If you think there have been more earthquakes than usual this year, you're right. A new study finds there were more than twice as many big earthquakes in the first quarter of 2014 as compared with the average since 1979.
"We have recently experienced a period that has had one of the highest rates of great earthquakes ever recorded," said lead study author Tom Parsons, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, California.
But even though the global earthquake rate is on the rise, the number of quakes can still be explained by random chance, said Parsons and co-author Eric Geist, also a USGS researcher. Their findings were published online June 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
With so many earthquakes rattling the planet in 2014, Parsons actually hoped he might find the opposite — that the increase in big earthquakes comes from one large quake setting off another huge shaker. Earlier research has shown that seismic waves from one earthquake can travel around the world and trigger tiny temblors elsewhere.
"As our group has been interested in the ability of an earthquake to affect others at a global scale, we wondered if we were seeing it happening. I really expected we would see evidence of something we couldn't explain by randomness," Parsons told Live Science's Our Amazing Planet in an email interview.
The new study isn't the first time researchers have tried and failed to link one earthquake to another in time and across distance. Earlier studies found that the biggest earthquakes on the planet — the magnitude-8 and magnitude-9 quakes — typically trigger much smaller jolts, tiny magnitude-2 and magnitude-3 rumblers. Yet, no one has ever proven that large quakes unleash other large quakes. Finding a statistical connection between big earthquakes is a step toward proving such connections takes place.
But despite the recent earthquake storm, the world's great earthquakes still seem to strike at random, the new study found.
The average rate of big earthquakes — those larger than magnitude 7 — has been 10 per year since 1979, the study reports. That rate rose to 12.5 per year starting in 1992, and then jumped to 16.7 per year starting in 2010 — a 65 percent increase compared to the rate since 1979. This increase accelerated in the first three months of 2014 to more than double the average since 1979, the researchers report.
The rise in earthquakes is statistically similar to the results of flipping a coin, Parsons said: Sometimes heads or tails will repeat several times in a row, even though the process is random.
"Basically, we can't prove that what we saw during the first part of 2014, as well as since 2010, isn't simply a similar thing to getting six tails in a row," he said.
But Parsons said the statistical findings don't rule out the possibility that the largest earthquakes may trigger one another across great distances. Researchers may simply lack the data to understand such global "communication," he said.
"It's possible that global-level communications happen so infrequently that we haven't seen enough to find it among the larger, rarer events," Parsons said.
Forget gory shows and gladiatorial combat. In the late Middle Ages, Rome's Colosseum was a huge condominium, says the latest archaeological investigation into Rome's most iconic monument.
Archaeologists from Roma Tre University and students from the American University of Rome unearthed evidence showing that ordinary Romans lived within the Colosseum from the ninth century until at least 1349, when the building was seriously damaged by an earthquake.
During a three-week excavation beneath some of the arched entrances that lead into the arena, the archaeologists discovered terracotta sewage pipes, potsherds and the foundations of a 12th-century wall that once enclosed one of the properties.
"This excavation has allowed us to identify an entire housing lot from the late medieval period," Rossella Rea, the director of the Colosseum, said.
The unusual medieval condo also included stables and workshops. Square feet inside the Colosseum were rented out as areas of housing by friars of the nearby Santa Maria Nova convent, who had taken control of the monument.
All houses and workshops opened onto the central arena where gladiators once fought.
"Indeed, that area was used as a common space," Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, professor of medieval archaeology at Roma Tre University and the director of the dig, said.
Acting as huge courtyard, the arena buzzled with people, animals and goods. There, the archaeologists found cooking pottery and an intriguing object: a figurine of a tiny monkey carved in ivory. Most likely, it was used as a pawn in a chess game.
An iconic symbol of imperial Rome, the Colosseum was built in A.D. 72 by the Flavian emperor Vespasian on the marshy bed of a drained lake.
Seating up to 50,000 spectators, the amphitheater was opened in A.D. 80 by Vespasian's son Titus with a festival that lasted 100 days and included gladiatorial combats, fights with wild beasts and naval battles, for which the arena was flooded.
Over the centuries, the Colosseum has survived three major earthquakes and disastrous fire. After the emperor Honorius prohibited the bloody gladiatorial combats in 404, the building fell into disuse and decay.
