Glowing Sea Turtle Spotted off the Solomon Islands

A sea turtle in the Solomon Islands has set imaginations to "11" on the mind-blown dial. It's being hailed as the first documented reptile to glow by way of biofluorescence.

National Geographic has the details behind the spotting of a hawksbill sea turtle by one of its explorers -- marine biologist David Gruber, from City University of New York.

The turtle Gruber spotted and recorded was showing off bright green and red colors that gave it a neon glow. It was biofluorescing -- reflecting blue light and flashing it back out as another color. (Not to be confused with the bioluminescence some animals exhibit, where they essentially give off their own light from within or from things such as bacteria resting on them.)

Corals and other creatures of the deep biofluoresce, National Geographic notes, but a marine reptile doing it came as a complete surprise.

"I've been [studying turtles] for a long time and I don't think anyone's ever seen this," a hawksbill sea turtle expert told NatGeo.

Gruber followed the shiny turtle for a bit before letting it go on its way. He told NatGeo it was too soon to know how glowing helps this particular turtle, adding that the usual reasons tend to do with hunting, camouflage, or communication.

The researcher said that while the glowing turtle raises many questions -- how specifically it does it, why it does it, for example -- the critically endangered animals will be tough to study. Their populations have declined about 80 percent in the last 10 years, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "red list" of endangered species.

From Discovery News

King Tut's Tomb Reveals Two Secret Chambers

A new examination of King Tut’s tomb has provided evidence of two hidden rooms, Egypt’s Antiquities minister Mamdouh Eldamaty announced on Monday.

According to Eldamaty, scratching and markings on both the northern and western walls are similar to those found by Howard Carter on the entrance gate of King Tut’s tomb. Carter discovered the treasure-packed burial in 1922.

“This indicates that the western and northern walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb could hide two burial chambers,” Eldamaty told Egypt’s English-language news site Ahram Online.

The investigation follows a similar claim by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist at the University of Arizona. Last month he published a paper arguing that high-resolution images of the tomb’s walls show “distinct linear traces” pointing to the presence of two still unexplored chambers.

Reeves speculated that one of such chambers contains the remains, and possibly the intact grave goods from queen Nefertiti, the wife of the “heretic” monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father.

He argued that a painting located behind King Tut’s sarcophagus has been wrongly interpreted. The painting shows Ay (who largely directed King Tut's reign and succeeded him) performing the Opening of the Mouth ritual on the boy king.

The figure labelled Tutankhamun would actually be Nefertiti. He noted that the lines at the corner of the figure’s mouth are a trademark in pictures of Nefertiti. On the other hand, the figure labelled Ay would be Tutankhamun, completing the death ritual for Nefertiti.

According to Reeves, the tomb of King Tut was not ready when he died unexpectedly at 19 in 1323 B.C. after having ruled a short reign of nine to 10 years. Thus he was buried in a rush in what was originally Nefertiti’s tomb, who died 10 years earlier.

Reeves told reporters the tomb’s examination revealed several unusual features, such as a contrast in the materials that cover different parts of the same wall and an extended ceiling which suggests King Tut’s tomb was originally a corridor.

“After our first examination of the walls we can do nothing more until we receive the all-clear from the radar device to confirm our findings,” Reeves told Ahram Online.

According to Eldamaty, it’s very likely there are hidden chambers in King Tut’s tomb. However, he disagrees with Reeves on the Nefertiti claim.

“The theory is a very good theory but it doesn’t mean it’s true. The best theories don’t always work,” he told reporters.

Read more at Discovery News

So Liquid Water Flows on Mars -- Now What?

The discovery of seasonal water flows on the surface of Mars could galvanize both the search for indigenous life as well plans for future human settlements, but don’t pack your bags quite yet.

For the immediate future, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which provided the legwork that led to Monday’s announcement, will continue to gather high-resolution images and chemical data from areas, known as recurring slope lineae, or RSL, that have been linked to recent briny water flows.

These dark, narrow streaks cut into cliff walls throughout the planet’s equator are unreachable by Curiosity and Opportunity, the two rovers now operating on Mars, and the Curiosity-class rover that is due to launch in 2020.

“Curiosity has gone up some pretty steep slopes, but some of these briny features are in tough terrain. It’d be trivial to an astronaut in a spacesuit to go up and investigate, but it’s very hard for a rover, so we’re a little ways off,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

“I think (the discovery) will really drive the ingenuity of our scientists and engineers to come up with a viable experiment – and hopefully we can do it in the 2020s -- that would go and investigate these areas and perhaps even return samples from these areas some day,” he added.

