Skeletal Remains of Hundreds of Warriors Unearthed

A fractured skull and a thighbone hacked in half. Finds of damaged human bones along with axes, spears, clubs and shields confirm that the bog at Alken Enge was the site of violent conflict.

"It's clear that this must have been a quite far-reaching and dramatic event that must have had profound effect on the society of the time," explains Project Manager Mads Kähler Holst, professor of archaeology at Aarhus University.

For almost two months now, Dr Holst and a team of fifteen archaeologists and geologists have been working to excavate the remains of a large army that was sacrificed at the site around the time of the birth of Christ. The skeletal remains of hundreds of warriors lie buried in the Alken Enge wetlands near Lake Mossø in East Jutland, Denmark.

The remains will be exhumed from the excavation site over the coming days. Then an international team of researchers will attempt to discover who these warriors were and where they came from by performing detailed analyses of the remains.

"The dig has produced a large quantity of skeletal remains, and we believe that they will give us the answers to some of our questions about what kind of events led up to the army ending up here," explains Dr Holst.

Forty hectares of remains

The archaeological investigation of the site is nearing its conclusion for this year. But there are many indications that the find is much larger than the area archaeologists have excavated thus far.

"We've done small test digs at different places in the 40 hectare Alken Enge wetlands area, and new finds keep emerging," says Field Director Ejvind Hertz of Skanderborg Museum, who is directing the dig.

In fact, the find is so massive that researchers aren't counting on being able to excavate all of it. Instead, they will focus on recreating the general outlines of the events that took place at the site by performing smaller digs at different spots across the bog and reconstructing what the landscape might have looked like at the time of the birth of Christ.

New geological insights

At the same time as the archaeological dig, geologists from the Department of Geoscience at AU have been investigating the development of the bog.

"The geological survey indicates that the archaeological finds were deposited in a lake at a point in time when there was a a smaller basin at the east end of Lake Mossø created by a tongue of land jutting into the lake," explains Professor Bent Vad Odgaard, Aarhus University.

Read more at Science Daily

Remaking History: A New Take On How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Europeans

Investigators reporting in the Cell Press journal Trends in Genetics say that new analytical techniques are changing long-held, simplistic views about the evolutionary history of humans in Europe. Their findings indicate that many cultural, climatic, and demographic events have shaped genetic variation among modern-day European populations and that the variety of those mechanisms is more diverse than previously thought.

Recent advances in paleogenetics are providing never-before-seen glimpses into the complex evolution of humans in Europe, helping researchers piece together the events that ultimately created what is now known as modern man. Following the period when ice sheets were at their maximum extension across Earth (between 27,000 and 16,000 years ago), hunter-gatherer populations re-colonized most parts of Europe. Then around 8,000 years ago, the first farming populations appeared on the continent during the so-called Neolithic transition. For several thousand years, two separate modes of life coexisted in Europe: hunter-gatherer populations continued to rely on wild food resources, while farming populations had an entirely different demographic profile and lifestyle that consisted of domesticated crops and livestock, pottery, housing, and storage technology.

For some decades, it was assumed that the genetic diversity of contemporary Europeans was shaped mainly during the Neolithic transition; however, it now appears that it was also affected both before and after this key event. Moreover, the spread of farming is likely to have varied to a great extent by region, leading to varying impacts of migrating farmers' and local hunter-gatherers' genetic contributions to future populations.

"We are currently at a stage in which next-generation sequencing technologies, ancient DNA analyses, and computer simulation modeling allow us to obtain a much more accurate and detailed perspective on the nature and timing of major prehistoric processes such as the colonization of Europe by modern humans, the survival of human populations during the ice age, the Neolithic transition, and the rise and fall of complex societies and empires," says first author Dr. Ron Pinhasi, of Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland.

Read more at Science Daily

Could Escaped Animals Account for Bigfoot Reports?

Last weekend a chimpanzee was seen rampaging through a Las Vegas neighborhood. It wasn't a hoax, nor a hallucination -- and it wasn't the first time.

The Associated Press reported,

A chimpanzee who rampaged through a Las Vegas neighborhood last month made a second escape from her backyard enclosure this weekend, but her caretaker thinks she had human help this time. Timmi De Rosa says the 13-year-old chimp, CJ, didn't get loose Saturday by bending steel bars without help. She thinks someone let CJ out of her cage. De Rosa says the 180-pound animal was captured quickly and was never a threat to neighbors. On July 12, CJ and her mate Buddy broke free and roamed the neighborhood, pounding on vehicles and climbing in an unoccupied car. An officer shot and killed Buddy when the animal frightened bystanders.

