Chimps Throw Stones at Trees in Mysterious New Behavior

In behavior never before seen, chimpanzees in West Africa have been filmed picking up stones and throwing them at trees, all the while making “hooting” vocalizations.

The resulting accumulation of stones either next to or in the hollows of the trees has created a new puzzle for chimp researchers:


Chimp stone throwing compilation from laura kehoe on Vimeo.

 Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) made the discovery with the help of camera traps, placed after field teams noticed piles of stones next to trees at some of their dozens of research sites.

The behavior was exhibited primarily by adult male chimps, but the scientists said some females and juveniles were also seen throwing the stones.

Data on these observations have just been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This study reports a new chimpanzee behavior not known,” said Christophe Boesch, a study co-author from the MPI-EVA, in a press release. “As the stone accumulation behavior does not seem to be linked to either the abundance of stones or the availability of suitable trees in an area, it is likely that it has some cultural elements.”

Chimps are known to use tools when foraging for food, such as using sticks to poke around for termites or to extract honey or ants. They’ll also use stone or wooden “hammers” to smash nuts open.

But the researchers say the stone-throwing activity doesn’t seem to have anything to do with foraging.

“This represents the first record of repeated observations of individual chimpanzees exhibiting stone tool use for a purpose other than extractive foraging at what appear to be targeted trees,” the authors of the study wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

520-Million-Year-Old Nervous System Found

A fossil of a 520-million-year-old animal is so well preserved that its individual nerve fibers are still visible, according to a new study on the crustacean-like creature that once lived in southern China.

The fossil represents the oldest and most detailed central nervous system ever found, reports the study, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The vast majority of fossils only reveal bone and other hard body parts, such as teeth, since the nervous system and soft tissues are essentially made of fatty-like substances that degrade over time.

"This is a unique glimpse into what the ancestral nervous system looked like," study co-author Javier Ortega-Hernández of the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology said of the fossil in a press release. "It's the most complete example of a central nervous system from the Cambrian period."

The animal, Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis, lived during a key part of Earth’s history known as the Cambrian explosion, a time during which rapid evolutionary development took place. At this time about a half billion years ago, most major animal groups first appear in the fossil record.

C. kunmingensis was a type of animal known as a fuxianhuiid, and was an early ancestor of modern insects, spiders and crustaceans.

Its nervous system featured a nerve cord running throughout its body. The nerve cord was similar to the spinal cord that we and many other organisms have today. Bead-like ganglia, or bundles of nerve cells, controlled the animal's single pair of walking legs.

Ortega-Hernández and his team closely examined the exceptionally preserved ganglia and discovered dozens of spindly fibers, each measuring about five thousandths of a millimeter in length.

“These delicate fibers displayed a highly regular distribution pattern, and so we wanted to figure out if they were made of the same material as the ganglia that form the nerve cord,” he explained. “Using fluorescence microscopy, we confirmed that the fibers were in fact individual nerves, fossilized as carbon films, offering an unprecedented level of detail. These fossils greatly improve our understanding of how the nervous system evolved.”

The researchers found that some aspects of the creature's nervous system are similar to that of modern velvet worms and penis worms, which really do resemble the male sexual organ. All of these animals have regularly spaced nerves that emanate from the central nerve cord.

Conversely, dozens of these nerves were independently lost over evolutionary time in many living animals including water bears, which are eight-legged segmented water-dwelling organisms that are so tiny that scientists refer to them as "micro-animals." The loss of the nerves over time in many species suggests that simplification played an important role in the evolution of the nervous system.

Read more at Discovery News

Mummified Sailor Found on Ghost Vessel

A mummified sailor has been found floating aboard a ghost yacht which could have drifted for years in the Pacific Ocean, according to a Philippine police report.

The naturally mummified body of German adventurer Manfred Fritz Bajorat, 59, was found by two fishermen who spotted a battered vessel in the Philippine Sea about 60 miles from Barabo.

“A white yacht floating with a destroyed sail prompted them to enter the boat to verify further,” the Barobo Police Station said in a Facebook post.

Certificates found on the vessel revealed Bajorat and his wife Claudia crossed the equator aboard another ship, the Hyundai Renaissance in 2008.

In that year, however, the couple split. Bajorat continued his round-the-world sail alone; Claudia died from cancer in 2010.

The mummy is estimated to be between one year and seven years old. It’s yet unknown how long the dead mariner had been sailing on his yacht: sightings of him have not been reported since 2009.

A yachtsman told the German magazine Bild that he met Bajorat in Mallorca in 2009.

“He was a very experienced sailor. I don’t believe he would have sailed into a storm. I believe the mast broke after Manfred was already dead,” he told Bild.

