Rare Omura's Whale Washes Up in Australia

A rarely seen Omura's whale has washed up in Australia, only the second sighting nationally and one of the few globally, exciting scientists who know little about the species, officials said Tuesday.

The dead whale was found on a remote beach near the town of Exmouth, 1,265 kilometres (784 miles) north of Perth, in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Olwyn which hit the region last month.

Western Australia Environment Minister Albert Jacob said it was the first record and sighting of the species in the state and only the second nationally.

"This find is highly significant for whale scientists in Western Australia and researchers globally because there have not been many recorded sightings of this species so very little is known about it," Jacob said.

"Omura's whale was only described in scientific journals for the first time in 2003 and is apparently restricted to tropical and subtropical waters.

"The knowledge we gain from this whale will help to improve field identification guides to better understand the whale's regional distribution," he added.

"Scientists know a fair bit about many whale species but this exciting discovery shows there is still so much more to learn in our oceans."

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, only a handful of specimens have been found before, including in the Sea of Japan and the Solomon Sea.

There is no population estimate, given the scarcity of information about them, with little known of the species' ecology and virtually nothing about its reproductive biology.

Read more at Discovery News

Richard III May Have Hid His Scoliosis Until Death

Careful tailoring may have helped King Richard III keep his his severe scoliosis a secret right up until his death in 1485, says a new study into historical sources about Richard’s condition and posthumous reputation.

Richard III suffered from a spine curving condition known as adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, which he most likely developed after the age of about 10. The 15h century king was reinterred last month with a solemn ceremony at Leicester Cathedral, 530 years after his death and more than two years after archaeologists discovered his twisted skeleton in a car park.

According to Mary Ann Lund, of the School of English at the University of Leicester, Richard III probably kept any signs of his scoliosis hidden outside of the royal household as part of his "propaganda of power."

"It is highly likely that Richard took care to control his public image," Lund wrote in the Medical Humanities journal.

"Tailoring probably kept the signs of his scoliosis hidden to spectators outside the royal household of attendants, servants and medical staff who dressed, bathed and tended to the monarch's body," she added.

Lund noted that no mention of Richard's anatomical abnormality survives from during his lifetime, perhaps out of respect to a reigning monarch, or perhaps because he hid it so well.

Richard, who reigned from 1483 to 1485, was probably treated by his surgically trained physician with a mixture of painful axial traction and manual manipulation — a therapy which needed specially designed equipment, space and assistants.

"Yet, it may have been only a relatively small group of people in Richard's trusted circle who knew of his condition. The absence of contemporary testimony does not prove this, however," Lund said.

What is certain is that hundreds of witnesses could see Richard’s severely bent spine after his death.

The last king of England to die on the battlefield, Richard was killed in 1485 at Bosworth. His defeat by Henry Tudor, who became King Henry VII, marked the end of the decades-long fight over the throne known as War of the Roses and the end of the Plantagenet dynasty.

Historical sources report Richard was vilified, stripped naked, slung across a horse and paraded through Leicester to let people know he was truly dead.

Read more at Discovery News

Battered Remains of Medieval Knight Found in UK

The battered remains of a medieval man uncovered at a famous cathedral hint that he may have been a Norman knight with a proclivity for jousting.

The man may have participated in a form of jousting called tourney, in which men rode atop their horses and attacked one another, in large groups, with blunted weapons.

Archaeologists uncovered the man's skeleton, along with about 2,500 others — including a person who had leprosy and a woman with a severed hand — buried at Hereford Cathedral in the United Kingdom. The cathedral was built in the 12th century and served as a place of worship and a burial ground in the following centuries, said Andy Boucher, a regional manager at Headland Archaeology, a commercial archaeology company that works with construction companies in the United Kingdom.

A few years ago, the Heritage Lottery Fund, which is financed by the national lottery in the United Kingdom, awarded money to the cathedral for the landscaping and restoration of its grounds. But first, workers had to relocate the thousands of skeletons, many of which were near the ground's surface.

"By church law, anybody who died in the parish had to be buried in the cathedral burial ground," almost continuously from the time the cathedral was built until the early 19th century, Boucher told Live Science.

From 2009 to 2011, his team respectfully removed the human remains. But one stood out — a 5-foot-8-inch (1.7 meters) man with serious trauma on his right shoulder blade, 10 of his right ribs and left leg.

"He's the most battered corpse on the site," Boucher said. "He had the largest number of broken bones."

The man was about 45 years or older when he died, according to a bone analysis. He was buried in a stone-lined grave, a type of grave that was used between the 12th and 14th centuries, the researchers said.