What might this sort of bizarre and scary incident have to do with Bigfoot and other mysterious creatures? Plenty.

The field of cryptozoology doesn't merely include unknown animals like Bigfoot, but also those "out of place" -- animals known to exist but rarely if ever reported outside of their natural habitats.

If a person walking in the woods sees a large, hairy bipedal creature, he or she is likely to assume it's Bigfoot. But Bigfoot is of course not the only large hairy animal that can stand on two legs; bears, for example, can stand and even briefly walk on two legs, as can chimpanzees, bonobos, baboons and other animals.

Other large animals such as moose or elk, when seen from behind and/or in near-darkness, can also appear to be standing on two legs and therefore Bigfoot-like.

In these cases the reason that an eyewitness rules out a known animal in favor of an unknown one is that he or she assumes that there are no wild animals in the area that could look like that. Clearly, that is not always the case.

As wild animals lose more and more of their native habitats they are drawn closer to cities and towns. Coyotes and bears, for example, have become an increasingly common sighting in many areas. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Exotic Animal Escapes

In 2010, two camels and a tiger were found in the woods in Canada. The animals were among several being moved from Nova Scotia to a private zoo outside of Toronto, and they escaped when the truck carrying them was stolen by thieves in Quebec.

In 2009 an Oklahoma couple driving home from church on U.S. 81 about an hour north of Oklahoma City swerved to avoid an eight-foot-tall, 4,500-pound elephant on the highway. It had escaped earlier that day from a circus at the Garfield County Fairgrounds, and amazingly no one had been able to track or find it.

Then of course there was the bizarre and tragic case in October 2011 when an Ohio man released his private menagerie of exotic animals into the wild before killing himself. In all nearly 60 animals including wolves, grizzly bears, lions, Bengal tigers, leopards and monkeys scattered into the woods outside of Columbus. All were (apparently) eventually recovered, though many had to be killed.

There are many other cases similar to these, and likely even more that go unreported. Some people whose exotic pets escape may not want to report it to police for fear that they will be fined or jailed (either for illegally keeping them in the first place, or for allowing them to escape), or that their animal will be shot and killed.

These misplaced animals don't always escape from private zoos or circuses. Last year a 140-pound cougar was killed on a highway in Connecticut, far outside its natural habitat. As the New York Times noted,

 So where had this cougar come from? Now we know the answer, and it couldn't be more astonishing. Wildlife officials, who at first assumed the cat was a captive animal that had escaped its owners, examined its DNA and concluded that it was a wild cougar from the Black Hills of South Dakota. It had wandered at least 1,500 miles before meeting its end at the front of an S.U.V. in Connecticut.

One wonders how many people saw the cougar during its journey halfway across the United States; did anyone see the elusive creature and think it might be an unknown creature or monster?

Read more at Discovery News

Nuke Disaster Spawns Mutant Butterflies

Japan may have a real-life Mothra on its hands. Like the giant moth that often battled Godzilla, the butterflies near the site of the 2011 Fukushima disaster may have been mutated by exposure to radiation. But Tokyo is in no danger of being demolished by these butterflies.

To the contrary, the butterfly's mutations, such as small wings and irregular eyes, seem like handicaps and the malformations are getting worse with succeeding generations, say a team from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa in the journal Scientific Reports. The team has been studying the species, known as the pale grass blue butterfly (Zizeeria maha) for more than 10 years, reported BBC News.

The fluttering freaks were found by the Japanese entomologists. The insects were part of a group of 144 of their kind collected from 10 different parts of Japan in May 2011, two month after the earthquake/tsunami/nuke disaster combination struck the Land of the Rising Sun. Only near the site of the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant did the scientists find abnormal butterflies.

To test the long term fallout of the possible radiation-induced mutations, the scientists raised some of the butterflies from the site in a lab far from the on-going effects of radiation exposure near the nuclear plant. The next generation was even more malformed that the first, even though they were raised far from any radioactive contamination. Field studies in September 2011 found that subsequent generations of wild butterflies were more warped as time went on as well.

Read more at Discovery News

100,000 DPI Image Pushes Limits of Resolution

A method of printing nanometer-tall pillars has been used to create full-colour images with a resolution pushing up against the maximum theoretical limit.

The Singapore-based team, who describe their work in a paper in Nature Nanotechnology, created pixels using tiny nanoscale posts, with silver and gold nanodiscs on top. The distance between these structures, and their diameter, sets the colour of light that they reflect.

