Space Station Soars Over the Southern Lights

It must be ISS flyover video season, because here's another breathtaking beauty made from images taken by the Expedition 28 crew aboard the space station! Here we get to witness the glamor of the Aurora Australis -- a.k.a. the Southern Lights -- as the International Space Station orbits high above.

The Aurora Australis is the southern hemisphere's version of the Aurora Borealis, and is created in the same way: high-energy ions emitted from the sun collide with Earth's magnetic field and excite atoms of various elements located in the upper atmosphere, which then release light energy we can see.

The colors of the aurora are determined by the type of atoms releasing light as well as their altitudes. The most common gas at lower levels of the Earth's ionosphere is oxygen, which emits light in the green and yellow end of the spectrum -- colors our eyes detect particularly well.

Other colors, like reds, blues and purples, are also possible but harder to detect without using longer-exposure photography.

Besides shimmering sheets of aurorae, a high-altitude phenomenon called airglow is also visible as a thin line of pale yellow light surrounding Earth's limb. This is caused by energy released by molecules high in the atmosphere that were charged up during the day by ultraviolet light from the sun... not unlike a glow-in-the-dark sticker!

Between this video and the previous one posted here, it's no wonder that the astronauts lucky enough to work on the Space Station love their jobs as much as they do. In spite of all the inherent risks to working in low-Earth orbit, you simply can't beat the view.

Read more at Discovery News

Spiky Newborn Dinosaur Found in D.C. Beltway

A five-inch-long baby dinosaur with a short nose, armor and spikes went belly-up and likely drowned in what is now the Washington, D.C. beltway, say scientists, who describe the find as a new species as well as the first hatchling of any dinosaur species ever recovered in the eastern United States.

The tiny dinosaur, Propanoplosaurus marylandicus, is the youngest nodosaur ever found. This group of short-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs reached about 30 feet long when fully grown and had powerful jaws and small teeth.

"Dinosaurs grew up faster than we ever imagined," said Ray Stanford, a Maryland-based dinosaur tracker who was the lead author of a study on the find in the Journal of Paleontology. "We can tell that this little guy was just a hatchling because the bones were elastic and cartilaginous upon death and not ossified."

Stanford found the new 110-million-year-old nodosaur while searching a creek bed in Maryland's Prince George's County after an extensive flood. The area, according to Stanford, was quite a hotbed of dinosaur activity during the Early Cretaceous.

Major predators, such as huge meat-eating Acrocanthosaurus, lived in the region, along with numerous large sauropods, and other plant-eaters like Hypsilophodon and Iguanodon.

"The climate was quite warm and tropical," he said, adding that it was full of lush palm-like trees, such as Cycadophytes members.

The living wasn't always easy for dinosaurs, however, as the little nodosaur proves. Stanford and his team believe the baby dinosaur, which grew to only five inches long, drowned before getting buried by sediment in the stream. They base this on the location and the fact that the dinosaur was preserved on its back. Stanford said dinosaurs that drown exhibit "float and bloat" characteristics shared by this specimen.

Weishampel, a paleontologist and a professor of anatomy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, led a computer analysis of the baby dinosaur's skull, comparing its bumps, grooves and proportions to 10 other species of ankylosaurs, the group that contains nodosaurs.

They determined the dinosaur was closely related to other nodosaurs, but had distinctive features, such as a particularly short snout, which earned its designation as a new species.

"We didn't know much about hatchling nodosaurs at all prior to this discovery," Weishampel was quoted as saying in a press release. "And this is certainly enough to motivate more searches for dinosaurs in Maryland, along with more analysis of Maryland dinosaurs."

Stanford indicated the short-snouted dinosaur, preserved as a natural cast, softens the image of its tougher looking armored parents.

"Babies tend to be cute with their short noses, so this one fits that description," he said. "It also had legs that were disproportionately long for its body, allowing for running."

Read more at Discovery News

The Ice Mummy: Little-Known Facts

Exactly 20 years ago, on Sept. 19, 1991, German hikers Erika and Helmut Simon spotted something brown while walking near a melting glacier in the Ötztal Alps in South Tyrol.

As they got closer, they realized with horror that it wasn't just some sort of rubbish: a human corpse was lying with the chest against a flat rock.

Only the back of the head, the bare shoulders and part of the back emerged from the ice and meltwater.

The hikers thought the body belonged to an unfortunate victim of a mountaineering accident a few years back. In fact, they discovered one of the world's oldest and best preserved mummies.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this sensational discovery, here are 20 known and lesser known facts about the Neothiltic frozen mummy.