It was known that medieval Romans used it as a garbage dump and a stone quarry for the construction of such buildings as Saint Peter's Basilica.
The recent excavation has revealed another piece of the monument's history. And more has yet to be discovered.
A new study has found an unusual risk in acupuncture: tuberculosis, which kills over 1 million people each year. While pulmonary tuberculosis is the best known and most common form, the infection can also be spread through skin contact.
Acupuncture, the traditional Chinese treatment of placing of needles in the body, is said to cure people of various ailments. Proponents believe that the needles control energy fields in the human body and treat medical issues. However, the energies that acupuncturists claim to manipulate have never been proven to exist and cannot be detected by any scientific instrument.
The article was published last week on the open-access journal PLoS-ONE and titled "Analysis of 30 Patients with Acupuncture-Induced Primary Inoculation Tuberculosis." In it the researchers described "Seven confirmed and 23 suspected, total 30 patients (13 male and 17 female) with primary inoculation tuberculosis were selected from the same clinic in Wenzhou City, China that specialized in treatment of muscle and soft tissue pain and osteoarthritis of the knee.... Patients ages ranged from 31 to 71 years... had all undergone acupuncture and electrotherapy, administered by the same clinician, once every two days for about two weeks for the treatment of neck, back, elbow, wrist, hip, knee and ankle pain. The procedures took place between May 2011 and August 2011."
About half of the patients came down with fevers, night sweats and other symptoms; several had open sores and skin lesions. The researchers were unable to pinpoint the exact route of transmission, whether the infections were the result of dirty needles, electrotherapeutic pads or other equipment. However, acupuncture was clearly the common factor; all patients received treatment and have since recovered.
Acupuncture: Risks Versus Benefits
This is not the first time that acupuncture has been implicated in the spread of disease. A 2010 study published in the British Medical Journal found that dirty acupuncture needles have caused dozens of serious infections, including hepatitis B and C.
Of course all medical treatments involve risks, so the question becomes one of a cost/benefit analysis: Do the benefits of acupuncture outweigh the risks? The fact is that there is real question in the medical community about whether acupuncture is effective at all.
Consumer advocate Dr. Steven Novella of the Science-Based Medicine website explains that the scientific evidence for acupuncture is inconsistent. Some studies show some small effect for a limited number of conditions (such as pain relief and anxiety), but many others don't. Furthermore, the conditions that acupuncture is most effective for are those that respond well to the placebo effect.
In other words, acupuncture is no more or less effective than a sugar pill with no active ingredient. Patients feel slightly better because they expect to feel better, not because needles were inserted into special points on their skin to redirect unknown energies. When a drug or treatment works no better than a placebo, in the field of medicine that means it doesn't work.
One of the key incentives behind hunting down exoplanets is to find alien worlds with qualities similar to Earth. But in the case of a newly-discovered exoplanet orbiting a star only 16 light-years away, although astronomers may call it ‘habitable’ and a ‘super-Earth,’ it’s likely anything but.
Gliese 832c orbits a red dwarf star and it was discovered by the international Anglo-Australian Planet Search team led by Robert Wittenmyer of the University of New South Wales, Australia. The discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
Red dwarfs are small, dim stars that generate far less energy than our sun. Therefore, for a red dwarf-orbiting planet to maintain water in a liquid state on its surface, it must orbit much closer to the star. In the case of Gliese 832, its ‘habitable zone’ is very compact and Gliese 832c has an orbital period of just under 36 days. The possibly-rocky world, which is around 5 times the mass of Earth, is therefore considered ‘habitable.’ In fact, Gliese 832c is considered to be the third-most habitable world known so far on the Earth Similarity Index (ESI).
But don’t go having dreams of blue skies, opal oceans and lush, alien forests — this world would likely choke any life (well, life as we know it).
“Given the large mass of the planet, it seems likely that it would possess a massive atmosphere, which may well render the planet inhospitable,” said co-investigator Chris Tinney, also of UNSW. “A denser atmosphere would trap heat and could make it more like a super-Venus and too hot for life.”
Like Venus, Gliese 832c is probably enduring intense warming caused by a runaway greenhouse effect. In this case, although the planet’s orbital location should allow liquid water to persist, any water would likely be ripped apart on a molecular level by intense atmospheric heating and ultraviolet light from the star, a process known as dissociation.