As proof of concept, the researchers, based at Singpore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, printed a 50 x 50 micrometer image of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model from a 1972 issue of Playboy magazine, often used in image processing experiments.

They used electro-beam lithography to cover a silicon wafer with pillars made from an insulating material, then deposited the nanodiscs on top and coated the surface of the wafer with metal to reflect the coloured light and make the image brighter. The resulting image came in at an impressive 100,000 DPI resolution.

That’s right up at the maximum possible resolution that can be achieved. Even under the best microscope, a limit can be reached due to the wavelength of visible light. If two objects are too close together, light reflecting off them will diffract and they’ll blur together. In the case of visible light, in the centre of the colour spectrum, that distance is 250 nanometers — exactly the distance between the pixels in the created image.

The other benefit of using nanostructures to create colour is that they’ll never fade. So long as the pillars don’t corrode and change shape, the image won’t change over time.

Read more at Wired Science

Prehistoric Shark Species Found in Ariz.

The remains of several new toothy shark species, with at least three dating to 270 million years ago, have been unearthed in Arizona, according to a new study.

The research, published in the latest issue of Historical Biology, suggests that Arizona was home to the most diverse collection of sharks in the world during the pre-dinosaur Middle Permian era. The researchers have discovered many other new shark species from the area, with papers in the works to document them.

For now, lead author John-Paul Hodnett described the three mentioned in the latest study:

Nanoskalme natans ("swimming dwarf blade") was a small (about 3.2-foot- long) shark with blade-like cutting teeth. It was probably a scavenger and predator on small fish.

Neosaivodus flagstaffensis ("new Saivodus from Flagstaff") was a medium-sized shark (about 6.6 feet) with gripping teeth that might have been a specialist on nautiloids as a juvenile, but a more generalist feeder as an adult.

Kaibabvenator swiftae ("Swift's Kaibab hunter") was a large (around 19.7 feet ) shark with big serrated cutting teeth. It was presumably an active apex predator on large prey including other sharks, similar to the modern great white shark.

Hodnett, a researcher in the Museum of Northern Arizona's Geology and Paleontology Department, analyzed the shark remains with colleagues David Elliott, Tom Olson and James Wittke. The sharks were unearthed at what is known as the Kaibab Formation of northern Arizona.

Elliott told Discovery News that a shallow, warm sea covered this part of Arizona at the time. Today, this same area is a high plateau region supporting a Ponderosa Pine forest. Although hard to imagine, the region was once home to a bustling shark-eat-shark ecosystem.

"At this time, sharks were the main vertebrate predators in marine environments world wide, and they were very numerous and diverse, filling niches that were occupied later by bony fish and even mammals, such as cetaceans (a group that includes whales and dolphins)," Hodnett said. "The main predators on sharks would have been other sharks."

According to the researchers, the new species are all ctenacanthiformes, an extinct order of primitive sharks characterized by two ornamental dorsal fin spines, and teeth in which the central cusp is large and well-developed, with smaller lateral cusps. The sharks' tails were symmetrical, unlike the asymmetrical tails of most modern sharks, and their heads were short-snouted.

The findings reveal how rich and diverse marine life was at the time, some 45 million years before the first dinosaurs even appeared.

Elliott shared that on land during this period, "the most important vertebrates were the synapsids (pre-mammals) that included animals such as Dimetrodon." That was a lizard-like beast with a large sail on its back.

Sharks, however, clearly ruled Arizona back in the day.

Read more at Discovery News

Seeing the Milky Way Spiral in a Coffee Cup

Coffee is a funny thing.

I seem to have been tempted away from tea by the seductive smell of coffee -- it feels like I've cheated on my beloved Earl Grey. Spending most of my time in coffee shops writing about all things space, I find myself looking at the top of my skinny peppermint latte (really, you should try it!) and notice how the pattern on the top resembles the Milky Way as seen from above.

The fact that I know it resembles the Milky Way is pretty clever given that no one has ever come remotely close to getting such a stunning view of the galaxy we live in. It's a testament to human logic that has granted us the knowledge of the shape of our galaxy and it's a story that starts back at the beginning of civilization.

We can even go back to prehistoric times when man first looked at the sky and had a view that was completely unrestricted by artificial lighting. To our ancestors, the view would have been stunning with the ghostly glow of thousands of visible stars arching overhead.

It wasn't until invention of the telescope in 1608 and the curiosity of Galileo Galilei that things started to change. Galileo found that under magnification, the band of light separated out into thousands of individual stars.

Not much changed until the 18th century when another astronomer, William Herschel who was working from his own observatory in England, turned one of his large telescopes on the Milky Way to try and measure the distance to as many stars as possible.

