Hunting for the Real 'Planet X'

The announcement of the discovery of exoplanet Alpha Centauri Bb on Oct. 16 is a testimony to how far planetary detection techniques have come over the last few decades.

It brings the total of confirmed exoplanets -- or "extra-solar planets" -- to a staggering 825. However, the search for planets in our own solar system has subsided since the pioneering days at the end of the 18th century with the discovery of Uranus and almost one hundred years later with the identification of Neptune. The idea of another planet, dubbed 'Planet X,' inspired astronomers to keep searching for yet another 100 years in a hunt that was full of twists and turns.

The hunt for Planet X began in 1781 when British astronomer Sir William Herschel was studying stars in the constellation of Taurus and noticed one star seemed slightly fuzzy or nebulous in appearance. A few days later it seemed to have moved position -- he concluded it was a comet. Further study revealed it was actually a planet -- Uranus -- the seventh planet in our solar system and beyond the orbit of Saturn.

Detailed observations of Uranus' movement revealed an orbit that seemed to be influenced by another, even more distant, object. Mathematicians studying the data predicted the position of an eighth planet before it was officially discovered. Visual confirmation of Neptune's existence was announced in 1846.

Using the same techniques to study the orbital characteristics of both Uranus and Neptune revealed they were both still being tugged at by the gravitational force from another unknown object. The search for the ninth planet in the solar system began and it was American astronomer Percival Lowell who identified possible candidates.

Some years after Lowell's death in 1930, Pluto was identified by Clyde Tombaugh (an astronomer working at Lowell Observatory) and was believed to be the final member of the solar system's planetary family.

However, the 1978 discovery of Pluto's moon Charon reopened the Planet X debate. Through accurate measurements of Charon's orbit, the mass of Pluto could be deduced. Ultimately it showed that the 'ninth planet' couldn't possibly have affected the orbits of Uranus and Neptune as observations appeared to show.

The renewed interest in Planet X was short lived as the Neptunian flyby by Voyager 2 in 1989 revealed its mass was less than thought. By reapplying this knowledge showed the outermost "ice giant" planets were behaving exactly as they should and the orbital perturbations were doewn to observational error. It seems the myth of Planet X had finally died.

This could have been the end of the Planet X saga, but recent studies of the Kuiper Belt -- a region of icy minor planets located in the outermost reaches of the solar system -- suggest this may not be the case.

Read more at Discovery News

Astrophysicist 'Discovers' Superman's Krypton

A prominent astrophysicist has pinned down a real location for Superman's fictional home planet of Krypton.

Krypton is found 27.1 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Corvus (The Crow), says Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The planet orbits the red dwarf star LHS 2520, which is cooler and smaller than our sun.

Tyson performed the celestial sleuthing at the request of DC Comics, which wanted to run a story about Superman's search for his home planet.

The new book -- Action Comics Superman #14, titled "Star Light, Star Bright" -- comes out Wednesday (Nov. 7). Tyson appears within its pages, aiding the Man of Steel on his quest.

"As a native of Metropolis, I was delighted to help Superman, who has done so much for my city over all these years," Tyson said in a statement. "And it's clear that if he weren't a superhero he would have made quite an astrophysicist."

You'll have to read "Star Light, Star Bright" to find out just how Superman and Tyson pinpoint Krypton. For amateur astronomers who want to spot the real star LHS 2520 in the night sky, here are its coordinates:

Right Ascension: 12 hours 10 minutes 5.77 seconds

Declination:  -15 degrees 4 minutes 17.9 seconds

Proper Motion: 0.76 arcseconds per year, along 172.94 degrees from due north

Superman was born on Krytpon but was launched toward Earth as an infant by his father, Jor-El, just before the planet's destruction. After touching down in Kansas, Superman was raised as Clark Kent by a farmer and his wife.

Now Superman will apparently know exactly where he came from.

Read more at Discovery News

Cockatoo 'Can Make Its Own Tools'

A cockatoo from a species not known to use tools in the wild has been observed spontaneously making and using tools for reaching food and other objects.

