Oceanic Black Holes Found in Southern Atlantic

Black holes are a tear in the fabric of space-time from which nothing escapes, not even light. They take on a mythic significance in popular culture as portals to alternate dimensions or grave threats to space travel. Astronomers are certain they exist out there in the universe, formed by the collapse of dead stars.

Now, physicists have found mathematical analogs to black holes here on Earth, specifically in the southern Atlantic Ocean where eddies whirl about. The work was posted to arXiv and reported first by the The Physics arXiv Blog.

The scientists describe the eddies using Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström”:

“The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel. . .”

That’s exactly how eddies look, the study says. A belt of spray encircles the whirlpool but the liquid does not fall in.

Similarly, black holes in space are encircled by photon (light) spheres, a region where the gravity is so strong (because of the density of the black hole) that it causes light to travel in an orbit. And there the photons remain, in precarious balance, neither falling into the hole or escaping. That’s similar to Poe’s description of the belt of spray around the Maelström.

And much like astronomical black holes, oceanic eddies exhibit singularity.

To locate these oceanic black holes, the scientists examined satellite images of the Agulhas Current in the Indian Ocean. The current travels along the east coast of Africa before turning back on itself in a loop. The loop occasionally pinches off and forms eddies that whirl off into the South Atlantic Ocean, remaining intact for more than three months.

The eddies are a coherent island of water in an otherwise turbulent ocean. As such, they “create moving oases for the marine food chain or even impact climate change through their long-range transport of salinity and temperature,” the study states. The eddies will capture any detritus floating nearby and swallow it, thereby transporting oil and garbage. And nothing within leaks out.

Read more at Discovery News

Spontaneous Human Combustion? Probably Not

Earlier this month a 4-month-old Indian boy was admitted to a hospital with burns on his chest, head and abdomen. Though police and medical suspicions first turned to parental abuse or neglect in the child’s injuries, the baby’s mother offered a strange explanation.

She claimed that Rahul had previously been injured by a mysterious phenomena called spontaneous human combustion (SHC), in which people are said to suddenly and inexplicably burst into flames.

She claimed that there was nothing flammable near him when he was burned and suggested that there may be something special or unique about the boy’s body chemistry that makes him prone to these strange attacks.

According to R. Jayachandran, a professor in the department of pediatrics at Kilpauk Medical College Hospital in Chennai, “The mother told us that the baby has suffered four episodes of such spontaneous fire and suffered burn injuries. The last episode was a month back.”

His parents claimed that Rahul first caught fire when he was nine days old. There is surely something strange going on with this child — but what?

Spontaneous Human Combustion?

The idea that people can suddenly burst into flames for no apparent reason has been around for over a century; it even happened to a character in the 1853 Dickens novel “Bleak House.”

Some sources claim that hundreds, or even thousands, of spontaneous combustion cases have been reported throughout history, though only about a dozen cases have been investigated.

There are many reasons to be skeptical that random people can spontaneously combust. Not only is there no plausible medical or physiological mechanism by which a person could generate enough heat to catch fire, but there exists no film or video evidence of it ever occurring.

With few exceptions, SHC cases follow a familiar pattern upon close investigation: elderly, young, or infirm people left alone in or near flammable materials and sources of ignition.

Despite a lack of credible evidence for the existence of SHC, belief in the phenomenon is widespread, and every few years a suspected case makes the news. In fact in 2011 an Irish coroner even officially listed it as a cause of death in the case of a 76-year-old man found dead lying near an open fire.

Police, understandably, take a dim view of supernatural or paranormal “explanations” for real-life injuries and crimes. Injuries to anyone — and especially children — blamed on ghosts should of course be treated with extreme skepticism; other than in scary movies and reality TV ghost shows, real injuries are caused by real people. If a child goes missing investigators assume abductions by family members, not aliens or Bigfoot.

In the case of the Indian toddler, follow-up tests found nothing unusual about Rahul.

“Over a dozen tests have been performed on the baby to check the vital functions and according to doctors the reports so far are normal,” according to a report from ZNews India. Though tests on the child turned up nothing unusual, investigators did locate a hidden source of flammable material in the huts where the family lived.

