Dinosaurs Could Have Pushed Up 'Daisies'

The dinosaurs of Gondwana may have wandered around and died in fields of flowers that were the ancestors of daisies, suggests new research.

Findings published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the Asteraceae family of flowering plants is much older than previously thought.

“It’s one of the few modern families of flowering plants that can be traced back to the Cretaceous,” says co-author and palynologist, Dr Ian Raine, of GNS Science in New Zealand.

Flowers of the Asteraceae family — such as daisies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, dandelions, gerberas and lettuce — are characterised by inflorescences, or clusters of small tightly packed flower heads, which often form a larger composite flower.

“The Asteraceae were thought to be a rather highly evolved family and not to have appeared until well along the evolution of the flowering plants,” says Raine.

While the earliest flowering plants evolved 130 million years ago, to date the earliest known member of the Asteraceae family, was thought to have lived in Patagonia 47.5 million years ago.

As part of ongoing research into the family, lead author Dr Viviana Barreda of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires, and colleagues, have now pushed that timeline back by at least 20 million years.

They examined pollen grains extracted from 76 to 66 million-year-old sediments on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Based on the shape and surface sculpture of the pollen grains the researchers identified the grains as being from the species Tubulifloridites lillei.

This extinct species had previously been found in New Zealand and southern Australia in sediments of the same age, but researchers have only now confirmed it is an early member of the Asteraceae family.

The team show the pollen grains are similar to those from members of the Barnadesioideae subfamily of Asteraceae in South America. However they don’t yet know exactly what the flower would have looked like.

Barreda and colleagues argue that once this latest find is included in the family tree of flowering plants, this places the earliest Asteraceae as living at least 80 million years ago.

While today, there are only two flowering plants native to Antarctica, back in the Cretaceous the continent was part of Gondwana and would have been covered with temperate forests and roaming dinosaurs, says Raine.

Read more at Discovery News

Doomed Mayan King Honored in 1,600-Year-Old Tablet

A 1,600-year-old Mayan stone tablet describing the rule of an ancient king has been unearthed in the ruins of a temple in Guatemala.

The broken tablet, or stela, depicts the king’s head, adorned with a feathered headdress, along with some of his neck and shoulders. On the other side, an inscription written in hieroglyphics commemorates the monarch’s 40-year reign.

The stone tablet, found in the jungle temple, may shed light on a mysterious period when one empire in the region was collapsing and another was on the rise, said the lead excavator at the site, Marcello Canuto, an anthropologist at Tulane University in Louisiana.

Hidden room

The team found the broken stela while excavating the ancient ruins of El Achiotal, a site occupied between 400 B.C. and roughly A.D. 550. Though archaeologists had been excavating at the site for years, they only discovered the stone tablet while digging a trench that revealed a hidden chamber at the site. The room was a sanctuary or shrine, and was so small that researchers had to crouch to get inside.

The stela was broken so that the portion that likely once depicted the King’s body was missing. Some of the hieroglyphics were worn away. But based on the inscriptions that were legible, the stela seemed to be commemorating a king who was the fifth vassal of another king.

“He’s someone under another larger person. He has an overlord of his own,” Canuto told Live Science.

The stela was also dated using the Mayan calendar, though the date was partly rubbed off. Given the text that remains, the number could refer to one of four possible dates, but the likeliest is equivalent to A.D. 418. Because the stela was celebrating the king’s 40th year in power, the ruler likely ascended to the throne in A.D. 378, the researchers deduced.

Mayan Waterloo

The year 378 was a significant one for the Mayans.

“It is like a Waterloo date for the Mayan, or a July 4, 1776,” Canuto said.

At that time, several texts describe a political upheaval wherein the king of Teotihuacan, near modern-day Mexico City, came down to the majestic capital city of Tikal in what is now Guatemala and overthrew its leader. (Whether that leader was killed, committed suicide or was simply deposed isn’t clear from texts, Canuto said). The king of Teotihuacan then placed one of his own vassals on the throne.

Read more at Discovery News

History Proves Solar Activity Isn't Causing Climate Change

Among those who don’t believe that humans largely are causing climate change, one popular argument has been that an increase in the Sun’s activity is the real culprit — or, “it’s the Sun, stupid,” as British newspaper columnist James Delingpole once put it.