A Goffin's cockatoo called 'Figaro', that has been reared in captivity and lives near Vienna, used his powerful beak to cut long splinters out of wooden beams in its aviary, or twigs out of a branch, to reach and rake in objects out of its reach. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Vienna filmed Figaro making and using these tools.

How the bird discovered how to make and use tools is unclear but shows how much we still don't understand about the evolution of innovative behaviour and intelligence.

A report of the research is published this week in Current Biology and an accompanying video showing the behaviour is available here: http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/kacelnik/movie_figaro_for_media.mov

Dr Alice Auersperg of the University of Vienna, who led the study, said: 'During our daily observation protocols, Figaro was playing with a small stone. At some point he inserted the pebble through the cage mesh, and it fell just outside his reach. After some unsuccessful attempts to reach it with his claw, he fetched a small stick and started fishing for his toy.

'To investigate this further we later placed a nut where the pebble had been and started to film. To our astonishment he did not go on searching for a stick but started biting a large splinter out of the aviary beam. He cut it when it was just the appropriate size and shape to serve as a raking tool to obtain the nut.

'It was already a surprise to see him use a tool, but we certainly did not expect him to make one by himself. From that time on, Figaro was successful on obtaining the nut every single time we placed it there, nearly each time making new tools. On one attempt he used an alternative solution, breaking a side arm off a branch and modifying the leftover piece to the appropriate size for raking.'

Professor Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University, an author of the study, said: 'Figaro shows us that, even when they are not habitual tool-users, members of a species that are curious, good problem-solvers, and large-brained, can sculpt tools out of a shapeless source material to fulfil a novel need.

'Even though Figaro is still alone in the species and among parrots in showing this capacity, his feat demonstrates that tool craftsmanship can emerge from intelligence not-specialized for tool use. Importantly, after making and using his first tool, Figaro seemed to know exactly what to do, and showed no hesitation in later trials.'

Professor Kacelnik previously led studies in the natural tool-using New Caledonian crows. One of them, named Betty, surprised scientists by fashioning hooks out of wire to retrieve food that was out of reach. These crows use and make tools in the wild, and live in groups that may support culture, but there was no precedent for Betty's form of hook making. Her case is still considered as a striking example of individual creativity and innovation, and Figaro seems ready to join her.

Read more at Science Daily

Rare Specimens From a World-Class Skull Collection

If you were to go clicking down Alan Dudley’s anonymous-looking English street in Google’s Street View, there’d be no reason to stop outside his anonymous-looking English home. But inside, in a space no bigger than a child’s bedroom, Dudley has amassed one of the world’s most impressive private collections of skulls -- some 2,500 of them, incredibly well-organized and impeccably preserved. A good chunk of the animal kingdom is represented -- fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals fill the space.

British journalist Simon Winchester’s first reaction to the collection was horror. “I thought, ‘This is macabre, this is horrible, this is grotesque,’ because I was, I think like most of us, brought up to associate skulls with piracy or warning or danger or death,” Winchester says. “But then you see beneath the muscle and the skin something so beautiful, so finely constructed, that you can understand the fascination that someone like Dudley has. It may sound rather corny, but it gives you a new reverence for life.”

Winchester was so moved that he, along with an ex-BBC producer, created an app that showcased the collection. Though highly regarded when it launched last year, the app didn’t sell particularly well. But publishers in New York were interested in the material. When he was asked to turn the app into a book, Winchester happily agreed. The result is Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection, which was published earlier this month. The book features hundreds of Dudley’s skulls, supplemented with rarer specimens and Winchester’s writings on skull lore and history. We spoke to Winchester about what he learned and the most interesting skulls he discovered. These are some of his favorites.

Above:

Babirusa from North Sulawesi

Winchester loves “the extraordinary canine teeth that look like horns but are actually teeth which curve back into its own head and make it look utterly weird.”

