they aren’t necessarily against the use of the technique. Rather, they are looking for some type of regulatory guideline to determine how and when CRISPR/Cas9 can and cannot be used—and for what purposes.
“There are the possibilities of spectacles. Animals and plants not created for personal use but to be exhibited,” the authors wrote, according to BBC News. For instance, the method has already been used to create “GloFish” that shine under UV light and a genetically-modified rabbit that can glow in the dark. But dragons and unicorns… could such things really be possible?
Greely and Charo told the BBC that their suggestions were “somewhat tongue-in-cheek” but “not impossible,” while Dr. Sam Sternberg, formerly of the University of California’s Doudna Lab, said that the “massive changes” to a creature’s genetic code required to create something like a dragon suggest that actually doing so is “probably bordering on impossible.”
Were a scientist to acquire Komodo dragons and “quickly resolve the regulatory, stem cell, and assisted reproduction problems,” he or she “could start tinkering,” the paper’s authors explained. “But it would likely take a very long time before you could hope to get something that looked much like a dragon.”
Astronomers reveal majority of stars have super strong magnetic fields
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Once believed to be rare, strong magnetic fields actually exist around the majority of stars, an international team of astronomers revealed in Monday’s edition of the journal Nature—and their discovery could radically alter our understanding of how stars evolve.
The researchers, led by astrophysicist Dennis Stello of the University of Sydney, reviewed data from NASA’s Kepler mission and found that stars only slightly more massive than our own sun have internal magnetic fields as much as 10 million times stronger than the Earth’s.
“This is tremendously exciting, and totally unexpected,” Stello, an associate professor, said in a statement. “Because only 50 percent of stars were previously thought to host strong magnetic fields, current models of how stars evolve lack magnetic fields as a fundamental ingredient. Such fields simply been regarded insignificant for our general understanding of stellar evolution.”
The new findings, which build upon previous research led by experts at the Californian Institute of Technology (Caltech) that found that sound waves within stars could be used to detect strong magnetic fields, “clearly shows this assumption needs to be revisited,” Stello added.
One-fifth of stars found to possess strong magnetic fields
The researchers looked at measurements of these sound waves, also known as stellar oscillations, in 3,600 red giant stars, which are stars with roughly the same mass as the sun but are in the final stages of their lives. They discovered that 20 percent of these stars (more than 700) showed signs of having strong magnetic fields that suppressed some of those oscillations.
“Because our sample is so big,” Stello said, “we have been able to dig deeper into the analysis and can conclude that strong magnetic fields are very common among stars that have masses of about 1.5-2.0 times that of the Sun. In the past we could only measure what happens on the surfaces of stars, with the results interpreted as showing magnetic fields were rare.”
He and his colleagues used a technique known as asteroseismology, which allowed them to look beneath the surface of a star and find whether or not it possessed a strong magnetic field near its core. These magnetic fields can alter the physical processes that take place in the stellar core, the study authors explained, including internal rotation rates that determine how the stars age.
Most stars have sound waves that bounce back and forth, essentially ringing like a bell on their interior, Stello said. The resulting sound can be used to reveal their physical properties, and the researchers measured slight variations in brightness caused by this so-called ringing. They found that magnetic fields suppressed specific oscillation frequencies in 60 percent of the stars.
As a result, they will now be able to directly test theories of how these magnetic fields form and evolve inside stars, and their work could shed new light on the processes that control the 22-year magnetic cycle of the sun. Stello and his colleagues now plan to find out just why these magnetic fields are more common than originally expected.
Why ancient Roman graffiti is so important to archaeologists
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny
Pompeii’s graffiti is the world’s most frustrating goldmine.
When it comes to ancient Rome, the vast majority of insights into their world we have are from one group: Wealthy (or patronized) free men. According to Charles Freeman[1], in all of the surviving works from Rome, only one author speaks of his life as a former slave—a philosopher named Epicetus. Meanwhile, every female Roman voice has been lost to time.
But there is one place on Earth that may yet hold their stories: The Bay of Naples, where in 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius buried the two seaside towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under feet of lava and ash. These places weren’t necessarily vast repositories of lost literature, but the eruption froze them nearly perfectly in time, preserving them for nearly 2,000 years—and preserving thousands of pieces of graffiti along with them.
