Where Blasphemy Carries a Death Sentence

On Thursday, October 13, Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi will face her final appeal in what has been a six-year-long ordeal on the charge of blasphemy. Following an altercation with a Muslim women over water, Bibi insulted the prophet Muhammad, an infraction for which Bibi was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to death by hanging.

If Bibi's sentence is not overturned, she will be the first woman to be executed since blasphemy laws were enacted in Pakistan in the 1980s.

When first created in 1980, the law originally called for a maximum sentence of three years in jail. In 1982, a separate clause was passed calling for life imprisonment for willful desecration of the Quran. In 1986, yet another clause was added recommending the death penalty or life imprisonment for blasphemy against Muhammad, according to the BBC.

Since the 1980s, more than 1,300 have been accused of blasphemy. Scores have been killed as a result, some even before their trials began as a result of vigilante violence. And Pakistan isn't alone in putting people to death for blasphemy.

According to the latest International Humanist and Ethical Union's Freedom of Thought report, 13 countries currently have laws on the books carrying a penalty of death for blasphemy or apostasy. Including Pakistan, the other 13 countries are Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Each of these countries have adopted Islamic law as the ideological foundation of the government.

Because blasphemy law is so subjective, the cases brought up in the various countries that try and execute for insulting religious belief have ranged from egregious to ridiculous.

In 2007, in Sudan, British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons was arrested and interrogated for allegedly insulting Islam after allowing her class of six-year-olds to name a teddy bear "Muhammad." Thousands of protestors took to the streets, calling for Gibbons' execution. It took the intervention of the British government and a presidential pardon from the government of Sudan to get Gibbons out of jail.

In Saudi Arabia, which also puts people to death for "sorcery," usually by beheading, religious authorities issued a fatwa against Pokemon Go, decrying it as blasphemous. "It is shocking that the word 'evolution' has been much on the tongues of children," the fatwa read, according to a Reuters report.

In Iran, an Islamic theocracy, political advocacy can come off as blasphemy, as was the case for Hashem Aghajari, a history professor and disabled war veteran, in 2002 calling for religious reform. His speech garnered massive protests, and Aghajari was tried, convicted and sentenced to death, though following appeals his punishment was reduced to jail time.

Blasphemy laws restrict religious freedom and promote intolerance of minority religions, and for that reason, a United Nations special investigator on religious freedom called for their universal repeal. Although they may not carry a death sentence everywhere, blasphemy laws on the books in about a quarter (26 percent) of the world's countries and territories, according to Pew Research Center.

From Discovery News

A Chunk of India and Eurasia Just Disappeared

Half of the mass of Eurasia and India is missing, new research finds, and may have been swallowed up by the Earth's mantle.

If so, that would be a surprise, as geoscientists thought that continental crust — the kind that makes up major landmasses — was too buoyant to dive down into the mantle, the pliable middle layer of the planet upon which the crust rides.

"It used to be thought that the mantle and the crust interacted only in a relatively minor way," study researcher David Rowley, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. "This work suggests that, at least in certain circumstances, that's not true."

The mystery of the missing crust emerged as Rowley and his colleagues examined the slow-moving collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. These two rafts of continental crust have been bumping against each other for 60 million years, crumpling up to form the Himalayan mountains. The researchers combined multiple data sources to figure out the original size of the two continental plates before they started colliding.

These new calculations, published online Sept. 19 in the journal Nature Geoscience, revealed a strange imbalance. Even after accounting for the ruched bits of crust that climbed upward to form the Himalayas, the excess that squeezed out the sides to form southeast Asia, and the crust that eroded over 60 million years and ended up in the oceans, Rowley and his colleagues couldn't explain where half of the original mass of India and Eurasia went.

That led to an unprecedented conclusion.

"If we've accounted for all possible solutions at the surface, it means the remaining mass must have been recycled wholesale into the mantle," said study researcher Miquela Ingalls, a graduate student in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

Unknown interactions

Continental crust isn't supposed to be able to sink in that way. Geoscientists have long known that dense oceanic crust can be "recycled" into the mantle — this is the geologic process that happens at subduction zones like the one off the coast of California. Oceanic crust slides under less dense continental crust like a conveyer belt and, under pressure, becomes ductile and gooey, mixing in with the mantle.

But because continental crust is so buoyant, researchers thought it acted more like a pool raft: Push it down, and it will just pop back up again.