Of course, the astronomers have no idea what chemicals are contained within Gliese 832c’s atmosphere. The world was discovered through its gravitational pull on its parent star, so no information about its atmosphere (if it indeed has one) and any water it contains is known. The wobbling effect (which can be detected through precise radial velocity measurements) was detected by combining observations by the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, the 6.5 meter Magellan Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope (both located in Chile).
A droplet bouncing on the surface of a
liquid has been found to exhibit many quantum-like properties, including
double-slit interference, tunneling and energy quantization.
For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice.
This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.
The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet’s interaction with its own ripples, which form what’s known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles — including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.
Particles at the quantum scale seem to do things that human-scale objects do not do. They can tunnel through barriers, spontaneously arise or annihilate, and occupy discrete energy levels. This new body of research reveals that oil droplets, when guided by pilot waves, also exhibit these quantum-like features.
To some researchers, the experiments suggest that quantum objects are as definite as droplets, and that they too are guided by pilot waves — in this case, fluid-like undulations in space and time. These arguments have injected new life into a deterministic (as opposed to probabilistic) theory of the microscopic world first proposed, and rejected, at the birth of quantum mechanics.
“This is a classical system that exhibits behavior that people previously thought was exclusive to the quantum realm, and we can say why,” said John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has led several recent bouncing-droplet experiments. “The more things we understand and can provide a physical rationale for, the more difficult it will be to defend the ‘quantum mechanics is magic’ perspective.”
Magical Measurements
The orthodox view of quantum mechanics, known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” after the home city of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, one of its architects, holds that particles play out all possible realities simultaneously. Each particle is represented by a “probability wave” weighting these various possibilities, and the wave collapses to a definite state only when the particle is measured. The equations of quantum mechanics do not address how a particle’s properties solidify at the moment of measurement, or how, at such moments, reality picks which form to take. But the calculations work. As Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, put it, “Quantum mechanics is just counterintuitive and we just have to suck it up.”
When light illuminates a pair of slits in a
screen (top), the two overlapping wavefronts cooperate in some places
and cancel out in between, producing an interference pattern. The
pattern appears even when particles are shot toward the screen one by
one (bottom), as if each particle passes through both slits at once,
like a wave.
A classic experiment in quantum mechanics that seems to demonstrate the probabilistic nature of reality involves a beam of particles (such as electrons) propelled one by one toward a pair of slits in a screen. When no one keeps track of each electron’s trajectory, it seems to pass through both slits simultaneously. In time, the electron beam creates a wavelike interference pattern of bright and dark stripes on the other side of the screen. But when a detector is placed in front of one of the slits, its measurement causes the particles to lose their wavelike omnipresence, collapse into definite states, and travel through one slit or the other. The interference pattern vanishes. The great 20th-century physicist Richard Feynman said that this double-slit experiment “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics,” and “is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way.”
Some physicists now disagree. “Quantum mechanics is very successful; nobody’s claiming that it’s wrong,” said Paul Milewski, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bath in England who has devised computer models of bouncing-droplet dynamics. “What we believe is that there may be, in fact, some more fundamental reason why [quantum mechanics] looks the way it does.”
Riding Waves
The idea that pilot waves might explain the peculiarities of particles dates back to the early days of quantum mechanics. The French physicist Louis de Broglie presented the earliest version of pilot-wave theory at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, a famous gathering of the founders of the field. As de Broglie explained that day to Bohr, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and two dozen other celebrated physicists, pilot-wave theory made all the same predictions as the probabilistic formulation of quantum mechanics (which wouldn’t be referred to as the “Copenhagen” interpretation until the 1950s), but without the ghostliness or mysterious collapse.
The probabilistic version, championed by Bohr, involves a single equation that represents likely and unlikely locations of particles as peaks and troughs of a wave. Bohr interpreted this probability-wave equation as a complete definition of the particle. But de Broglie urged his colleagues to use two equations: one describing a real, physical wave, and another tying the trajectory of an actual, concrete particle to the variables in that wave equation, as if the particle interacts with and is propelled by the wave rather than being defined by it.
For example, consider the double-slit experiment. In de Broglie’s pilot-wave picture, each electron passes through just one of the two slits, but is influenced by a pilot wave that splits and travels through both slits. Like flotsam in a current, the particle is drawn to the places where the two wavefronts cooperate, and does not go where they cancel out.