Now, in modern times, graffiti bears the notions of vandalism and illegality, usually resulting in small, hasty scribbles of “Joanie loves Chachi” or some anatomically-puzzling genitalia (which was actually pretty true for Pompeii, too). But, unlike today, Roman graffiti was not forbidden—and it was practically everywhere, from the private dining rooms of wealthy homes (domi, where friends sometimes left messages for the hosts) to the public forum. In fact, according to Kristina Milnor[2], more 11,000 graffiti images have been found in Pompeii—which is just about the size of the population at the height of the town.
Poetry graffito from the stairwell of the House of Maius Castricius, Pompeii. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The evidence of lack of restriction is probably best demonstrated by the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a Latin word for graffiti—the words typically associated with it were those of writing or drawing*, like pictor (painter). Reading between the lines, it seems ancient graffiti was much less seen as destruction of public property and more as a public and acceptable form of self-expression and advertisement.
The text of the everyman
Without this threat of punishment, it seems that graffiti was readily practiced by people at all strata of society, making it perhaps the most valuable text we have from the ancient world. Man, woman, child, slave, poor, rich, illiterate—it did not matter, so long as there was an empty spot on a wall. Which means that, through graffiti, we are able to hear the voices of those who have been traditionally voiceless, granting us the possibility of astounding insights into lives and minds we’ve never been able to access.
And the variety of what has been found is astonishing. There is graffiti from foreigners passing through Pompeii, often scratched near the gates (“Feliciter Pompeii” was a common way to wish the city well). Or little drawings of gladiators, animals, and the like:
There was crude (by modern standards) sexual humor, such as, “Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.” And there was plenty more: advertisements for apartments for rent, prostitutes, and political campaigns; poems seemingly composed on the fly; records of debt; love letters; mockery; puns; poems found scratched on doorways by rejected lovers standing outside; quotes from great works of Roman literature; alphabets; words and phrases in other languages, like Greek or Safaitic (a sort of pre-Arabic).
Seeds of change
Naturally, all of these works have slowly changed ideas on what Roman life was like at the time.
One interesting example has to do with the extremely disliked Nero—the infamous Christian persecutor who was suspected of burning Rome down and who had his own mother murdered. Amazingly, according to the graffiti around Pompeii, Nero actually wasn’t as disliked by Romans as historians have believed. In fact, it’s estimated that more than half of the graffiti found praising emperors lauds Nero.
His popularity apparently only took a sharp, permanent downturn when he kicked his pregnant wife, Poppaea, to death. Yet, when his memory was condemned by the Senate following his death, and his statues were effaced, it appears that the people of Pompeii did not destroy the graffiti praising him—perhaps indicating that, despite everything, he still was in favor.
Functionally literate
Another long-held belief was that very few members of Roman society were literate, especially in the case of the lower classes. However, the graffiti found in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum seem to tell otherwise.
For example, a common aspect of campaigning for political office involved painting an advertisement (programmata) on the wall of a building in a busy area. This required one to hire (literate) men to grab a ladder, some torches, and a whitewasher to paint a well-worded vote of confidence in the middle of the night. Which begs the question: Why would one bother to hire men to paint an advertisement if so few people could read it?
The same goes for other advertisements as well, like for goods, apartments for rent, or prostitutes, such as this one found on the Street of the Theatres: “A copper pot went missing from my shop. Anyone who returns it to me will be given 65 bronze coins [roughly 26 days of wages for a soldier]. 20 more will be given for information leading to the capture of the thief.”
A rich man is less likely to care about such a small amount of money, and would likely own his own domus (house) in lieu of living in the working-class apartment buildings known as insulae. So who was expected to read and care about such things?
Moreover, in graffiti scratched into the soft plaster walls of various buildings, there seems to be examples of what some call “recreational literacy”. As in: There are what appear to be many attempts of people practicing writing alphabets and practice sentences, likely in an attempt to boost their ability to read and write. Paper was expensive, but walls were free and easy to scratch—and thus were the perfect place to drill oneself.
There are also a large number of references to Roman literature, especially Virgil’s Aeneid, which suggests that such works were widely-known throughout society. This of course doesn’t necessarily indicate literacy, but the first few words of the Aeneid, “Arma virumque cano” (I sing of arms and the man”) are so prevalent, it seems that they were widely memorized at all levels of society. In fact, those words were so famous that it seems a clever pictor painted this for a political campaign:
Progamma in grey, with pictor’s “arma virumque” below. Author added representative drawings based on other images. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The programma here is written in the boldest black, and the same paint is used to write the first words of the Aeneid—meaning the pictor wrote both of them. Such a practice wasn’t unusual; sign writers often filled in space around a programma with unrelated words or phrases.
