Firefighter Gets Face Transplant

More than 100 doctors, nurses and medical support staff took part in the 26-hour operation on August 14-15 at the NYU Langone Medical Center after more than a year of preparation, it said.

The recipient was Patrick Hardison, 41, from Senatobia, Mississippi who suffered extensive facial burns as a volunteer firefighter, just days before the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Hardison was severely disfigured when the roof of a burning home collapsed on top of him during a rescue search. He lost his eyelids, ears, lips, most of his nose, hair and eyebrows.

Eduardo Rodriquez led the surgery to give Hardison a new face, scalp, ears, ear canals, and selected portions of bone from the chin, cheeks, and nose, the medical center said.

He was given new eyelids and muscles that control blinking, as he was previously unable to shut his eyes completely, it added.

Hardison came to Rodriguez after more than 70 previous surgeries after a fellow fire fighter in Mississippi wrote to the doctor who performed an earlier face transplant in Maryland in 2012.

But he had to wait more than a year for a donor, someone with the right age, height, weight, skin and hair color and similar bone structure, and whose family would agree.

- Great risk -

That suddenly happened in August, when David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old award-winning BMX cyclist who lived in Brooklyn, died in a road accident. His mother agreed to organ donation.

NYU Langone met the $850,000 to $1 million cost of Hardison’s preparatory, surgical and rehabilitative care, similar to the cost of a liver transplant, said Rodriguez.

The doctor said he gave Hardison a 50:50 chance of success, because he wanted him to understand the “great risk in being listed for this experimental procedure.”

“This is not an operation for everyone, it’s for very courageous individuals,” he told a news conference.

Face transplants have become increasingly common since the first, partial face transplant was carried out by doctors in France in 2005 on a woman who had been mauled by her dog.

In March, Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron University Hospital said it had carried out what it called the world’s most complex face transplant, reconstructing two thirds of the lower face of a 45-year-old man terribly disfigured by disease.

The same hospital in 2010 carried out the world’s first full face transplant on a man who suffered an accident that left him without a nose and deformed his jaw and cheekbones.

Rodriguez said the New York operation would make future transplants safer and with better results, and proved that the entire scalp can be transplanted with the face.

- Medication for life -

The transplant of eyelids, in particular, “provides a great hope for individuals missing eyelids with vision,” he said.

Rodriguez also said it was the most facial tissue that had been transplanted, stressing that removing all Hardison’s damaged tissue was vital to making the results as normal as possible.

“I am deeply grateful to my donor and his family,” Hardison said in a statement released by the medical center. “I hope they see in me the goodness of their decision. I also want to thank Dr. Rodriguez and his amazing team. They have given me more than a new face. They have given me a new life.”

Read more at Discovery News

Strange Stellar Spirals Could Hide Baby Exoplanets

Artist's illustration of a protoplanetary disc and a young star. Can we spot giant planets from the patterns in spirals?

When planets are in the process of being born, they grow from clouds of gas and dust surrounding their young star. However, penetrating this dense region to see planets coming to be, or to understand if planets outside of the dust are influencing them, is a difficult task.

To face this challenge, new research has found that some spiral patterns in the dust could, however, be evidence of huge planets swimming in its midst.

Scientists observed a protoplanetary disc around star MWC 758, using the ground-based Very Large Telescope. They found a spiral pattern that could suggest a planet lurking nearby. It's about 1.7 times the mass of our sun and only 8 million years old, a youngster compared to the sun's 4.5 billion years. The planet is believed to be outside the arms at about five times Neptune's equivalent distance from the sun.

"Our model with a 10 Jupiter mass planet is the best (and I would say the only) model so far to be able to account for all the major aspects of the arms as seen in the observations," wrote lead author Ruobing Dong, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, in an e-mail to Discovery News. "Also, in such a young system, it is quite reasonable to believe there are giant planets currently forming. 10 Jupiter mass planets have been found around other (much older) stars, for example HR 8799."