De Broglie could not predict the exact place where an individual particle would end up — just like Bohr’s version of events, pilot-wave theory predicts only the statistical distribution of outcomes, or the bright and dark stripes — but the two men interpreted this shortcoming differently. Bohr claimed that particles don’t have definite trajectories; de Broglie argued that they do, but that we can’t measure each particle’s initial position well enough to deduce its exact path.
In principle, however, the pilot-wave theory is deterministic: The future evolves dynamically from the past, so that, if the exact state of all the particles in the universe were known at a given instant, their states at all future times could be calculated.
At the Solvay conference, Einstein objected to a probabilistic universe, quipping, “God does not play dice,” but he seemed ambivalent about de Broglie’s alternative. Bohr told Einstein to “stop telling God what to do,” and (for reasons that remain in dispute) he won the day. By 1932, when the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann claimed to have proven that the probabilistic wave equation in quantum mechanics could have no “hidden variables” (that is, missing components, such as de Broglie’s particle with its well-defined trajectory), pilot-wave theory was so poorly regarded that most physicists believed von Neumann’s proof without even reading a translation.
At the fifth Solvay Conference, a 1927
meeting of the founders of quantum mechanics, Louis de Broglie (middle
row, third from right) argued for a deterministic formulation of quantum
mechanics called pilot-wave theory. But a probabilistic version of the
theory championed by Niels Bohr (middle row, far right) won the day.
More than 30 years would pass before von Neumann’s proof was shown to be false, but by then the damage was done. The physicist David Bohm resurrected pilot-wave theory in a modified form in 1952, with Einstein’s encouragement, and made clear that it did work, but it never caught on. (The theory is also known as de Broglie-Bohm theory, or Bohmian mechanics.)
Later, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell went on to prove a seminal theorem that many physicists today misinterpret as rendering hidden variables impossible. But Bell supported pilot-wave theory. He was the one who pointed out the flaws in von Neumann’s original proof. And in 1986 he wrote that pilot-wave theory “seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”
The neglect continues. A century down the line, the standard, probabilistic formulation of quantum mechanics has been combined with Einstein’s theory of special relativity and developed into the Standard Model, an elaborate and precise description of most of the particles and forces in the universe. Acclimating to the weirdness of quantum mechanics has become a physicists’ rite of passage. The old, deterministic alternative is not mentioned in most textbooks; most people in the field haven’t heard of it. Sheldon Goldstein, a professor of mathematics, physics and philosophy at Rutgers University and a supporter of pilot-wave theory, blames the “preposterous” neglect of the theory on “decades of indoctrination.” At this stage, Goldstein and several others noted, researchers risk their careers by questioning quantum orthodoxy.
When a droplet bounces along the surface of
a liquid toward a pair of openings in a barrier, it passes randomly
through one opening or the other while its “pilot wave,” or the ripples
on the liquid’s surface, passes through both. After many repeat runs, a
quantum-like interference pattern appears in the distribution of droplet
trajectories.
A Quantum Drop
Now at last, pilot-wave theory may be experiencing a minor comeback — at least, among fluid dynamicists. “I wish that the people who were developing quantum mechanics at the beginning of last century had access to these experiments,” Milewski said. “Because then the whole history of quantum mechanics might be different.”
The experiments began a decade ago, when Yves Couder and colleagues at Paris Diderot University discovered that vibrating a silicon oil bath up and down at a particular frequency can induce a droplet to bounce along the surface. The droplet’s path, they found, was guided by the slanted contours of the liquid’s surface generated from the droplet’s own bounces — a mutual particle-wave interaction analogous to de Broglie’s pilot-wave concept.
In a groundbreaking experiment, the Paris researchers used the droplet setup to demonstrate single- and double-slit interference. They discovered that when a droplet bounces toward a pair of openings in a damlike barrier, it passes through only one slit or the other, while the pilot wave passes through both. Repeated trials show that the overlapping wavefronts of the pilot wave steer the droplets to certain places and never to locations in between — an apparent replication of the interference pattern in the quantum double-slit experiment that Feynman described as “impossible … to explain in any classical way.” And just as measuring the trajectories of particles seems to “collapse” their simultaneous realities, disturbing the pilot wave in the bouncing-droplet experiment destroys the interference pattern.