Read more at Discovery News

Blue Moon Rises: What Does It Mean?

When the moon rises Tuesday night (Aug. 20), it brings us the August full moon and in addition, it will also technically be a "Blue Moon."

"But wait a minute," you may ask. "Isn't a Blue Moon defined as the second full moon that occurs during a calendar month? Tuesday’s full moon will be the only full moon of August 2013. So how can we call it a 'Blue' moon?"

Yet it still is a Blue Moon, but only if we follow a now somewhat obscure rule of astronomy. In fact, the current "two full moon in one month" rule has superseded the rule that would allow us to call Tuesday’s full moon "blue."

Confused yet? Well, as the late Paul Harvey used to say, here now, is the rest of the story:

A Blue Moon: The Almanac Moon Rule

Back in the July 1943 issue of "Sky & Telescope magazine, in a question and answer column written by Lawrence J. Lafleur, there was a reference made to the term "Blue Moon." Lafleur cited the unusual term from a copy of the 1937 edition of the now-defunct Maine Farmers’ Almanac (NOT to be confused with The Farmers' Almanac which is still published in Lewiston, Maine).

On the Maine Farmers' almanac page for August 1937, the calendar definition of the Blue Moon explained that occasionally "one of the four seasons would contain four full moons instead of the usual three."

"There are seven Blue Moons in a Lunar Cycle of nineteen years," continued the Almanac, ending on the comment: "In olden times the almanac makers had much difficulty calculating the occurrence of the Blue Moon and this uncertainty gave rise to the expression 'Once in a Blue Moon.'"

Unfortunate Astronomical Oversight

While LaFleur quoted the Almanac's account, he made one important omission: He never specified any date for the Blue Moon. And as it turned out, in 1937 it occurred on Aug. 21. That was the third full moon in the summer of 1937, a summer season that would see a total of four full moons.

Names were assigned to each moon in a season: For example, the first moon of summer was called the early summer moon, the second was the midsummer moon, and the last was called the late summer moon. But when a particular season has four moons the third was apparently called a Blue Moon so that the fourth and final one can continue to be called the late moon.

So where did we get the "two full moons in a month is a Blue Moon rule" that is so popular today?

Pruett's Mistake

Once again, we must turn to the pages of Sky & Telescope. This time to page 3 of the March 1946 issue.

In that issue, author James Hugh Pruett wrote the article "Once in a Blue Moon" in which he made a reference to the term "Blue Moon" and referenced LaFleur's S&T article from July 1943. But because Pruett had no specific dates to fall back on, his interpretation of the ruling given by the Maine Farmers' Almanac was highly subjective. Pruett ultimately came to this conclusion:

"Seven times in 19 years there were — and still are — 13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon."

How unfortunate that Pruett did not have a copy of that 1937 almanac at hand, or else he would have almost certainly noticed that his "two full moons in a single month assumption" would have been wrong. For the Blue Moon date of Aug. 21 was most definitely not the second full moon that month!

Blue Moon Goes Viral

Pruett's 1946 explanation was, of course, the wrong interpretation and it might have been completely forgotten were it not for Deborah Byrd who used it on her popular National Public Radio program, StarDate on Jan. 31, 1980. We could almost say that in the aftermath of her radio show, the incorrect Blue Moon rule "went viral." Over the next decade, this new Blue Moon definition started appearing in such diverse places such as the Kids edition of the World Almanac, and the board game Trivial Pursuit.

I must confess that even I was involved in helping to perpetuate the new Blue Moon phenomenon. More than 30 years ago, in the Dec. 1, 1982 edition of The New York Times, I made reference to it in the "New York Day by Day" column.

And by 1988 the new definition started receiving international press coverage.

Today, Pruett's misinterpreted "two full moons in a month rule" is recognized worldwide. Indeed, Sky & Telescope turned a literary lemon into lemonade, proclaiming later that — however unintentional — it changed pop culture and the English language in unexpected ways.

Meanwhile, the original Maine Farmers' Almanac rule had been all but forgotten.