The existence of regions associated with present day water also means that visiting rovers must be properly sterilized to assure that hitchhiking Earth microbes don’t contaminate potential native populations.

“We’re being very careful that we don’t send a spacecraft to Mars with the intention of detecting Martian life and find out that we’ve detected the Earth life that we took with us,” Grunsfeld said.

Curiosity, which has provided evidence that ancient Mars had the necessary ingredients and suitable environments for microbial life, could end up playing a role in the search for present-day water as well.

Scientists have noticed RSL-like streaks in the walls of Mount Sharp, the three-mile high mound rising from the floor of Gale Crater, which Curiosity has been exploring since August 2012.

“We don’t really know if Curiosity will have an opportunity to go to one of these areas and make measurements,” said NASA’s planetary science chief Jim Green. “They may or may not be RSLs. We've got a lot of work to do on that.”

After three years of intense radiation exposure on Mars, Curiosity could be sterile enough to venture near a potential RSL, but its suite of instruments might not be suited for the job, Green added.

“It has a limited set of capabilities to be able to make any sort of detection in this area,” he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Tasmanian Devils Set Free in Test of New Vaccine

Twenty Tasmanian devils were released into Narawntapu National Park in northern Tasmania on September 26, each inoculated with a new vaccine against a deadly disease that has decimated the endangered species.

The animals (11 males and 9 females) received a vaccine against devil facial tumor disease, a condition that causes cancers to form around and inside the devil's mouth, making eating difficult and ultimately causing death by starvation.

The disease is rare in that it's a contagious cancer -- spread by bites among the devils or through sharing food or eating an infected carcass.

Thanks to the disease, Tasmanian devil populations have declined by more than 60 percent in the last 10 years, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "red list" of endangered species.

The release was carried out under the aegis of an initiative called the Wild Devil Recovery Project, a Tasmanian government-funded joint effort between the Menzies Institute for Medical Research and the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program (STDP).

The newly wild devils, formerly kept at a free-range enclosure site for "insurance" populations, will join existing devils already living in the park, and they will be monitored over time to gauge the vaccine's effectiveness.

The hope is that the re-wilding program will not only boost the devil populations but also increase their genetic diversity.

"The next milestone will be to see them start breeding in the wild and thus further ensuring their chances of survival into the future," said Bob Wiese, director of living collections for San Diego Zoo Global, an STDP partner in Tasmania, in a press release.

From Discovery News

Sea Otter with Asthma Learns to Use an Inhaler

The air was hazy from forest fires, and Mishka, a 1-year-old sea otter at the Seattle Aquarium, could barely breathe.

Aquarium staff jumped into action, putting an oxygen mask on the 45-lb. (20 kilograms) sea otter and administering anti-inflammatory medication to help her breathe. After several medical tests, Mishka became the first-known sea otter (Enhydra lutris) to be diagnosed with asthma.

Now, trainers are teaching Mishka how to use an inhaler — one that's not designed for sea otters (after all, Mishka is the first one) but for cats, said Seattle Aquarium staff veterinarian Dr. Lesanna Lahner.

"She's very smart, and she's picking it up quite quickly," Lahner told Live Science. "But being an otter, she's also extremely playful. So we have to work with her and with her playfulness to make it fun."

Mishka is relatively new to the Seattle Aquarium. The Alaska native was rescued after people found her tangled in a fishing net in July 2014, according to the aquarium. She spent the next several months in rehabilitation at the Alaska SeaLife Center. However, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deemed her nonreleasable because she never learned critical survival skills, such as how to forage for food, and thus would be unable to survive in the wild, Lahner said.

Zookeepers named her Mishka, Russian for "little bear," when she arrived in Seattle in January. They didn't realize she had asthma until months later, when smoke from the forest fires in eastern Washington floated over the Cascade Range mountains into western Washington.

On Aug. 22, zookeepers noted that Mishka was acting lethargic and not eating much.

"It's abnormal for a sea otter not to eat pretty voraciously," Lahner said.

The next day, Mishka had a full-blown asthma attack, prompting immediate treatment.

Afterward, Lahner took a blood sample to make sure Mishka didn't have pneumonia or another respiratory pathogen (she didn't). Then, Lahner listened to Mishka's lungs with a stethoscope and took a radiograph of the animal's chest. The results pointed toward asthma, she said.