Droplets can also seem to “tunnel” through barriers, orbit each other in stable “bound states,” and exhibit properties analogous to quantum spin and electromagnetic attraction. When confined to circular areas called corrals, they form concentric rings analogous to the standing waves generated by electrons in quantum corrals. They even annihilate with subsurface bubbles, an effect reminiscent of the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter particles.
In each test, the droplet wends a chaotic path that, over time, builds up the same statistical distribution in the fluid system as that expected of particles at the quantum scale. But rather than resulting from indefiniteness or a lack of reality, these quantum-like effects are driven, according to the researchers, by “path memory.”Every bounce of the droplet leaves a mark in the form of ripples, and these ripples chaotically but deterministically influence the droplet’s future bounces and lead to quantum-like statistical outcomes. The more path memory a given fluid exhibits — that is, the less its ripples dissipate — the crisper and more quantum-like the statistics become. “Memory generates chaos, which we need to get the right probabilities,” Couder explained. “We see path memory clearly in our system. It doesn’t necessarily mean it exists in quantum objects, it just suggests it would be possible.”
The quantum statistics are apparent even when the droplets are subjected to external forces. In one recent test, Couder and his colleagues placed a magnet at the center of their oil bath and observed a magnetic ferrofluid droplet. Like an electron occupying fixed energy levels around a nucleus, the bouncing droplet adopted a discrete set of stable orbits around the magnet, each characterized by a set energy level and angular momentum. The “quantization” of these properties into discrete packets is usually understood as a defining feature of the quantum realm.
As a droplet wends a chaotic path around the liquid’s surface, it gradually builds up quantum-like statistics.
If space and time behave like a superfluid, or a fluid that experiences no dissipation at all, then path memory could conceivably give rise to the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement — what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” When two particles become entangled, a measurement of the state of one instantly affects that of the other. The entanglement holds even if the two particles are light-years apart.
In standard quantum mechanics, the effect is rationalized as the instantaneous collapse of the particles’ joint probability wave. But in the pilot-wave version of events, an interaction between two particles in a superfluid universe sets them on paths that stay correlated forever because the interaction permanently affects the contours of the superfluid. “As the particles move along, they feel the wave field generated by them in the past and all other particles in the past,” Bush explained. In other words, the ubiquity of the pilot wave “provides a mechanism for accounting for these nonlocal correlations.” Yet an experimental test of droplet entanglement remains a distant goal.
Subatomic Realities
Many of the fluid dynamicists involved in or familiar with the new research have become convinced that there is a classical, fluid explanation of quantum mechanics. “I think it’s all too much of a coincidence,” said Bush, who led a June workshop on the topic in Rio de Janeiro and is writing a review paper on the experiments for the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.
Quantum physicists tend to consider the findings less significant. After all, the fluid research does not provide direct evidence that pilot waves propel particles at the quantum scale. And a surprising analogy between electrons and oil droplets does not yield new and better calculations. “Personally, I think it has little to do with quantum mechanics,” said Gerard ’t Hooft, a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He believes quantum theory is incomplete but dislikes pilot-wave theory.
Many working quantum physicists question the value of rebuilding their highly successful Standard Model from scratch. “I think the experiments are very clever and mind-expanding,” said Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at MIT and a Nobel laureate, “but they take you only a few steps along what would have to be a very long road, going from a hypothetical classical underlying theory to the successful use of quantum mechanics as we know it.”
“This really is a very striking and visible manifestation of the pilot-wave phenomenon,” Lloyd said. “It’s mind-blowing — but it’s not going to replace actual quantum mechanics anytime soon.”
In its current, immature state, the pilot-wave formulation of quantum mechanics only describes simple interactions between matter and electromagnetic fields, according toDavid Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford in England, and cannot even capture the physics of an ordinary light bulb. “It is not by itself capable of representing very much physics,” Wallace said. “In my own view, this is the most severe problem for the theory, though, to be fair, it remains an active research area.”
