Shush! World's Oldest Resting Scorpion

This is a drawing of the scorpion who left behind the only fossil body ever found.

It may not look like much, but together with other tracks in the 280 million-year-old rocks of Prehistoric Trackways National Monument in southern New Mexico, this vague form has been identified as the one and only fossil impression of a scorpion body ever found. The scorpion rested here for a time, then scurried off, and the imprint of its body eventually turned to stone.

The age of the trace fossil, as body impressions and tracks are called, takes scorpions way back to the early Permian. That confirms that scorpions have survived a lot of gigantic mass extinction events between then and now. What’s more, seeing how the carbon dioxide levels in the Permian atmosphere were probably three times what they are today on Earth, it’s not likely anthropogenic climate change will stop these hardy arthropods either.

“We gave it the name Alacranichnus, which means scorpion trace (alacran is Spanish for scorpion and ichnos is Greek for trace),” said Spencer Lucas, curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS). The discovery was just published in the journal Ichnos: An International Journal for Plant and Animal Traces by scientist at the museum in Albuquerque.

The scorpion fossil

In the paper Lucas, Allan Lerner and Sebastian Voigt describe the trace fossil as a “substantial addition to the poorly known Permian fossil record of scorpions that demonstrates that scorpions were present in the Early Permian coastal plain…. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the way of morphological characters evident from the resting trace that can help determine which particular type of scorpion made it.”

Scorpions are the oldest known arachnids, the researchers explain, with some fossils of probably aquatic scorpions dating back to the Silurian Periods about 430 million years ago. Later, in the Carboniferous (359 million to 299 million years ago), scorpions took to land. But then the fossils peter out.

Read more at Discovery News

Mechanism Behind Blood Stem Cells' Longevity Discovered

The blood stem cells that live in bone marrow are at the top of a complex family tree. Such stem cells split and divide down various pathways that ultimately produce red cells, white cells and platelets. These "daughter" cells must be produced at a rate of about one million per second to constantly replenish the body's blood supply.

Researchers have long wondered what allows these stem cells to persist for decades, when their progeny last for days, weeks or months before they need to be replaced. Now, a study from the University of Pennsylvania has uncovered one of the mechanisms that allow these stem cells to keep dividing in perpetuity.

The researchers found that a form of the motor protein that allows muscles to contract helps these cells divide asymmetrically, so that one part remains a stem cell while the other becomes a daughter cell. Their findings could provide new insight into blood cancers, such as leukemia, and eventually lead to ways of growing transfusable blood cells in a lab.

The research was conducted by Dennis Discher, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and members of his lab: lead author Jae-Won Shin, Amnon Buxboim, Kyle R. Spinler, Joe Swift, Dave P. Dingal, Irena L. Ivanovska and Florian Rehfeldt. They collaborated with researchers at the Université de Strasbourg, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, San Francisco.

It was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

"Your blood cells are constantly getting worn out and replaced," Discher said. "We want to understand how the stem cells responsible for making these cells can last for decades without being exhausted."

The standing theory to explain these cells' near immortality is asymmetric division, though the cellular mechanism that enables this kind of division was unknown. Looking to identify the forces responsible for this phenomenon, the researchers analyzed all of the genes expressed in the stem cells and their more rapidly dividing progeny. Proteins that only went to one side of the dividing cell, the researchers thought, might play a role in partitioning other key factors responsible for keeping one side a stem cell.

They saw different expression patterns of the motor protein myosin II, which has two forms, A and B. Myosin II is the protein that enables the body's muscles to contract, but in nonmuscle cells it is also used in cell division, where it helps cleave and close off the cell walls as the cell splits apart.

"We found that the stem cell has both types of myosin," Shin said, "whereas the final red and white blood cells only had the A form. We inferred that the B form was key to splitting the stem cells in an asymmetric way that kept the B form only in the stem cell."

With these myosins as their top candidate, the researchers labeled key proteins in dividing stem cells with different colors and put them under the microscope.

"We could see that the myosin IIB goes to one side of the dividing cell, which causes it to cleave differently," Discher said. "It's like a tug of war, and the side with the B pulls harder and stays a stem cell."