1. An incredible chain of coincidences allowed the Iceman to remain intact: he was covered by snow shortly after his death and later by ice; the deep gully where the Iceman lay prevented the body from being ground up by the base of the glacier; the body was exposed to damaging sunlight and wind only for a short time in 1991 between the time the mummy thawed and the accidental discovery.

2. It was an Austrian reporter, Karl Wendl, who first named the mummy "Ötzi," referring to the Ötzal Alps where it was found. According to a resolution by the South Tyrol Provincial Government, the official name for the mummy is "Der Mann aus dem Eis" -- "L'Uomo venuto dal ghiaccio" (The man who came from ice).

3. Soon after the mummy was recovered, a harsh controversy arose on which soil -- Italian or Austrian -- it was found. A survey of the border carried out on Oct. 2, 1991 established that the mummy lay 303.67 feet from the border in South Tyrol, in Italy.

4. Radio carbon dating established that the Ötzi lived around 5,000 years ago, between 3350 and 3100 B.C.

5. Recent investigations established that he had brown eyes, not blue as previously thought.

6. Ötzi was probably a bearded, furrow faced man. He was about 5 foot, 3 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds.

7. He lacked a twelfth pair of ribs -- a rare anatomical anomaly.

8. The Iceman had a remarkable diastema, or natural gap, between his two upper incisors. He also lacked wisdom teeth. Even though he suffered from cavities, worn teeth and periodontal diseases, he still had all his teeth when he died at around 45.

9. Ötzi could have been a little better endowed. The man's natural mummification and dehydration in the Alpine glacier produced a "collapse of the genitalia," which left the Iceman with an almost invisible member.

10. The Iceman's last meal probably consisted of a porridge of einkorn, meat and vegetables. Researchers are still investigating the sampled material to determine the exact nature on the Iceman’s last meal.

11. Three gallbladder stones were recently found which, in combination with the previously identified atherosclerosis, show that Ötzi’s diet may have been richer in animal products than previously thought.

12. The Iceman's stomach also contained 30 different types of pollen, which ended up there with the food he ate, the water he drank and the air he breathed. The pollen showed that he died in the spring or early summer.

13. Analysis of the isotopic composition of Ötzi's tooth enamel and bones suggest that the man was born and lived in what is now South Tyrol. He probably spent his childhood in the upper Eisack Valley or the lower Puster Valley. He lived at least ten years in the Vinschgau prior to his death.

14. Among the clothing and items found with the mummy, one of the most important pieces is the copper-bladed axe. Archaeological experiments showed that the axe could fell a yew tree in 35 minutes without sharpening.

15. Ötzi's body is covered with over 50 tattoos made with fine incisions into which charcoal was rubbed. In the shape of lines and crosses, they were probably used as pain-relieving treatments. Indeed, the tattooed areas correspond to skin acupuncture lines, which predate acupunture in Asia by two thousand years.

16. Many theories have been proposed on Ötzi' social status. Among the various theories, the Iceman was identified with a shaman, a mineral prospector looking for ore deposits in the mountains, a hunter, a trader, a shepherd, and a man banished from his community.

17. The Iceman had been involved in a fight shortly before his death. He was shot with an arrow which pierced the subclavian artery and also suffered a blow to the death just before dying.

18. Ötzi's belonged to the European genetic haplogroup K. He was probably infertile.

Read more at Discovery News

Asteroid Family Not Guilty of Dinosaur Killing

Around 65 million years ago, an asteroid plummeted to Earth, triggering a cascade of events that led to the demise of the dinosaurs, among other life forms.

The guilty party, previous studies showed, hailed from a family of asteroids called the Baptistina, residents of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of their members, the story goes, crashed into a sizeable neighbor some 160 million years ago, and shattered, sending at least one hefty chunk hurling toward Earth.

Or maybe not.

New evidence from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE telescope, exonerates the Baptistina family, scientists reported Monday.

New data refined the age estimates of the suspect's family, casting doubt they were around at the right time to cause the impact. Rather, the original parent Baptistina asteroid seems to have broken apart closer to 80 million years ago, about half as long as originally proposed, which doesn't give any large pieces enough time to have reached Earth to trigger the dinosaur-killing impact, says astronomer Amy Mainzer, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The WISE team reached its conclusion after surveying more than 157,000 asteroids, including 1,056 members of the Baptistina family.