Making the rather rash, yet incorrect assumption that all stars give off the same amount of light, he estimated their distance based on apparent brightness in the sky, fainter ones being further away than the brighter ones. We now know that stars vary considerably in the amount of light they give off, so his distance estimates would have been quite wrong even though he was just working on relative distances rather than absolute.

That said, Herschel correctly drew the conclusion that we are located inside a giant disk of stars with the Milky Way representing the plane of the disk.

Other than Herschel's disk-shaped view of our galaxy, very little was known about the actual size and shape until 1914 when another astronomer called Harlow Shapley started to study clusters of stars with the 60 inch (1.5 meter) reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson observatory in California. He found that these clusters seemed to contain a type of variable star whose actual light output was directly linked to how long it took the star to brighten from from minimum to maximum brightness.

By observing these very special Cepheid variable stars in distant clusters, Shapley could time how long it took for them to change in brightness and therefore deduce how much light they really produced. Comparing this to how bright they appeared in the sky would allow him to calculate their distance and hence our distance to the cluster.

When Shapley plotted the positions of some of the clusters, a remarkable picture emerged. Their distribution seemed to be centered on a point a staggering 60,000 light-years away and the Galaxy itself was about 300,000 light-years in diameter. We now know that the diameter is about a third of Shapley's figure at around 100,000 light-years and galactic center is around 30,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

Read more at Discovery News

Mystery Rock Shelf Floating in Pacific

An "island" of floating pumice rocks bigger in area than Israel has been spotted in the South Pacific, New Zealand's Royal Navy said.

Officers on a Royal New Zealand Air Force ship saw the rock raft southwest of Raoul Island on Aug. 9. It measures an astounding 300 miles (482 kilometers) in length and more than 30 miles (48 km) in width, the Navy said.

Lieutenant Tim Oscar, of the Royal Australian Navy, described the rocks as "the weirdest thing I've seen in 18 years at sea," according to the Australian Associated Press.

"The rock looked to be sitting two feet above the surface of the waves, and lit up a brilliant white color in the spotlight," Oscar told AAP. "It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf."

Pumice forms when lava from a volcano cools rapidly. Trapped gas in the hardening lava creates pores in the rocks, which allow them to float. The Navy said scientists believe these chunks off New Zealand's coast were likely spewed to the surface by an underwater volcano, possibly the Monowai seamount, which has been active along the Kermadec arc.

Officials said the phenomenon is probably not related to the eruption at New Zealand's Mout Tongariro, which sent ash 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) into the air earlier this week.

A group of researchers from GNS Science, a government-owned firm, were traveling nearby on another military ship. That group changed course to collect samples of the pumice, which will be analyzed to determine where the rocks came from, the Navy wrote on its Facebook page.

Read more at Discovery News

Mutations Disrupt Cellular Recycling, Cause a Childhood Genetic Disease

Genetics researchers have identified a key gene that, when mutated, causes the rare multisystem disorder Cornelia deLange syndrome (CdLS). By revealing how mutations in the HDAC8 gene disrupt the biology of proteins that control both gene expression and cell division, the research sheds light on this disease, which causes intellectual disability, limb deformations and other disabilities resulting from impairments in early development.

"As we better understand how CdLS operates at the level of cell biology, we will be better able to define strategies for devising treatments for CdLS, and possibly for related disorders," said study leader Matthew A. Deardorff, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric genetics clinician and scientist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Deardorff also is in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Deardorff and co-corresponding author Katsuhiko Shirahige, Ph.D., of the Research Center for Epigenetic Disease at the University of Tokyo, published their study online August 12 in Nature.

The current findings add to previous discoveries by researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. A group led by Ian Krantz, M.D., and Laird Jackson, M.D., announced in 2004 that mutations in the NIPBL gene are the primary cause of CdLS, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the "classical" cases of the disease. In 2007, Deardorff joined them to describe mutations in two additional genes, SMC1A and SMC3. First described in 1933, CdLS affects an estimated 1 in 10,000 children.

The CdLS research team at Children's Hospital has focused on the cohesin complex, a group of proteins that form a bracelet-like structure that encircles pairs of chromosomes, called sister chromatids. "Cohesin has two roles," said Deardorff. "It keeps sister chromatids together during cell division, and it allows normal transcription -- the transmission of information from DNA to RNA."

Deardorff added that mutations that perturb normal cohesin function can interfere with normal human development. Such is the case in CdLS, which exemplifies a newly recognized class of diseases called cohesinopathies.