The researchers then performed in vivo tests using mice that had human stem cells injected into their bone marrow. By genetically inhibiting myosin IIB production, the researchers saw the stem cells and their early progeny proliferating while the amount of downstream blood cells dropped.

"Because the stem cells were not able to divide asymmetrically, they just kept making more of themselves in the marrow at the expense of the differentiated cells," Discher said.

The researchers also used a drug that temporarily blocked both A and B forms of myosin II, finding that it increased the prevalence of non-dividing stem cells, blocking the more rapid division of progeny.

Read more at Science Daily

Mach 1000 Shock Wave Lights Supernova Remnant

When a star explodes as a supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away. Yet the material blasted outward from the explosion still glows hundreds or thousands of years later, forming a picturesque supernova remnant. What powers such long-lived brilliance?

In the case of Tycho's supernova remnant, astronomers have discovered that a reverse shock wave racing inward at Mach 1000 (1000 times the speed of sound) is heating the remnant and causing it to emit X-ray light.

"We wouldn't be able to study ancient supernova remnants without a reverse shock to light them up," says Hiroya Yamaguchi, who conducted this research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Tycho's supernova was witnessed by astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572. The appearance of this "new star" stunned those who thought the heavens were constant and unchanging. At its brightest, the supernova rivaled Venus before fading from sight a year later.

Modern astronomers know that the event Tycho and others observed was a Type Ia supernova, caused by the explosion of a white dwarf star. The explosion spewed elements like silicon and iron into space at speeds of more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 km/s).

When that ejecta rammed into surrounding interstellar gas, it created a shock wave -- the equivalent of a cosmic "sonic boom." That shock wave continues to move outward today at about Mach 300. The interaction also created a violent "backwash" -- a reverse shock wave that speeds inward at Mach 1000.

"It's like the wave of brake lights that marches up a line of traffic after a fender-bender on a busy highway," explains CfA co-author Randall Smith.

The reverse shock wave heats gases inside the supernova remnant and causes them to fluoresce. The process is similar to what lights household fluorescent bulbs, except that the supernova remnant glows in X-rays rather than visible light. The reverse shock wave is what allows us to see supernova remnants and study them, hundreds of years after the supernova occurred.

"Thanks to the reverse shock, Tycho's supernova keeps on giving," says Smith.

Read more at Science Daily

Is a 17th Century Wreck Buried in Lake Michigan?

One of the Great Lakes’ most enduring puzzles, the fate of the 17th century vessel the Griffin, continues to be a mystery.

Experts are debating whether a wooden slab found protruding from the bed of Lake Michigan is a wreckage from the long sought vessel or just a pound net stake — an underwater stationary fishing device used in the Great Lakes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A 10.5-foot section of the timber was found by shipwreck hunter Steve Libert in 2001 in a remote area of Lake Michigan near Poverty Island.

Libert, the president of Great Lakes Exploration Group, who has spent three decades and more than $1 million on the hunt for the elusive ship, noticed the timber was protruding from the lake bed.

After 12 years of research and legal tussles, the U.S. government acknowledged France’s claim to the wreck. French archaeologists last June finally dislodged the nearly 20-foot beam and dug beneath it. The results were disappointing.

“Sadly the survey could not confirm the presence of a homogeneous wreck under the thick layer of sediment and zebra mussels which covers the bottom of Lake Michigan,” Libert said.

Long considered the Holy Grail of Great Lakes shipwrecks, the Griffin was built by the legendary French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle, who journeyed across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi in a quest for what he erroneously believed to be a passageway to China and Japan.

The ship vanished just a few months after her launch with a crew of six men and a cargo of furs.

According to Libert, the Griffin sailed between Green Bay and the Jesuit mission of Michilimackinac on the north bank of the Straits of Mackinac which join lakes Michigan and Huron.

“Searches shortly after her disappearance found nothing and for the following three centuries the circumstances and location of the loss of the Griffon were a mystery,” Libert said.

Theories about her fate included the ship sinking in a fierce storm, being captured and burned by Native Americans or scuttled by a mutinous crew.