Here, however, the pictor got clever. A previous programma had the letters DIDOVF in it; the new programma used the first four letters, DIDO, to make a sort of wordplay by writing the Aeneid quote under it—as Queen Dido was the great tragic love of the Aeneid’s protagonist, Aeneas. Thus, this not only demonstrated the pictor’s skills and sign writing abilities, but also added a sort of “learned” joke that could have scored his candidate some bonus points.
In short, it seems that ancient Romans, as a whole, were much more literature (and steeped in works of literature) than previously guessed—which would only make sense. At the very least, functional literacy, or knowing how to read key things like prices, seems like it would have been much more common than absolute illiteracy.
A woman speaks (finally)
As for voices of the voiceless, Pompeii may house some extraordinary pieces of graffiti—in theory, lost written works from the past could be somewhere there on the walls. Better yet, though, is a definite lost voice: Pompeii contains what seems to be the only female homoerotic love poem in the entire empire.
Not only are women typically nonexistent in terms of authoring Roman literature, but female homosexuality was (according to male sources) viewed as an abomination. (Male homosexuality, however, was widely accepted for the majority of the empire, until Christianity grew in strength. There are many extant male homoerotic love poems.)
Oh, would that it were permitted to grasp with my neck your little arms
as they entwine [it] and to give kisses to your delicate little lips.
Come now, my little darling, entrust your pleasures to the winds.
(En)trust me, the nature of men is insubstantial.
Often as I have been awake, lovesick, at midnight,
you think on these things with me: many are they whom Fortune lifted high;
these, suddenly thrown down headlong, she now oppresses.
Thus, just as Venus suddenly joined the bodies of lovers,
daylight divides them and if…
However, this is a hotly debated work of poetry. Like all of Latin, the sex of the people involved derives from the endings of the nouns and adjectives. The case ending for the person addressed, “my little darling” (pupula), is feminine. Meanwhile, the person who is talking to their darling describes themselves as perdita, or the feminine form of lovesick. However, perdita could also be referring to another aspect of the story (the night, nocte, in the ablative case) instead of a human person, making the speaker of an unlisted sex and most likely a man.
However, ancient Roman women often spoke to each other using baby talk (blanditiae)—so the language here could simply be that as well, since many of the nouns are in diminutive forms, like pupula (making “my darling” “my little darling”). All in all, the jury is currently out (but hopeful).
Clueless context
There are several other enormous issues that come along with graffiti. Namely: context.
For archaeology, it is the most important thing you need for an object. Where was an object found? A well? A grave shaft? What layer of dirt was it in? Was it found in Sicily? Athens? What was found with it? And it goes on and on.
Without context, it’s pretty hard to figure anything out about an object aside from the medium and style, and can make it impossible to tell if a work is a forgery—part of the reason why looting is such a huge problem for archaeologists and museums. And unfortunately, a lot of the graffiti from Pompeii lacks context.
Because of the 11,000 graffiti found, roughly 90% have disappeared thanks to weathering or destruction caused by bombs dropped in World War II. Of course, each graffito was recorded—but often, the location of the graffito is missing. Or, the graffito was copied down wrong, and we have no way of knowing the true inscription.
For example, in aforementioned female homoerotic love poem, copying down just two letters wrong, like perdita instead of perditus, means that the speaker was actually a male. Or, if there were, say, a drawing of a gladiator with the words “Trimalchio is the best,” knowing it came from the house of a wealthy man named Trimalchio who had hosted public gladiator battles would add much more meaning than just knowing that, at one point, such a graffito existed somewhere in Pompeii—which is sadly the case for a lot of the graffiti.
Another problem with context is not knowing who drew or painted a graffito, nor when they did it. With rare exception, the graffiti of Pompeii isn’t dated. And when it is, it very rarely gives the year. (Somewhat puzzlingly, the graffiti with written years only date up until the year 62 CE, when a major earthquake rocked the area and destroyed an enormous portion of the city. It’s suspected that such an event may have dampened the spirit of the Pompeii, to the point where it quelled creative expression—and thus the production of graffiti past that point.)
Too much anonymity
Further, in all of the 11,000 pieces of graffiti, classicists have only recognized one man as a true “author” of any work: Loreius Tiburtinus. He is credited with 11 separate graffiti poems or fragments, the majority of which were found outside a gate leading into one of the small theaters of the city.