Read more at Wired Science

Why Dogs Find Some Toys Boring

Ever bring a new toy home for your dog -- only for the gizmo to end up neglected and ignored on the floor?

It turns out there could be a way to avoid such flops in the future with new research detailing which toys will either interest or bore canines. The study, published in the journal Animal Cognition, sheds light on why dogs ignore some toys after just a minute of investigation, while other toys become coveted favorites.

"Because we think that dogs perceive toys in the same way that wolves perceive prey, they prefer toys that either taste like food or can be torn apart, however the latter can cause health problems if the dog accidentally swallows some of the pieces," co-author John Bradshaw, a researcher in the University of Bristol's Veterinary School, told Discovery News.

Co-author Anne Pullen, also at the University of Bristol, added that dog toys should be "soft, easily manipulable toys that can be chewed easily and/or make a noise."

As for what toys cause many dogs to grow bored, Pullen said, "Dogs quickly lose interest in toys with hard unyielding surfaces, and those that don't make a noise when manipulated."

The team, including colleague Ralph Merrill of the Waltham Center for Pet Nutrition, has studied canine play and dog toys for some time. Their latest study involved presenting multiple kennel-housed Labrador retrievers with one toy for 30-second periods until interaction ceased.

Prior research has looked at other dogs, but Labradors were chosen for this study "because they're are very popular pets," Merrill told Discovery News.

Bradshaw added that Labradors, due to their breeding, are one of the most playful breeds "and we had to be sure that the dogs we studied would play with the toys for a few minutes at least, otherwise we couldn't have measured what would get them playing again once they'd lost interest in the original toy."

They presented the dogs with toys of varying types, including different colors and odors. The researchers then gave the dogs a unique toy that contrasted with whatever one the canines were playing with first.

It was clear that all of the dogs showed intense, but transient, interest toward nearly all new toys. Dogs appear to be hard-wired to explore any novel object -- toy or not. In the case of toys, the problem is that dogs can become habituated to them quickly, which leads to boredom and neglected toys.

Changing the delay from habituation to presentation of the second toy, between 10 seconds and 15 minutes, did not affect the dogs' duration of play. No single toy characteristic altered the test results much either, suggesting that getting used to the stimulus qualities of a toy -- be they through smell, sound, color, texture -- is the clincher for canine boredom.

Read more at Discovery News

Rarest Whale Seen for the First Time

The world's rarest whale, previously only known from a few bones, was seen for the first time on a New Zealand beach, according to a new Current Biology paper.

The elusive marine mammal is the spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii). The good news is that it was seen at all, revealing that it still exists. The bad news is that the sighting was of a mother and her male calf, both of which became stranded and died on the beach.

"This is the first time this species -- a whale over five meters (about 16.5 feet) in length -- has ever been seen as a complete specimen, and we were lucky enough to find two of them," Rochelle Constantine of the University of Auckland said in a press release. "Up until now, all we have known about the spade-toothed beaked whale was from three partial skulls collected from New Zealand and Chile over a 140-year period. It is remarkable that we know almost nothing about such a large mammal."

The discovery actually happened two years ago, when the whales live-stranded and died on Opape Beach, New Zealand. It's only after DNA analysis that the identification of the rare species was made. At first, they were incorrectly identified as being the much more common Gray's beaked whales.

"When these specimens came to our lab, we extracted the DNA as we usually do for samples like these, and we were very surprised to find that they were spade-toothed beaked whales," Constantine said. "We ran the samples a few times to make sure before we told everyone."

Read more at Discovery News

Scientists Monitor Comet Breakup

The Hergenrother comet is currently traversing the inner-solar system. Amateur and professional astronomers alike have been following the icy-dirt ball over the past several weeks as it has been generating a series of impressive outbursts of cometary-dust material. Now comes word that the comet's nucleus has taken the next step in its fragmentation.