Read more at Discovery News

Psychic Sally Morgan hears voices from the other side (via a hidden earpiece)

According to her website, Sally Morgan is "Britain's best-loved psychic". She is certainly a very successful psychic – she has just released her third book and is currently filming the third series of Psychic Sally on the Road for Sky LIVING. But an incident that took place a few days ago may cause a few of her fans to wonder whether Morgan is deserving of their adoration. Could it be that, like so many self-professed psychic superstars in the past, Morgan is nothing more than a self-serving con artist?

Let me describe what happened so that you can make up your own mind. On Monday 12 September, a caller named Sue phoned the Liveline show on RTÉ Radio 1, an Irish radio station. Sue said that she had attended Morgan's show the previous night at the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin and had been impressed by the accuracy of the readings she made in the first half of the show.

But then something odd happened. Sue was sitting in the back row on the fourth level of the theatre and there was a small room behind her ("like a projection room") with a window open. Sue and her companions became aware of a man's voice and "everything that the man was saying, the psychic was saying it 10 seconds later."

Sue believes, not unreasonably, that the man was feeding information to Sally through an earpiece attached to her microphone. For example, the voice would say something like "David, pain in the back, passed quickly" and a few seconds later Sally would claim to have the spirit of a "David" on stage who – you'll never guess – suffered from back pain and passed quickly.

A member of staff realised that several people near the back of the theatre were aware of the mystery voice and the window was gently closed. The voice was not heard again.

Sue speculated, again not unreasonably given the history of psychic frauds, that the man was feeding Sally information that had been gathered by engaging members of the audience in conversation in the foyer before the show began. This is a technique widely used by psychic fraudsters, as audience members will naturally discuss with each other who they are hoping to hear from "on the other side", how their loved one died, and so on.

Subsequent callers to the radio programme supported Sue's account.

The theatre's general manager, Stephen Faloon, claimed that the voice heard by the audience was actually the voices of two members of staff working for the theatre, not someone supplying information to Sally. Sally Morgan Enterprises also denied that the medium was being fed information during the show.

This episode is reminiscent of the exposure of faith healer Peter Popoff by James Randi in 1986. Popoff would wow his audiences by giving specific and accurate details of their medical problems before claiming to cure them with his divine powers. This information was, according to Popoff, provided to him directly by God. It was certainly an effective technique, as at this time Popoff was raking in around $4m per month (tax-free) from his poor, sick and uneducated followers.

Randi, with the assistance of investigator Alexander Jason, convincingly demonstrated that Popoff was actually receiving the "divine" information from his wife via a hearing aid. Following his exposure on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Popoff declared bankruptcy in 1987.

In a more rational world, that would have been the end of Popoff's career as a faith healer. Sadly, we do not live in a rational world. Popoff is back, earning more than ever by fleecing his flock using exactly the same techniques that Randi exposed, plus a few new ones, such as the sale of "Miracle Spring Water". According to ABC News, Popoff's ministry received more than $9.6m in 2003 and more than $23m in 2005. In that year, Popoff paid himself and his wife a combined total of almost a million dollars (not to mention two of his children receiving more than $180,000 each).

Since the heyday of mediumship during the Victorian era, exposure as frauds has typically done little to diminish the popularity of alleged psychics in the eyes of their followers.

It is important to realise that many self-professed psychics, possibly the majority, are sincere in their beliefs that they possess a "gift". Such practitioners are probably unintentionally using some of the same techniques used by so-called cold readers to convince themselves and their sitters that they are tapping into some paranormal source of information. Because the cold reading technique is not being exploited deliberately and systematically, such readings are usually unimpressive to anyone except hardcore believers.

But con artists can use cold reading to convince complete strangers that they know all about them. It relies on the clever use of language, careful observation, intelligent guesswork, and the production of vague and ambiguous statements that the sitter interprets (and remembers) as being more specific than they actually were. In a skilled practitioner, cold reading can produce much more impressive results than the rather amateurish readings produced by most psychics.

Read more at The Guardian

Scientists Generate First Detailed Map of Human Neuroreceptor

For the first time, USC scientists have mapped out a neuroreceptor. This scientific breakthrough promises to revolutionize the engineering of drugs used to treat ailments such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.

The team produced the world's first high-resolution images of the α7 (Alpha 7) receptor, a molecule responsible for transmitting signals between neurons -- particularly in regions of the brain believed to be associated with learning and memory.

Using the image, scientists will be better equipped to design pharmaceuticals specifically to interact with the receptor, instead of blindly using a trial-and-error approach.

"A lot of interest in this work will come from pharmaceutical companies," said corresponding author Lin Chen, professor of biological sciences and chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "They really have no clear picture of this. They don't know how or why [their drugs] work."