A protoplanetary disc around MWC 758, a young star, based on observations from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The spiral arms are each about 10 billion miles long, or more than three times the diameter of Neptune's orbit.

The challenge is these features are hard to spot. You need to be able to see extremely fine detail, which can only be achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope and a few 8-meter ground based telescopes, Dong said. Worse, the light from the star can wash out the details in the disc. Adaptive optics on Earth can help account for that, but such a system to reduce the star's glare does not exist on Hubble.

The James Webb Space Telescope, which launches in 2018, should "in principle" be able to block out the light of the star and perhaps be able to better see these features than Hubble. The challenge, however, is it observes at longer wavelengths of light than Hubble and ground-based telescope, which makes the resolution more blurry. "Without carrying out detailed simulations to examine the predicted performance of JWST in this sort of observations, I would just say it might (work), but not sure," he added.

But if we were to see better in these systems, it would complement all the Kepler space telescope observations of older stars that we already have in hand. We would understand more about the older stars' history by looking at the youngsters, Dong said, using the analogy of observing business mogul (and presidential candidate) Donald Trump today versus when he was a child.

This computer model attempts to duplicate the structure seen in MWC 758. The "X" marked in the picture is where a planet supposedly lurks, unseen among all the dust and creating the arms.

"You don’t know what kind of baby he was when he was two years old," Dong said. "Did he cry a lot? Was he friendly to his playmates in day care? What kind of fairy tales did he like? In one sentence, Kepler finds 70-year-old Trumps, while the significance of our research is that we want to find baby Trumps."

The shape of the arms tells us about the mass of the planet, which they estimate is about 10 times the size of Jupiter. A smaller planet would be too weak to make the arms the shape that we see, according to the simulations, while a larger planet should already have been spotted in the disc, dusty as it is. Dong allowed, however, that there is some uncertainty in the calculations and the planet could be a slightly different mass than predicted.

Read more at Discovery News

1700-Year-Old Mosaic Floor Unveiled in Israel

Israel’s Antiquities Authority unveiled Monday an impressive mosaic that paved the courtyard pavement of a magnificent villa some 1,700 years ago.

Measuring 36 feet by 42 feet, the colorful mosaic was unearthed in the central Israeli city of Lod last year during the construction of a visitor center for the Lod Mosaic, one of the most spectacular artwork in the country that was discovered two decades ago in the same place. It covered the villa’s living room.

“The villa was part of a neighborhood of affluent houses that stood here during the Roman and Byzantine periods,” Amir Gorzalczany, excavation director, said in a statement.

“At that time Lod was called Diospolis and was the district capital, until it was replaced by Ramla after the Muslim conquest. The building was used for a very long time,” he added.

The new mosaic features scenes of hunting and hunted animals, fish, flowers in baskets, vases and birds.

“The quality of the images indicates a highly developed artistic ability,” Gorzalczany said.

Currently on display at the Cini Gallery in Venice, Italy, the Lod Mosaic has been exhibited in recent years in some of the world’s leading museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg.

It will return to Lod after the visitors’ center is finished.

The part of the villa containing the new mosaic will also be incorporated in the new display.

From Discovery News

500-Year-Old Church Found in Slave Trade Settlement

Archaeologists have uncovered a 500-year-old church that may be the oldest known European Christian church in the tropics.

Deformed by floods and possibly visited by famed naturalist Charles Darwin, the church had been built by Portuguese colonizers in Cidade Velha, the former capital of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. The historic settlement was recently made a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There are upward of 1,000 bodies, many of them likely slaves, buried underneath the nave of the church. For hundreds of years, Cape Verde was a place where African slaves were held and sold before being sent to Portugal and the Americas. That ugly industry made Cidade Velha, at its peak, the second richest city in the Portuguese empire.

Darwin’s most famous stop during his long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle may have been the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. But his first port of call was a different volcanic archipelago that was uninhabited until the 15th century: Cape Verde.

