Lost 'Nightsnake' Rediscovered on Volcanic Island off Mexico

A mysterious species of snake has been rediscovered lurking in volcanic rocks on an island off Mexico.

The elusive, nocturnal Clarion nightsnake was first discovered more than 80 years ago on Clarion Island, but was then lost to science.

"The rediscovery of the Clarion nightsnake is an incredible story of how scientists rely on historical data and museum collections to solve modern-day mysteries about biodiversity in the world we live in," lead author Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "Proper identification is the first step toward conserving this snake, and we plan to continue monitoring this species to learn more about the role it plays in the delicate Clarion Island ecosystem."

In 1936, naturalist William Beebe first unearthed a lone nightsnake, dubbed Hypsiglena ochrorhyncha unaocularus, on Clarion Island, which is one of the four Revillagigedo Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The reptile's speckled, brownish-black camouflage blended in with the black lava rock on the island, making it difficult to spot.

That single snake specimen was tagged and kept in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but because no other researchers had seen the snake since, its existence as a separate species was questioned. In part, the snake, which grows to about 18 inches (45 centimeters) long, has remained hidden for decades because of its coloration — dark spots on its head and neck act as camouflage — and secretive behavior; the island itself is so remote that biologists can only access it with a military escort, limiting how many scientists actually searched for these reptiles.

But in 2013, Mulcahy and colleagues at the Instituto de Ecología in Mexico set out on a quest to the Revillagigedo Islands to find the missing species.

The team uncovered 11 of the elusive snakes, all on the volcanic island of Clarion. DNA testing confirmed the snakes were a distinct species from mainland nightsnakes.

Read more at Discovery News

Giant Dinosaurs Unearthed in Argentina

The bones of seven huge dinosaurs that each weighed more than a dozen elephants and had femurs bigger than a human adult have been discovered in Argentina, scientists announced.

The plant-eating beasts plodded across South America 95 million years ago, during the Mesozoic Era, and they may represent a new species. The creatures may even be the biggest dinosaurs known, outshining their long-tailed, long-necked titanosaur cousins like Argentinosaurus, said the paleontologists who excavated the bones.

Using jackhammers, shovels and even bulldozers, researchers of the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Argentina's Patagonia region removed the fossils from a site in the center of Chubut province, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) from the city of Trelew. A farm worker first discovered dinosaur bones there in 2011. So far, scientists have found more than 200 fossils at the site, including leg bones, vertebrae, teeth and tail bones.

The amazing state of preservation of the bones is rare. The animals, all adults, appear to have died around the same time. The researchers speculate that they they succumbed to dehydration or got stuck in the mud while gathering around small pools of water to drink. In this deadly graveyard, the reptiles may have become food for scavengers like carnivorous dinosaurs in the Tyrannotitan genus.

Read more at Discovery News

'Magical' 18th-Century Artifacts Found in Caribbean

Archaeologists working on two small Caribbean islands have found artifacts intentionally buried beneath two 18th-century plantation houses.

They appear to have been placed there for their spiritual power, protecting the inhabitants against harm, said John Chenoweth, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, in an interview with Live Science.

The discoveries were made recently in the British Virgin Islands, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom.

On one island archaeologists found "grape shot" — iron balls less than an inch (2 centimeters) in diameter meant to be shot from a cannon — buried in two postholes under a sugar plantation house. At this time on the British Virgin Islands "weapons were in short supply, so these bullets would have been likely relatively important," Chenoweth said. Why someone would bury them in postholes is a mystery, as one would need to dig up the house's foundation to access the iron balls, not to mention the balls would corrode over time, Chenoweth said.

That ammunition likely served a spiritual or magical purpose, he said. Supporting that idea, researchers Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud write in the "Dictionary of English Folklore" (Oxford University Press, 2002) that "the power of iron to repel evil is very well attested in Englishfolklore, and throughout Europe — all sorts of domestic objects, and even lumps of scrap iron, were placed in homes, stables and cowsheds as defenses against witchcraft and harmful fairies, or used in counter-spells."

Chenoweth believes that this ammunition was used like a counterspell. Grape shot was intended for warfare and therefore could be magically used to stop violence. "Following the idea of 'like cures like' the grape shot may have beenburied to keep violent attack away," he said in a follow-up email.