Read more at Discovery News

Face of Bronze Age Warrior Revealed

The face of a warrior buried in a treasure-packed grave in Greece some 3,500 years ago has now been revealed — and he was a looker.

Dubbed the "Griffin Warrior," from an ivory plaque depicting the mythical beast within his burial, the man featured a broad, handsome face with a square jaw and powerful neck.

Reconstructing the closest possible depiction of the Griffin Warrior was not an easy task, says Tobias Houlton, a specialist in facial reconstruction, who worked on the project with his colleague Lynne Schepartz of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The skull of the man, thought to have been between 30 and 35 when he died around 1500 BC, was in very poor condition.

"It was multi-fragmented, with evident deterioration of the bones across the mid-face, affecting the nasal region and inner eye details," Houlton told Discovery News. "Prior to re-assembly, we were uncertain that a facial reconstruction would be possible," he added.

To reach the best approximation of the warrior's face, Houlton used the so-called Manchester method. The facial tissues are laid from the skull surface outward by using depth marker pegs to determine thickness. The shape, size and position of the eyes, ears, nose and mouth are determined through the features of the underlying skull.

The condition of the skull did not allow Houlton to reconstruct the regions around the eyes and nose.

To compensate, Houlton and Schepartz generated an average face template using a face pool of 50 modern Greek males aged 25-35 years.

"This is the closest possible population group data we can access in relation to the Griffin Warrior. The nose from the template was then used to facilitate the nasal reconstruction and identify the most likely angle of the eyes," Houlton said.

He noted that features such as skin and hair color, which would require DNA information, could only be assumed according to identified trends in Mycenaean and Minoan artifacts.

"We used many types of comparative information, including Mycenaean wall paintings for the hairstyle," Schepartz told Discovery News.

The result is a sturdy man with long black hair, staring from a past that is reminiscent of Homer's epics.

The Griffin Warrior's tomb, measuring about 5 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long, was found near the remains of the fabled Palace of Nestor, who headed a contingent of Greek forces at Troy in Homer's Iliad.

"This is not the grave of the legendary King Nestor, nor is it the grave of his father, Neleus. The warrior predates the time of Nestor and Neleus by, perhaps, 200 or 300 years," Stocker said.

Analysis of beautifully engraved rings found in the tomb revealed the warrior was part of the elite that ruled Pylos right around the time the Mycenaeans were conquering the Minoans, adopting much of their culture.

It is not yet known if the man was a Minoan warrior or a native Mycenaean steeped in Minoan culture.

The lavish contents of the man's grave had hinted at his importance. It was found in the summer of 2015 by Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, a husband-and-wife team from the University of Cincinnati, as they excavated what they believed was an ancient house in Pylos, a city on the southwest coast of Greece.

What they found turned out to be a treasure-packed grave and one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries since the Second World War.

Stretched out on his back, a skeleton lay on the floor of the grave, undisturbed for 3,500 years. A dazzling hoard of more than 2,000 objects surrounded the remains. A bronze sword, with an ivory handle, laced with gold, was placed near the head and chest. Next to it was a gold-handled dagger, while more weapons were scattered around the legs and feet.

A plaque of carved ivory with a depiction of a griffon with huge wings lay between the man's legs and nearby was a bronze mirror with an ivory handle.

Read more at Discovery News

Obama: NASA Will Land on Mars in the 2030s

In a patriotic and emotional op-ed for CNN Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama reaffirmed NASA's aim to land and return astronauts on the Martian surface by the 2030s, "with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time."

To take this next giant leap into interplanetary space, Obama added, NASA will partner with private companies to make this vision a possibility.

"Getting to Mars will require continued cooperation between government and private innovators, and we're already well on our way," he writes. "Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station."

Since NASA's inception, the space agency has contracted private companies to provide hardware for space exploration and NASA currently contracts private space launch companies to deliver equipment and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), invigorating a new race to commercialize space.

Now the space station is, in part, supplied by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and these partnerships are set to continue and expand to the delivery of astronauts to the orbiting outpost. So it may not come as a surprise that NASA will seek partnerships in the private sector to make a Mars mission possible.

Six years ago, on Oct. 11, 2010, Obama signed into law a redirection in NASA's road map to Mars, skipping the moon and developing the technologies to visit an asteroid and then send a human mission to the Red Planet. And in his op-ed, Obama reflects on the achievements NASA has made in the past six years to drive forward investment in the private sector, while boosting the economy and inspiring the nation. But now, NASA aims to push humanity beyond Earth orbit.