Darwin was unimpressed with what he saw. However, among his disparaging remarks about Cape Verde and its people, he mentions visiting the ruins of a church:

"This little town, before its harbour was filled up, was the principal place in the island: it now presents a melancholy, but very picturesque appearance. Having procured a black Padre for a guide, and a Spaniard who had served in the Peninsular war as an interpreter, we visited a collection of buildings, of which an ancient church formed the principal part. It is here the governors and captain-generals of the islands have been buried. Some of the tombstones recorded dates of the sixteenth century. The heraldic ornaments were the only things in this retired place that reminded us of Europe. The church or chapel formed one side of a quadrangle, in the middle of which a large clump of bananas were growing. On another side was a hospital, containing about a dozen miserable-looking inmates."

Over the last year, archaeologists from Cambridge University have revealed a ruined church in what may be the first major excavations to take place at Cape Verde. Christopher Evans, director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, thinks the church is likely the same one that Darwin described.

For a city built on the slave trade, Cidade Velha had a lot of Christian churches. The newly revealed building, which probably could have fit about 75 people, was just one of about two dozen churches and chapels in the small river valley where Cidade Velha is located, Evans said.

"Religion was an integral part of early Portuguese colonialism," Evans told Live Science. "People were competitively building churches. You also have religious orders establishing themselves in the early 16th century, and Cidade Velha becomes the seat of the bishopric of Africa."

Slaves may not have been excluded from religious life in Cape Verde. Already, isotope analyses of teeth suggest that many of the people buried under the church were African, and likely slaves.

"The fact that they're getting a church burial could be evidence that converting the slaves to Christianity meant something," Evans said. Further investigation of the bones could reveal more about the work conditions and the diets of the slaves, shedding light on slavery in a late medieval context.

While the main church was built during the decade straddling 1500, there are some early stone foundations from a Gothic chapel that date back to around 1470, which would make it the earliest building on the Cape Verde islands, Evans said.

Since the colonizers were the first people to inhabit the island, they had no knowledge of the local environment, and they made some critical mistakes when building the church. First, they built it on top of a seasonal stream course. Second, the church was located at the bend of a river. These factors made the building vulnerable to flash floods, and the church had to be rebuilt twice in the 16th and 17th centuries, Evans said.

Read more at Discovery News

'Blood Rain' on Spanish Village Remains a Mystery

Here’s one that sounds like a plot line from the upcoming reboot of “The X-Files” — or for a more arcane reference — the files of Charles Fort, the early 20th Century author who collected accounts of bizarre occurrences.

Last year, residents of the Spanish village of Zamora were startled when what looked like raindrops of blood fell from the sky. As the red fluid filled outdoor basins, some people reportedly feared that it was some sort of hazardous chemical that had been dropped from airplanes. Others remembered the Old Testament plagues afflicted upon Egypt.

As news of the strange event got around, a man from a nearby town came to see the blood-colored water for himself, and gathered a sample of it. Over the fall and winter, he kept the blood-colored water and observed it. He noticed that the small particles in the water were staining the containers red. Finally, he sent some of the water to scientists at the University of Salamanca.

When the scientists analyzed the water under a microscope, they quickly deduced what was causing the red liquid. In a newly-published study in Spanish Royal Society of Natural History Journal, they reveal that the culprit is Haematococcus pluvialis, a freshwater green microalgae that’s capable of synthesizing a red carotene pigment called astaxanthin.

But that only solves part of the mystery. Haematococcus pluvialis isn’t usually found in the Mediterranean region, so the scientists aren’t sure how it got into the rainfall over Zamora. Meteorological data analyzed by the scientists suggests that it could have been blown across the ocean by westerly winds, possibly from as far away as North America.

The blood rain is rare, but  isn’t unprecedented. According to an article in the Hindu, an Indian newspaper, since the 1890s there have been sporadic reports of similar rainfall in the south Indian state of Kerala and the neighboring island nation of Sri Lanka, most recently in 2013.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Phylogenetics and Evolutionary Biology pointed to a different microalgae, Trentepohlia annulata, as the source. That species had previously been reported only in Austria. Scientists theorize that it somehow spreads through exchanges between ocean clouds, and that the rain is part of its very weird reproductive process.