Pilot-wave theory has the reputation of being more cumbersome than standard quantum mechanics. Some researchers said that the theory has trouble dealing with identical particles, and that it becomes unwieldy when describing multiparticle interactions. They also claimed that it combines less elegantly with special relativity. But other specialists in quantum mechanics disagreed or said the approach is simply under-researched. It may just be a matter of effort to recast the predictions of quantum mechanics in the pilot-wave language, said Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Nobel laureate. “Whether one thinks this is worth a lot of time and effort is a matter of personal taste,” he added. “Personally, I don’t.”
On the other hand, as Bohm argued in his 1952 paper, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics might make the same predictions as the standard version at the quantum scale, but differ when it comes to smaller scales of nature. In the search for a unified theory of physics at all scales, “we could easily be kept on the wrong track for a long time by restricting ourselves to the usual interpretation of quantum theory,” Bohm wrote.
If you ever run into a group of chimpanzees in a record store, you may find them congregating around the Indian classical section.
That's according to a new study that tested the musical tastes of humans' primate cousins. The researchers found that while chimpanzees shun the steadily strong beats common in Western genres, they like Indian ragas and Akan tunes from West Africa.
"Our objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music," study co-author Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a statement. Rather, the researchers used music from Africa, India and Japan to test how the primates reacted to specific acoustic characteristics, such as the ratio of strong to weak beats (or stressed to unstressed beats).
De Waal and colleagues said that similar studies in the past only tested how chimpanzees reacted to Western music. But even though the sounds of Western pop and classical might seem different to the casual listener, they share similar rhythmic patterns and intervals. Musical traditions from other cultures, however, may have fundamentally different properties. While a typical Western song might have one strong beat for every one to three weak beats, an Indian raga (or series of notes in a classical composition) might have one strong beat for every 31 weak beats in a long rhythmic cycle.
Previous studies that focused on Western tunes found that primates preferred silence over any kind of human music. One study, published in the journal Cognition in 2007, found that marmosets and tamarins would rather listen to no music than Mozart or a lullaby. For the new study, the researchers looked outside the Western canon and used Indian ragas, Japanese taiko and music from the Akan culture in West Africa.
Every morning for 12 days, the researchers played 40 minutes of music in the outdoor enclosures of 16 adult chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. They discovered that chimps spent more time in areas where they could best hear the African and Indian music, but they fled to the quietier parts of their enclosure when the researchers played Japanese taiko music, which uses regular strong beats like Western music.
These apparent preferences could have something to do with the chimps' own music-making.
A new, tiny species of elephant shrew, also called a round-eared sengi, has been discovered in the Namib Desert in Africa, scientists say.
The newbie, now called Macroscelides micus, is the smallest member of the scientific order Macroscelidea, which now includes 19 known sengis. Like other sengi, the creature sports a narrow, trunk-like snout.
One of the study researchers, Michael Griffin of the Namibia Ministry of Environment and Tourism, collected the first representative of this newfound species around the ancient Etendeka volcanic formation, which is an arid area inland from the coastal Namib Desert between the Ugab and Hoanib rivers. At first, the researchers thought the creature was a known species from Namibia, Macroscelides flavicaudatus.
"We knew that it looked a little odd, but it was the genetic analyses that suggested that it was really very different," researcher John Dumbacher, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, told Live Science in an email. "Once we got back to the field and saw several live individuals, it was clear that they differed from M. flavicaudatus in many ways, and that this wasn't just an 'odd' individual."
For instance, not only is the newbie smaller than any other sengi — at just 7.5 inches, or 190 millimeters, from nose-tip to tail-tip — it also has redder fur and lighter skin, particularly noticeable on the ears and feet, Dumbacher said.
"They also have a very large scent gland on their tail, which is probably important in signaling other members of their species in order to find mates and mark territories," Dumbacher added.
Subsequent trips taken by the team revealed the newfound sengi lives throughout this ancient volcanic region, which is about 136 miles (220 kilometers) long and about 62 miles (100 km) wide, Dumbacher said. The creature likely evolved its red fur as an adaptation to blend into the region's red soil.
"We hope to learn more about this in coming field seasons, where we plan to radio-collar some of these small sengis and study their activities and spatial movements," Dumbacher said.
New NASA gear that could help humanity set up an outpost on Mars has gotten its first test flight.
The space agency launched its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) test vehicle Saturday (June 28) from Hawaii. Although the first part of the test went well, the vehicle's huge parachute apparently failed to deploy properly — but LDSD engineers are pleased anyway.