"I'm excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space," he writes. "These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth -- something we'll need for the long journey to Mars."

In response to the President's remarks, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said that NASA is primed to test technologies that will allow astronauts to live in space for days or weeks away from Earth, rather than hours.

"For example, in the mid-2020s, NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission will send a robotic spacecraft to a nearby asteroid to test out important exploration technologies such as solar-electric propulsion, conduct scientific and planetary defense experiments, and then return a boulder from the asteroid to an orbit around the Moon for astronauts to study," Bolden writes. The Asteroid Redirect Mission -- known as "ARM" -- will be an opportunity to prepare and refine technologies for missions to Mars and beyond.

In his statement, Bolden provided some detail on what NASA is doing now to make these aims possible, including the "NextSTEP" program that is asking private enterprises to come up with new and innovative designs for space habitats.

In addition, Bolden discussed the possibility of adding a "commercial module" to a special port on the space station in "preparation for one or more future commercial stations in Low Earth Orbit, ready to take over for the Space Station once its mission ends in the 2020s." In response to this challenge, private companies have responded "enthusiastically," he writes.

NASA continues to develop its next powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule that will be used to get astronauts to asteroids and Mars, but in the background, private companies are developing their own, independent plans for getting to Mars.

Read more at Discovery News

Goliath Worms 'Drown' and Then Recover

Manduca sexta caterpillar, also known as a "goliath worm", found in Urbana, Illinois, U.S.

Hefty, bright-green caterpillars sometimes called goliath worms are living up to their moniker: They are so tough, they can survive underwater for hours, scientists have found.

And during their pupa stage — encased in a chrysalis before transforming into adult moths — they can survive for days at a time without surfacing.

Researchers discovered that the hardy caterpillars ofManduca sexta moths could recover after spending as much as 4 hours immersed in water. The pupae were even more resilient, emerging after a five-day soak and showing no long-term ill effects.

Caterpillars are the larvae of moths and butterflies, and many species are known to have extraordinary adaptations during this life stage that help them weather tough conditions or escape threats. Some click, squeak or whistle to scare off attackers, while others rely on defensive barfing. Someuse their poop to send chemical signals that trick plants into lowering their defenses, while others pretend to be poop, to fool predators.

M. sexta larvae, which pupate (grow into an adult) in the ground, face a particularly tough challenge due to seasonal flooding in their desert habitat; how they might overcome that challenge was a question that intrigued study co-author H. Arthur Woods, an entomologist at the University of Montana.

"I've always been really impressed with the torrential rains and flooding that can occur during the summer monsoon rains," Woods told Live Science. "We often saw Manduca habitat that got flooded out for days at a time, and we started to wonder whether and how pupae could survive that water."

Insects experiencing long dunks underwater use one of two mechanisms to survive and recover, Woods said.

One technique involves the insect extracting oxygen from the surrounding water; that requires specialized body parts. Mayflies and damselflies, for example, have a type of gill that connects to the trachea and conveys dissolved oxygen in water into the insect's body, allowing them to breathe even when fully immersed.

The other method involves sealing up the body and getting by without oxygen, a process known as anaerobic metabolism. But this can be risky, Woods said. This type of metabolism produces toxic byproducts, which, at high levels, can poison the insect.

"So usually insects can use anaerobic metabolism for finite periods of time," he said.

To find out M. sexta's strategy for surviving underwater, the researchers immersed caterpillars and the more developed pupae. The caterpillars were able to recover after 4 hours underwater — not too shabby. But pupae were "the champs" at recovery, according to Woods. He and his colleagues found that the submerged pupae didn't draw upon dissolved oxygen, and relied on anaerobic metabolism to keep going when they were underwater, for as long as five days.

What surprised Woods was how long they could do it, and still recover.

In the absence of oxygen, a compound called lactate built up in the M. sexta pupae's cells. This could have had fatal consequences, but the scientists found that M. sexta was capable of quickly metabolizing, or breaking down, the lactate once they were removed from the water.

Read more at Discovery News

Mice Sing Love Songs Like a Jet Engine

Ultra-high pitched mouse squeaks have something in common with the roar of a jet engine. New research finds that the rodents make ultrasound bleeps by creating a small air jet in their windpipes, employing a mechanism previously seen only in jet engines and high-speed subsonic flows.

The ultrasonic whistles are important because rodents use them to sing mating songs and make announcements about their territory. The sounds are too high in frequency to be detected by the human ear.