Mystery also wraps the retrieved beam. Definitive answers about its original purpose came from neither carbon-14 dating, nor from CT scans.

The tests indicated the wood could have originated anywhere from 1670 to 1950, opening many possibilities. Analysis of ring patterns also proved incomplete, as only 29 out of the 50 rings necessary for the dating were visible in the scans.

“I’m looking at the evidence, and the evidence is pointing to a net stake,” Dean Anderson, Michigan’s state archaeologist, told the Associated Press.

“I’m not seeing any evidence of a vessel element here,” he added.

Libert hotly disagrees and claims the timber, which features four treenails, is a bowsprit — a spur or pole that extends from a vessel’s stem.

“It cannot be a pound net stake,” he told Discovery News. “Who would have put it there?”

“We know from the French archeologists that the bowsprit is at least 200 years old due to the erosion marks on this piece. It wasn’t until the 1880s that the fishing method was used by white settlers in Lake Michigan,” he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Where Are All the 'Inbetweener' Black Holes?

There's small black holes and supermassive black holes, but where are all the "inbetweener" black holes?

This question has been foxing astrophysicists for years; the apparent dearth of medium-sized or "intimediate" black holes -- between 100 to 1 million solar masses -- doesn't make logical sense. But when it comes to black holes, you can often check logic at the door.

One would assume that to make a supermassive black hole, there must be some growth mechanism that causes small black holes, say around 100 solar masses, to pack on the pounds and grow to the gravitational behemoths that occupy the centers of most known galaxies.

Black holes at the lower end of the mass spectrum are stellar-mass black holes and, as their name suggests, they were formed by the collapse of massive stars and the result of supernoavae. The most massive black holes that are found in the cores of galaxies -- often reaching tens of millions to billions of solar masses -- are less well understood and astronomers are currently trying to understand how they grew to be so massive.

But the scarcity of intermediate-mass black holes poses a quandary: Is there some black hole growth mechanism that is stranger than we can possibly imagine? Or are current observatories simply not sensitive to the emissions from these middleweight objects?

"Exactly how intermediate-sized black holes would form remains an open issue," said Dominic Walton of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena. "Some theories suggest they could form in rich, dense clusters of stars through repeated mergers, but there are a lot of questions left to be answered."

In an effort to get to know the nature of intermediate mass black holes, a collaboration of international observatories "went to town" on two ultraluminous X-ray sources (or ULXs) that were thought to contain black holes in the 100 to 10,000 solar mass range.

ULXs are likely composed of a star and a nearby black hole. The black hole does what it does best, sucking material from the unfortunate binary partner, generating radiation in the process. These compact sources of X-rays have led astronomers to believe that the feeding black holes in ULXs fall into the intermediate-mass category.

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has joined Europe's XMM-Newton satellite in an effort to study a recently-identified ULX in the Circinus spiral galaxy some 13 million light-years distant (pictured top). Combining these X-ray observations with archival data from NASA's Chandra, Swift and Spitzer space telescopes plus the Japanese Suzaku satellite, this has become one of the most intensely-scrutinized ULXs ever.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, this collaboration deduced that the Circinus ULX is around 100 solar masses -- but it may not be an intermediate-mass black hole at all. It could actually just be a large stellar-mass black hole that has an exotic "feeding" mechanism that generates intense X-ray emissions.

In another study also accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, two ULXs in NGC 1313, a spiral galaxy 13 million light-years away, were examined. Those too, after being studied by NuSTAR, appear to also be large stellar-mass black holes and not the much sought-after intermediate-mass black holes. So what's going on?

Read more at Discovery News

Oldest Buddha Shrine Dates Birth to 6th Century B.C.

The birthplace of the Buddha has been found in Nepal, revealing that the origins of Buddhism date to the sixth century B.C., according to archaeologists. What’s more, evidence of tree roots at the birth site reinforce the mythology of Buddha’s birth under a tree.

The excavations took place within the already sacred Maya Devi Temple at Lumbini, Nepal, a UNESCO World Heritage site long thought to have been the Buddha’s birthplace.