Tiburtinus was credited with these poems because, like many other people, he signed his work: Tiburtinus epoese, which is an interesting mix of Ancient Greek and Latin. “Epoese” is a transliterated form of the Greek verb ποιέω, to make. So roughly, it reads, “Tiburtinus made this.” Which, unfortunately, is problematic again. In what way did Tiburtinus make these poems? Did he compose them, or did he simply make the graffiti marks, thereby copying down someone else’s work?
In sum, graffiti was the text of the everyman in ancient Rome, granting us unique insight into how everyone lived—not just wealthy free men. But for everything we learn, there seems to be a tantalizing mystery we have no way of resolving, making graffiti both our greatest aid and our most frustrating foe.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
*Though, there was a specific word for the person who whitewashed a wall so an advertisement or political campaign could be drawn on a clean slate: dealbator.
[1] Freeman, Charles. Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
[2] Milnor, Kristina. Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Milnor was also the source for all non-cited information.
[3] http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm has a hilarious, probably NSFW list of graffiti from across Pompeii that is worth a read-through. My favorite, from the basilica inside Region VIII: “Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than when they ever have before!”
Early humans came into Europe from North Africa via the Strait of Gibraltar
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A new study published by the Journal of Human Evolution has added to the growing body of evidence showing early humans came into Europe from North Africa across a land bridge that formed through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Using cutting-edge dating techniques, a team of researchers has been able to confirm a date range between 900,000 and 850,000 years ago as a period when a species of Old World monkey and an early species of human lived in the same cave location in southeastern Spain.
The location isn’t far from where many researchers have hypothesized that humans may have gone over into Europe from North Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar at a time when sea levels were low enough to offer a land bridge connecting the continents.
The study team assessed cave deposit specimens and found evidence for the Old World monkey Theropithecus living between 900,000 and 850,000 years ago. Comparable dates have been reached through previous scientific studies on the Cueva Negra cave in the same area of Spain. This cave also held evidence of early human fossils connected with what is arguably regarded as some of the earliest Paleolithic stone tools in Europe.
The study authors said the existence of the same species of Theropithecus and human at around the same time in North Africa, in conjunction with the lack of Theropithecus fossils elsewhere in Europe, props up the theory of a dispersal of the two primates through the Strait of Gibraltar nearly 1 million years ago. At this time, sea levels were likely low enough to generate a land bridge at the Strait connecting Africa and Europe.
Previous research studies by other teams have also indicated a different, earlier human dispersal into southeastern Spain through the Strait of Gibraltar around 1.3 million years ago. Well-known research and Homo fossil discoveries in the country of Georgia have indicated an even earlier Homo diaspora out of Africa, quite possibly through the Middle East and up through Asia Minor to the southern Caucasus at approximately 1.8 million years ago.
Super rare pink hippo makes appearance in Kenya reserve
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Typically, when a person sees a pink elephant, it’s because they’re experiencing hallucinations resulting from drinking too much. Seeing a pink hippopotamus, on the other hand, doesn’t have anything to do with alcohol intake—it just means you’ve seen a very rare animal.
According to Yahoo News and the New York Post, one French couple recently had the chance to see such a creature as it bathed alongside traditional, gray-colored hippos at Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Fortunately, they were able to snap a photo of the unusual creature.
Laurent Renaud, who spotted the hippo along with his wife Dominique this winter, told the Daily Mail, “We knew the pink hippo was in a group of hippos in a bend of the river—people talked about it, but we were never sure whether it was real or a myth or not.
“So to see it in real life was an absolutely life changing experience,” he explained. “We checked the area every day and we were lucky enough to spot and to photograph it. I could barely get my camera out to take the photo, I was shaking so much!”
So what caused this hippo to turn pink?
The pink coloring of the hippopotamus, which also included a few speckled gray spots, is said to be due to a condition called leucism that is caused by a partial loss of pigmentation. Even though this sounds similar to albinism, or the absence of melatonin throughout an animal’s entire body, this condition differs in that it only affects the skin, scales, or feathers.
Leucism is caused by a reduction in multiple types of pigments, not just melanin, the Daily Mail added. It does not affect the creature’s eyes, which is why the hippo in the Renaud’s picture has a pair of dark-colored eyes just like the gray-colored members of the herd, not red ones.