Four of the man's ribs showed healed fractures that may have occurred simultaneously, suggesting a single instance of trauma, researchers wrote in the pathology report. Another four ribs were in the process of healing, indicating that the man was still recovering from the injuries when he died. The other two damaged ribs also show evidence of trauma, and his left lower leg has an unusual twisting break, one that could have been caused by a direct blow or a rolled ankle, according to the report.

In addition, the man had lost three of his teeth during his lifetime. A chemical analysis of his other teeth that matched different isotopes (a variation of an element) to foods and water samples from different geological locations showed that the man likely grew up in Normandy and moved to Hereford later in life, Boucher said.

Jousting battle

It's impossible to know what wounded the man, but his injuries are in line with those that nobility got through tourney, or jousting, the researchers said.

"Tourney, the true form of jousting, is open combat between large groups of people in fields — basically, a mock battle," Boucher said. "They just laid into each other with blunted weapons, which is another reason we think he might be a knight, because none of the wounds to him are caused by sharp weapons. They're all caused by blunt-force trauma."

Perhaps the man injured his leg during a horse ride during one of these tourneys, if the foot had gotten stuck in the stirrup, Boucher said. Moreover, the injuries to his right shoulder and ribs could have happened if he fell from his horse, or was hit with a blunt weapon on the right side of his body, according to the report.

However, the man may have sustained his injuries in other ways. The coroner's files show that men older than age 46 who died of accidental deaths during medieval times were likely to die while traveling or transporting goods, according to the report.

Read more at Discovery News

Enigmatic Moon Mimas Bathes in 'Saturnshine'

NASA’s Cassini mission around Saturn has given us a very privileged view of the gas giant, its beautiful rings and rich variety of moons. Along the way, it has also treated us to some stunning Saturnian phenomena. In this dreamy view across Saturn’s rings, the small moon Mimas can be seen, but it is strangely illuminated by a phenomenon known as “Saturnshine.”

Our own moon exhibits “Earthshine” when the position of the sun and Earth are just right for us to see the double reflection of sunlight — light is reflected off our planet and then that light reflects off the moon’s surface, often producing a dim glow when much of the lunar disk is otherwise in shadow.

And this is exactly what is happening to Mimas here; sunlight is reflected off Saturn’s upper atmosphere, casting a weak glow across the 250 mile-wide moon.

In a news release, NASA notes that, to better illustrate the effect of Saturnshine, Mimas “has had its brightness enhanced by a factor of 2.5 relative to the rings.”

The result is a beautiful portrait of a little cratered moon, highlighted by the reflected light from its parent planet Saturn.

This observation was made by Cassini on Feb. 16 when the spacecraft was approximately 1.6 million miles from Mimas.

From Discovery News

Gigantic Marine Lizard's Origin Story Gets a Rewrite

A fierce marine lizard that patrolled the sea more than 65 million years ago wasn't born quite where paleontologists thought it was.

Mosasaurs, once thought to be reared from eggs deposited on land, were instead born out in the open ocean, a new study out of Yale University and the University of Toronto suggests.

The family of marine reptiles, which could reach some 50 feet in length, lived during the Late Cretaceous, between 66 and 85 million years ago. The top-drawer predators ate fare such as turtles and birds but weren't averse to taking on bigger prey such as sharks and plesiosaurs. They went extinct along with practically everything else in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of 65 million years ago.

While the creature's later stages of life are well known, little is understood about the initial environment it faced.

"Mosasaurs are among the best-studied groups of Mesozoic vertebrate animals, but evidence regarding how they were born and what baby mosasaur ecology was like has historically been elusive," said Yale doctoral candidate in geology and geophysics, Daniel Field, the study's lead author.

Field and Aaron LeBlanc, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, examined mosasaur specimens from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History that had been gathered more than a century ago.

The finds in the collection had been identified as belonging to ancient marine birds, but the two scientists saw something else. They noted jaw and teeth features that were unique to mosasaurs and realized they were studying the youngest mosasaur samples ever found. Too, the finds came from open ocean deposits.

Read more at Discovery News

Earth Was Once a Snowball Locked in 'Crazy' Deep Freeze

A new study shows Earth’s temperature plunged to Arctic temperatures -- in Florida, Egypt and other lands near the planet’s supposedly warmer equatorial regions during a radical climate shift known as “Snowball Earth.”

This finding is based on analysis of oxygen isotopes in rocks bathed in the meltwater of ancient glaciers shows annual mean temperatures of minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit or colder during a planet-wide deep-freeze roughly 2.4 billion years ago.