Playing by the (Old) Rules

Now, let's come back to this August's full moon. Under the "old" Almanac rule, Tuesday's lunar event will be a "Blue Moon."

In northern summer of 2013, there are four full moons: They occur on June 23, July 22, Aug. 20 and Sept. 19.

This means that under the original Maine Almanac rule — the one promoted by Lafleur and later misinterpreted by Pruett — the third full moon of the 2013 summer season on Aug. 20 would be a Blue Moon.

Read more at Discovery News

Tiny Fish Make 'Eyes' at Their Killer

Small prey fish can grow a bigger 'eye' on their rear fins as a way of distracting predators and dramatically boosting their chances of survival, new scientific research has found.

Researchers from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) have made a world-first discovery that, when constantly threatened with being eaten, small damsel fish not only grow a larger false 'eye spot' near their tail -- but also reduce the size of their real eyes.

The result is a fish that looks like it is heading in the opposite direction -- potentially confusing predatory fish with plans to gobble them up, says Oona Lönnstedt, a graduate student at CoECRS and James Cook University.

For decades scientists have debated whether false eyespots, or dark circular marks on less vulnerable regions of the bodies of prey animals, played an important role in protecting them from predators -- or were simply a fortuitous evolutionary accident.

The CoECRS team has found the first clear evidence that fish can change the size of both the misleading spot and their real eye to maximise their chances of survival when under threat.

"It's an amazing feat of cunning for a tiny fish," Ms Lonnstedt says. "Young damsel fish are pale yellow in colour and have this distinctive black circular 'eye' marking towards their tail, which fades as they mature. We figured it must serve an important purpose when they are young."

"We found that when young damsel fish were placed in a specially built tank where they could see and smell predatory fish without being attacked, they automatically began to grow a bigger eye spot, and their real eye became relatively smaller, compared with damsels exposed only to herbivorous fish, or isolated ones.

"We believe this is the first study to document predator-induced changes in the size of eyes and eye-spots in prey animals."

When the researchers investigated what happens in nature on a coral reef with lots of predators, they found that juvenile damsel fish with enlarged eye spots had an amazing five times the survival rate of fish with a normal-sized spot.

"This was dramatic proof that eyespots work -- and give young fish a hugely increased chance of not being eaten.

"We think the eyespots not only cause the predator to attack the wrong end of the fish, enabling it to escape by accelerating in the opposite direction, but also reduce the risk of fatal injury to the head," she explains.

Read more at Science Daily

Computer Can Read Letters Directly from the Brain

By analysing MRI images of the brain with an elegant mathematical model, it is possible to reconstruct thoughts more accurately than ever before. In this way, researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen have succeeded in determining which letter a test subject was looking at.

The journal Neuroimage has accepted the article, which will be published soon.

Functional MRI scanners have been used in cognition research primarily to determine which brain areas are active while test subjects perform a specific task. The question is simple: is a particular brain region on or off? A research group at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University has gone a step further: they have used data from the scanner to determine what a test subject is looking at.

The researchers 'taught' a model how small volumes of 2x2x2 mm from the brain scans -- known as voxels -- respond to individual pixels. By combining all the information about the pixels from the voxels, it became possible to reconstruct the image viewed by the subject. The result was not a clear image, but a somewhat fuzzy speckle pattern. In this study, the researchers used hand-written letters.

Prior knowledge improves model performance

'After this we did something new', says lead researcher Marcel van Gerven. 'We gave the model prior knowledge: we taught it what letters look like. This improved the recognition of the letters enormously. The model compares the letters to determine which one corresponds most exactly with the speckle image, and then pushes the results of the image towards that letter. The result was the actual letter, a true reconstruction.'

'Our approach is similar to how we believe the brain itself combines prior knowledge with sensory information. For example, you can recognise the lines and curves in this article as letters only after you have learned to read. And this is exactly what we are looking for: models that show what is happening in the brain in a realistic fashion. We hope to improve the models to such an extent that we can also apply them to the working memory or to subjective experiences such as dreams or visualisations. Reconstructions indicate whether the model you have created approaches reality.'