Lending at least some plausibility to these hypothesis was the scientific consensus that the solar activity has been trending upwards in the 300 years since the Maunder Minimum that occurred between 1645 and 1715, when there was little sunspot activity. That has led some to argue that the Sun, rather than the burning of fossil fuels, has been the main driver of rising global temperatures.

But deniers will have a tougher time making the case now. The solar explanation for global warming is refuted by a new study just presented at the International Astronomical Union’s annual assembly in Hawaii, which fixes a discrepancy among historical records of sunspots.

The apparent upward trend of solar activity between the 18th century and the late 20th century has now been identified as a major calibration error in the Group Sunspot Number, one of the two systems for counting sunspot activity historically. (The other is the Wolf Sunspot Number.)

But now that the error has been fixed, scientists say that solar activity actually has remained relatively stable since the 1700s. That means that although fluctuations in solar weather can influence climate over shorter periods, the long-term trend is being caused by something else.

The Wolf system, which was developed back in 1856, is the oldest time series in solar terrestrial physics that’s still in use today. It counts both individual sunspots and sunspot groups. But in the mid-1990s, scientists began to question whether it was an accurate way to reconstruct the longer history of solar activity. In 1998, the Group Sunspot Number, a new index, was established. It was based in part based on sunspot measurements made by Galileo in 1612.

Read more at Discovery News

Pulsar Proves Gravitational Constant is 'Rock-Solid'

Through extremely high precision measurements of a pulsar orbiting a white dwarf star, astronomers have found that the gravitational constant, which dictates the force of gravity, is “reassuringly constant” throughout the universe.

Just as the speed of light in a vacuum (c) and Planck’s constant (h) well-known universal constants, the gravitational constant (or simply “G“) has been long assumed to be constant everywhere throughout the cosmos. But how can we be sure?

In the past, scientists have bounced lasers off the moon to measure the Earth-moon distance, thereby arriving at a precise measure of G. But now, astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have taken a long look beyond the solar system and recorded the steady flashes of radiation produced by a spinning neutron star, or pulsar, thousands of light-years away.

Pulsars are the cosmic clocks of our universe. They are ancient remnants of larger stars that have run out of fuel and gone supernova and now consist of extremely dense, degenerate matter less than 20 miles in diameter. Pulsars also possess powerful magnetic fields that can generate extremely collimated beams of radio emissions. Each time a pulsar spins, the polar beams may sweep in the direction of Earth, registering as a pulse — much like a lighthouse appears to flash in the distance.

By timing these pulses on the finest of scales, astronomers have come to see these objects as the most precise timekeepers in the universe, rivaling even the most advanced atomic clocks we have on Earth.

Now, through the study of one special pulsar called PSR J1713+0747, astronomers have arrived at the best, and most precise, measure of G outside the solar system.

“The uncanny consistency of this stellar remnant offers intriguing evidence that the fundamental force of gravity — the big ‘G’ of physics — remains rock-solid throughout space,” said astronomer Weiwei Zhu, formerly with the University of British Columbia in Canada, in a NRAO press release. “This is an observation that has important implications in cosmology and some of the fundamental forces of physics.”

Zhu is lead author of a new study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

PSR J1713+0747 is an ideal “laboratory” to study some of the most fundamental quantities of space, time and relativity. For starters, it has a uniquely wide orbit around the white dwarf, taking 68 days for the pulsar to complete one orbit. It is also extremely bright, one of the brightest pulsars known. As pair orbit one another, an extremely tiny amount of energy is lost from the system, via gravitational waves — a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Their wide and stable orbit means that this energy loss is extremely small and has a negligible impact on the orbit of the pulsar, making it a prime target for any gravitational observations. (A more compact orbit would cause more energy to be carried away from the system via gravitational waves, introducing errors in the measurements of the pulsar’s orbital characteristics.)

So, we can now precisely measure the gravitational nature of this star system — why does it matter?

