Skeletons Shed Light on Ancient Earthquake in Israel

Archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of a severe earthquake that rumbled more than 1,700 years ago in the region of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus performed most of the miracles described in the New Testament.

Skeletons crushed under a collapsed roof depicted a scenario of death and destruction caused by the earthquake that hit Israel and the region in 363 A.D.

The ancient city of Hippos, known as Sussita in Hebrew (both names mean “horse”) was among the most damaged centers. However, it was another powerful quake, on Jan. 18, 749, that razed the city, leaving it covered in debris, never to be resettled.

“While the evidence of the final destruction are clear and dramatic, those of the 363 are less known and not as evident in the ruins of Hippos,” said Michael Eisenberg, director of the Hippos-Sussita project, an international enterprise affiliated with the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa.

“The reason is rather simple. The city was rebuilt and some of the ruins cleared while others were buried as new building enterprises took place,” he added.

A mountaintop town overlooking the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, Hippos was founded during the Hellenistic period, in the 2nd century B.C.

In Roman times it became known as one of the Decapolis, a group of 10 cities in Jordan, Israel and Syria which were regarded as centers of Greek and Roman culture. Hippos became a powerful city-state, allowed to mint its own coins, with the emblem of a horse on the back of each coin.

With its Graeco-Roman temples, its large marketplace and colonnaded streets, Hippos would have been for Jesus the “city set upon a hill” that “cannot be hidden.”

The city was prospering and was almost entirely Christian when the 363 quake violently struck its walls.

Eisenberg’s team found a number of skeletons crushed under a collapsed roof in the northern section of the Basilica, the largest structure in the city. Built at the end of the 1st century A.D. during the peak of Roman building in the city and the region, it served as marketplace and main seat of the judge.

Among the bones of the people killed in the collapse, the archaeologists found the skeleton of a woman with a golden pendant in the shape of a dove.

“Looking at the angle of the skeleton’s head we realized it was facing south towards the entrances to the basilica, about 140 feet away,” Eisenberg told Discovery News.

The skeletons could be dated to the 363 earthquake because of coins found trapped between the basilica floor and some architectural elements made of marble.

“The latest of those coins dated to 362 A.D. About three feet above the debris of the basilica we found Early Byzantine rooms dated by dozens of coins in the floors themselves to 383 A.D.,” Eisenberg said.

“It shows that major parts of the city were totally destroyed and neglected for a period of about 20 years,” he added.

Read more at Discovery News

600-Year-Old Canoe Discovered in New Zealand

Sophisticated oceangoing canoes and favorable winds may have helped early human settlers colonize New Zealand, a pair of new studies shows.

The remote archipelagos of East Polynesia were among the last habitable places on Earth that humans were able to colonize. In New Zealand, human history only began around 1200-1300, when intrepid voyagers arrived by boat through several journeys over some generations.

A piece of that early heritage was recently revealed on a beach in New Zealand, when a 600-year-old canoe with a turtle carved on its hull emerged from a sand dune after a harsh storm. The researchers who examined the shipwreck say the vessel is more impressive than any other canoe previously linked to this period in New Zealand.

Separately, another group of scientists discovered a climate anomaly in the South Pacific during this era that would have eased sailing from central East Polynesia southwest to New Zealand. Both findings were detailed today (Sept. 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The canoe was revealed near the sheltered Anaweka estuary, on the northwestern end of New Zealand's South Island.

"It kind of took my breath away, really, because it was so carefully constructed and so big," said Dilys Johns, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

The hull measured about 20 feet (6.08 meters), long and it was made from matai, or black pine, found in New Zealand. The boat had carved interior ribs and clear evidence of repair and reuse. Carbon dating tests showed that the vessel was last caulked with wads of bark in 1400.