Until now, though, no one knew exactly how these whistles were produced. Researchers led by biologist Coen Elemans of the University of Southern Denmark used high-speed camera scopes to capture images of the larynxes, or voice boxes, of mice as the animals made their vocalizations. The cameras captured 100,000 frames per second for analysis.

Two competing hypotheses had been put forward to explain how the ultrasonic vocalizations are made. The first suggested that the sounds are the result of superficial vocal-cord vibrations; essentially, air moves through the vocal cords as it would for any typical vocalization. However, the videos showed that the vocal cords weren't vibrating, even superficially.

The second explanation was that mice make the noises by forcing air through two constricted holes in the larynx, much in the same way a tea kettle whistles when steam forces its way through the kettle's openings. To test this, the researchers surgically removed the upper thyroid tissue in the mouse larynx, trying to find the constrictions. The researchers found that removal of this tissue silenced the ultrasonic vocalizations. They then replaced the tissue with a metal plate and found that the mice could again vocalize, without any sort of second constriction. Thus, the tea kettle theory failed to hold up.

What actually happens, Elemans and his colleagues found, is that a small jet of air originates in the windpipe and flows against the inner wall of the larynx. The air waves bounce back from the wall, traveling upstream into the air jet and creating a feedback loop that creates the whistling sound.

"Interestingly, this mechanism is known only to produce sound in supersonic-flow applications, such as vertical takeoff and landing with jet engines, or high-speed subsonic flows, such as jets for rapid cooling of electrical components and turbines," study researcher Anurag Agarwal of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. "Mice seem to be doing something very complicated and clever to make ultrasound."

Read more at Discovery News

Was the secret spice in primal gene soup a thickener?

Gene puddle primeval, a drawing by talented first author Christine He to illustrate her discovery that viscosity moves spontaneous gene strand copying forward.

The original recipe for gene soup may have been simple -- rain, a jumble of common molecules, warm sunshine, and nighttime cooling. Then add a pinch of thickener.

The last ingredient may have helped gene-like strands to copy themselves in puddles for the first time ever, billions of years ago when Earth was devoid of life, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found. Their novel discoveries add to a growing body of evidence that suggests first life may have evolved with relative ease, here and possibly elsewhere in the universe.

And they offer a straightforward answer to a gnawing 50-year-old question: How did precursors to the present-day genetic code first duplicate themselves before the existence of enzymes that are indispensable to that process today?

The spice of life?

For generations, scientists pursuing an answer performed experiments in water but hit a wall.

Georgia Tech researchers Christine He and Isaac Gállego overcame it by adding an off-the-shelf viscous solvent (the thickener). In separate experiments with DNA then RNA, the copying process proceeded.

"I think it's very, very different from anything that's been done before," said researcher He. "We can change the physical environment in an easy way, and promote these processes that wouldn't happen in conditions ordinarily being used."

Easy recipe

Easy is crucial, said Martha Grover, a professor who oversaw the research at Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Easy reactions are likely to be more productive and more prevalent.

"A simple and robust process like this one could have operated in a variety of environments and concentrations making it more realistic in moving evolution forward," she said.

Grover's lab and that of Nick Hud at Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry published the results on Monday, October 10, 2016 in the journal Nature Chemistry. Their research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the NASA Astrobiology Program under the NASA/NSF Center for Chemical Evolution.

Nucleotide noodles

Earliest life was based on RNA, or a similar polymer, according to a hypothesis called the RNA World. In that scenario, on the evolutionary timeline, the self-replication of RNA strands long enough to be potential genes would roughly mark the doorstep to life.

Those long nucleotide chains may have been mixed together in puddles with shorter nucleotide chains. Heat from the sun would have made long strands detach from their helix structures, giving short ones a chance to match up with them, and become their copies.

But there's a problem.

In water alone, when cooling sets in, the long chains snap back into their helix structure so rapidly that there's no time for the matching process with the shorter chains. That snapping shut, which happens in both RNA and DNA, is called "strand inhibition," and in living cells, enzymes solve the problem of keeping the long chains apart while gene strands duplicate.

More like a stew

"The problem is a problem in water, which everybody sort of looks at in prebiotic (pre-life) chemistry," said graduate research assistant He. She felt it was time to rethink that, and her expertise in chemical engineering helped.

High viscosity has been known to slow down the movement of long strands of DNA, RNA and other polymers.