The pulsar-white dwarf binary are located 3,750 light-years from Earth and the value of G derived over 21 years of radio observations almost exactly match the most precise measurements of G we’ve carried out in our solar system. Therefore, it appears (in this test at least) that G is constant throughout the known universe.

“Gravity is the force that binds stars, planets, and galaxies together,” said astronomer and co-author Scott Ransom, with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Va. “Though it appears on Earth to be constant and universal, there are some theories in cosmology that suggest gravity may change over time or may be different in different corners of the Universe.”

“These results — new and old — allow us to rule out with good confidence that there could be ‘special’ times or locations with different gravitational behavior,” said astronomer and co-author Ingrid Stairs, also from the University of British Columbia in Canada. “Theories of gravity that are different from general relativity often make such predictions, and we have put new restrictions on the parameters that describe these theories.”

Read more at Discovery News

Seagulls Terrorize British Vacationers

A familiar presence at Britain’s seaside resorts, seagulls have this summer spread fear after ambushing holidaymakers as they tuck into their fish and chips, even attacking pets.

The country’s tabloid newspapers have had a field day, with headlines including: “Seagull stole my iPhone” (The Sun), “Moment killer seagull turns cannibal” (The Daily Mail) and “Psycho seagulls keep out illegals” (Daily Express).

Even the broadsheets have joined in, with The Sunday Times warning that “Gull gangs learn new tricks to steal your seafront snacks”.

The squawking menaces have always had a bad reputation as scavengers.

But the gulls are now apparently growing in audacity and rather than feeding on leftovers, are deliberately targeting people’s fish and chips, the battered haddock or cod combination traditionally eaten by holidaymakers, as they tuck in.

“They’ve been trained by terrorists, I’m sure,” said Cliff Faires, owner of a seafood kiosk in the historic south coast resort of Brighton.

A sign outside his Brighton Shellfish and Oyster Bar warns: “Seagulls will snatch your food. Please be aware. We don’t take any responsibility for this action.”

 ’Never been so bad’

Local witnesses described a common plan of attack used by the birds, whereby a lone assailant pounces on an unsuspecting diner, forcing them to drop their food. At this point, hordes of reinforcements arrive to feast on the spilled remains.

“They’ll eat everything except lemon and tabasco,” one added.

“I see gulls grabbing food from people three or four times a day, more when it’s sunny,” said Chris, who works at a fish-and-chip kiosk on Brighton pier.

“The worst thing I’ve seen is one landing on the head of an old lady who had a hot dog. She obviously dropped it and the same gull took it away really fast, the woman was terrified,” he told AFP.

“It’s never been as bad. This is the worst year,” said Jack Messenger, from the Sea Haze Bar, another beachfront restaurant.

“It’s probably best for us, because when the seagulls eat their food, they (the customers) come and get more,” he joked.

It is not only seaside towns that are suffering, with inland cities such as Bath and Bristol reporting problems.

Experts blame a combination of factors for this summer’s Hitchcockian events.

They include gulls becoming more accustomed to living close to humans and the birds being particularly aggressive in July when they have young in their nests.

Three pets have been pecked to death by seagulls in southwest England in recent months: a turtle, a chihuahua and a Yorkshire Terrier.

“Blood was coming out of his head. It was like a murder scene,” the Yorkshire Terrier’s owner Emma Vincent told reporters.

Hysteria ‘not justified’

Even Prime Minister David Cameron has swooped into the debate.

“I think a big conversation needs to happen,” he said. ”Reading the papers this morning about how aggressive the seagulls are now in St Ives, for instance, we do have a problem.”

It is forbidden to kill seagulls, so the only way to fight them is to destroy their eggs or release birds of prey to hunt them.

Tony Whitehead, spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said he “didn’t think the hysteria is justified.”

“There is an issue… but to demonize the whole species off the back of a few incidents, I don’t agree with that,” he told AFP.

Read more at Discovery News

Tiny New Frog with a Face Like a Bandit Found in Andes

A tiny new frog species discovered in the Peruvian Andes has a white-mottled belly and a dark face mask that makes it look like a bandit.