Read more at Science Daily

Russian Meteor Explosion's Dust Lingered for Months

When a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February, pieces of the bus-sized space rock hit the ground while its detonation shattered windows, set off car alarms and injured more than 1,000 people.

Masked in the chaos, however, was an enormous plume of dust that the Russian meteor left behind in Earth's atmosphere. This cloud, which had hundreds of tons of material in it, was still lingering three months after the Feb. 15 explosion, a new study has found. Scientists created a video of the Russian meteor explosion's dust cloud to illustrate the phenomenon.

"Thirty years ago, we could only state that the plume was embedded in the stratospheric jet stream," Paul Newman, chief scientist for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's atmospheric science lab, said in a statement. "Today, our models allow us to precisely trace the bolide and understand its evolution as it moves around the globe."

Chasing dust

The Russian meteor, which weighed 11,000 metric tons when it hit the atmosphere, detonated about 15 miles (24 kilometers) above Chelyabinsk. The explosion sent out a burst of energy 30 times greater than the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima during World War II.

Some of the asteroid's remnants crashed to the ground, but hundreds of tons of dust remained in the atmosphere. A team led by NASA Goddard atmospheric physicist Nick Gorkavyi, who is from Chelyabinsk, wondered if it was possible to track the cloud using NASA's Suomi NPP satellite.

"Indeed, we saw the formation of a new dust belt in Earth's stratosphere, and achieved the first space-based observation of the long-term evolution of a bolide plume," Gorkavyi said in a statement.

Initial measurements 3.5 hours after the meteor explosion showed the dust 25 miles (40 km) high in the atmosphere, speeding east at 190 mph (306 km/h).

Russian officials were still cleaning up in Chelyabinsk when, four days after the explosion, the higher portion of the plume reached all the way around Earth's northern hemisphere. Even three months into the study, Suomi still saw a "detectable belt" of dust circling the globe, researchers said.

Putting it in perspective

Tracking the plume also revealed some insights into how particles behave in Earth's atmosphere. Heavier particles, for example, moved more slowly as they dropped closer to Earth in an area with lower wind speeds. Lighter particles maintained speed and altitude, consistent with predictions of wind velocities at their heights.

While the plume was easily detectable, it was by no means extraordinarily dense, NASA researchers noted. About 30 metric tons of space dust hits the Earth every day on average. Also, volcanoes and other natural Earth sources contribute far greater numbers of particles to the stratosphere.

Read more at Discovery News

First Fossil Whale Poop Pops Up in Italy

Clumps of squid beaks sticking out of clay in Italy's Umbrian badlands may be the first fossilized ambergris, or whale poo, ever found.

Ambergris is a fatty, waxy-looking substance. Scientists believe sperm whales — the largest toothed predator on Earth — secrete ambergris inside their digestive tracts to protect themselves from sharp objects, like giant squid beaks and fish bones and teeth. And contrary to urban legend, ambergris is actually whale poo, not vomit. Sought after by perfume makers, aged ambergris is like umami for the nose, adding musky depth to scents.

Even though scientists have discovered fossilized feces, called coprolites, from dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mammoths and sharks, no one has reported finding ancient ambergris.

"These structures, derived from the original fossil ambergris masses, represent the first recovery on a global scale, since nothing like has been described before in the scientific literature," lead study author Angela Baldanza, a sedimentary geologist at the University of Perugia in Italy, said in an email interview.

Baldanza and her colleagues discovered the fossil ambergris in September 2011, while surveying the remains of a Pleistocene ocean in southwestern Umbria in central Italy. The region is well known for sperm whale fossils, though few have been found near the site of the fossil ambergris, Baldanza said.

Trekking across the badlands, the scientists noticed mineralized lumps sticking out of the 1.75-million-year-old rocks. They found 25 of the rounded structures over an area of about 0.3 acres (1,200 square meters). Each was about 23 to 47 inches (60 to 120 centimeters) wide and 12 to 23 inches (30 to 60 cm) long. The mounds were circular or tapered.

"The preliminary observations revealed they were of biological origin, but bore no resemblance to any known trace fossil," Baldanza told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "From the first moment we discovered them, these structures looked enigmatic."