The radiograph showed that Mishka had abnormal thickening on her bronchial walls. This can make it difficult for enough oxygen to enter the lungs — a pattern that "is typical of what is seen in cats presenting with acute asthma," Lahner said.

Trainers are giving Mishka food rewards to use a device called the AeroKat, which has a chamber filled with aerosolized medicine. Mishka is learning to put her nose against a rubber face piece that's connected to the medicine-filled chamber, and take a couple of breaths.

Read more at Discovery News

Meet 'Microsnail,' Now the World's Smallest Snail

The world’s smallest known terrestrial snail has just been discovered in China.

The snail, Angustopila dominikae, measures just .03 inches tall — nearly 10 of them could fit into the eye of a sewing needle.

Named after the wife of lead author Barna Páll-Gergely from Shinshu University, the snail is described in the journal ZooKeys.

“Extremes in body size of organisms not only attract attention from the public, but also incite interest regarding their adaptation to their environment,” Páll-Gergely and his team wrote.

“Investigating tiny-shelled land snails is important for assessing biodiversity and natural history as well as for establishing the foundation for studying the evolution of dwarfism in invertebrate (lacking a backbone) animals.”

The scientists found the snail while examining soil samples collected from the base of limestone rocks in Guangxi Province, Southern China. Seven snails were found, represented just by their now-empty light grey shells.

The researchers also found six other new small species of terrestrial snails. Yet another of the new species, Angustopila subelevata, was a tiny fraction larger than A. dominikae. Both are considered “microsnails.” They are also sometimes called “micromolluscs.”

It can be challenging to discover such animals. The molluscs are delicate, often overlooked, and are rarely found alive. The bodies degrade long before the shells do. Not much is known about how many different microsnails might exist in this particular ecosystem, not to mention, elsewhere in the world.

The researchers also do not know yet what the snail might eat, or what the evolutionary relationship is between the different species.

From Discovery News

Mystery Solved: Water DOES Flow on Mars

Scientists have their first evidence that trickles of liquid water play a role in sculpting mysterious dark streaks that appear during summertime months on Mars, a finding that has implications for potential life on Mars, as well as planning for future human expeditions.

The discovery, reported Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, follows years of speculation and studies to learn why the faces of some cliff walls on Mars are streaked with narrow dark slopes, some more than 300 feet long, that appear when temperatures are warm and then vanish during the winter chill.

The streaks, known as recurring slope lineae, or RSL, were first reported in 2011 in the Martian southern highlands, but have since been found throughout the planet’s equatorial region, particularly within deep canyons.

Using data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and a new analysis technique, scientists were for the first time able to detect the telltale chemical fingerprints of hydrated salts in dozens of RSL sites.

“That implies that there was liquid water there very recently to leave this residue of hydrated salts. It confirms that water is playing a role in these features,” University of Arizona planetary geologist Alfred McEwen told Discovery News.

In a press conference advisory, NASA said that the research “solves” a Mars mystery, but it actually opens the door to another, potentially more challenging puzzle: Where is the water coming from?

“We haven’t been able to pinpoint the source,” lead researcher Lujendra Ojha, a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.

“Water could form by the surface/subsurface melting of ice, but the presence of near-surface ice at equatorial latitudes is highly unlikely,” Ojha and colleagues write in Nature Geoscience.

Another option is that salts absorb water vapor directly from the Martian air, though scientists are at a loss to explain how they could trap enough water from the tiny amount available in the atmosphere to seep down hill slopes and form the streaks.

“It’s just not clear that the atmosphere can supply enough water to do that,” McEwen said.

Whatever the source of the water, its seasonal appearance on the surface of Mars raises the prospect that life might be present on the planet today.

Read more at Discovery News

Rosetta's Comet is Actually 2 Comets Glued Together

Scientists have solved the mystery of why the comet being studied by Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is shaped like a rubber duck -- it started off as two separate comets, a new study shows.

Ever since Rosetta sent back pictures of its twin-lobed target more than a year ago, scientists have debated whether the comet, known as 67P/Churyumov-Garasimenko, could be the result of two comets that merged together during the solar system’s early years.

The other option is that the so-called “neck region” between 67P’s two lobes experienced some particularly active and still unexplained outgassing over the eons, eroding its more spherical shape into a body that resembles a rubber duck.

“Our study rules out the possibility that the comet shape is the outcome of erosion,” planetary scientist Matteo Massironi, with the University of Padova in Italy, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Rather, the neck region is where two independent bodies collided, analysis of high-resolution images taken by the orbiting Rosetta spacecraft shows.