From Discovery News

Look Up! The Hunt for Leonid Meteors Is On

I recall it well: It was November 1999 and I had wrapped myself up in as many layers as I could and come midnight, I was out under a dark, clear sky with temperatures plummeting. Comfort was my watchword for the night, so I relaxed on a sun lounger, wrapped up and toasty warm in preparation for a long night's observing.

I remember seeing the Milky Way glistening away to the south and the moon was out of sight. The view that greeted me was one that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately, this year’s Leonid meteor shower will likely not be as spectacular as the one I saw in 1999 when a meteor erupted overhead every few seconds. The shower peaks every year around Nov. 17 and 18 and is the result of an interaction between the Earth and remnants of the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The comet travels around the sun and completes an orbit once every 33 years and, as it hurtles around the solar system, it leaves dusty debris along its orbit like a celestial trail of bread crumbs.

When Earth passes through the comet debris, which it does every year, the remnants of Tempel-Tuttle get swept up. If this happens to coincide with a recent passage of the comet then we can encounter storm levels of activity, igniting an impressive meteor display. Sadly, meteor shower forecasts suggest that we'll have to wait until 2032 for the next great display.

This week, instead of hundreds (or even thousands) of meteors per hour, this year's display is expected to peak at around 15 meteors per hour by the early hours of Wednesday (Nov. 18).

To understand why meteor activity tends to intensify during the hours after midnight, imagine a car travelling down a country road when it encounters a swarm of flies. As the car heads through the unsuspecting insects, they all get splatted by the front of the car. In a similar way, as the Earth plows through the stream of meteors, its the forward facing hemisphere of the Earth that gets the best display of splatted meteors. The Earth's spin makes sure that observers located on the forward facing side of the Earth will get the best view, and this happens in the few hours before dawn.

It's not just Nov. 17/18 that meteors from the Leonid display can be seen, they can be spotted any time from around Nov. 6 until the end of the month. To spot them, you need to wrap up warm, find a location far from any city lights and make yourself comfortable. While the peak is expected in the early hours of the 18th, it's a good idea to also keep an eye out on the 17th too as meteors care little for schedules!

You can tell if you have spotted a meteor from the Leonid shower by tracing its path backwards in the sky and seeing if it came from the constellation Leo -- then you will have bagged your first Leonid meteor. It is best not to look directly toward Leo, the best chances of spotting meteors are when you look either side -- just lie back and try to have an uninterrupted view of the sky. Typically, Leonids are fast, travelling through our atmosphere with speeds in excess of 45 miles (70 kilometers) per second!

Read more at Discovery News

To Find Alien Worlds, First Look at Our Sun

One well-trusted method of finding an exoplanet is to see how much wobble it induces in its parent star. Right now, the state of the art precision for detecting planets a few dozen light-years away via this method is about one meter per second, which is produced by planets more massive than Earth. But if something disturbs the surface of the star — say, a sunspot — this can mess with the measurements and produce false positives.

A team of researchers is hoping to get around this by doing a test study on our own sun. If it works out, their project will allow them to detect Venus orbiting the sun using this “radial velocity” technique. This will be a proof of concept for finding Earth-size or smaller planets around other stars.

“We decided to build an instrument that was able to get radial velocity of the sun as if it was another star,” said Xavier Dumusque, an astrophysicist and data scientist at Geneva Observatory, in an e-mail to Discovery News. He co-led the study with David F. Phillips of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“The sun is extremely close,” he added, “so we can resolve its surface and therefore see the different sunspots on its surface. By comparing resolved images of the sun and the radial velocity obtained with this new instrument, we hope to understand better the effect of sunspots on radial velocity measurements, and find optimal correction techniques applicable to other stars.”

A test run over seven days, using the HARPS-N instrument on a 3.6-meter telescope in Chile, showed promising results. They rigged a solar telescope to pass the sunlight of the entire disc (just like a distant star) into the instrument, which is generally used to hunt exoplanets by night. They then calibrated the light with an “astro-comb”, a device used by spectrographs to detect star wobbles. They plan to repeat this technique during every clear day for the next two to three years.