Several clues led the researchers to conclude they had found fossil whale poo. The trace fossils were striated with concentric rings, like modern ambergris, and their rounded and tapered shapes matched the appearance of ambergris found in sperm whales killed on ships in the 1950s. Squid beaks and altered organic matter in the fossils also hinted at an origin in a sperm whale's stomach.

Read more at Discovery News

Dread Pirate Blackbeard's Wreck Is Coming Up

Sunken treasure lies 25 feet beneath the sea off North Carolina, where archaeologists are probing the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge -- the flagship in the dread pirate Blackbeard’s flotilla.

But this treasure won’t sparkle and gleam, and it definitely isn’t locked in a dead man’s chest.

“The project calls for the recovery of all the materials. Everything. All the weapons, all the bits of the ship, all the personal items. Everything. If it’s down there, it’s coming up,” project leader Billy Ray Morris told FoxNews.com.

Morris and a group of 14 marine archaeologists, technicians and restoration experts from the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources believe the Queen Anne's Revenge itself is a treasure trove, a unique repository of history from centuries ago. They plan to salvage the entire remains of the pirate ship by 2014. Cannon by cannon, plank by plank.

“I’ve worked on shipwrecks all around the world, and this is one of the coolest,” Morris said.

Pulled from the ocean's chemical stew, the artifacts are taken to a lab in Greenville, where it may take as much as a decade to leach out 300 years worth of salt and sea, preparing the ship for the final phase of its life out of the water. More than 280,000 such artifacts have already been recovered; many are displayed in an exhibit at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort. It will ultimately provide a detailed look at 18th century life, information Morris said is hard to come by.

“It’s not like these guys left their memoirs," he told FoxNews.com. "We’re looking at the stuff that these guys used on a daily basis.”

The Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground in Beaufort in June 1718, on the western side of the channel. Morris said the ship was most likely intentionally grounded; historical documentation indicates Blackbeard wanted to downsize his flotilla of four ships -- and the crew that sailed on them.

“So there would be fewer guys he had to split the goodies with,” Morris said.

Intersal, Inc., a private research firm, discovered the site in late 1996. The Department of Cultural Resources has been working it ever since, bit by bit. In 2009, they recovered the ship's anchor. The interest is driven in part because this pirate ship was not always a pirate ship: Queen Anne’s Revenge was built as a privateer, then served as a slave ship before coming under Blackbeard’s command.

“We’re going to have a magnificent collection,” Morris told FoxNews.com. “We’ve got the plates they ate off. We’ve got bones with butcher’s marks.”

A treasure chest is an unlikely find in the wreckage: When you sink your own pirate ship, you pull the loot off it first. But what does exist, 300 years after the ship was abandoned in shallow waters, will be of incalculable value for future scholars, Morris said. There is navigation equipment, weaponry, ceramics, glass wear, personal effects, material from the African slave trade and more. These items often are locked in a concrete like crust of sand, shells and marine life that must be removed during the conservation process.

Read more at Discovery News

Medieval Child's Last Day Revealed With New Tech

Soil surrounding centuries-old skeletons can reveal how the deceased people spent their last day on Earth, according to a new study published in the journal Heritage Science.

Danish researchers used the new technology to investigate the remains of a 10- to 13-year-old child who had been buried in the medieval town of Ribe, in Denmark, some 800 years ago.

According to their findings, the day before death was indeed painful for the poor child, who was likely suffering from a severe illness. In a desperate attempt to save his or her life, the child was given a high dose of bacteria-killing mercury.

“I cannot say which diseases the child had contracted.” Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a chemist from the University of Southern Denmark, said. “But I can say that (the child) was exposed to a large dose of mercury a couple of months before its death and again a day or two prior to death.”

“You can imagine what happened: that the family for a while tried to cure the child with mercury-containing medicine which may or may not have worked, but that the child’s condition suddenly worsened and that it was administered a large dose of mercury which was, however, not able to save its life,” he added.

The detailed insight into the life of the child did not come from analyses of the child’s bones. Rather, Rasmussen and colleagues extracted the crucial information from the soil surrounding the skeletal remains.