The inhabitants of the two-room plantation house had plenty of potential violence to worry about, as historical records show the island government continually warned London the colony was short of weapons and ammunition and was vulnerable to a Spanish attack or slave uprising, Chenoweth said. The fact that the plantation homeowners buried this scarce ammunition makes the find all the more remarkable.

"When they placed them there they had a good reason for doing so," Chenoweth said.

The quarters for the plantation slaves have not yet been found.

On another small island, in postholes of another two-room plantation house, Chenoweth's team discovered a whelk shell plugged so that it could be used as a container. Next to it they found fish bones, pins and the bones of a Puerto Rican racer snake.

Chenoweth thinks the shell, which would have held the bones and pins, had a spiritual purpose of sorts. It appears to have been inserted into the foundations around 1740 during a remodeling. Similar objects, called "witch's bottles," have been found at sites in England and America. "It has a long history in England and something that seems to be connected to pre-Christian spiritual practices," he told Live Science.

Objects like these are "seen as an effort to protect the house against bad magic basically, spirits and spells that might seek to harm some of the occupants of the house," Chenoweth said.

Placing the snake bone, which symbolizes something negative, in the shell could have magically canceled out the negative power that the creature represents, he noted.

This plantation was in use from 1720 until about 1780. The slave village is about 150 feet (46 meters) away and would have held no more than 20 slaves. This plantation produced mainly cotton, and, curiously, historical records indicate its owner was a member of the "Religious Society of Friends," also known as Quakers, a group that tended to stay away from rituals and ritual objects.

The two islands are located a few miles from Tortola, the seat of the British Virgin Islands government. The plantations are now part of private property, and the landowners prefer the name of the islands not be released.

Read more at Discovery News

'Byzantine iPad' Found in Ancient Shipwreck

Turkish archaeologists excavating a harbor site on the European side of the Bosphorus have unearthed a 1,200-year-old wooden object which they claim is the ancient equivalent of a tablet computer. The device was a notebook and tool — in one.

The Byzantine invention was found within the remains of one of the 37 ships unearthed in the Yenikapi area of Istanbul, a site which has been at the center of excavations for the past 10 years.

Also known as Theodosius Port, it was built in the late 4th century during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I and become the city's most important commercial port.

Probably belonging to the ship's captain, the wooden object, whose cover is finely carved with decorations, is the size of a modern seven-inch tablet, but it's much thicker.

It consists of a set of five overlaid rectangular panels carved with frames and covered with wax. Notes could be taken on those panels, as shown by writing in Greek which is still visible on the wax.

A primitive "app" is hidden on the bottom panel: a sliding lid revealing a hidden plate with carved spaces.

"When you draw the sliding part, there are small weights used as an assay balance," Ufuk Kocabaş, director of Istanbul University’s department of marine archeology and the Yenikapi Shipwrecks Project, told Hurriyet Daily News.

Since it was a merchant ship, the tool was likely used to assess the value of some items. Assay balances were used to determine the metal content in ore or the kind of precious metal in an alloy.

The notebook could have been easily carried. Each panel features four holes -- they were drilled in two pairs in order to bind the notebook together, probably by leather straps.

"Yenikapı is a phenomenon with its 37 sunken ships and organic products. I think these organic products are the most important feature of the excavations," Kocabaş said.

The sunken ship upon which the "Byzantine iPad" was found, has been dated to around the 9th century A.D.

Read more at Discovery News

Earth organisms survive under Martian conditions: Methanogens stay alive in extreme heat and cold

New research suggests that methanogens -- among the simplest and oldest organisms on Earth -- could survive on Mars.

Methanogens, microorganisms in the domain Archaea, use hydrogen as their energy source and carbon dioxide as their carbon source, to metabolize and produce methane, also known as natural gas. Methanogens live in swamps and marshes, but can also be found in the gut of cattle, termites and other herbivores as well as in dead and decaying matter.

Methanogens are anaerobic, so they they don't require require oxygen. They don't require organic nutrients and are non-photosynthetic, indicating they could exist in sub-surface environments and therefore are ideal candidates for life on Mars.