“The heating and partial melting at the impact location and the subsequent cooling and gluing of the two bodies explain the shape of the neck region,” Massironi wrote.

In a paper published in this week’s Nature Geoscience, scientists say that 67P’s lobes are made up of similar, but independent stratified, “onion-like” layers.

“Geological sections through the comet show that the larger lobe is made up of strata up to 650 meters (2,133 feet) thick, which are independent of analogous stratified layers on the smaller lobe,” the scientists wrote.

“Our analysis ... clearly shows that the layers of the body and the head of the comet are not related,” Massironi said.

Combining the geological data with measurements of the comet’s gravity, and Rosetta scientists conclude that 67P is the result of two independent bodies that gently and repeatedly impacted before merging together soon after the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.

Read more at Discovery News

Green storage for green energy

A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a rechargeable battery that could make storage of electricity from intermittent energy sources like solar and wind safe and cost-effective for both residential and commercial use. The new research builds on earlier work by members of the same team that could enable cheaper and more reliable electricity storage at the grid level.

The mismatch between the availability of intermittent wind or sunshine and the variability of demand is a great obstacle to getting a large fraction of our electricity from renewable sources. This problem could be solved by a cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy for delivery over the long periods when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

In the operation of the battery, electrons are picked up and released by compounds composed of inexpensive, earth-abundant elements (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, iron and potassium) dissolved in water. The compounds are non-toxic, non-flammable, and widely available, making them safer and cheaper than other battery systems.

"This is chemistry I'd be happy to put in my basement," says Michael J. Aziz, Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and project Principal Investigator. "The non-toxicity and cheap, abundant materials placed in water solution mean that it's safe -- it can't catch on fire -- and that's huge when you're storing large amounts of electrical energy anywhere near people."

The research appears in a paper published in the journal Science.

This new battery chemistry was discovered by post-doctoral fellow Michael Marshak and graduate student Kaixiang Lin working together with co-lead author Roy Gordon, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science at Harvard.

"We combined a common organic dye with an inexpensive food additive to increase our battery voltage by about 50 percent over our previous materials," says Gordon. The findings "deliver the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive, and low-cost chemicals for flow batteries."

Unlike solid-electrode batteries, flow batteries store energy in liquids contained in external tanks, similar to fuel cells. The tanks (which set the energy capacity), as well as the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are pumped (which sets peak power capacity), can be sized independently. Since the amount of energy that can be stored can be arbitrarily increased by scaling up only the size of the tanks, larger amounts of energy can be stored at lower cost than traditional battery systems.

The active components of electrolytes in most flow battery designs have been metal ions such as vanadium dissolved in acid. The metals can be expensive, corrosive, tricky to handle, and kinetically sluggish, leading to inefficiencies. Last year, Aziz and his Harvard colleagues demonstrated a flow battery that replaced metals with organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are abundant, naturally occurring chemicals that are integral to biological processes like photosynthesis and cellular respiration. While quinones in aqueous solution formed the negative electrolyte side of the battery, the positive side relied on a conventional bromine-bearing electrolyte that is used in several other batteries. The high performance and low cost of the technology, which Harvard has licensed to a company in Europe, hold the potential to provide scalable grid-level storage solutions to utilities.

But bromine's toxicity and volatility make it most suitable for settings where trained professionals can deal with it safely behind secure fences.

So the team began searching for a new recipe that would provide comparable storage advantages -- inexpensive, long lasting, efficient -- using chemicals that could be safely deployed in homes and businesses. Their new battery, described in a paper published today in the journal Science, replaces bromine with a non-toxic and non-corrosive ion called ferrocyanide.

"It sounds bad because it has the word 'cyanide' in it," explains co-lead author Marshak, who is now assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Cyanide kills you because it binds very tightly to iron in your body. In ferrocyanide, it's already bound to iron, so it's safe. In fact, ferrocyanide is commonly used as a food additive, and also as a fertilizer."

Because ferrocyanide is highly soluble and stable in alkaline rather than acidic solutions, the Harvard team paired it with a quinone compound that is soluble and stable under alkaline conditions, in contrast to the acidic environment of their original battery developed last year.

Marshak compares exposure to the concentrated alkaline solution to coming into contact with a damaged disposable AA battery. "It's not something you want to eat or splash around in, but outside of that it's really not a problem."