Noblella madreselva lives in the humid cloud forest near Cusco, Peru, probably only in the valleys right around where it was discovered, researchers report today (Aug. 6) in the journal ZooKeys. The frogs, which are not much bigger than jelly beans, can fit on the tip of a human finger. They're active during the day, and live in leaf litter on the forest floor.

Vanessa Uscapi, a biologist at the National University of Saint Anthony the Abbot in Cusco, Peru, discovered the new tiny frog in January 2011, but only now has it been officially described. She and her colleagues picked the name madreselva to honor conservation initiatives in the region: The word means "mother jungle" and is also the name of a nearby ecotourism lodge and a small valley where a group called Sircadia is trying to launch a sustainable eco-community.

N. madreselva has a dark-brown body with a darker patch on its head. Its belly is decorated with striking white marks. It's not the only recently discovered tiny frog with bold coloration; in June, researchers in Brazil announced the discovery of seven itsy-bitsy new frogs from rainforests in Brazil. Those frogs, all of which belong to the genus Brachycephalus, came in colors ranging from greenish-brown to bright orange and blue.

The smallest frog ever discovered hails from Papua New Guinea, and could perch quite comfortably on a penny. Frogs, of the genus Paedophryne, are less than half an inch long. The smallest species in the genus, Paedophryne amauensis, grows to be just 0.3 inches (7.7 millimeters), on average. It's not only the world's smallest frog, but also the smallest vertebrate discovered so far.

The newly discovered Peruvian frog likely has a very limited geographical range, making it vulnerable to the effects of deforestation and habitat loss, Uscapi and her colleagues said. Andean frogs are also at risk of a deadly chytrid fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. This fungus has devastated frog populations worldwide. It causes the amphibians' skin to harden, disrupting their electrolyte balance and causing cardiac arrest. A December 2013 study in the journal Conservation Biology found that climate change in the Andes is increasing the area in which this fungus can thrive. Alessandro Catenazzi, one of the researchers on the team that discovered the new frog along with Uscapi, was an author of that 2013 study as well.

Read more at Discovery News

Universe Is Dying, Galactic Survey Shows

A study of more than 200,000 galaxies, encompassing wavelengths of light from the far ultraviolet to infrared, shows that the universe is producing half as much energy as it did 2 billion years ago and continues to fade.

“Newer galaxies are simply putting out less energy than galaxies did in the past,” astronomer Mehmet Alpaslan, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News.

Older stars are fading out faster than new stars are forming, a trend that eventually will leave the universe a cold and lonely place. “At some point, all matter will eventually decay. We’re observing the lights slowly shutting down," Alpasian said.

“The timeline for all this to come to pass is very long, hundreds of trillions of years,” he added.

The study, released Monday at the International Astronomical Union conference in Hawaii, culminates a seven-year, international effort to measure both the distances and energy output of more than 200,000 galaxies.

Seven observatories, including Europe’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and its VLT Survey Telescope, both at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, contributed to the study. Other data came from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and its now-defunct Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) space telescopes, and European Space Agency’s retired Herschel space telescope.

“GAMA is the first survey to study a large number of galaxies and map the energy outputs over the range where most of the energy comes out,” lead scientist Simon Driver, with the University of Western Australia, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Scientists have known since the late 1990s that the universe is slowly fading, but the GAMA study is the first to measure galaxies’ radiation across the spectrum. Measurements were made at 21 wavelengths, ranging from the far ultraviolet to the infrared.

“You’re probing a lot of different kinds of physics when you look at a lot of different energy,” Alpaslan said. “Having the homogeneous data set makes it a lot easier to fully understand what is going on in a galaxy across all these different kinds of physics.”

The decline in galaxies’ energy output coincides with the universe’s ever-increasing rate of expansion, which is due to a mysterious, anti-gravity force referred to as dark energy.

Read more at Discovery News

Woman Loses Vision After Mosquito Bites

A woman who caught chikungunya fever while vacationing in the Caribbean wound up losing some of the vision in her right eye permanently, according to a new report of her case.

The findings suggest that vision problems may be an underreported effect of the mosquito-transmitted virus, which has spread in recent years from Africa and Asia to the Caribbean, Latin America and parts of the United States, the report’s authors said.