Rebecca Mickol, a doctoral student in space and planetary sciences at the University of Arkansas, subjected two species of methanogens to Martian conditions: Methanothermobacter wolfeii and Methanobacterium formicicum. Both species survived the Martian freeze-thaw cycles that Mickol replicated in her experiments.

The species were tested for their ability to withstand Martian freeze-thaw cycles that are below the organisms' ideal growth temperatures: 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for M. formicicum and 55 degrees Celsius (131 degrees Fahrenheit) for M. wolfeii.

"The surface temperature on Mars varies widely, often ranging between minus 90 degrees Celsius and 27 degrees Celsius over one Martian day," Mickol said. "If any life were to exist on Mars right now, it would at least have to survive that temperature range. The survival of these two methanogen species exposed to long-term freeze/thaw cycles suggests methanogens could potentially inhabit the subsurface of Mars."

Mickol conducted the study with Timothy Kral, professor of biological sciences in the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences and lead scientist on the project. She is presenting her work at the 2014 General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, being held May 17-20 in Boston.

The two species were selected because one is a hyperthermophile, meaning it thrives under extremely hot temperatures, and the other is a thermophile, which thrives under warm temperatures.

"The low temperature on Mars inhibited their growth, but they survived," Mickol said. "Once they got back to a warm temperature, they were able to grow and metabolize again. I wanted to see if these cold temperatures would kill them, or if they were able to survive and adapt."

Read more at Science Daily

Human Albino Gene Found in Dogs

Dogs and people have more in common than a love of Frisbees and long walks on the beach. A new study finds that certain dogs, just like certain humans, carry a gene mutation that causes albinism — a condition that results in little or no pigment in the eyes, skin and hair.

The study by researchers at Michigan State University identifies the exact genetic mutation that leads to albinism in Doberman pinschers, a discovery that has eluded veterinarians and dog breeders until now. Interestingly, the same mutated gene that causes albinism in this dog breed is also associated with a form of albinism in humans.

"What we found was a gene mutation that results in a missing protein necessary for cells to be pigmented," study co-author Paige Winkler, a doctoral student in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, said in a statement.

Winkler said the gene mutation found in Doberman pinschers is responsible for a condition known as oculocutaneous albinism, which also affects humans. The condition expresses certain characteristics in both humans and dogs.

"With an albino Doberman, you see a white or lighter-colored coat, pink noses and lips, along with pale irises in the eyes," Winkler said. "These traits are very similar to the characteristics humans display with this particular condition, causing light-pigmented skin and hair, along with eye discoloration and vision disturbances."

Just as people with this type of albinism experience skin sensitivity to sunlight, which can result in an increased vulnerability to skin tumors, canines with the mutated gene were also found to be at higher risk for developing skin tumors, the researchers said.

"We knew that albino Dobermans typically developed these types of tumors, much like humans, but we wondered what the actual increase in prevalence was between a 'white' dog and a regular-colored Doberman," said Joshua Bartoe, an assistant professor in the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences at Michigan State University, who co-led the study. "What we found was a significant increase in risk for development of melanoma-like tumors in the albino dogs."

These findings were based on a study of 40 Dobermans pinschers — 20 albino dogs and 20 "regular-colored" dogs. The researchers found that more than half of the albino dogs had at least one tumor, while only one of the regular-colored dogs had a tumor.

Bartoe and Winkler said their study could serve as a valuable resource for Doberman breeders around the world, particularly because the American Kennel Club, a registry of purebred dog pedigrees in the United States, doesn't allow the registration of albino dogs.

Read more at Discovery News

Witch Doctors in East Africa Arrested in Albino Killing

Last week an albino woman in a rural area of the East African country of Tanzania was murdered for her body parts. Two witch doctors have been arrested in connection with the death, though it’s not clear whether the pair committed the crime themselves or hired others to mutilate the woman.

According to a news report from Australia’s Skynews:

“Munghu Lugata, 40, was killed after attackers hacked off her left leg above the knee and chopped off three fingers on Monday… Charles Mkumbo, police chief of the Simiyu region in northwestern Tanzania, said a man and a woman, Gudawa Yalema and Shiwa Masalu, had been arrested.” Under the Same Sun, a foundation created to help albino victims in Africa, issued a statement adding that “‘Her grossly mutilated body was discovered outside of her home by her own niece’ and that ‘more than 70 albinos have been killed since 2000, with a similar number suffering violent attacks.’”