The archaeological team dug under a series of brick temples at the site and unearthed a previously unknown sixth-century B.C. timber structure. It is described in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.

The timber structure contains an open space in the center that links to the nativity story of the Buddha himself.

“By placing the life of the Gautama Buddha firmly into the sixth century B.C. we can understand the exact character of the social and economic context in which he taught — it was a time of dramatic change with the introduction of coinage, the concept of the state, urbanization, the growth of merchants and the middle classes,” Robin Coningham, co-leader of the project, told Discovery News.

“The discovery of evidence of tree roots in the center of the earliest shrines at Lumbini — the presence of a tree shrine — add a real physical perspective to the Buddhist traditions of his life story, which associated Lumbini with the Buddha’s birth under a tree,” added Coningham, who is an archaeologist at Durham University.

Coningham, with Kosh Prasad Acharya of the Pashupati Area Development Trust in Nepal and colleagues used a combination of radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence techniques to date fragments of charcoal and grains of sand at the timber shrine. Analysis of the site’s geology confirmed the presence of ancient tree roots within the temple’s central void.

Buddhist tradition records that Queen Maya Devi, the mother of the Buddha, gave birth to him while holding on to the branch of a tree within the Lumbini Garden, midway between the kingdoms of her husband and parents. The researchers speculate that the open space in the center of the most ancient, timber shrine may have accommodated a tree. Brick temples built later above the timber one were also arranged around the central space, which was unroofed.

Coningham says the discovery contributes to a greater understanding of the early development of Buddhism as well as the spiritual importance of Lumbini.

“Most historical studies of early Buddhism start with the rule of the Emperor Asoka in the third century B.C. as he was personally responsible for patronizing Buddhism and helping it spread from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” he said.

“However, the discovery of two earlier shrines at Lumbini demonstrate that Buddhism had already attracted powerful sponsors before his imperial intervention,” he continued. “The fact that all three shrines were constructed around a tree also provides us with a unique insight into Buddhist veneration before the introduction of the image of the Buddha centuries later.”

Lumbini is one of the key sites associated with the life of the Buddha. Others are Bodh Gaya, where he became a Buddha or enlightened one; Sarnath, where he first preached; and Kusinagara, where he died. At his passing at the age of 80, the Buddha is recorded as having recommended that all Buddhists visit “Lumbini.” The shrine was still popular in the middle of the first millennium A.D. and was recorded by Chinese pilgrims as having a shrine beside a tree.

The Maya Devi temple at Lumbini remains a living shrine. The archaeologists worked alongside meditating monks, nuns and pilgrims.

Bokova urged that there be “more archaeological research, intensified conservation work and strengthened site management” to ensure Lumbini’s protection.

Ram Kumar Shrestha, Nepal’s minister of culture, tourism and civil aviation, concluded, “These discoveries are very important to better understand the birthplace of the Buddha. The government of Nepal will spare no effort to preserve this significant site.”

Half a billion people around the world are Buddhists. Hundreds of thousands make a pilgrimage to Lumbini each year, numbers that are likely to increase all the more given today’s announcement.

Read more at Discovery News

New Zealand Earthquakes Weakened Earth's Crust

A series of deadly earthquakes that shook New Zealand in 2010 and 2011 may have weakened a portion of Earth's crust, researchers say.

New Zealand lies along the dangerous Ring of Fire — a narrow zone around the Pacific Ocean where about 90 percent of all the world's earthquakes, and 80 percent of the largest ones, strike.

A devastating magnitude- 6.3 quake struck New Zealand's South Island in 2011. Centered very close to Christchurch, the country's second-largest city, it killed 185 people and damaged or destroyed 100,000 buildings. The earthquake was the costliest disaster to ever strike New Zealand, consuming about one-sixth of the country's gross domestic product.

This lethal earthquake was the aftershock of a magnitude-7.1 temblor that struck 172 days earlier (in 2010) in the area, causing millions of dollars in damage to bridges and buildings, and seriously injuring two people. Although the 2010 temblor was stronger than its aftershock, it caused less damage because it occurred farther away from any city. The 2011 earthquake was, in turn, followed by a number of large aftershocks of its own.