Forensic examiners said natural mummification occurred because dry ocean winds, hot temperatures and salty air helped preserve the body. Post-mortem examination found no evidence of foul play, so it is believed Bajorat had died of natural causes.

The final position in which the body was mummified suggests Bajorat possibly succumbed to a heart attack.

German officials are trying to trace any relatives in the hope they can help reconstruct the circumstances and time of death.

From Discovery News

7-Year-Old Finds Ancient Figurine in Israel

Seven-year-old Ori Greenhut was hiking up an archaeological mound in Israel when he came across a huge stone. On closer inspection, the youngster saw a face staring back at him.

What he found on the Tel Rehov mound completely stunned him and his friends. Just beneath the soil, they discovered a 3,400-year-old clay figurine with a portrait of a naked woman. It has since been compared by antiquity authorities to figurines from the Canaanite culture of the 15th to 13th centuries BCE.

“Ori returned home with the impressive figurine and the excitement was great,” Ori’s mother, Moriya Greenhut, said in a statement. “We explained to him this is an ancient artifact and that archaeological finds belong to the State.”

The Greenhut family turned palm-sized figurine over to the Israel Antiquities Authority. The clay figurine is believed to have been made by pressing soft clay into a mold.

“Some researchers think the figure depicted here is that of a real flesh and blood woman, and others view her as the fertility goddess Astarte, known from Canaanite sources and from the Bible,” Amihai Mazar, professor emeritus at Hebrew University and expedition director of the archaeological excavations at Tel Rehov who examined the figurine, said in a statement.

“It is highly likely that the term trafim mentioned in the Bible indeed refers to figurines of this kind,” Mazar said. “Evidently the figurine belonged to one of the residents of the city of Rehov, which was then ruled by the central government of the Egyptian pharaohs.”

From Discovery News

Leap Year: Why You Can Thank Julius Caesar

Today is Feb. 29 — the bissextle or “leap day,” an artifact that dates back to the year 46 B.C.

Back then, Julius Caesar took the advice of the learned astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria, who knew from Egyptian experience that the tropical year (also known as the solar year) was about 365.25 days in length. So to account for that residual quarter of a day, an extra day — a leap day — was added to the calendar every four years.

This new “Julian” calendar was used throughout the Roman Empire and by various Christian churches. At that time, February was the last month of the year.

Initially, in order to make a proper transition from the Roman calendar (which had 355 days and which was basically a lunar calendar) to the Julian calendar, and to get the months and various feast days and holidays back into their normal seasons, 90 extra days were inserted into the year 46 B.C. Caesar divided these 90 extra days into three temporary months.

One month was added between February and March. Two other months (Intercalaris Prior and Intercalaris Posterior) were added after November. The end result was a year that was 15 months and 445 days long, and was nicknamed Annus Confusionus — the Year of Confusion.

Then, to honor his contribution to timekeeping, Julius Caesar later renamed the fifth month (formerly known as Quintilis) after himself (July). See what sweeping changes you can make when you’re an emperor?

Flawed timetable

The Julian calendar worked so well at first that many countries adopted it. Unfortunately, it was flawed, being 0.0078 of a day (about 11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year.

So, the Julian calendar introduced an error of one day every 128 years, which means that, every 128 years, the tropical year shifts one day backward with respect to the calendar. This made the method for calculating the dates for Easter inaccurate.

As a result, by the year 1582 — thanks to the overcompensation of observing too many leap years — the calendar had fallen out of step with the solar year by a total of 10 days. It was then that Pope Gregory XIII stepped in and, with the advice of a German Jesuit mathematician and astronomer named Christopher Clavius, produced our current Gregorian calendar.

First, to catch things up, 10 days were omitted after Thursday, Oct. 4, 1582, making the next day Friday, Oct. 15. This edict was most unpopular; many people felt that 10 days had been taken from their lives. There were riots in the streets throughout Europe, and workers demanded their 10 days’ pay — forgetting, conveniently, that they hadn’t worked those 10 days! Thankfully, the hubbub eventually died down.

Next, to more closely match the length of the tropical year, “century years” were declared not to be leap years (though they had been leap years in the old Julian calendar). The exceptions were those century years divisible by 400.

And that’s why the year 2000 was a leap year, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not.

Some couldn’t let go

The Gregorian calendar, however, was not adopted by the American Colonies until 1752. That’s why George Washington was not born on Washington’s Birthday.

In our time, we celebrate Washington’s Birthday on Feb. 22. But the United States’ first president was born in 1732 — and by that time, the error in the Julian calendar had increased to 11 days. So a calendar hanging on the wall where Washington was born would have read Feb. 11, 1732.