Johns and colleagues say it's likely that the hull once had a twin, and together, these vessels formed a double canoe (though the researchers haven't ruled out the possibility that the find could have been a single canoe with an outrigger). If the ship was a double canoe, it probably had a deck, a shelter and a sail that was pitched forward, much like the historic canoes of the Society Islands (a group that includes Bora Bora and Tahiti) and the Southern Cook Islands. These island chains have been identified as likely Polynesian homelands of the Maori, the group of indigenous people who settled New Zealand.

 boat was surprisingly more sophisticated than the canoes described centuries later by the first Europeans to arrive in New Zealand, Johns told Live Science. At the time of European contact, the Maori were using dugout canoes, which were hollowed out from single, big trees with no internal frames. In the smaller islands of Polynesia, boat builders didn't have access to trees that were big enough to make an entire canoe; to build a vessel, therefore, they had to create an elaborate arrangement of smaller wooden planks.

The newly described canoe seems to represent a mix of that ancestral plank technology and an adaptation to the new resources on New Zealand, since the boat has some big, hollowed-out portions but also sophisticated internal ribs, Johns and colleagues wrote.

The turtle carving on the boat also seems to link back to the settlers' homeland. Turtle designs are rare in pre-European carvings in New Zealand, but widespread in Polynesia, where turtles were important in mythology and could represent humans or even gods in artwork. In many traditional Polynesian societies, only the elite were allowed to eat turtles, the study's authors noted.

A separate recent study examined the climate conditions that may have made possible the long journeys between the central East Polynesian islands and New Zealand. Scientists looked at the region's ice cores and tree rings, which can act like prehistoric weather stations, recording everything from precipitation to wind patterns to atmospheric pressure and circulation strength.

Because of today's wind patterns, scholars had assumed that early settlers of New Zealand would have had to sail thousands of miles from East Polynesia against the wind. But when the researchers reconstructed climate patterns in the South Pacific from the year 800 to 1600, they found several windows during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly when trade winds toward New Zealand were strengthened. (That anomaly occurred between the years 800 and 1300.)

Read more at Discovery News

Alien World Drives its Star Into Early Retirement

A nearby star is not acting its age, thanks to the influence of a massive exoplanet.

The close-orbiting alien planet, known as WASP-18b, is apparently disrupting the magnetic field of its host star so much that the object is behaving like a much older star, researchers said.

"WASP-18b is an extreme exoplanet," study lead author Ignazio Pillitteri, of the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo in Italy, said in a statement. "It is one of the most massive hot Jupiters known and one of the closest to its host star, and these characteristics lead to unexpected behavior. The planet is causing its host star to act old before its time."

The star WASP-18, which lies about 330 light-years away, is about as massive as our own sun. The gas giant WASP-18b weighs in at more than 10 times the mass of Jupiter and completes one orbit around the star in less than 23 hours, leading scientists to classify it as a "hot Jupiter."

WASP-18b's tight orbit has led scientists to estimate that it may have only one million years of life or so remaining before it's destroyed by the parent star.

Pillitteri's team targeted WASP-18 with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and found it to be relatively quiet — a characteristic of older stars. Young stars tend to be more active, with stronger magnetic fields, larger flares and more intense X-ray emission. Stellar activity is connected to rotation, a process that slows with age.

Observations of WASP-18 using Chandra revealed no X-ray emission. This by itself would suggest that the star has an age similar to the sun's 5 billion years, researchers said. However, Pillitteri and his team used other data as well as theoretical models to calculate that WASP-18 is actually just 500 million to 2 billion years old, and thus approximately 100 times less active than a star its age should be.

The difference, the researchers determined, is due to the planet.

"We think the planet is aging the star by wreaking havoc on its innards," said co-author Scott Wolk, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

WASP-18b's strong gravitational pull may be disrupting the star's magnetic field, researchers said. The planet's tug exerts forces similar to those imposed on Earth's tides by the moon, but on a much larger scale.

The strength of a star's magnetic field depends on how much the hot gases within the star stir up its interior, a process known as convection. WASP-18 has a convection zone narrower than most stars, making it more vulnerable to the massive tidal forces exerted by WASP-18b, researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

Antarctica Has Lost Enough Ice to Cause a Measurable Shift in Gravity

Gravity—yes, gravity—is the latest victim of climate change in Antarctica. That’s the stunning conclusion announced Friday by the European Space Agency.