The high-resolution image will also help neuroscience researchers study how these receptors receive and transmit neuronal signals, a question that has puzzled researchers for decades.

The article, co-authored with scientists from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, appears in Nature Neuroscience this month.

The findings follow up on Chen's earlier landmark achievement, deciphering the inner workings of a nicotine receptor in 2007.

Developing an image of the α7 receptor was no simple task, which is partly why it has taken until now to achieve this despite the wide interest in the understanding the receptor's structure. Attempts to decipher neuroreceptors have been ongoing for 30 years.

"This has been a longstanding challenge," Chen said. The challenge is twofold, he said. It is difficult to obtain enough receptor protein for structural analysis, and the flexible nature of these receptors makes them difficult to crystallize -- a necessary step for high-resolution imaging.

The biologist's usual go-to method to study such molecules -- growing a large quantity using molecular cloning -- failed to produce enough correctly structured α7 to study.

"You can't study it directly in its natural form, so you have to engineer it," Chen said.

In the case of α7, Chen's collaborator, Dr. Steve Sine from Mayo Clinic, engineered a chimera, a Frankenstein molecule sharing about 70 percent of its structure in common with the α7 that reacted to stimuli in the same way that natural α7 does.

The next step was to form crystals with these proteins for high-resolution study. This turns out to be particularly difficult for neuronal receptors because they are intrinsically flexible -- they need to bind to a neurotransmitter, a small molecule that acts as a messenger in the nervous system, and transmit the signal across the protein body. Moreover, these receptors are decorated with sugar molecules that add further flexibility to the system.

Read more at Science Daily

Around the World on the Space Station: Video

Now watch it 14 more times for an idea of what the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) get to see every day. No wonder after five months up there they still don't want to come down!

This gorgeous video was made by science teacher James Drake using images downloaded from The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. This is a great online resource with basically all of the images taken from orbit, categorized into a searchable database by region and date. He used a free program called VirtualDub to create the final edit.

ames explains on YouTube: "This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy."

Read more at Discovery News

David Attenborough joins campaign against creationism in schools

The naturalist joined three Nobel laureates, the atheist Richard Dawkins and other leading scientists in calling on the government to tackle the "threat" of creationism.

Gordon Brown's government issued guidance to all schools that the subject should not be taught to pupils, but neither they nor the coalition government enshrined the recommendation in law.

In a statement on a new campaign website, the 30 scientists and campaign groups including the British Science Association demanded creationism and "intelligent design" be banned outright.

Prof Colin Blakemore, the neurobiologist, Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, and former Royal Society director of education Rev Prof Michael Reiss were among the signatories.

Rev Prof Reiss, who has described evolution as "God's work", resigned from his Royal Society post in 2008 after suggesting science lessons ought to include discussion of creationism.

Speaking ahead of the launch today he said: "Evolution is an extremely powerful idea that lies at the heart of biology.

"At the same time, it's a sufficiently simple concept that there's no good reason why it should be left out of the primary curriculum. If creationism is discussed, it should be made clear to pupils that it is not accepted by the scientific community."

Last year the campaign group, led by the British Humanist Association (BHA) and comprising many of the same members, called for evolution to be taught in all primary schools.

Prof Dawkins said: "We need to stop calling evolution a theory. In the ordinary language sense of the word it is a fact. It is as solidly demonstrated as any fact in science."

Most schools in England teach evolution, the idea popularised by Charles Darwin that all living things developed from primitive organisms through a process of natural selection.

But the arguments of creationists, who believe God built the world in six days in line with the story of Genesis, and of devout Muslims have become steadily more popular in recent years.

Andrew Copson, chief executive of the BHA, said: "Evolution is probably the most important idea underlying biological science and we support the view of many experts that it should be introduced right from primary level in all state-maintained schools.

Read more at The Telegraph

Invasive Amphibians, Reptiles in Florida Outnumber World, Study Finds

Florida has the world's worst invasive amphibian and reptile problem, and a new 20-year study led by a University of Florida researcher verifies the pet trade as the No. 1 cause of the species' introductions.

From 1863 through 2010, 137 non-native amphibian and reptile species were introduced to Florida, with about 25 percent of those traced to one animal importer. The findings appear online September 15 in Zootaxa.

"Most people in Florida don't realize when they see an animal if it's native or non-native and unfortunately, quite a few of them don't belong here and can cause harm," said lead author Kenneth Krysko, herpetology collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. "No other area in the world has a problem like we do, and today's laws simply cannot be enforced to stop current trends."