"Comet Hergenrother is splitting apart," said Rachel Stevenson, a post-doctoral fellow working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Using the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Gemini North Telescope on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, we have resolved that the nucleus of the comet has separated into at least four distinct pieces resulting in a large increase in dust material in its coma."

With more material to reflect the sun's rays, the comet's coma has brightened considerably.

"The comet fragments are considerably fainter than the nucleus," said James Bauer, the deputy principal investigator for NASA's NEOWISE mission, from the California Institute of Technology. "This is suggestive of chunks of material being ejected from the surface."

The comet's fragmentation event was initially detected on Oct. 26 by a team of astronomers from the Remanzacco Observatory, using the Faulkes Telescope North in Haleakala, Hawaii. The initial fragment was also imaged by the WIYN telescope group at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

For those interested in viewing Hergenrother, with a larger-sized telescope and a dark sky, the comet can be seen in between the constellations of Andromeda and Lacerta.

Read more at Science Daily

Asteroid Belts Could Be Key to Finding Alien Life

If we want to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it might be wise to look for stars with asteroid belts similar the one in our own Solar System.

According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, evolution goes faster and further when life has to make rapid changes to survive new environments — and few things have as dramatic an effect on the environment as an asteroid impact. If humans evolved thanks to asteroid impacts, intelligent life might need an asteroid belt like our own to provide just the right number of periodic hits to spur evolution on. Only a fraction of current exoplanet systems have these characteristics, meaning places like our own Solar System — and intelligent aliens — might be less common than we previously thought.

Astronomers Rebecca Martin of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore have hypothesised that the location of the Solar System’s asteroid belt — between Jupiter and Mars — is not an accident, and actually necessary for life. As the Solar System formed, the gravitational forces between Jupiter and the Sun would have pulled and stretched clumps of dust and planetoids in the inner Solar System. The asteroid belt lies on the so-called “snow line” — fragile materials like ice will stay frozen further out, but closer in they will melt and fall apart.

During the formation of the Solar System, cold rock and ice coalesced into the planets as we know them. However, as Jupiter formed, it shifted in its orbit closer to the Sun just a little bit before stopping. The tidal forces at work between Jupiter and the Sun would have torn apart the material on the snow line, preventing a planet forming and leaving behind an asteroid belt — which today has a total mass only one percent of that which would have been there originally.

Those asteroids would have bombarded the inner Solar System — including Earth — and, in theory, provided the raw materials needed for life (like water) and also giving evolution a kickstart by drastically changing the early Earth’s climate and environment. To check that this wasn’t just something restricted to our Solar System, Martin and Livio looked at data from Nasa’s Spitzer telescope, which has so far found infrared signals around 90 different stars which can indicate the presence of an asteroid belt. In every case, the belts were located exactly where Martin and Livio had predicted the snow line should be relative to each star’s mass, supporting their snow line theory of asteroid belt formation.

If these are the circumstances which allow intelligent life to evolve somewhere, then it will make the task of finding aliens we can chat with a lot harder — few stars with exoplanets that we’ve found so far have the right setup of a dusty asteroid belt on the snow line with a gas giant parked just outside it.

If the gas giant has formed but not shifted in slightly, as Jupiter did, then the belt will become so full of large objects that the inner planets will be bombarded too frequently for life to fully take hold; if the gas giant continues to move inwards as it orbits, it won’t just stop the belt turning into a planet — it’ll suck everything of any serious size up and leave behind only minor fragments of space rock and dust, including any planets life could evolve on.

Martin and Livio then looked at 520 gas giants found orbiting other stars — in only 19 cases were they outside of where that star’s snow line would be expected to be. That means fewer than four percent of exoplanet systems will have the right setup to support the evolution of advanced, intelligent life in accordance with the punctuated equilibrium theory.

Read more at Wired Science

The Oldest Trees on the Planet

Trees are some of the longest-lived organisms on the planet. At least 50 trees have been around for more than a millenium, but there may be countless other ancient trees that haven’t been discovered yet.