Scientists found that most of the earthquakes that struck New Zealand during these two years released abnormally high levels of energy, consistent with those seen from ruptures of very strong faults in the Earth's crust. To learn more about this long series of energetic quakes, researchers analyzed the rocks beneath the area hit, known as the Canterbury Plains.

Widespread weakening

Approximately 6 miles (10 kilometers) below the Canterbury Plains lies a large, extremely strong block of volcanic rock called the Hikurangi Plateau, which was pulled underground about 100 million years ago, when the portion of the Earth's surface it rested on dove under the edge of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. It remains attached to Earth's crust, welded to chunks of a dark, gray sandstone known as greywacke.

The scientists analyzed seismic waves detected before and after the quakes by GeoNet, a network of seismographs across New Zealand. Based on this data, including seismic waves from more than 11,500 aftershocks of the 2010 quake, they mapped the 3D structure of the rock under the Canterbury Plains, similar to the way ultrasound data can provide an image of a fetus in a womb.

Beneath the surface broken by the quakes, the researchers identified a broad region that appeared to be dramatically weaker after the quakes. This suggests there was widespread cracking of greywacke 3 miles (5 km) around the fault. In contrast, earthquakes of similar magnitude in the crust elsewhere typically only "produce zones of cracked rock around the fault which are a few hundred meters wide," said study lead author Martin Reyners, a seismologist at research institute GNS Science in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

Until now, scientists had assumed that the strength of Earth's crust remains constant during aftershocks. But these new findings, detailed online Nov. 24 in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggest energetic quakes can lead to widespread weakening of the crust.

"Such widespread weakening is not common, and has not been reported previously," Reyners told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Why there?

To explain why weakening was seen in that particular region and not elsewhere after strong quakes, Reyners noted the increasing pressure and temperature seen with increasing depth in the crust that usually means that at depths of more than about 6.8 miles (10.9 km), rocks are no longer brittle. As a result, the rocks often flow, not crack, when force is applied to them.

"This is known as the brittle-plastic transition," Reyners said.

Read more at Discovery News

Twice as Much Methane Escaping Arctic Seafloor

The Arctic methane time bomb is bigger than scientists once thought and primed to blow, according to a study published today (Nov. 24) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

About 17 teragrams of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, escapes each year from a broad, shallow underwater platform called the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, said Natalia Shakova, lead study author and a biogeochemist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons; the world emits about 500 million tons of methane every year from manmade and natural sources. The new measurement more than doubles the team's earlier estimate of Siberian methane release, published in 2010 in the journal Science.

"We believe that release of methane from the Arctic, in particular, from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, could impact the entire globe, not just the Arctic alone," Shakova told LiveScience. "The picture that we are trying to understand is what is the actual contribution of the to the global methane budget and how it will change over time."

Waiting to escape

Arctic permafrost is an area of intense research focus because of its climate threat. The frozen ground holds enormous stores of methane because the ice traps methane rising from inside the Earth, as well as gas made by microbes living in the soil. Scientists worry that the warming Arctic could lead to rapidly melting permafrost, releasing all that stored methane and creating a global warming feedback loop as the methane in the atmosphere traps heat and melts even more permafrost.

Researchers are trying to gauge this risk by accurately measuring stores of methane in permafrost on land and in the ocean, and predicting how fast it will thaw as the planet warms. Though methane gas quickly decays once it escapes into the atmosphere, lasting only about 10 years, it is 30 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat (the greenhouse effect).

Shakova and colleague Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences first discovered methane bubbling up from the shallow seafloor a decade ago in Russia's Laptev Sea. Methane is trapped there in ground frozen during past ice ages, when sea level was much lower.

Shallow waters

In their latest study, Shakova and her colleagues reported thousands of measurements of methane bubbles taken in summer and winter, between 2003 and 2012.

But the team also sampled seawater temperature and drilled into the ocean bottom, to see if the sediments are still frozen. Most of the survey was in water less than 100 feet (30 meters deep).