While the pink hippo certainly stands out, as Yahoo News and the New York Post explained, this is not necessarily a good thing. The unusual color makes it harder for it to blend into the scenery, which in turn makes it more likely to be spotted by predators. In addition, the pink hue makes this hippo more likely to suffer sunburn than its gray-colored counterparts.
January offers a once in a lifetime chance to see Comet Catalina
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Stargazers and amateur astronomers will have their first (and likely only) opportunity to see Comet Catalina this month, as the green, two-tailed celestial object will be visible in the night sky when it passes by the Earth on its way out of the solar system—probably for good.
Catalina, officially known as comet C/2013 US10, is believed to have originated from the Oort Cloud, a spherical mass of billions of icy objects that have a loose and chaotic bond to the solar system, according to NASA. It was first discovered in October 2013 and named in honor of the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, they added.
The comet, which the CBC said is less than 20 km (nearly 12.4 miles) across, reached perihelion—or the point where it is nearest to the sun—at a distance of 122 million km (76 million miles) back on November 15. Due to its peak velocity of 166,000 km (103,000 miles) per hour, experts at the US space agency believe that the comet is on an escape trajectory from the solar system.
What that means is that this is probably the one and only chance people will have to see Comet Catalina before it essentially vanishes for view from good, and while a few prime opportunities to take a look have already passed by, there will still be plenty of good chances to see it.
So how can I catch a glimpse of this comet before it’s too late?
According to NASA, the best opportunity to see comet C/2013 US10 will be to look in the east just before dawn—weather permitting, of course. The waning gibbous moon could make actually spotting the object difficult, though. Binoculars or a telescope will be essential to your success.
On New Year’s Day, the comet passed 0.5 degrees to the west of Arcturus, a star located in the constellation Bootes in the eastern part of the sky, left and slightly below the moon. That meant that the star, which is the second-brightest in the Northern Hemisphere, made a good guidepost to find the star during the early morning hours, according to NASA.
Alas, the calendar reveals that this particular opportunity has come and gone. However, Michael Watson, an astronomer at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, told the CBC that another good time to try and catch a glimpse of the comet will be between January 8 and January 10, as there will be no moon in the early morning sky and it will be passing very close to the Earth.
It’s closest approach will be on January 17, when it will pass 110 million km (68 million miles) from the Earth, and Ottawa-based astronomer Gary Boyle told the CBC that it will appear to be a fuzzy, slightly green blob in the sky. Its tails may or may not be visible to the naked eye, he said, but they should appear in photographs taken using a decent-quality digital camera.
43-year-old man with bionic penis is about to lose his virginity
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
A 43-year-old Scotland native who was given a bionic penis after losing his own organ in an accident when he was a child is about to lose his virginity, telling reporters that he had “waited long enough” and that it would be “a great start to the new year.”
According to theDaily Mail and the New York Daily News, Mohammed Abad of Edinburgh was equipped with the “mechanical member” in 2012 after he had lost his organic one in what has been described as a freak road accident when he was just six years old.
Following his procedure, he is now able to urinate and ejaculate normally, and he plans to take full advantage of the latter next week with a 35-year-old dominatrix named Charlotte Rose, the media outlets have reported, but not until after a dinner date in London.
Abad told The Sun that he was “really excited” about the hook-up, and Rose, who said that she will not charge him for their romantic rendezvous, said that she was “honored that he chose me to take his virginity” and that she hopes he can “find a lovely lady to settle down with.”
So, uh, how exactly does a bionic penis work?
Abad, who lost his penis and testicles after being run over and dragged by a car when he was a boy, originally had surgery to fit an eight-inch bionic replacement in 2012. However, it has only been fully functional since July 2015 following a special surgery, the Daily Mail said.
The bionic penis was created using a skin graft from Abad’s arm and has a pair of tubes under the skin. Those tubes become inflated with saline with the push of a button, the New York Daily News explained, which is how he gets an erection. Fluids come from an abdominal pouch.
A second button on the penis allows it to deflate after use, reports indicate. The device was made by researchers at University College London. It took surgeons 11 hours to attach the organ, Abad said, and afterwards he had an erection for two weeks in order to allow the penis to fully heal.
He also told the This Morning program last year that he had undergone a total of 119 operations to correct the issue, and that he doubted he would feel the same sensations during sex that other men with biological penises would. “I’m totally different,” Abad said.
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Feature Image: ITV
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