“The first data obtained with this new instrument show that we reach a precision on the sun of 0.5 meters per second. We are therefore at the precision we wanted,” Dumusque wrote. “We also show that at first order, the radial velocity variation observed on the sun can be estimated using the full disc photometry (the total light emitted by the sun). This is not surprising because sunspots are darker than than the surface of the sun, and therefore induce a variation in photometry.”

To be sure, planets that are Earth’s size and smaller have been detected around small stars very far away from us, usually using the Kepler space telescope — a prolific planet-hunting device. However, this proves a challenge for planets that are much closer to us and orbiting bright stars. Kepler looks at how much the light dims as the planet passes in front of a star. A small planet going across a bright star could slip by unnoticed.

Read more at Discovery News

Dinosaur Puke Fossil Mystery Deepens

A small, unusual skeleton in fossilized dinosaur yak discovered back in 1989 might not be the creature we thought it was after all.

So what actually got caught in this prehistoric upchuck? Italian scientists tackle one heck of a cold case.

When researchers came across a unique fossil in Northern Italy in 1989, they concluded it was dinosaur vomit roughly 220 million years old. The fossil lacked the mineralization that would have put it in the dinosaur poop category — that’s “coprolite” if you want to be technical.

They also identified the bones captured for eternity inside the puke as a tiny winged pterosaur. These reptilian dinosaur cousins evolved into dozens of species, and were the first animals after insects to evolve powered flight, according to the American Museum of Natural History.

Vomit like this, usually from a predator regurgitating indigestible animal parts, is called a “gastric pellet” containing “ejecta.” Owl pellets are basically the same thing, PLOS blogger Andrew Farke pointed out.

Although pterosaurs could range in size from a sparrow to an F-16 fighter jet, the one in Northern Italy was small. And rare. For decades it was “one of the very few cases of gastric ejecta containing pterosaur bones,” the researchers wrote in their recent PLOS ONE journal article. The group included paleontologist Fabio Marco Dalla Vecchia, who worked on the 1989 study.

But closer examination prompted the group to doubt there was a winged pterosaur in the vom. Using an X-ray microCT, they compared the bones with basal pterosaurs and concluded it had to be a different animal. The bones seem like they belonged to a lizard-like protorosaur, only not the same species found in the same rock formation where the puke was discovered.

Read more at Discovery News

Paris Attacks: The Mental Scars of Terrorism

When terrorists strike, as they did in Paris in a coordinated attack orchestrated by the Islamic State that left at least 128 people dead, the events are felt around the world as images and video of the aftermath pour through mass communications channels.

Terrorists choose their targets not based on military or political importance, but rather emotional and visceral impact, as I note in an earlier post. After extremists strike, there are notable behavioral and psychological changes among both victims and observers of terrorist actions.

Behavioral Impacts of a Terrorist Attack

After a terrorist attack, those affected by the assault covet control, according to a study by Vanderbilt University researchers published in September in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

The study analyzed the effects of terrorist attacks on consumer behavior, specifically among those affected by extremist actions in Israel. After all, one of the aims of such actions is to disrupt economic and commercial activity and the researchers found that consumers will change their habits in the wake of a terrorist attack, at times drastically.

For example, as suicide attacks often target restaurants, some of the study’s participants chose to sit near the kitchen when they dined out, creating the possibility of an alternative exit in an attack, a subtle change in otherwise normal behavior. Others, however, quit restaurants entirely for fear of a terrorist attack.

The greater the sense of a loss of control a particular victim or observer feels, the more dramatic the changes in behavior to regain a sense of stability, the researchers found.