Florida law prohibits the release of non-native species without a state permit, but offenders cannot be prosecuted unless they are caught in the act. To date, no one in Florida has been prosecuted for the establishment of a non-indigenous animal. Researchers urge lawmakers to create enforceable policies before more species reproduce and become established. The study names 56 established species: 43 lizards, five snakes, four turtles, three frogs and a caiman, a close relative of the American alligator.

"The invasion of lizards is pretty drastic considering we only have 16 native species," Krysko said. "Lizards can cause just as much damage as a python. They are quicker than snakes, can travel far, and are always moving around looking for the next meal."

Defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as organisms "whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health," invasive species are a growing concern for residents and policymakers. Only three species were intercepted before reaching the wild and researchers documented 137 introductions. The study also shows no established, non-native amphibian or reptile species has been eradicated.

Floridians have experienced some of the damage these animals can cause, from iguanas that destroy cement walls to Burmese pythons released in the Everglades that eat protected species. While the impact of many of the introduced species has not been determined, the study provides new information about how, why and when they entered the state.

The first introduction in 1863 was of the greenhouse frog, native to the West Indies. One of the most easily recognized species is the brown anole, the first introduced lizard, which reached Florida from Cuba via cargo ships in 1887. Until about 1940, nearly all non-native species arrived through this accidental cargo pathway, but the boom in popularity of exotic terrarium animals in the 1970s and 1980s led to the pet trade being accountable for 84 percent of the introductions, Krysko said.

"It's like some mad scientist has thrown these species together from all around the world and said, 'hey let's put them all together and see what happens,' " Krysko said. "It could take decades before we actually know the long-term effects these species will have."

Other pathways include biological control, in which an animal is intentionally released to control a pest species, and accidental introduction through the zoo or plant trade. The study will serve as a baseline for establishing effective policies for control or eradication, said Fred Kraus, a vertebrate biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu who helped establish policies for invasive amphibians and reptiles in Hawaii.

"This paper by Kenney and company I think is a good example of the approach that needs to be taken, providing the detail and being rather cautious in making immediate claims that things are established until there is evidence for it," Kraus said. "There is a lot more work going on now, but for years it was just ignored. For years, climate change was ignored, too. You know, humans just tend to ignore bad news until you can't ignore it anymore."

One of the greatest obstacles pet owners face is how to feed and house an exotic animal that has become too large or difficult to handle, Krysko said.

"The biggest example is the Burmese python," Krysko said. "It's a large constrictor and has definitely shown impact on native species, some you just can't even find anymore."

Read more at Science Daily

Mother Tongue Comes from Your Prehistoric Father

Language change among our prehistoric ancestors came about via the arrival of immigrant men -- rather than women -- into new settlements, according to new research.

The claim is made by two University of Cambridge academics, Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, in a report to be published in Science on September 9.

They studied the instances of genetic markers (the male Y chromosome and female mtDNA) from several thousand individuals in communities around the world that seem to show the emergence globally of sex-specific transmission of language.

From Scandinavian Vikings who ferried kidnapped British women to Iceland -- to African, Indian and Polynesian tribes, a pattern has emerged which appears to show that the arrival of men to particular geographic locations -- through either agricultural dispersal or the arrival of military forces -- can have a significant impact on what language is spoken there.

Professor Renfrew said: "It may be that during colonisation episodes by emigrating agriculturalists, men generally outnumber women in the pioneering groups and take wives from the local community.

"When the parents have different linguistic backgrounds, it may often be the language of the father which is dominant within the family group."

Dr Forster, of Murray Edwards College, also pointed to the fact that men have a greater variance in offspring than women -- they are more likely to father children with different mothers than vice versa. This has been recorded both in prehistoric tribes such as the 19th and 20th century Polar Eskimos from Greenland and in historic figures like Genghis Khan, who is believed to have fathered hundreds of children.

Indeed, his Y chromosome is carried by 0.5 per cent of the world's male population today.

Perhaps the most striking example of sex-biased language change however comes from a genetic study on the prehistoric encounter of expanding Polynesians with resident Melanesians in New Guinea and the neighbouring Admiralty Islands. The New Guinean coast contains pockets of Polynesian-speaking areas separated by Melanesian areas. The Polynesian mtDNA level (40-50%) is similar in these areas regardless of language, whereas the Y chromosome correlates strongly with the presence of Polynesian languages.

Past studies have shown similar findings in the Indian subcontinent among the speakers of Tibeto-Burman and among the immigrant Indo-European languages as opposed to indigenous Dravidian languages.

In the Americas, too, language replacement in the course of postulated farming dispersal has also been found to correlate for the Uto-Aztecan language family.

Read more at Science Daily