Trees can live such a long time for several reasons. One secret to their longevity is their compartmentalized vascular system, which allows parts of the tree to die while other portions thrive. Many create defensive compounds to fight off deadly bacteria or parasites.

And some of the oldest trees on earth, the great bristlecone pines, don’t seem to age like we do. At 3,000-plus years, these trees continue to grow just as vigorously as their 100-year-old counterparts. Unlike animals, these pines don’t rack up genetic mutations in their cells as the years go by.

Some trees defy time by sending out clones, or genetically identical shoots, so that one trunk’s demise doesn’t spell the end for the organism. The giant colonies can have thousands of individual trunks, but share the same network of roots.

This gallery contains images of some of the oldest, most venerable and impressive trees on earth.

Pando

While Pando isn’t technically the oldest individual tree, this clonal colony of Quaking Aspen in Utah is truly ancient. The 105-acre colony is made of genetically identical trees, called stems, connected by a single root system. The “trembling giant” got its start at least 80,000 years ago, when all of our human ancestors were still living in Africa. But some estimate the woodland could be as old as 1 million years, which would mean Pando predates the earliest Homo sapiens by 800,000 years. At 6,615 tons, Pando is also the heaviest living organism on earth.

The photo above of the Pando colony was taken by Rachel Sussman, as part of The Oldest Living Things In The World project.

Read more at Wired Science

New Three-Fingered Frog Discovered

On a trek across this Atlantic rainforest reserve in southern Brazil, biologist Michel Garey recalled how on his birthday in 2007 he chanced upon what turned out to be a new species of tiny, three-fingered frogs.

"I was doing research with two friends on a hilltop in the reserve and I stumbled into this unusual frog with only three fingers," he told a small group of reporters this week on a tour of Salto Morato, a nature preserve owned by Brazil's leading cosmetic firm Boticario.

"It happened on February 14, 2007: My birthday. What a treat!" he said.

But it was not until June this year that the discovery of this new species -- Brachycephalus tridactylus -- was officially established. A report on his finding was published in Herpetologica, a quarterly international journal focusing on study and conservation of amphibians and reptiles.

"At the time I was doing some other work related to ecology and I figured I could wait as no one else doing frog research would have access to the area," Garey said.

"It took me 18 months from early 2011 to collect seven of the new frogs, go to museums to compare them with other species, realize that they were new, write my paper and have it published in the journal."

The tiny brachycephalus tridactylus was found at an altitude of around 900 meters (3,000 feet). Its most striking feature is the absence of a fourth finger, which Garey attributes to an evolutionary process rather than to environmental effects.

The frog, which measures less than 1.5-centimeters in length, is mostly orange with olive-gray spots and dots on its body.

Garey said the male frog makes around 30 mating calls a day, sounds he described as "a single short note that decreases in dominant frequency from beginning to end."

Garey said he could not estimate the frog population, but plans to do so in a future research project.

The frog is part of 43 amphibian species found in this 2,253-hectare (5,567-acre) reserve, located in Guaraquecaba, the easternmost city in the southern state of Parana.

Experts estimate around 950 amphibian species live across Brazil and more than 6,700 around the world.

Amphibians -- cold-blooded animals such as frogs, toads, salamanders and newts -- are increasingly threatened by climate change, pollution, and the emergence of a deadly and infectious fungal disease, which has been linked to global warming.

One-third of the known species are threatened with extinction, according to the Global Amphibian Assessment, an extensive survey of the world's amphibian species. More than 120 species are believed to have gone extinct since 1980.

Frogs spend part of their life in water and on land, so understanding their complex life cycle is crucial because they can serve as "bioindicators of environmental quality", said Garey.

Frogs "have permeable skin which make them more susceptible to ultra-violet radiation and their body temperatures change with the environment," Garey said.

"As larvae in the water, they eat various organisms such as algae and as adults they eat insects. The larvae are also eaten by fish while the adults are eaten by cobras and mammals," he added. "So they are having a cascade effect in the food chain."

Read more at Discovery News