The shallow water is one reason so much methane escapes the Siberian shelf — in the deeper ocean, as methane-eating microbes digest the gas before it reaches the surface, Shakova said. But in the Laptev Sea, "it takes the bubbles only seconds, or at least a couple of minutes, to escape from the water column," Shakova said.

Arctic storms that churn the sea also speed up the release of methane from ocean water, like stirring a soft-drink releases gas bubbles, Shakova said. During the surveys, the amount of methane in the ocean and atmosphere dropped after two big Arctic storms passed through in 2009 and 2010, the researchers reported.

The temperature measurements revealed the water just above the ocean bottom warms by more than 12 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) in some spots during the summer, the researchers found. And the drill core revealed that the surface sediment layers were unfrozen at the drill site, near the Lena River delta.

"We have now proved that the current state of subsea permafrost is incomparably closer to the thaw point than that of terrestrial permafrost," Shakova said.

Shakova and her colleagues attribute the warming of the permafrost to long-term changes initiated when sea levels rose starting at the end of the last glacial period. The seawater is several degrees warmer than the frozen ground, and is slowly melting the ice over thousands of years, they think.

Massive burst

But other researchers think the permafrost warming started only recently. "This is the first time in 12,000 years the Arctic Ocean has warmed up 7 degrees in the summer, and that's entirely new because the sea ice hasn't been there to hold the temperatures down," said Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., who was not involved in the study. The summer ice melt season has lasted longer since 2005, giving the sun more time to warm the ocean.

"If we do have a methane burst it's going to be catastrophic," Wadhams said. Earlier this year, Wadhams and colleagues in Britain calculated that a mega-methane release from the Siberian shelf could push global temperatures up by 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius). The suggestion, published in the journal Nature, was widely debated by climate researchers. Climate change experts and international negotiators have said that keeping the rise in Earth's average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Read more at Discovery News

Watch Earth Spin From Your Browser

You might not have hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat on Richard Branson’s private shuttle, but one enterprising outfit is about to offer the next best thing: the chance to see the Earth from space, from the comfort of your couch.

With the aid of Russian space authorities, Vancouver-based UrtheCast (pronounced “earthcast”) will launch two cameras into orbit today (Nov. 25) with the immediate goal of streaming images of the Earth back home in near-real time.

For free, Internet users will log on to UrtheCast.com anytime to see the beauty of the big blue ball we live on, as the cameras make the 90-minute revolution around Earth, 16 times a day. It's a sight few have ever seen before.

“Ten years ago it would have been incredibly difficult to do this,” Scott Larson, CEO of UrtheCast, told FoxNews.com. But after three years of raising money and working with Russian and Canadian engineers and developers, the project is about to lift-off -- literally. The cameras will ride a Russian Soyuz rocket on Monday at 3:53 p.m. EST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. You can watch it live on FoxNews.com.

“I’ve never seen a launch before -- we’re all excited, there's no doubt about it,” Larson said.

The cameras will orbit for a few days before docking at the Russian portion of the International Space Station (ISS). The largest artificial body in orbit, the ISS serves as a research laboratory and testing facility for future space missions. It will add streaming media to its long list of functions.

Once calibrated – and this could take several months, Larson said – the cameras will start beaming down images. For the first time, ordinary web surfers will see the Earth in space with a delay of only 45 minutes to a couple hours at the most (this accounts for the near-real time nature). The crisp resolution will let them see not only the Earth -- with all the accompanying weather patterns and seasonal changes -- but moving vehicles, large crowds, boats and buildings.

Not only will viewers get the greatest panoramic view of all but they’ll be able to customize it too, locking on to their country, their state, their neighborhood when the cameras pan over that part of the world on rotation.

“Streaming video is a large amount of data that will have to reach Earth somehow, which will require a lot of bandwidth,” noted Austin Bradley, a Washington, D.C.-area space enthusiast who hopes one day to hitch a ride to Mars. Until then, he says that accessible video from space will definitely whet his appetite.