There are other advantages to using alkaline solution. Because it is non-corrosive, the flow battery system components can be constructed of simpler and much less expensive materials such as plastics.

"First generation flow batteries were single-element couples -- transition metals like vanadium or iron or chrome," says Michael Perry, Project Leader for Electrochemical Systems at United Technologies Research Center, who was not involved in the work. "Now we're seeing the possibility of engineered molecules giving us the properties and attributes that we want in one complete system. More work is required and justified but the Harvard team is really demonstrating the promise of next-generation chemistries."

Robert F. Savinell, Distinguished University Professor and George S. Dively Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, another battery expert who was not part of the Harvard research, agrees that the new technology offers significant advantages over other flow batteries concepts, including "potential very low costs with sustainable materials, high efficiencies at practical power densities, and safe and simple operation." He adds: "It should be expected that this flow battery approach will have a short development and scale-up path for fast commercial introduction."

Harvard's Office of Technology Development has been working closely with the research team to navigate the shifting complexities of the energy storage market and build relationships with companies well positioned to commercialize the new chemistries.

The demand for battery storage is driven by regulatory factors as much as economic ones. In some states, as well as many parts of the world, if it can't be instantaneously used by meeting electricity demand, solar energy incident on solar panels goes to waste unless the electricity is stored. However, in many states, customers have the right to sell electricity produced by rooftop solar panels at high consumer rates under a regulatory scheme called net metering. Under those circumstances, consumers have little incentive to install batteries. But market experts like William W. Hogan, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, believe that such policies are ultimately "uneconomic and unsustainable." And as more and more homeowners install solar panels, utilities are opposing requirements to buy electricity from their customers.

Hogan says net metering is one of a series of "regulatory gimmicks designed to make solar more attractive" and predicts that eventually consumers with rooftop photovoltaic panels will lose the option of exchanging electricity for discounts on their utility bills. When that happens, these homeowners have an incentive to invest in battery storage.

Read more at Science Daily

'Fossils' of galaxies reveal the formation and evolution of massive galaxies

An international team led by researchers at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich observed massive dead galaxies in the universe 4 billion years after the Big Bang with the Subaru Telescope's Multi-Object InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS). They discovered that the stellar content of these galaxies is strikingly similar to that of massive elliptical galaxies seen locally. Furthermore, they identified progenitors of these dead galaxies when they were forming stars at an earlier cosmic epoch, unveiling the formation and evolution of massive galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic time.

In the local universe, massive galaxies hosting more than about 100 billion stars are predominantly dead elliptical galaxies, that is, without any signs of star-formation activity. Many questions remain on when, how and for how long star formation occurred in such galaxies before the cessation of star formation, as well as what happened since to form the dead elliptical galaxies seen today.

In order to address these issues, the research team made use of fossil records imprinted by stars in the spectra of distant dead galaxies which give important clues to their age, metal content, and element abundances. Local massive dead galaxies are about 10 billion years old and rich in heavy elements. Also, α-elements, which measure the duration of star formation, are more abundant than iron, indicating that these galaxies formed a large amount of stars in a very short period. The team investigated the stellar content of galaxies in the distant universe 4 billion years after the Big Bang, in order to study galaxy evolution much closer to their formation epoch.

The team took the advantage of the MOIRCS's capability to observe multiple objects simultaneously, efficiently observing a sample of 24 faint galaxies. They created a composite spectrum that would have taken 200 hours of Subaru Telescope's time for a single spectrum of comparable quality.

Analysis of the composite spectrum shows that the age of the galaxies is already 1 billion years old when observed 4 billion years after the Big Bang. They host 1.7 times more heavy elements relative to the amount of hydrogen and their α-elements are twice enhanced relative to iron than the solar values. It is the first time that the α-element abundance in stars is measured in such distant dead galaxies, and it tells us that the duration of star formation in these galaxies was shorter than 1 billion years. These results reveal that these massive dead galaxies have evolved to today without further star formation.

What do massive dead galaxies look like when they are forming stars? To answer this, the team investigated the progenitors of their sample based on their spectral analysis. The progenitors must be star-forming galaxies in the universe 1 billion years before the observed epoch for the dead galaxies. Indeed, they do find similarly massive star-forming galaxies at the right epoch and with the right star formation rate expected from the spectra. If these active galaxies continue to create stars at the same rate, they will immediately become more massive than seen in the present universe. Therefore, these galaxies will cease star formation soon and simply age.

Read more at Science Daily