And if you think the 20 years that it took the American Colonies to finally ratify the Gregorian calendar was a long time, that was nothing compared to Russia, which finally accepted calendar reformation in 1918.

And Greece held out even longer — all the way to 1923!

The Gregorian calendar has proven to be far superior to the Julian calendar. Over a span of one year, it runs 26 seconds too fast, but that’s an error so slight that it will not be necessary to eliminate a day from the calendar until around the year 5300.

Suggested ‘improvements’

Still, some people would like to see our calendar changed yet again. One of the more popular proposals is the World Calendar created by Elisabeth Achelis of The World Calendar Association in 1930.

The World Calendar consists of 364 days. The year would be divided into four quarters, with each quarter consisting of three months. The first month of each new quarter (January, April, July and October) would have 31 days and would always begin on a Sunday. All the remaining months would have just 30 days.

In such a setup, each date would fall on the same day of the week every year. So if you were born on a Tuesday, your birthday would always fall on a Tuesday. Independence Day would always fall on a Wednesday; Christmas Day would be a Monday; and Thanksgiving would finally have a fixed date: Nov. 23, since the fourth Thursday in November on the World Calendar would always be on that date.

Triskaidekaphobes likely would not like this new setup; it would mean four Friday the 13ths every year. (Currently, the maximum number for any given year is three.)

But wait! This is a 364-day calendar. What happens to day 365? And what about leap years?

Dec. 31 would be recognized as “Worldsday” (a world holiday). It would come between Saturday, Dec. 30 and Sunday, Jan. 1. As for leap years, the extra day would be inserted not at the end of February as it is now, but at the end of June. June 31 would thus become a second World Holiday; like the Olympics, it would be celebrated every four years.

In the Jan. 17, 2016, issue of Parade magazine, Marilyn vos Savant answered a question from a reader who wanted to know if there were a “less clunky” alternative to our present calendar.

Read more at Discovery News

Will Climate Change Boost Mosquito-Borne Disease?

The immense amount of coverage of the Zika virus outbreak has focused attention on the health care situation in Brazil, particularly with the Rio Olympics almost upon us. Most recently, U.S. women’s soccer goalkeeper Hope Solo has said that, because of the virus, she is unsure about whether she will participate in the games.

A recent PBS Frontline report showed how Zika strained the country’s health care system — the largest in the world — which was already overwhelmed by a huge increase in two other mosquito-borne illnesses: dengue fever and chikungunya. Pouring gasoline on the fire is an economic crisis resulting in fewer doctors and nurses to a combat greater numbers of cases.

And of course, it isn’t just Brazil. The spread of Zika across the Americas has prompted the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency.

One of the questions raised about the outbreak is whether climate change is involved. After all, it has to varying degrees also been implicated in the spread of other mosquito-borne diseases. There have been big increases in cases of West Nile Virus and dengue in the United States, while chikungunya has recently been reported in western Europe.

And if climate change is responsible, it’s easy to understand why. As temperatures around the country rise, the areas that are conducive to such mosquitoes could expand, and the insects could start to emerge earlier in the year, meaning more opportunities for bites that could spread disease. It’s notable that the 2012 West Nile Virus outbreak in the United States followed an unseasonably warm late, spring, summer and early fall. But within that overall trend, there some nuance.

For example, temperatures more conducive to mosquitoes won’t necessarily mean conditions that are more conducive to the pathogens they transmit. There are a lot of Aedes aegeypti mosquitoes, an invasive species, in Arizona, but no dengue fever, which they often carry. It’s possible that because A. aegypti thrives in environments that are moist as well as warm, Arizona’s desert climate doesn’t allow the mosquito to live long enough for the dengue parasite to go through its full life cycle.

So, as climate change increases drought in some areas, should those places cross dengue fever off their lists of things to be worried about? Not so fast, because as with many diseases, human behavior also plays a role. Because A. aegypti often breed in containers used for household water storage, and because the need for such water storage containers will increase in areas projected to be more prone to drought as climate continues to change, there may ultimately be more opportunities for dengue-carrying mosquitoes in arid environments.

There are other factors, as well. Australia, for example, has seen increased cases of the Ross River Virus, which is the most common mosquito-borne disease in that country. And while climate may be part of the reason for this increase, so too are land-use changes: Newly-constructed wetlands in urban fringe areas are increase mosquito habitat, and efforts to control foxes in those areas have led to increases in wallabies. This is significant because in order to become vectors of the virus, mosquitoes must first bite an infected animal, normally a wallaby or kangaroo.