The Psychological Toll of Terrorism

The immediate impact of a terrorist attack is physical, claiming lives and causing injuries. But psychological damage quickly follows. As Arieh Shalev, an NYU School of Medicine psychiatry professor, explained in “Treating Survivors in the Acute Aftermath of Traumatic Events (PDF)“:

Shortly after exposure, the traumatic event ceases to be a concrete event and starts to become a psychological event. As such, it has to be metabolized and assimilated, that is, become part of the survivor’s inner network of meanings and experiences.

Traumatic events are not only internalized, but repeatedly recalled, reassessed and progressively assimilated. As a result, early intervention is necessary to help recovery, the author writes.

If left unaddressed, particularly among those who deal with long-term exposure to terrorism, the stress can take a physical toll, according to research published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a study of over 17,000 Israelis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers found that fear of terror was a major contributor to increases in resting heart rate, a predictor of death from cardiovascular disease, stroke and other causes.

Changes in Beliefs

Psychological impacts aren’t limited strictly to victims. A 2013 study published in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences looked at the long-lasting emotional toll of the 2004 Beslan massacre, in which Chechen terrorists took an entire school hostage, a tragedy that ended in the deaths of 385 people.

Victims, relatives and others emotionally connected to an extreme traumatic event suffered severe emotional anguish. In particular, basic beliefs they once held changed. For example, researchers found that among adults, “beliefs in meaningfulness and benevolence of the world were destroyed,” the authors wrote.

Winning the Psychological War?

To the extent that terrorists use violence to elicit a strong emotional and psychological response, they’re effective at the most basic level in inducing mental anguish and affecting some behaviors and beliefs.

Reactions to traumatic events, however, are complicated. Everyone looks to reestablish a sense of security in different ways, and this can often result in affected individuals and observers coming together. Look no further than the global response to the Paris attacks of countries incorporating the colors of the French flag in their landmarks.

On a local level, among those who most closely felt the attack, behavior can sometimes be counterintuitive. Take the example of the reaction of young people in London following the 7/7 bombings in 2005.

According to an article published in the book “Evolutionary Psychology and Terrorism,” attendance at nightclubs in the capital increased that month, a trend not seen elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Rather than locking themselves in their homes to feel secure, young London residents congregated in large numbers in public.

Read more at Discovery News

Mars Rover Finds Rich Mineral Stew in Fractured Rock

Chemical analysis by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity indicates that water made several repeat appearances to create the rich mineral veins at a site called “Garden City” in the lower part of Mount Sharp.

The veins form in places where fluids have move through fractured rocks, depositing minerals and leaving telltale chemical fingerprints on surrounding areas. Some of the mineral veins at Garden City protrude the equivalent of two finger widths above the now-eroded bedrock in which they formed.

The site was not accessible to Curiosity’s drill, but in March the rover zapped 17 targets with its ChemCam laser and discovered a diverse chemical stew.

“I think this has some of the most extreme chemistry that we’ve seen in a very localized area. There’s been other places where we’ve seen very strong chemistry, but in this kind of meter-square area, up until this point I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere with this much variability and this much unexpected chemistry,” Curiosity scientist Diana Blaney, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, told Discovery News.

Many of the veins contain rich deposits of calcium sulfate. Others are laced with magnesium sulfate or fluorine. Levels of iron vary.

The three-mile-high Mount Sharp rises from the floor of a huge impact basin that once held water. The Garden City veins were created after mud in the lake had hardened into rock and cracked.

“At Garden City, because there’s such good preservation and we get the cross-cutting, we’re able to start pulling out some chemical signatures that we saw at different places into distinct fluids. And by looking at the cross-cutting relationships and the difference in chemistries, I think we have really strong evidence that they’re distinct fluid events,” Blaney said.

“We don’t know how far apart in time these different events occurred, or what was driving them,” she added. “I think as we get more information on what it’s going to take to chemically evolve these fluids, we might be able to pin that down.”

Curiosity is scouring Mount Sharp to look for habitats that could have supported past life and for places suitable to preserve organics.

“Veins have a good potential — because it’s a fluid and there is crystallization — to include things as inclusions, but the organic preservation has a lot of factors,” Blaney said.

Read more at Discovery News