The new data indicates Earth’s global oceans froze into a blanket of ice and glaciers 1,000 feet thick, challenging theories that open patches of water existed in the equatorial regions during the first of at least two Snowball Earth periods.

“These events are fascinating. We had times where we really had a completely frozen Earth. If you go now to tropical regions and you imagine thick glaciers and all the oceans frozen, it’s crazy I think, but it appears to be that this has happened,” geoscientist Daniel Herwartz, with the University of Gottingen in Germany, told Discovery News.

Scientists have been dividend about whether some of Earth’s oceans remained liquid (or slushy). That research that has been dependent on climate models, not hard data.

The new study changes that paradigm with a technique to ferret out a third oxygen isotope from 700 million-year-old rocks from China and 2.4 billion-year-old rocks from northwestern Russia. Both lands were then located close to the equator.

“These Snowball Earth events also happened when most of the continents were forming a supercontinent, which was located at equatorial regions,” Herwartz said.

The research shows the 700 million-year-old rocks were exposed to water temperatures similar to what southern Greenland experiences today. The 2.4 billion-year-old samples, however, experienced much colder temperatures.

“This low temperature would actually require that the whole Earth was completely frozen in and that we really had most of the oceans under hundreds-of-meter thick ice,” Herwartz said.

The study has implications for understanding what happened to life on Earth during the deep freeze, namely whether it could still exist via photosynthesis or if it retreated into more extreme niches powered by hydrothermal vents, for example.

“Life on Earth originated and spread in shallow, light-filled, ice-free environments. Organisms in these environments evolved over billions of years, so glaciations, as long as they may be, are temporary interruptions to our biosphere, which is powered largely by photosynthesis,” geobiologist Tanja Bosak, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.

Read more at Discovery News

Does Massive Methane Hotspot Reveal Bigger Problem?

The Four Corners region of the southwestern U.S.– where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet — is one of the most ruggedly scenic locales you could imagine.

But Four Corners has another, more puzzling distinction. As a 2014 study of data from a European satellite by NASA and University of Michigan researchers revealed, a 2,500-square mile area near the intersection produces the nation’s biggest concentration of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s many times more potent than carbon dioxide, and a significant contributor to global warming.

Now, as scientists launch a team effort to figure out the cause for the massive methane plume, another more troubling question arises. Is the hotspot an anomaly, or an indication that previous measurements have underestimated the amount of methane that’s being released into the atmosphere?

If the latter is true, it could have disturbing implications for the struggle against climate change.

Nobody knows yet why Four Corners is giving off so much methane — an amount equivalent to almost 15 million tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of adding 3.1 million cars to the road every year, according to ThinkProgress.

For much of the 2003-2009 period in the satellite study, the area didn’t have a lot of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas,a process that some are concerned is a source of methane emissions.  But Four Corners is a major coal mining area, and a source of coal-bed methane, which supplies about 8 percent of the nation’s natural gas.

The plume discovered over Four Corners, raises the possibility that large amounts of methane are escaping from the mines — a problem that hasn’t been factored into the equation before.

Read more at Discovery News

Deep Diving Sub Streams Live From Unexplored Ocean

While we think of the cosmos as being full of mystery, there are plenty of unexplored places remaining on our own planet — under the oceans. Only about 5 percent of the Earth’s sea floor has been explored.

But now, thanks to a robotic submarine deployed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship Okeanos Explorer, we’ll all be able to go online and take a peek at some of that unknown territory in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

The just-started mission will send the robotic sub on 20 dives, some of them as much as 3.7 miles deep, according to a NOAA press release. Many of those dives will take place in the Puerto Rico Trench, a 500-mile-long stretch of the sea floor that in some places is 5.4 miles deep, making it the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean basin.

Other areas to be explored include the Muertos Trough, Mona Channel and Virgin Islands Trough.

The robotic sub — in NOAA lingo, a remotely-operated vehicle, or ROV — will continuously capture high-definition video, which the public will be able to view on this website.

While the area to be explored is uncharted, scientists know that it has a lot of tectonic plate activity and is a potential source of earthquakes and tsunamis. They also suspect that it contains geological figures such as seamounts and mud volcanoes.

Okeanos Explorer recently finished mapping 13,600 square miles of seafloor around the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, gathering data that will be used by biologists, geologists, oceanographers and geophysicists.

Live video from a 2013 expedition to deep-sea canyons off the northeast Atlantic coast of the United States garnered more than 875,000 views.

From Discovery News

Accelerating universe? Not so fast

Certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars, are more diverse than previously thought, a University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has discovered. The results, reported in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal, have implications for big cosmological questions, such as how fast the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang.