“For a lower cost than training as an astronaut and taking a weeklong vacation on the , it’s amazing that UrtheCast is bringing the opportunity to see Earth from the perspective that the few lucky astronauts in this world get to experience,” Bradley told FoxNews.com.

Larson said the company will be sending 200 gigabytes a day down in “big chunks,” which of course will create a bottleneck and thus the delay. But considering that the only other option for free space viewing – Google Earth – carries a delay of months if not years (Google superimposes pictures gleaned from various satellites), this “near-real time” opportunity is quite unprecedented.

And not inexpensive. to pay the bills, UrtheCast went public last July and raised $45 million in private funding. The company is striking numerous deals through partnerships too, including media companies like the Discovery Channel, which will have access to distribution once the cameras are up and running. UrtheCast is also marketing the images to private companies, and has already sold rights to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research’s operational satellite applications program (UNOSAT), which will use the pictures to track natural disasters and humanitarian crises.

This is all in line with promoting the webcast on social, educational, environmental and commercial fronts, said Larson.

An engineering firm based in British Columbia helped to build the cameras for about $15 million. The Russians will not only help deliver and stage the equipment, but will transmit the images too. This saves the project a lot of money. In return, UrtheCast will share the data with their Russian partners, who in the meantime get a payload of positive publicity for their space program.

Larson, who is Canadian, said it was the Russians that approached him several years back. They wanted to put cameras into space.

"It landed on my desk,” he recalled. “It was their idea frankly.”

Aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin said NASA should have been doing this kind of thing years ago. Currently, only major corporations and government agencies can afford to buy satellite images from space, and it's very expensive. A project like this not only makes space accessible to regular people, he told FoxNews.com, but it re-ignites a fascination with space travel that has been dormant in recent years.

Read more at Discovery News

The Secrets of Owls' Near Noiseless Wings

Many owl species have developed specialized plumage to effectively eliminate the aerodynamic noise from their wings -- allowing them to hunt and capture their prey in silence.

A research group working to solve the mystery of exactly how owls achieve this acoustic stealth will present their findings at the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, held Nov. 24 -- 26, in Pittsburgh, Pa. -- work that may one day help bring "silent owl technology" to the design of aircraft, wind turbines, and submarines.

"Owls possess no fewer than three distinct physical attributes that are thought to contribute to their silent flight capability: a comb of stiff feathers along the leading edge of the wing; a flexible fringe a the trailing edge of the wing; and a soft, downy material distributed on the top of the wing," explained Justin Jaworski, assistant professor in Lehigh University's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics. His group is exploring whether owl stealth is based upon a single attribute or the interaction of a combination of attributes.

For conventional wings, the sound from the hard trailing edge typically dominates the acoustic signature. But prior theoretical work carried out by Jaworski and Nigel Peake at the University of Cambridge revealed that the porous, compliant character of the owl wing's trailing edge results in significant aerodynamic noise reductions.

"We also predicted that the dominant edge-noise source could be effectively eliminated with properly tuned porous or elastic edge properties, which implies that that the noise signature from the wing can then be dictated by otherwise minor noise mechanisms such as the 'roughness' of the wing surface," said Jaworski.

The velvety down atop an owl's wing creates a compliant but rough surface, much like a soft carpet. This down material may be the least studied of the unique owl noise attributes, but Jaworski believes it may eliminate sound at the source through a novel mechanism that is much different than those of ordinary sound absorbers.

"Our current work predicts the sound resulting from air passing over the downy material, which is idealized as a collection of individual flexible fibers, and how the aerodynamic noise level varies with fiber composition," Jaworski said.

The researchers' results are providing details about how a fuzzy -- compliant but rough -- surface can be designed to tailor its acoustic signature.

A photographic study of actual owl feathers, carried out with Ian Clark of Virginia Tech, has revealed a surprising 'forest-like' geometry of the down material, so this will be incorporated into the researchers' future theoretical and experimental work to more faithfully replicate the down structure. Preliminary experiments performed at Virginia Tech show that a simple mesh covering, which replicates the top layer of the 'forest' structure, is effective in eliminating some sound generated by rough surfaces.

Read more at Science Daily