"We are thrilled about yesterday's test," Mark Adler, LDSD project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Sunday (June 29). "The test vehicle worked beautifully, and we met all of our flight objectives. We have recovered all the vehicle hardware and data recorders and will be able to apply all of the lessons learned from this information to our future flights."
Saturday's test — which lifted off from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island of Kauai at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT; 8:45 a.m. local Hawaii time) — was designed to help NASA engineers get their first good look at how equipment designed to slow the descent of heavy spacecraft through the Red Planet's atmosphere performs at high speeds in Mars-like conditions.
The flight was originally scheduled for June 3, but poor weather conditions pushed it back multiple times, causing a delay of nearly a month.
New Tech's First Flight
The LDSD project is developing and testing a 100-foot-wide (30.5 meters) parachute — the biggest supersonic chute ever flown — and two saucer-like devices called Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators, or SIADs.
One SIAD is 20 feet (6 m) wide, while the other measures 26 feet (8 m) across. Both devices are built to fit around the rim of atmospheric entry vehicles like the one that carried NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in August 2012, slowing them down by increasing their drag.
During Saturday's test, a huge balloon carried the 7,000-lb. (3,175 kilograms) test vehicle, which was equipped with the big chute and the 20-foot SIAD, up to an altitude of 23 miles (37 kilometers). The balloon dropped the craft at that point, and its onboard rocket motor kicked on, boosting it to Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound) and 34 miles up (55 km) if all went according to plan.
The thin air at such heights is a good analog for the Martian atmosphere, which is just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth at sea level, researchers said.
If the test had gone perfectly, the SIAD would have inflated and slowed the test vehicle down to Mach 2.5, at which point the chute would have deployed and taken the craft down to a soft splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
But things did not go perfectly. The balloon dropped the test vehicle at 5:05 p.m. EDT (2105 GMT), and the rocket appeared to fire properly. The SIAD seemed to inflate as planned, but data indicate that the parachute didn't deploy correctly, officials said. More information will become available later, after engineers have had a chance to analyze data from the test.
The LDSD vehicle splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 5:35 p.m. EDT (2135 GMT), NASA officials said. The craft and the big parachute were retrieved later Saturday by a recovery boat.
Getting Big Payloads Down on Mars
At 1 ton, the SUV-size Curiosity rover is the biggest spacecraft ever to touch down on Mars. The robot landed softly thanks to a bold and complicated scheme that involved a 51-foot-wide (15.5 m) parachute and a rocket-powered sky crane, which lowered Curiosity down to the surface on cables.
The sky crane can (and probably will) be used again to put payloads down on Mars. But new gear such as bigger chutes and SIADs will likely have to be included to slow really heavy stuff down enough for the sky crane to finish the job, Clark said. And that's where the LDSD project comes in.
"With the science and the technologies that we're testing here, we think we could double the mass that we land on Mars, which would go from something like the 1-ton Curiosity rover to something twice that," Clark told reporters during a pre-launch briefing in early June, adding that the gear could also help put payloads down more accurately and at higher elevations on the Red Planet than is currently possible.
One of the hardiest fungi on the planet, a fungus known as AMA that lives in Nova Scotia, may be able to do more than survive from the Arctic to the Dead Sea: It may restore the efficacy of antibiotics, say authors of a new study in the journal Nature.
“This will solve one aspect of a daunting problem. AMA rescues the activity of carbapenem antibiotics, so instead of having no antibiotics, there will be some,” said Gerry Wright, director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University in Canada.
With bacteria evolving to evade antibiotics, drug companies have been trying to stay ahead of the game by developing stronger drugs. Bacteria are now able to damage a chemical ring that is present in most antibiotics, which neutralizes the effect of the drug. The use of AMA goes back to a previous strategy of combining an antibiotic with a disabler. The difference in the new study is that the researchers looked to nature to find a molecule that could interfere with bacterial enzymes.
“Natural products -- and especially natural products that come from microbes like bacteria and fungi, are privileged molecules -- in the sense that they are products of evolution themselves, so they are much better at interacting with bacteria,” Wright told Time.