“The loss of ice from West Antarctica between 2009 and 2012 caused a dip in the gravity field over the region,” writes the ESA, whose GOCE satellite measured the change. Apparently, melting billions of tons of ice year after year has implications that would make even Isaac Newton blanch. See the data visualized above.

To be fair, the change in gravity is very small. It’s not like you’ll float off into outer space on your next vacation to the Antarctic Peninsula.

The biggest implication is the new measurements confirm global warming is changing the Antarctic in fundamental ways. Earlier this year, a separate team of scientists announced that major West Antarctic glaciers have begun an “unstoppable” “collapse,” committing global sea levels to a rise of several meters over the next few hundred years.

Though we all learned in high-school physics that gravity is a constant, it actually varies slightly depending on where you are on the Earth’s surface and the density of the rock (or, in this case, ice) beneath your feet. During a four-year mission, the ESA satellite mapped these changes in unprecedented detail and was able to detect a significant decrease in the region of Antarctica where land ice is melting fastest.

Using 200 million measurements collected by ESA’s CryoSat mission between January 2011 and January 2014, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany have discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking in volume by 125 cubic kilometres a year. Helm et al., The Cryosphere, 2014

 The new results in West Antarctica were achieved by combining the high-resolution gravity field measurements from the ESA satellite with a longer-running but lower resolution gravity-analyzing satellite mission called Grace, which is jointly operated by the United States and Germany. Scientists hope to scale up this analysis to all of Antarctica soon, which could provide the clearest picture yet of the pace global warming is taking in the frozen continent. Current best estimates show that global seas could be as much as 50 inches higher by century’s end, due in large part to ice melt in West Antarctica.

Read more at Wired Science

Simulations reveal an unusual death for ancient stars

Certain primordial stars -- those between 55,000 and 56,000 times the mass of our Sun, or solar masses -- may have died unusually. In death, these objects -- among the Universe's first-generation of stars -- would have exploded as supernovae and burned completely, leaving no remnant black hole behind.

Astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the University of Minnesota came to this conclusion after running a number of supercomputer simulations at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota. They relied extensively on CASTRO, a compressible astrophysics code developed at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Computational Research Division (CRD). Their findings were recently published in Astrophysical Journal (ApJ).

First-generation stars are especially interesting because they produced the first heavy elements, or chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium. In death, they sent their chemical creations into outer space, paving the way for subsequent generations of stars, solar systems and galaxies. With a greater understanding of how these first stars died, scientists hope to glean some insights about how the Universe, as we know it today, came to be.

"We found that there is a narrow window where supermassive stars could explode completely instead of becoming a supermassive black hole -- no one has ever found this mechanism before," says Ke-Jung Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSC and lead author of the ApJ paper. "Without NERSC resources, it would have taken us a lot longer to reach this result. From a user perspective, the facility is run very efficiently and it is an extremely convenient place to do science."

The Simulations: What's Going On?

To model the life of a primordial supermassive star, Chen and his colleagues used a one-dimensional stellar evolution code called KEPLER. This code takes into account key processes like nuclear burning and stellar convection. And relevant for massive stars, photo-disintegration of elements, electron-positron pair production and special relativistic effects. The team also included general relativistic effects, which are important for stars above 1,000 solar masses.

They found that primordial stars between 55,000 to 56,000 solar masses live about 1.69 million years before becoming unstable due to general relativistic effects and then start to collapse. As the star collapses, it begins to rapidly synthesize heavy elements like oxygen, neon, magnesium and silicon starting with helium in its core. This process releases more energy than the binding energy of the star, halting the collapse and causing a massive explosion: a supernova.

To model the death mechanisms of these stars, Chen and his colleagues used CASTRO -- a multidimensional compressible astrophysics code developed at Berkeley Lab by scientists Ann Almgren and John Bell. These simulations show that once collapse is reversed, Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities mix heavy elements produced in the star's final moments throughout the star itself. The researchers say that this mixing should create a distinct observational signature that could be detected by upcoming near-infrared experiments such as the European Space Agency's Euclid and NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Depending on the intensity of the supernovae, some supermassive stars could, when they explode, enrich their entire host galaxy and even some nearby galaxies with elements ranging from carbon to silicon. In some cases, supernova may even trigger a burst of star formation in its host galaxy, which would make it visually distinct from other young galaxies.