The sampling technique relies on the compounds released when a body decays in the grave.

“If we can localize an element in the soil in the immediate vicinity of the skeleton which is not normally found in the soil itself, we can assume that it came from the deceased and this can tell us something about how the person lived. We are not interested in death, but in the life before death,” Rasmussen said.

The soil samples must be taken from the regions once occupied by the individual’s lungs, kidneys, liver and muscle tissue.

For example, the compounds that were originally part of the kidneys have now become part of the soil — provided they have not been washed away by groundwater.

“If there was mercury present in the kidney at the time of death it would have been transformed rapidly to mercury sulphide, which is very immobile and undissolvable in water. In this way we can obtain information about the deceased even though we do not analyze the bones,” Rasmussen said.

Locating the compounds in relation to the decayed organs is very important to get clues about the last days of the deceased. For instance, mercury is excreted very fast from the lungs, within hours or at the most a couple of days.

“When we found high mercury concentrations in the soil that had once been the lungs of the child, we could conclude that the child probably was exposed to mercury within the last 48 hours or so before its death,” Rasmussen said.

Although bones can also be analyzed for excess mercury, the technique has some limitations, according to Rasmussen.

“While the soil gives insight into the last months and days before death, the bones can only give information about the mercury exposure from about 10 to three years prior to death,” he said.

Rarely found naturally in soil, mercury is particularly interesting for archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with this chemical element.

Read more at Discovery News

CIA Admits 'Area 51' Exists, But Says No UFOs

A newly declassified CIA document confirms the existence of famed Area 51 in Nevada, but conspiracy theorists will be disappointed the spy agency offers no proof of alien spaceship landings in the desert.

Area 51 has long been fodder for science fiction films and wild UFO tales claiming the US government imposed secrecy over the site northwest of Las Vegas to cover up evidence of extra-terrestrials touching down on Earth.

Instead of encounters with flying saucers, the documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday recount a less sensational history of Area 51 -- as a testing range for the government's U-2 spy plane during the Cold War.

The CIA in-house history makes no mention of the legendary "Roswell incident," when a weather balloon crashed in New Mexico in 1947. UFO true believers allege it was an alien spacecraft that went down, and that Area 51's hangars had hidden evidence of extra-terrestrial corpses.

But according to the CIA, the government secrecy surrounding Area 51 was not about Martians but about hiding a new spy plane from the Soviets.

The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was designed to snoop on the Soviet Union at high-altitude, and its development was top-secret.

In April 1955, the CIA chose a remote dry lakebed in the Nevada desert as a testing ground, which was designated on maps as Area 51.

Test flights for the U-2 aircraft were conducted at a much higher altitude than commercial airliners or other military planes.

In the 1950s, commercial planes flew at between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and warplanes such as B-47 reached altitudes of less than 40,000 feet.

The U-2 planes flew at above 60,000 feet, and reports of unidentified flying objects in the Nevada desert started to roll in, the report said.

"High altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect -- a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)," it said.

The reports of UFOs often came from pilots from commercial airliners in the early evening hours, with the U-2 plane's silver wings reflecting the rays of the sun.

The surveillance planes appeared to be "fiery objects" high in the sky, it said.

"At this time, no one believed manned flight was possible above 60,000 feet, so no one expected to see an object so high in the sky," it said.

The commercial pilots and other observers on the ground wrote letters to an Air Force unit in Dayton, Ohio charged with investigating such sightings.

Anxious to avoid exposing the ultra-secret U-2 program, Air Force officers explained the sightings as merely due to natural phenomena, though they knew the high-flying U-2 was the true cause.

U-2 and other surveillance flights "accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s," it said.

The 400-page report, titled "Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974," was released as a result of a Freedom of Information request dating to 2005 from the National Security Archives at George Washington University.

The study was published in classified form for spy agencies in 1992 and a heavily censored version was published in 1998.

Area 51's location has been an open secret for years but government documents released previously had not acknowledged its existence and role in such a detailed way. Officials also had referred to a location "near Groom Lake."

Read more at Discovery News