The Ross River Virus issue is a little different, because it’s an Australian disease that may be increasing its range within that country. The likes of dengue and chikungunya are appearing in countries far from where they have traditionally been found. And a big part of the reason for that is that people have brought them there.

Read more at Discovery News

Major Jurassic Fossil Site Found in Argentina

Paleontologists in Argentina have announced the discovery of a major Jurassic-era fossil site four years after it was first discovered.

The site, which spans 23,000 square miles in Patagonia in southern Argentina, came to light this week with the publication of a report in the journal Ameghiniana.

“No other place in the world contains the same amount and diversity of Jurassic fossils,” said geologist Juan Garcia Massini of the Regional Center for Scientific Research and Technology Transfer (CRILAR).

The fossils — between 140 and 160 million years old — lie on the surface because they were recently exposed by erosion, said Garcia Massini, who leads the research team investigating the site.

“You can see the landscape as it appeared in the Jurassic — how thermal waters, lakes and streams as well as plants and other parts of the ecosystem were distributed,” he said.

The fossils were preserved almost immediately, in less than a day in some cases.

“You can see how fungi, cyanobacteria and worms moved when they were alive,” Garcia Massini said of the site that lies along the Deseado Massif mountain range.

Ignacio Escapa of the Egidio Feruglio Paleontology Museum said the researchers had found “a wide range of micro and macro-organisms.”

The fossils are so well preserved, that researchers say each rock extracted from the site could possibly open the door to a new discovery.

From Discovery News

Gravitational Waves: Spying the Universe's 'Dark Side'

The Feb. 11 announcement that scientists had, for the first time, proof that space itself vibrates is expected to unleash a bevy of discoveries about things that go bump in the proverbial darkness.

The initial detection of so-called gravitational waves occurred in September when a pair of black holes, each about 30 times more massive than the sun, spiraled in toward each other and then merged into a new, larger black hole more than 1.3 billion light years away.

In a flash, the crash released the equivalent of 50 times the energy of all the stars in the universe, powerful enough to ever-so-slightly jiggle L-shaped, 2.5 mile-long laser beams on Earth that comprise the heart of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.

LIGO observatories in Louisiana and Washington had just been upgraded when the detection was made. Scientists spent months verifying the gravitational waves’ footprint, which changed the length of the laser light arms an amount 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a proton. Meanwhile, LIGO continued to monitor for other space-shaking cosmic booms.

“Before this, we didn’t even know that black holes existed in pairs,” University of Florida physicist David Reitze, now serving as LIGO director at the California Institute of Technology, told the House Science Committee last week.

“It’s the start of a new astronomy,” added Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist David Shoemaker.

The LIGO detectors collected data for another three months, then shut down to prepare for an even larger boost in sensitivity.

Additional findings have yet to be released, but Louisiana State University physicist Gabriela González, a spokeswoman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, hinted to legislators that the detection of the merging black holes was not a solitary event.

“We saw one event in one month … so we can only predict from that data. But we have taken data for three more months, which we are still analyzing and everything that we see is consistent with what we saw there,” Gonzalez said.

From theoretical models, scientists expect to be able to detect at least a few gravitational wave events per year, she added.

Merging black holes aren’t the cosmic events likely to vibrate the fabric of space and time.

Scientists are hopeful that LIGO will sense the rumblings of neutron stars, which are the dense remnants of collapsed stars so packed with matter that a single teaspoon would weigh 10 million tons.

Typically, neutron stars are magnetized and spinning, though how that works is not fully understood. They also can exist in pairs, giving scientists an opportunity to detect not only gravitational waves set off by their interactions, but X-ray, radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation they produce.

“We can put together all this information … and know more than we could have ever known without gravitational waves or without this combination, this synergy of information,” Shoemaker said.

LIGO also may be able to ferret out supernova explosions, collapsing stars, cosmic strings and even what Shoemaker calls “defects” in the interwoven fabric of spacetime.

“There certainly will be surprises. Every time we open up a new window to the universe, we see new things,” Shoemaker said.

By the time LIGO returns to work late this summer or early fall, it may be joined by the first of several planned laser interferometers outside the United States.

Virgo, a French- and Italian-backed project, located near Pisa in Italy, will add a third ear to detect and verify gravitational waves and pinpoint their source.

Virgo also will serve as a backup if either of twin U.S. LIGO detectors is offline. Having at least two simultaneous detections is key to being able to rule out possible terrestrial sources of vibrations.

Read more at Discovery News

Tetraquarks: New four-flavor particle discovered

Scientists have discovered a new particle -- the latest member to be added to the exotic species of particle known as tetraquarks.