“Sight-threatening visual loss can be a late complication of infection with chikungunya,” said Dr. Abhijit Mohite, who treated the woman and co-authored the report of her case.

It is important that people with vision problems get treatment early, to prevent lasting vision loss, said Mohite, an ophthalmologist at the West Midlands Postgraduate Deanery and Queen’s Hospital in the United Kingdom.

The virus

Researchers first recognized chikungunya (chik-un-GUN-ya) in Tanzania in 1952. The name is based on an East African word that means “that which bends,” because people infected with the virus are often bent over with muscle and joint pain. Other symptoms include fever, headache, nausea, vomiting and rash, according to the case report, which was published online July 28 in the journal BMJ Case Reports.

In July 2014, a Florida man became the first person to get chikungunya in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease is transmitted by two species of mosquito — Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus — that are recognizable by their black and white legs.

There is no vaccine or drug to treat the disease, but medications such as steroids can treat the symptoms, which include inflammation, said Dr. Aileen Marty, director of the Florida International University Health Travel Medicine Program and Vaccine Clinic, who was not involved in the case report.

Visual loss

The woman in the case was 69, and visited the Caribbean island of Grenada in July 2014. During her stay, she was bitten by mosquitoes, and developed a flu-like illness, fever, rash and joint pain. She also developed muscle weakness in her face, and received steroids from a local doctor to treat it, according to the study.

The woman returned home to the United Kingdom that August. Although her illness appeared to go away (except for lingering joint pain and stiffness), she began having trouble seeing with her right eye.

“Her main symptom was that she felt she could not see the lower half of her vision in the right eye,” Mohite told Live Science in an email. “This had come about only a day before she came to see us, and about three weeks after she returned from Grenada.”

At first, the woman’s central vision appeared fine, and she could see with normal acuity, 20/20 vision, with both eyes. However, as the doctors raced to diagnose her illness — testing her for HIV, syphilis, Lyme disease and dengue fever — her right optic nerve swelled and damaged her vision. Within days, she had 20/80 vision, and could read only to the third line down on the eye chart.

Two days after her initial visit, a blood test showed the woman had chikungunya. But the doctors still had to rule out other possible causes of her vision loss, such as another infection, inflammation, or a tumor pressing on the optic nerve or pathway, Mohite said.

After more tests ruled out these conditions, the doctors prescribed steroids to treat the woman’s optic nerve, which had swelled as part of her body’s inflammatory reaction to the virus, he said. “One of the main risks of high-dose steroids is that they can exacerbate an infection, if she had another infection somewhere else in the body. This is why we had to await all the other tests before we could start steroids, and this took six days.”

Treated too late?

However, during the six days that it took for the doctors to run all the tests and prescribe the steroids, about half of the nerve cells in woman’s optic nerve died, Mohite said.

The steroids decreased the inflammation, but couldn’t undo all of the damage.

“The steroids, unfortunately, were not started soon enough in our patient,” Mohite said. The vision loss was permanent.

Other doctors have noted eye problems in people infected with chikungunya, but this is the first known case of a woman in the United Kingdom developing this problem, Mohite said.

It’s unknown how often chikungunya infections may lead to eye problems, experts said.

Read more at Discovery News

Salt flat indicates some of the last vestiges of Martian surface water

Mars turned cold and dry long ago, but researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered evidence of an ancient lake that likely represents some of the last potentially habitable surface water ever to exist on the Red Planet.

The study, published in the journal Geology, examined an 18-square-mile chloride salt deposit (roughly the size of the city of Boulder) in the planet's Meridiani region near the Mars Opportunity rover's landing site. As seen on Earth in locations such as Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, large-scale salt deposits are considered to be evidence of evaporated bodies of water.

Digital terrain mapping and mineralogical analysis of the features surrounding the deposit indicate that this one-time lakebed is no older than 3.6 billion years old, well after the time period when Mars is thought to have been warm enough to sustain large amounts of surface water planet-wide. Planetary scientists believe that the solar system formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago.

"This was a long-lived lake, and we were able to put a very good time boundary on its maximum age," said Brian Hynek, a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU-Boulder and lead author of the study. "We can be pretty certain that this is one of the last instances of a sizeable lake on Mars."