In Africa, witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing (or removing) magic curses or bringing luck in love or business. The belief and practice of using body parts for magical ritual or benefit is called muti. Muti murders are particularly brutal, with knives and machetes used to cut and hack off limbs, breasts, and other body parts from their living victims.

Vicky Ntetema, a Tanzanian journalist who went undercover for a 2008 BBC News investigation into this practice, explained that the murdered albinos’ “bodies are left limbless and sometimes with a huge hole in the neck, from where blood would have been drained. Families not only grieve because of the loss of their loved ones but are also shocked at the state in which the bodies are left by these murderers. As if that is not enough, they have to bury their dead in the house, guard the graves on their farm and or build them with stones, metal bars and cement to prevent the killers from stealing the body parts.”

Though the two witch doctors accused of Lugata’s death have been arrested, many Africans believe that police, politicians and judges are hesitant to pursue muti murders because belief in witchcraft is so widespread. It’s possible that some of the judges believe they gained their positions in part because of magic.

Read more at Discovery News

Experiment to Turn Light Into Matter

Scientists have worked out an easy way of turning light into matter, a process thought to be impossible when first proposed 80 years ago.

The proposed experiment, reported in the journal Nature photonics, would recreate events that occurred in the first 100 seconds of the big bang, as well as in cosmic rays and gamma ray bursts.

In 1934, scientists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler suggested light can be converted into matter by smashing two photons together to create an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

Breit and Wheeler's calculations were correct, but they never expected anyone to physically demonstrate their prediction.

"The Breit-Wheeler process is one of the simplest interactions of light and matter and one of the purest demonstrations of E=mc2," said the study's lead author Oliver Pike of Imperial College London.

"However, Breit-Wheeler pair production has never been observed. The experimental design we propose can be carried out with relative ease and with existing technology."

Just add gold

The photon collider would convert light directly into matter by using an extremely powerful high intensity laser to fire electrons at almost the speed of light into a slab of gold. This created a beam of photons a billion times more energetic than visible light.

The next step involves firing a separate high energy laser onto the surface of a tiny gold cylinder called a vacuum hohlraum (German for hollow cavity), to create a thermal radiation field of photons.

The researchers would then direct the photon beam from the gold slab through the center of the hohlraum, causing the photons from the two sources to collide and create electrons and positrons, which could be detected as they beamed out of the device.

Matter was first created out of pure energy in 1997 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center when a powerful electron beam was fired into a laser beam of photons.

Occasionally an electron collided with a photon pushing it into other photons with enough force to produce an electron and a positron.

"There was not enough energy at Stanford to observe the Breit-Wheeler process, instead a much more complex process was observed -- high-energy photons interacted with multiple low-energy photons in a strong laser field," said Pike.

"In our work, there are no massive particles present. Our scheme would therefore represent the first proof-of-principle of a pure photon-photon collider."

Easier way

Associate Professor Martin Sevior, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Melbourne, agrees.

"This new method won't require such high energy electron beams as those used by Stanford," said Sevior, who was not involved in the research.

"The Stanford experiment used the world's most intense and highest energy electron beam. This new system will work with a much lower energy electron beam, and it has a much greater photon yield for the same amount of energy."

Read more at Discovery News

Lighting the way to graphene-based devices

Graphene continues to reign as the next potential superstar material for the electronics industry, a slimmer, stronger and much faster electron conductor than silicon. With no natural energy band-gap, however, graphene's superfast conductance can't be switched off, a serious drawback for transistors and other electronic devices. Various techniques have been deployed to overcome this problem with one of the most promising being the integration of ultrathin layers of graphene and boron nitride into two-dimensional heterostructures. As conductors, these bilayered hybrids are almost as fast as pure graphene, plus they are well-suited for making devices. However, tailoring the electronic properties of graphene boron nitride (GBN) heterostructures has been a tricky affair, involving chemical doping or electrostatic-gating -- until now.

Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have demonstrated a technique whereby the electronic properties of GBN heterostructures can be modified with visible light. Feng Wang, a condensed matter physicist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley's Physics Department, as well as an investigator for the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at Berkeley, led a study in which photo-induced doping of GBN heterostructures was used to create p-n junctions and other useful doping profiles while preserving the material's remarkably high electron mobility.