Scientists on the DZero collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab have discovered a new particle -- the latest member to be added to the exotic species of particle known as tetraquarks.

Quarks are point-like particles that typically come in packages of two or three, the most familiar of which are the proton and neutron (each is made of three quarks). There are six types, or "flavors," of quark to choose from: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. Each of these also has an antimatter counterpart.

Over the last 60 years, scientists have observed hundreds of combinations of quark duos and trios.

In 2008 scientists on the Belle experiment in Japan reported the first evidence of quarks hanging out as a foursome, forming a tetraquark. Since then physicists have glimpsed a handful of different tetraquark candidates, including now the recent discovery by DZero -- the first observed to contain four different quark flavors.

DZero is one of two experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron collider. Although the Tevatron was retired in 2011, the experiments continue to analyze billions of previously recorded events from its collisions.

As is the case with many discoveries, the tetraquark observation came as a surprise when DZero scientists first saw hints in July 2015 of the new particle, called X(5568), named for its mass -- 5568 megaelectronvolts.

"At first, we didn't believe it was a new particle," says DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov. "Only after we performed multiple cross-checks did we start to believe that the signal we saw could not be explained by backgrounds or known processes, but was evidence of a new particle."

And the X(5568) is not just any new tetraquark. While all other observed tetraquarks contain at least two of the same flavor, X(5568) has four different flavors: up, down, strange and bottom.

"The next question will be to understand how the four quarks are put together," says DZero co-spokesperson Paul Grannis. "They could all be scrunched together in one tight ball, or they might be one pair of tightly bound quarks that revolves at some distance from the other pair."

Four-quark states are rare, and although there's nothing in nature that forbids the formation of a tetraquark, scientists don't understand them nearly as well as they do two- and three-quark states.

This latest discovery comes on the heels of the first observation of a pentaquark -- a five-quark particle -- announced last year by the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

Scientists will sharpen their picture of the quark quartet by making measurements of properties such as the ways X(5568) decays or how much it spins on its axis. Like investigations of the tetraquarks that came before it, the studies of the X(5568) will provide another window into the workings of the strong force that holds these particles together.

Read more at Science Daily

Black holes banish matter into cosmic voids

Distribution of dark matter, with a width and height of 350 million light-years and a thickness of 300000 light years. Galaxies are found in the small, white, high-density dots.

We live in a universe dominated by unseen matter, and on the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Thought to be almost empty until now, a group of astronomers based in Austria, Germany and the United States now believe these dark holes could contain as much as 20% of the 'normal' matter in the cosmos and that galaxies make up only 1/500th of the volume of the universe. The team, led by Dr Markus Haider of the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, publish their results in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Looking at cosmic microwave radiation, modern satellite observatories like COBE, WMAP and Planck have gradually refined our understanding of the composition of the universe, and the most recent measurements suggest it consists of 4.9% 'normal' matter (i.e. the matter that makes up stars, planets, gas and dust), or 'baryons', whereas 26.8% is the mysterious and unseen 'dark' matter and 68.3% is the even more mysterious 'dark energy'.

Complementing these missions, ground-based observatories have mapped the positions of galaxies and, indirectly, their associated dark matter over large volumes, showing that they are located in filaments that make up a 'cosmic web'. Haider and his team investigated this in more detail, using data from the Illustris project, a large computer simulation of the evolution and formation of galaxies, to measure the mass and volume of these filaments and the galaxies within them.

Illustris simulates a cube of space in the universe, measuring some 350 million light years on each side. It starts when the universe was just 12 million years old, a small fraction of its current age, and tracks how gravity and the flow of matter changes the structure of the cosmos up to the present day. The simulation deals with both normal and dark matter, with the most important effect being the gravitational pull of the dark matter.

When the scientists looked at the data, they found that about 50% of the total mass of the universe is in the places where galaxies reside, compressed into a volume of 0.2% of the universe we see, and a further 44% is in the enveloping filaments. Just 6% is located in the voids, which make up 80% of the volume.

But Haider's team also found that a surprising fraction of normal matter -- 20% -- is likely to be have been transported into the voids. The culprit appears to be the supermassive black holes found in the centres of galaxies. Some of the matter falling towards the holes is converted into energy. This energy is delivered to the surrounding gas, and leads to large outflows of matter, which stretch for hundreds of thousands of light years from the black holes, reaching far beyond the extent of their host galaxies.

Apart from filling the voids with more matter than thought, the result might help explain the missing baryon problem, where astronomers do not see the amount of normal matter predicted by their models.

Read more at Science Daily