The researchers tested 500 natural molecules and 30,000 synthetic compounds and found that AMA inhibits New Delhi Metallobeta-Lactamase-1 (NDM-1), an antibiotic resistant gene. The World Health Organization has called NDM-1 a global public health threat. Mice infected with pneumoniae with NDM-1 resistance recovered with help from ADA.
“The idea of rescuing our old antibiotics, is something that folks are starting to realize is not only a good idea, but doable,” Wright said.
Optogenetics, a technology that allows scientists to control brain activity by shining light on neurons, relies on light-sensitive proteins that can suppress or stimulate electrical signals within cells. This technique requires a light source to be implanted in the brain, where it can reach the cells to be controlled.
MIT engineers have now developed the first light-sensitive molecule that enables neurons to be silenced noninvasively, using a light source outside the skull. This makes it possible to do long-term studies without an implanted light source. The protein, known as Jaws, also allows a larger volume of tissue to be influenced at once.
This noninvasive approach could pave the way to using optogenetics in human patients to treat epilepsy and other neurological disorders, the researchers say, although much more testing and development is needed. Led by Ed Boyden, an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, the researchers described the protein in the June 29 issue of Nature Neuroscience.
Optogenetics, a technique developed over the past 15 years, has become a common laboratory tool for shutting off or stimulating specific types of neurons in the brain, allowing neuroscientists to learn much more about their functions.
The neurons to be studied must be genetically engineered to produce light-sensitive proteins known as opsins, which are channels or pumps that influence electrical activity by controlling the flow of ions in or out of cells. Researchers then insert a light source, such as an optical fiber, into the brain to control the selected neurons.
Such implants can be difficult to insert, however, and can be incompatible with many kinds of experiments, such as studies of development, during which the brain changes size, or of neurodegenerative disorders, during which the implant can interact with brain physiology. In addition, it is difficult to perform long-term studies of chronic diseases with these implants.
Mining nature's diversity
To find a better alternative, Boyden, graduate student Amy Chuong, and colleagues turned to the natural world. Many microbes and other organisms use opsins to detect light and react to their environment. Most of the natural opsins now used for optogenetics respond best to blue or green light.
Boyden's team had previously identified two light-sensitive chloride ion pumps that respond to red light, which can penetrate deeper into living tissue. However, these molecules, found in the bacteria Haloarcula marismortui and Haloarcula vallismortis, did not induce a strong enough photocurrent -- an electric current in response to light -- to be useful in controlling neuron activity.
Chuong set out to improve the photocurrent by looking for relatives of these proteins and testing their electrical activity. She then engineered one of these relatives by making many different mutants. The result of this screen, Jaws, retained its red-light sensitivity but had a much stronger photocurrent -- enough to shut down neural activity.
"This exemplifies how the genomic diversity of the natural world can yield powerful reagents that can be of use in biology and neuroscience," says Boyden, who is a member of MIT's Media Lab and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Using this opsin, the researchers were able to shut down neuronal activity in the mouse brain with a light source outside the animal's head. The suppression occurred as deep as 3 millimeters in the brain, and was just as effective as that of existing silencers that rely on other colors of light delivered via conventional invasive illumination.
A key advantage to this opsin is that it could enable optogenetic studies of animals with larger brains, says Garret Stuber, an assistant professor of psychiatry and cell biology and physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"In animals with larger brains, people have had difficulty getting behavior effects with optogenetics, and one possible reason is that not enough of the tissue is being inhibited," he says. "This could potentially alleviate that." Restoring vision
Working with researchers at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland, the MIT team also tested Jaws's ability to restore the light sensitivity of retinal cells called cones. In people with a disease called retinitis pigmentosa, cones slowly atrophy, eventually causing blindness.
Friedrich Miescher Institute scientists Botond Roska and Volker Busskamp have previously shown that some vision can be restored in mice by engineering those cone cells to express light-sensitive proteins. In the new paper, Roska and Busskamp tested the Jaws protein in the mouse retina and found that it more closely resembled the eye's natural opsins and offered a greater range of light sensitivity, making it potentially more useful for treating retinitis pigmentosa.
This type of noninvasive approach to optogenetics could also represent a step toward developing optogenetic treatments for diseases such as epilepsy, which could be controlled by shutting off misfiring neurons that cause seizures, Boyden says. "Since these molecules come from species other than humans, many studies must be done to evaluate their safety and efficacy in the context of treatment," he says.