Most importantly, the findings hint at the possibility that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe might not be quite as fast as textbooks say.

The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic "beacons" to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations. The findings are analogous to sampling a selection of 100-watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness.

"We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances -- and thus when the universe was younger," said Milne, an associate astronomer with the UA's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. "There are different populations out there, and they have not been recognized. The big assumption has been that as you go from near to far, type Ia supernovae are the same. That doesn't appear to be the case."

The discovery casts new light on the currently accepted view of the universe expanding at a faster and faster rate, pulled apart by a poorly understood force called dark energy. This view is based on observations that resulted in the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to three scientists, including UA alumnus Brian P. Schmidt.

The Nobel laureates discovered independently that many supernovae appeared fainter than predicted because they had moved farther away from Earth than they should have done if the universe expanded at the same rate. This indicated that the rate at which stars and galaxies move away from each other is increasing; in other words, something has been pushing the universe apart faster and faster.

"The idea behind this reasoning," Milne explained, "is that type Ia supernovae happen to be the same brightness -- they all end up pretty similar when they explode. Once people knew why, they started using them as mileposts for the far side of the universe.

"The faraway supernovae should be like the ones nearby because they look like them, but because they're fainter than expected, it led people to conclude they're farther away than expected, and this in turn has led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding faster than it did in the past."

Milne and his co-authors -- Ryan J. Foley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Peter J. Brown at Texas A&M University and Gautham Narayan of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, or NOAO, in Tucson -- observed a large sample of type Ia supernovae in ultraviolet and visible light. For their study, they combined observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope with those made by NASA's Swift satellite.

The data collected with Swift were crucial because the differences between the populations -- slight shifts toward the red or the blue spectrum -- are subtle in visible light, which had been used to detect type Ia supernovae previously, but became obvious only through Swift's dedicated follow-up observations in the ultraviolet.

"These are great results," said Neil Gehrels, principal investigator of the Swift satellite, who co-authored the first paper. "I am delighted that Swift has provided such important observations, which have been made toward a science goal that is completely independent of the primary mission. It demonstrates the flexibility of our satellite to respond to new phenomena swiftly."

"The realization that there were two groups of type Ia supernovae started with Swift data," Milne said. "Then we went through other datasets to see if we see the same. And we found the trend to be present in all the other datasets.

"As you're going back in time, we see a change in the supernovae population," he added. "The explosion has something different about it, something that doesn't jump out at you when you look at it in optical light, but we see it in the ultraviolet.

"Since nobody realized that before, all these supernovae were thrown in the same barrel. But if you were to look at 10 of them nearby, those 10 are going to be redder on average than a sample of 10 faraway supernovae."

The authors conclude that some of the reported acceleration of the universe can be explained by color differences between the two groups of supernovae, leaving less acceleration than initially reported. This would, in turn, require less dark energy than currently assumed.

Read more at Science Daily

Chicxulub Crater's Dino-Destroying Mystery To Be Probed

The catastrophic asteroid crash blamed for the demise of the dinosaurs also left a gaping scar in the Earth. That sprawling crater made 65.5 million years ago may hold the answers to many mysteries surrounding the space-rock event.

Now, scientists plan to drill 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below the surface of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico to bring up a giant core — and delve 10 million to 15 million years into the past. The endeavor would result in the first offshore core taken from near the center of the crater, which is named for a nearby seaside village located on the Yucatán Peninsula.

An international team of scientists met last week in Mérida, Mexico, located within the 125-mile-wide (200 kilometers) Chicxulub crater, to discuss their plans for the drilling project, slated to start in spring 2016.

Why now? “The Chicxulub impact crater has been a remarkable scientific opportunity for the 20 years since it’s been discovered,” said Sean Gulick, of The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics.

And, for the first time, scientists have subsurface images from the offshore part of the crater, so they can pinpoint a spot for sampling. They chose a spot along the crater’s peak ring — a ring of mountainlike structures around the center of the crater.

By sampling there, the researchers can get a clearer picture of ancient biological and geological processes.

Scientists think that, when a big rock smashes into Earth at high enough velocities, the collision causes the crust temporarily to act sort of like a liquid, first forming a so-called transient crater (like the indentation that forms on a lake surface after a rock is thrown in), and the center rebounds, or splashes, upward and then outward.

“We think the peak ring is the record of the material that rebounded and splashed outward,” Gulick told Live Science.

All of these ideas are based on models and aren’t necessarily what happened. “We’ve never gotten a rock back from a peak ring to know if that’s correct,” Gulick said.

Read more at Discovery News