"We've demonstrated that visible light can induce a robust writing and erasing of charge-doping in GBN heterostructures without sacrificing high carrier mobility," Wang says. "The use of visible light gives us incredible flexibility and, unlike electrostatic gating and chemical doping, does not require multi-step fabrication processes that reduce sample quality. Additionally, different patterns can be imparted and erased at will, which was not possible with doping techniques previously used on GBN heterostructures."

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Boron nitride is a layered compound that features a similar hexagonal lattice -- in fact hexagonal boron nitride is sometimes referred to as "white graphene." Bound together by the relatively weak intermolecular attraction known as the van der Waals force, GBN heterostructures have shown high potential to serve as platforms not only for high-electron-mobility transistors, but also for optoelectronic applications, including photodetectors and photovoltaic cells. The key to future success will be the ability to dope these materials in a commercially scalable manner. The photo-induced modulation doping technique developed by Wang and a large team of collaborators meets this requirement as it is comparable to the photolithography schemes widely used today for mass production in the semiconductor industry. Illumination of a GBN heterostructure even with just an incandescent lamp can modify electron-transport in the graphene layer by inducing a positive-charge distribution in the boron nitride layer that becomes fixed when the illumination is turned off.

"We've shown show that this photo-induced doping arises from microscopically coupled optical and electrical responses in the GBN heterostructures, including optical excitation of defect transitions in boron nitride, electrical transport in graphene, and charge transfer between boron nitride and graphene," Wang says. "This is analogous to the modulation doping first developed for high-quality semiconductors."

Read more at Discovery News

Herpes-loaded stem cells used to kill brain tumors

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have a potential solution for how to more effectively kill tumor cells using cancer-killing viruses. The investigators report that trapping virus-loaded stem cells in a gel and applying them to tumors significantly improved survival in mice with glioblastoma multiforme, the most common brain tumor in human adults and also the most difficult to treat.

The work, led by Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, an HSCI Principal Faculty member, is published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Shah heads the Molecular Neurotherapy and Imaging Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Cancer-killing or oncolytic viruses have been used in numerous phase 1 and 2 clinical trials for brain tumors but with limited success. In preclinical studies, oncolytic herpes simplex viruses seemed especially promising, as they naturally infect dividing brain cells. However, the therapy hasn't translated as well for human patients. The problem previous researchers couldn't overcome was how to keep the herpes viruses at the tumor site long enough to work.

Shah and his team turned to mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) -- a type of stem cell that gives rise to bone marrow tissue -- which have been very attractive drug delivery vehicles because they trigger a minimal immune response and can be utilized to carry oncolytic viruses. Shah and his team loaded the herpes virus into human MSCs and injected the cells into glioblastoma tumors developed in mice. Using multiple imaging markers, it was possible to watch the virus as it passed from the stem cells to the first layer of brain tumor cells and subsequently into all of the tumor cells.

"So, how do you translate this into the clinic?" asked Shah, who also is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.

"We know that 70-75 percent of glioblastoma patients undergo surgery for tumor debulking, and we have previously shown that MSCs encapsulated in biocompatible gels can be used as therapeutic agents in a mouse model that mimics this debulking," he continued. "So, we loaded MSCs with oncolytic herpes virus and encapsulated these cells in biocompatible gels and applied the gels directly onto the adjacent tissue after debulking. We then compared the efficacy of virus-loaded, encapsulated MSCs versus direct injection of the virus into the cavity of the debulked tumors."

Using imaging proteins to watch in real time how the virus combated the cancer, Shah's team noticed that the gel kept the stem cells alive longer, which allowed the virus to replicate and kill any residual cancer cells that were not cut out during the debulking surgery. This translated into a higher survival rate for mice that received the gel-encapsulated stem cells.

"They survived because the virus doesn't get washed out by the cerebrospinal fluid that fills the cavity," Shah said. "Previous studies that have injected the virus directly into the resection cavity did not follow the fate of the virus in the cavity. However, our imaging and side-by-side comparison studies showed that the naked virus rarely infects the residual tumor cells. This could give us insight into why the results from clinical trials with oncolytic viruses alone were modest."

Read more at Science Daily