"It's a little like making them swim in honey," Grover said. Applying that to origin-of-life chemistry seemed obvious, because in prebiotic times, there probably were quite a few sticky puddles.

"In that solution, it gives the short nucleotides, which move faster, time to jump onto the long strand and piece together a duplicate of the long strand," researcher He said. In her experiments, it worked.

Hairpins in the soup

And it produced an encouraging surprise. The DNA and RNA strands folded onto themselves forming shapes called hairpins.

"In the beginning, we didn't realize the importance of the internal structure," Christine He said. Then they noticed that the shape was helping keep RNA and DNA available for the pairing process. "Hairpin formation is integral to keeping them open," Grover said.

But it also could have accelerated chemical evolution in another way. "The solution is selecting here for sequences that fold, and that would have more potential for functional activity -- like a ribozyme," said researcher He.

Ribozymes are enzymes made of RNA, and enzymes catalyze biochemical processes. To have them evolve in the same solution that promotes genetic code replication could have shortened the path to first life.

"You really need to amplify functional sequences for evolution to move forward," Grover said. The folds were an unexpected side-effect, and finding them paves the way for future research.

Next ingredient?

The Georgia Tech scientists used real gene strands in their experiments, which may sound mundane, but in the past, some researchers have specially engineered DNA and RNA sequences in attempts to arrive at similar results.

He and Gállego's use of a naturally occurring gene, rather than a specifically engineered sequence, shows that viscosity could have been a very general solution to promote copying of nucleic acids with mixed length and sequences.

To facilitate quick, clear outcomes, the Georgia Tech researchers used purified short nucleotide chains and applied them in ratios that favored productive reactions. But they had started out with messier, less pure ingredients, and the experience was worthwhile.

"Considering a pre-biotic soup, it's probably messy; it's got a lot of impurities," Christine He said. "When we first started out with more impure nucleotides, it still worked. Maybe the same reaction really could have happened in a messy puddle billions of years ago."

The viscous solvent was glycholine, a mixture of glycerol and choline chloride. It was not likely present on pre-biotic Earth, but other viscous solvents likely were.

Read more at Science Daily

Rare Venomous Sea Snake Pops Up in Iranian Waters

Shown is the smallish head of an adult Günther's sea snake.

Off the western coast of the Gulf of Oman, a fishing vessel turned up something curious in its by-catch: A rare, venomous sea snake that was 248 miles (400 kilometers) from where it was supposed to be.

Caught in the haul was a Günther's sea snake (Microcephalophis cantoris), a little-seen aquatic animal thought to inhabit only the waters from the western Malay peninsula to the coasts of Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

The animal was found during a sea snake population survey being performed in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman by a team of Iranian and French scientists.

Almost all sea snakes (Hydrophiinae) live fully aquatic lives. They don't have gills, so, like whales, they have to surface for air. Their tails, shaped a bit like paddles, propel them through the water.

The Günther's sea snake was first discovered in 1864 by zoologist, Albert Günther. It can grow to nearly 5 feet (1,448 millimeters) long for males and almost 6 feet (1,829 millimeters) for females. It has a small head compared to the rest of its body and it's spotted so infrequently that the IUCN "red list" of threatened species designates it as "Data Deficient."

The scientists have included the Iran snake sighting in a new sea-snake checklist for the Gulf of Oman and Persian Gulf that has just been published in the journal ZooKeys.

There are 62 species of venomous sea snake globally, spread largely throughout Indo-Pacific waters (the yellow-bellied sea snake, an exception, can be found in all oceans except for the Atlantic). According to the researchers, the new sighting brings to just 10 the count of sea snake species spotted in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Here's one in action, a species called Hydrophis lapemoides:

From Discovery News

New Dead Sea Scrolls: The Real Thing?

The Psalms scroll, one of the established Dead Sea scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are about 2,000 years old and hold text from the Hebrew Bible. Hundreds of fragments of the scrolls were first found between 1947 and 1956 in caves in Qumran in the Judean Desert.

More recently, additional scroll fragments have come to light. Since 2002, around 70 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments have appeared on the antiquities market, said Eibert Tigchelaar, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, in an interview with Live Science.

Tigchelaar believes that some of the scroll fragments that have recently appeared are actually modern-day forgeries, while others are not from Qumran, but rather other caves in the Judean Desert, possibly ones that haven't been discovered by archaeologists.

"I think what we have here is a mix of material that is authentic and of material that are forgeries," Tigchelaar told Live Science.