In the current study, the scientists investigated both acetylation -- how an acetyl molecule is attached to part of the cohesin complex¬ -- and deactylation, the removal of that molecule. Normally, deactylation helps recycle cohesin to make it available during successive rounds of cell division. The study team found that mutations in the HDAC8 gene threw off normal cellular recycling of cohesin.

Mutations in the gene cause loss of HDAC8 protein activity, and consequently decrease the amount of "recharged" cohesin available to properly regulate gene transcription. This, in turn, the researchers suggest, impairs normal embryonic development and gives rise to CdLS.

The researchers showed in cell cultures that mutations in HDAC8 lead to a decrease in cohesin binding to genes, similar to that seen for cells deficient in the NIPBL gene. They also identified HDAC8 mutations in approximately 5 percent of patients with CdLS.

Because mothers of children with CdLS may carry mutations in the HDAC8 gene, identifying these mutations will be very useful in accurately counseling families of their recurrence risk -- the likelihood of having a subsequent child with CdLS.

Furthermore, added Deardorff, by providing biological details of the underlying defect in CdLS, the current research suggests future approaches to treating the genetic disease. "By concentrating downstream on the biological pathway in the cohesin cycle rather than focusing on the defective gene, we may be able to eventually screen for small-molecule drugs that could be used to intervene in CdLS."

Deardorff and colleagues will continue investigate CdLS and possible therapies. Last month, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation chose Deardorff to receive a Clinical Scientist Development Award. This three-year award, totaling $486,000, is directed to further studies of cohesin abnormalities in human disease. Deardorff is a member of Children's Hospital's Center for Cornelia deLange Syndrome and Related Diagnoses, one of the world's leading programs in studying and treating CdLS.

Read more at Science Daily

World's Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Beam Refined to Scalpel Precision

'Self-seeding' promises to speed discoveries, add new scientific capabilities.

With a thin sliver of diamond, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have transformed the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) into an even more precise tool for exploring the nanoworld. The improvements yield laser pulses focused to higher intensity in a much narrower band of X-ray wavelengths, and may enable experiments that have never before been possible.

In a process called "self-seeding," the diamond filters the laser beam to a single X-ray color, which is then amplified. Like trading a hatchet for a scalpel, the advance will give researchers more control in studying and manipulating matter at the atomic level and will deliver sharper images of materials, molecules and chemical reactions.

"The more control you have, the finer the details you can see," said Jerry Hastings, a SLAC scientist and co-author on the research, published this week in Nature Photonics. "People have been talking about self-seeding for nearly 15 years. The method we incorporated at SLAC was proposed in 2010 by Gianluca Geloni, Vitali Kocharyan and Evgeni Saldin of the European XFEL and DESY research centers in Germany. When our team from SLAC and Argonne National Laboratory built it, we were surprised by how simple, robust and cost-effective the engineering turned out to be." Hastings added that laboratories around the world are already planning to incorporate this important advance into their own X-ray laser facilities.

Self-seeding has the potential to produce X-ray pulses with significantly higher intensity than the current LCLS performance. The increased intensity in each pulse could be used to probe deep into complex materials to help answer questions about exotic substances like high-temperature superconductors or intricate electronic states like those found in topological insulators.

The LCLS generates its laser beam by accelerating bunches of electrons to nearly the speed of light and setting them on a zig-zag path with a series of magnets. This forces the electrons to emit X-rays, which are gathered into laser pulses that are a billion times brighter than any available before, and fast enough to scan samples in quadrillionths of a second.

Without self-seeding these X-ray laser pulses contain a range of wavelengths (or colors) in an unpredictable pattern, not all of which experimenters can use. Until now, creating a narrower wavelength band at LCLS meant subtracting the unwanted wavelengths, resulting in a substantial loss of intensity.

To create a precise X-ray wavelength band and make the LCLS even more "laser-like," researchers installed a slice of diamond crystal halfway down the 130-meter bank of magnets where the X-rays are generated.

Producing the narrower wavelength band is just the beginning. "The resulting pulses could pack up to 10 times more intensity when we finish optimizing the system and add more undulators," said Zhirong Huang, a SLAC accelerator physicist and co-author, who has been a major contributor to the project.

LCLS has already begun accepting proposals to use self-seeding for future experiments.

The first tests of the LCLS self-seeding system have generated intense excitement among scientists the world over. Representatives from other X-ray laser facilities, including Swiss FEL, SACLA in Japan and the European XFEL, came to help, and also learn how to implement it at their own sites.

Read more at Science Daily