Read more at Science Daily

Limb Regeneration Began 300 Million Years Ago

Fossilized, primitive amphibians with odd-looking appendages, some with extra toes and deformed shapes, suggest the ability of some vertebrates to regenerate or regrow amputated limbs first evolved at least 300 million years ago.

Salamanders are the only modern four-legged vertebrates, or animals that have backbones, able to fully regenerate their limbs into adulthood. But many other animals, including frogs, caecilians (amphibians that resemble earthworms) and some fish, also have some regenerative capabilities, suggesting the ability may have initially evolved a very long time ago. Yet, scientists have lacked fossil evidence for the ancient evolution of limb regeneration until now.

"In recent years, people have speculated about the evolution of regeneration, but the amount of data available has been limited," said David Gardiner, a developmental biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies limb regeneration but wasn't involved in the current research.

To observe limb regeneration in the fossil record, scientists need to find well-preserved specimens with abnormal limbs or limbs in the process of regenerating (a fully regenerated limb that has formed without defects is difficult to differentiate from an original limb). But in the majority of cases, researchers deal with fossils that are missing skeletal segments or entire body parts.

To better understand the early evolution of vertebrate limb regeneration, scientists at the Museum für Naturkunde (a natural history museum in Berlin) analyzed fossils of Micromelerpeton crederni, a primitive amphibian species and distant relative of modern amphibians that lived during the Upper Carboniferous to Lower Permian time periods, between about 310 million and 280 million years ago. The fossils were originally discovered in lake deposits in Central Europe, such as Lake Odernheim in southwest Germany — the oxygen-free environment at the bottom of the lakes helped preserve the animals' remains, including fine structures such as gills, stomach contents and scale patterns.

The team found that several of the Micromelerpeton fossils had abnormal limbs. For example, some of the limbs had certain bones fused together. Other limbs had additional toes that were narrower than normal toes. And some limbs had toes with too many or too few bones. Though odd, these types of abnormalities can also be seen in living animals.

"These same kinds of anomalies typically are observed in response to injury in modern salamanders that are capable of regeneration, both in the wild and in response to experimental amputations in the lab," Gardiner told Live Science, adding that the modern examples suggest Micromelerpeton was also capable of limb regeneration.

The study suggests limb regeneration was an ancient ability present in the amphibian lineage that led to modern amphibians — an ability that salamanders retained. The ability of modern frogs to regenerate limbs as tadpoles further supports the idea, the researchers wrote in their paper, published today (Sept. 23) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"The similarity between the variant patterns in the limbs of extant salamanders and Micromelerpeton caused by limb regeneration is striking," the authors wrote. It is "suggestive of shared molecular mechanisms that are still acting in modern salamanders as they did in their 300-million-year-old relative Micromelerpeton."

Read more at Discovery News

Colorado Rock Formation May Be Result of 'Natural Fracking'

An ancient, catastrophic flood or earthquake may explain how a bewildering rock formation in Colorado's Rocky Mountains formed, a new study finds.

For more than 120 years, geologists have wondered how giant chunks of Tava sandstone, a sedimentary rock, had become inserted into a section of the igneous rocks that shape the backbone of the Front Range, within the southern Rockies. Scientists call formations where one rock is inserted into another "intrusions."

The rocks within the formation are "reversed from what we would ordinarily expect," said the study's lead author, Christine Siddoway, a professor of geology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Typically, it is igneous rocks, such as granite, that intrude into sedimentary stone.

It's extremely unusual to find sandstone that has forced its way into granite, making the Colorado formation a rare find, Siddoway said.

Intrusions of sedimentary rock into granite-type rock "speak of a catastrophic event," she said, such as an earthquake or flood. An earthquake can cause sediment to liquefy, as it did during the 6.0-magnitude earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011. It could have been another large earthquake that forced the sedimentary sandstone into the granite in Colorado, she said.

Or, it could have been rapid-moving floodwaters that lodged the Tava sandstone sediment into a fracture in the granite, explaining the intrusion, Siddoway added.