Based on the extent and thickness of the salt, the researchers estimate that the lake was only about 8 percent as salty as Earth's oceans and therefore may have been hospitable to microbial life.

"By salinity alone, it certainly seems as though this lake would have been habitable throughout much of its existence," said Hynek, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at CU-Boulder and director of the CU Center for Astrobiology. He noted, however, that other factors such as acidity levels were not included in the scope of the study.

From Science Daily

Experiment sees neutrinos change over 500 miles

Scientists on the NOvA experiment saw their first evidence of oscillating neutrinos, confirming that the extraordinary detector built for the project not only functions as planned but is also making great progress toward its goal of a major leap in our understanding of these ghostly particles.

NOvA is on a quest to learn more about the abundant yet mysterious particles called neutrinos, which flit through ordinary matter as though it weren't there. The first NOvA results, released this week at the American Physical Society's Division of Particles and Fields conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, verify that the experiment's massive particle detector -- 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long -- is sitting in the sweet spot and detecting neutrinos fired from 500 miles away. Scientists have sorted through millions of cosmic ray strikes and zeroed in on neutrino interactions.

"People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations," said NOvA co-spokesperson Peter Shanahan of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning and operating this experiment, it's beyond gratifying."

Researchers have collected data aggressively since February 2014, recording neutrino interactions in the 14,000-ton far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, while construction was still under way. This allowed the collaboration to gather data while testing systems before starting operations with the complete detector in November 2014, shortly after the experiment was completed on time and under budget. NOvA construction and operations are supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The neutrino beam generated at Fermilab passes through an underground near detector, which measures the beam's neutrino composition before it leaves the Fermilab site. The particles then travel more than 500 miles straight through Earth, no tunnel required, oscillating (or changing types) along the way. About once per second, Fermilab's accelerator sends trillions of neutrinos to Minnesota, but the elusive neutrinos interact so rarely that only a few will register at the far detector.

When a neutrino bumps into an atom in the NOvA detector, it releases a signature trail of particles and light depending on which type it is: an electron, muon or tau neutrino. The beam originating at Fermilab is made almost entirely of one type -- muon neutrinos -- and scientists can measure how many of those muon neutrinos disappear over their journey and reappear as electron neutrinos.

If oscillations did not occur, experimenters predicted they would see 201 muon neutrinos arrive at the NOvA far detector in the data collected; instead, they saw a mere 33, proof that the muon neutrinos were disappearing as they transformed into the two other flavors. Similarly, if oscillations did not occur, scientists expected to see only one electron neutrino appearance (due to background interactions). But the collaboration saw six such events, evidence that some of the missing muon neutrinos had turned into electron neutrinos.

Similar long-distance experiments such as T2K in Japan and MINOS at Fermilab have seen these muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations before. NOvA, which will take data for at least six years, is seeing nearly equivalent results in a shorter time frame, something that bodes well for the experiment's ambitious goal of measuring neutrino properties that have eluded other experiments so far.

"One of the reasons we've made such excellent progress is the impressive Fermilab neutrino beam and accelerator team," said NOvA co-spokesperson Mark Messier of Indiana University. "Having a beam of that power running so efficiently gives us a real competitive edge and allows us to gather data quickly."

Fermilab's flagship accelerator recently set a high-energy neutrino beam world record when it reached 521 kilowatts, and the laboratory is working on improving the neutrino beam even further for projects such as NOvA and the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Researchers expect to reach 700 kilowatts early next calendar year, accumulating a slew of neutrino interactions and tripling the amount of data recorded by year's end.

Neutrinos are the most abundant massive particle in the universe but are still poorly understood. While researchers know that neutrinos come in three types, they don't know which is the heaviest and which is the lightest. Figuring out this ordering -- one of the goals of the NOvA experiment -- would be a great litmus test for theories about how the neutrino gets its mass. While the famed Higgs boson helps explain how some particles obtain their masses, scientists don't know yet how it is connected to neutrinos, if at all. The measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy is also crucial information for neutrino experiments trying to see if the neutrino is its own antiparticle.

Read more at Science Daily