One of his arguments supporting the forgery claim is that of the 70 fragments that have appeared only one or two seem to be part of the 900 manuscripts found in the Qumran caves. To have so many scroll fragments that are not part of the other manuscripts found at Qumran is "statistically impossible," Tigchelaar said.

Additionally, Tigchelaar has found that most of the 70 new scroll fragments are from books of the Hebrew Bible, whereas the manuscripts found at Qumran contain a wider mix of texts, including calendars, community rules and apocryphal (noncanonical) texts.

Some of the new scroll fragments also contain oddities in their writing, such as small letters that appear to be crammed in at the edge of fragments (a fragment is supposed to be part of a manuscript that fell apart), Tigchelaar and other scholars have found.

Some of the scrolls may be authentic but not from Qumran, Tigchelaar said noting that the sellers could claim the scrolls were found in Qumran in order to boost the sales price or to avoid legal problems related to provenance.

After Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, laws were enacted that prohibited the selling of newly discovered scrolls. "If they [the new scroll fragments] were found after 1967, they [collectors and dealers] would not be allowed to own them or to sell them, but they would have to give them to the Israel Antiquities Authority," Tigchelaar said. He said that a close examination of the provenance of the new scroll fragments is needed.

More undiscovered scrolls are likely hidden in the Judean Desert, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said, adding that looters are probably already finding them. Last year, the antiquities authority launched a series of surveys and excavations in the Judean desert to try to find caves that may contain undiscovered scrolls.

"For years now our most important heritage and cultural assets have been excavated illicitly and plundered in the Judean Desert caves for reasons of greed," Miri Regev, Israel's Minister of Culture and Sports,said in a statement. "The goal of the national plan that we are advancing is to excavate and find all of the scrolls that remain in the caves, once and for all, so that they will be rescued and preserved by the state."

A team led by Randall Price, a professor at Liberty University in Virginia, and Oren Gutfeld, a researcher with the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem, will lead an excavation of one cave in the Judean Desert, which is set to begin in December.

That cave was partially excavated in the past, but "much remains to be excavated, including two wings of the cave at the back. There is always the possibility of finding scroll fragments because this cave, as well as others, shows signs of habitation from the time when the Qumran community who produced the scrolls was active," Price said.

Read more at Discovery News

Major Dust Storm Could Soon Hit Mars

This image illustrates the haze that engulfs Mars during major dust storms. These two images were taken in 2001, about a month apart.

A raging Martian dust storm is expected to sweep across the Red Planet within the next few months, according to a study that found a way to predict these otherwise variable weather events.

Global dust storms on Mars threaten robotic rovers traversing the Martian surface, as well as astronauts that may one day set up camp on the Red Planet. However, based on past weather patterns, Martian dust storms may soon become more predictable -- and if history repeats itself, the next storm is just around the corner, according to a statement from NASA.

"Mars will reach the midpoint of its current dust storm season on October 29th of this year," James Shirley, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement. "Based on the historical pattern we found, we believe it is very likely that a global dust storm will begin within a few weeks or months of this date."

Local dust storms are fairly frequent on Mars. However, these localized storms can grow into regional or, in some cases, global storms. The dust storm season typically reaches its peak during the spring and summer in the planet's southern hemisphere, when Mars is closest to the sun, NASA officials said in the statement.

Dust storms on Mars create a massive haze that blankets the planet. The last global dust storm on Mars was in 2007. During this storm, NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity received scarce solar power, but were able to survive.

"The global dust storm in 2007 was the first major threat to the rovers since landing," John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity, said in the statement. "We had to take special measures to enable their survival for several weeks with little sunlight to keep them powered. Each rover powered up only a few minutes each day, enough to warm them up, then shut down to the next day without even communicating with Earth. For many days during the worst of the storm, the rovers were completely on their own."

Before 2007, major Martian dust storms have been recorded in 1971, 1977, 1982, 1994 and 2001. Using data on the orbital motion of Mars, Shirley discovered a pattern in the occurrence of these storms. He found other planets impact the momentum of Mars as it orbits the solar system's center of gravity.

The planet's momentum increases and decreases in a cycle that lasts 2.2 years, slightly longer than the Martian year, which is 1.9 years. Shirley found that global dust storms tend to occur when the momentum is increasing during the first part of the dust storm season, which doesn't happen during every Martian year. The finding is reported in a new study, published May 2015 in the journal Icarus.

Read more at Discovery News