Whether it was an earthquake or a flood that set the formation into motion, the intrusion as we see it today can be explained by "natural fracking," she said. The fracking that we usually hear about is human fracking, in which machines are used to pump water underground to create enormous pressure to crack open rocks deep in the ground, so that fossil fuels can be extracted. But nature can cause fracking too — rocks crack open underground and then particles such as sand fill in the spaces.

Rock of ages

"On a very grand scale, what allowed the Tava sandstone dikes to form is analogous to what happens on a small scale by human-induced pressure fracturing," Siddoway said.

The new study also hinted at how old the Tava sandstone may be, another riddle that has perplexed geologists.

The researchers analyzed samples from the sandstone that consisted mostly of quartz, with pieces of feldspars, micas, magnetite and zircon, which is both a mineral and a semiprecious gem.

"(Zircon) is the workhorse for isotopic dating of rocks to find out their age," Siddoway said. "The wonderful thing about zircon, that makes it a good gemstone, is that it's very hard and difficult to cut. It remains in the sedimentary record for a long time."

As soon as zircon forms, radioactive elements in its structure start to decay at a known rate, allowing scientists to date it. In this study, the geologists looked at tiny zircons in each sample, and then compared them to zircons in other sedimentary rock samples of a known age, Siddoway said.

The Tava sandstone zircons, however, did not match those from 65 million years ago or 500 million years ago, as other researchers had suggested.

"I was utterly shocked to find that," Siddoway said.

Instead, the zircons in the Tava sandstone matched those from rocks from California's Death Valley and the Grand Canyon, the researchers found.

By comparing the Tava sandstone zircon to these other samples, the researchers determined its age is between 680 million years old and 800 million years old. That means that at the time the Tava formed, the continents were in a supercontinent called Rodinia, which had nothing but single-celled microbes. Colorado may have been near or south of the equator.

Read more at Discovery News

Strange New Type of Brain Cell Discovered

The discovery of a new shape of brain cell has neuroscientists scratching their heads over what the function of these neurons might be.

Though neurons come in different shapes and sizes, the basic blueprint consists of a cell body, from which protrude spindly appendages called dendrites and axons. Dendrites are branchlike structures that receive signals from other nerve cells and deliver them to the cell body. The neuron then processes the signals and zaps along information to the next cell via a long projection called the axon.

At least, that's how it normally works. The newly discovered cells have a different, and until now, unknown process. In these cells, the signals skip the cell body altogether, instead traveling along an axon that projects directly from one of the dendrites.

"We found that in more than half of the cells, the axon does not emerge from the cell body, but arises from a lower dendrite," study researcher Christian Thome, a neuroscientist at Heidelberg University and the Bernstein Center Heidelberg-Mannheim, said in a statement.

Unexpected finding

The new cells were discovered in the mouse brain. Specifically, they are found in the hippocampus, a deep-brain structure involved in memory and navigation. Humans have the same general brain structure and types of hippocampus cells as mice.

The hippocampus is home to extensively branched neurons called pyramidal cells, so dubbed because of their triangular cell bodies. To map out the connections between these cells, researchers used a fluorescent red protein that stuck to the origin of each axon protruding from a cell.

The team expected the axons to extend from the cell bodies. Instead, they saw that in many cases, the axons emerged from the branching dendrites instead. The base of the hippocampus is divided into areas labeled CA1, CA2, CA3 and CA4. The most common site for strangely shaped cells was in the CA1 region, where about 50 percent of cells had dendrite-originating axons. About 28 percent of cells in the CA3 region were the newly discovered shape.

Exciting input

To find out how these oddly placed axons functioned, the researchers used light pulses to activate a neurotransmitter called glutamate. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals released by nerve cells to transmit messages from cell to cell.

They found that dendrites directly connected to an axon responded strongly to even the smallest influx of neurotransmitter, activating the nerve cell, said study researcher Tony Kelly, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bonn.

"That way, information transmitted by this special dendrite influences the behavior of the nerve cell more than input from any other dendrite," Kelly said in the statement. The researchers reported their findings Sept. 17 in the journal Neuron.

Read more at Discovery News

New poison dart frog species discovered in Donoso, Panama

A bright orange poison dart frog with a unique call was discovered in Donoso, Panama, and described by researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí in Panama, and the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. In the species description published this week in Zootaxa, it was named Andinobates geminisae for Geminis Vargas, "the beloved wife of [coauthor] Marcos Ponce, for her unconditional support of his studies of Panamanian herpetology."

Every new species name is based on a representative specimen. The specimen for this species was collected Feb. 21, 2011, in the headwaters of the Rio Caño, in the district of Donoso, Colón Province, Panama, by Samuel Valdés, who was then the MWH Global Inc. environment office director, and his field assistant, Carlos de la Cruz. Additional specimens were collected between the Rio Coclé del Norte and the Rio Belen by biologists Marcos Ponce and Abel Batista, then a student at the Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí. The specimens were deposited in the Museo de Vertebrados at the University of Panama, the Museo Herpetólogico de Chiriquí at the Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí and in the Círculo Herpetólogico de Panamá.

"Abel Batista and Marcos Ponce were the first to note the presence of this species," said Cesar Jaramillo, Smithsonian herpetologist. "They've known it was there for several years. However, they were not sure if it was only a variety of another poison dart frog species, Oophaga pumilio, which exhibits tremendous color variation. Based on morphological characteristics of the adult and the tadpole, I thought it might be a new species of Andinobates."

Andrew Crawford, professor at Universidad de Los Andes and former STRI postdoctoral fellow, sequenced the DNA, confirming that this was a new species of Andinobates. Genetic information about this species is available in the Barcode of Life Data System and in GenBank. A recording of the call is available at AmphibiaWeb.org.

Because this new frog species appears to be found in only a very small area, habitat loss and collecting for the pet trade are major threats to its existence. The authors recommend the formulation of special conservation plans to guarantee its survival. A. geminisae is included in the captive breeding program of the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation project, a consortium of six zoos and research institutions dedicated to saving amphibians from the chytrid fungal disease, which is decimating amphibians worldwide, and habitat loss.

From Science Daily

New molecule found in space connotes life origins

Hunting from a distance of 27,000 light years, astronomers have discovered an unusual carbon-based molecule -- one with a branched structure -- contained within a giant gas cloud in interstellar space. Like finding a molecular needle in a cosmic haystack, astronomers have detected radio waves emitted by isopropyl cyanide. The discovery suggests that the complex molecules needed for life may have their origins in interstellar space.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, known as the ALMA Observatory, a group of radio telescopes funded partially through the National Science Foundation, researchers studied the gaseous star-forming region Sagittarius B2.

Astronomers from Cornell, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the University of Cologne (Germany) describe their discovery in the journal Science (Sept. 26.)

Organic molecules usually found in these star-forming regions consist of a single "backbone" of carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain. But the carbon structure of isopropyl cyanide branches off, making it the first interstellar detection of such a molecule, says Rob Garrod, Cornell senior research associate at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research.

This detection opens a new frontier in the complexity of molecules that can be formed in interstellar space and that might ultimately find their way to the surfaces of planets, says Garrod. The branched carbon structure of isopropyl cyanide is a common feature in molecules that are needed for life -- such as amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. This new discovery lends weight to the idea that biologically crucial molecules, like amino acids that are commonly found in meteorites, are produced early in the process of star formation -- even before planets such as Earth are formed.

Garrod, along with lead author Arnaud Belloche and Karl Menten, both of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and Holger Müller, of the University of Cologne, sought to examine the chemical makeup of Sagittarius B2, a region close to the Milky Way's galactic center and an area rich in complex interstellar organic molecules.

With ALMA, the group conducted a full spectral survey -- looking for fingerprints of new interstellar molecules -- with sensitivity and resolution 10 times greater than previous surveys.

The purpose of the ALMA Observatory is to search for cosmic origins through an array of 66 sensitive radio antennas from the high elevation and dry air of northern Chile's Atacama Desert. The array of radio telescopes works together to form a gigantic "eye" peering into the cosmos.

Read more at Science Daily