Controversial Killer Flu Research Paused

Researchers developing extra-contagious strains of H5N1 avian influenza have agreed to pause their work for 60 days.

The moratorium, announced Jan. 20 in Nature and Science, is a response to public fear and alarm in the scientific community, which has split over whether the research could inadvertently lead to release of a nightmare disease.

Depending on perspective, the moratorium is either a genuine recognition of the need for broader discussion or a public relations gesture. Either way, it’s a chance for everyone to catch their breath without reaching for a mask.

Fear that the viruses “may escape from the laboratories has generated intense public debate in the media on the benefits and potential harm of this type of research,” the researchers wrote in an open letter declaring the moratorium. “To provide time for these discussions, we have agreed on a voluntary pause of 60 days on any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses leading to the generation of viruses that are more transmissible in mammals.”

The controversy began in November when ScienceInsider reported that two teams of virologists — one led by Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands , the other by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin — had developed H5N1 strains capable of passing easily between ferrets, which are used as models for influenza infection in humans. Whether the strains are as easily transmissible between people isn’t known, but is considered possible.

In humans, H5N1 is extraordinarily virulent — mortality runs between 60 and 80 percent — but far less contagious, requiring prolonged contact with infected birds or people. That it could become more contagious is a public health fear of the first order: Containing an outbreak would be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, and millions of people would almost certainly die. It’s also a fear full of scientific unknowns. Despite a seemingly simple genome containing just a handful of genes, scientists don’t know what mutations could make H5N1 more transmissible between humans.

The research by Fouchier, Kawaoka and other labs was intended to identify those mutations, giving researchers an idea of what to look for in naturally evolving influenza, and perhaps allowing for early warning of strains that are just a few mutations away from causing human pandemics. But when the general outlines of the research became public — detailed descriptions await formal publication, and key details will be redacted at the request of a federal biosecurity committee — outrage followed.

Critics, including many high-profile virologists, epidemiologists and biosecurity experts, said it was possible that would-be biological terrorists could use the research to develop weaponized flu strains. Another, perhaps more frightening possibility was unintentional release: dozens of accidental infections (.pdf) have occurred at high-security laboratories in the United States, and it’s thought that one now-global flu strain may actually have escaped from a Russian laboratory in the 1970s. Against these risks, the benefits were arguable, and some virologists even said that mutations engineered in a laboratory didn’t necessarily illuminate future dangers.

“The research should never have been undertaken because the potential harm is so catastrophic and the potential benefits from studying the virus so speculative,” opined the New York Times in a Jan. 8 editorial entitled “An Engineered Doomsday.”

By declaring the 60 day moratorium, which will pause both further H5N1 engineering and experiments on the existing mutant strains, the researchers attempt to allay these fears.

“We recognize that we and the rest of the scientific community need to clearly explain the benefits of this important research and the measures taken to minimize its possible risks,” they write. “We propose to do so in an international forum in which the scientific community comes together to discuss and debate these issues.”

Reception to the moratorium appears mixed. Michael Osterholm, head of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a member of the federal committee that recommended redacting the findings, told Nature News that 60 days is far too short a time for developing any meaningful policies. “I just don’t think that’s realistic,” he said.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and vocal critic of the research, called the moratorium “an empty gesture. Strictly public relations.”

Contrary to the researchers’ insistence that the work was “using the highest international standards of biosafety and biosecurity,” it was conducted at so-called Biosafety Level 3 — a set of techniques and safeguards less strict than is used for Ebola and the Marburg virus, which pose less potential threat than an H5N1 strain that easily infects people. And outside of biosafety committees at researchers’ institutions, there appears to have been no official discussion of potential safety risks until the controversy made it unavoidable.

Read more at Wired Science

Carbon Dioxide Is 'Driving Fish Crazy'

Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes' ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

"For several years our team have been testing the performance of baby coral fishes in sea water containing higher levels of dissolved CO₂ -- and it is now pretty clear that they sustain significant disruption to their central nervous system, which is likely to impair their chances of survival," Prof. Munday says.

In their latest paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Prof. Munday and colleagues report world-first evidence that high CO₂ levels in sea water disrupts a key brain receptor in fish, causing marked changes in their behaviour and sensory ability.

"We've found that elevated CO₂ in the oceans can directly interfere with fish neurotransmitter functions, which poses a direct and previously unknown threat to sea life," Prof. Munday says.

Prof. Munday and his colleagues began by studying how baby clown and damsel fishes performed alongside their predators in CO₂-enriched water. They found that, while the predators were somewhat affected, the baby fish suffered much higher rates of attrition.

"Our early work showed that the sense of smell of baby fish was harmed by higher CO₂ in the water -- meaning they found it harder to locate a reef to settle on or detect the warning smell of a predator fish. But we suspected there was much more to it than the loss of ability to smell."

The team then examined whether fishes' sense of hearing -- used to locate and home in on reefs at night, and avoid them during the day -- was affected. "The answer is, yes it was. They were confused and no longer avoided reef sounds during the day. Being attracted to reefs during daylight would make them easy meat for predators."

Other work showed the fish also tended to lose their natural instinct to turn left or right -- an important factor in schooling behaviour which also makes them more vulnerable, as lone fish are easily eaten by predators.

"All this led us to suspect it wasn't simply damage to their individual senses that was going on -- but rather, that higher levels of carbon dioxide were affecting their whole central nervous system."

The team's latest research shows that high CO₂ directly stimulates a receptor in the fish brain called GABA-A, leading to a reversal in its normal function and over-excitement of certain nerve signals.

While most animals with brains have GABA-A receptors, the team considers the effects of elevated CO₂ are likely to be most felt by those living in water, as they have lower blood CO₂ levels normally. The main impact is likely to be felt by some crustaceans and by most fishes, especially those which use a lot of oxygen.

Prof. Munday said that around 2.3 billion tonnes of human CO₂ emissions dissolve into the world's oceans every year, causing changes in the chemical environment of the water in which fish and other species live.

"We've now established it isn't simply the acidification of the oceans that is causing disruption -- as is the case with shellfish and plankton with chalky skeletons -- but the actual dissolved CO₂ itself is damaging the fishes' nervous systems."

Read more at Science Daily

When It Comes to Accepting Evolution, Gut Feelings Trump Facts

For students to accept the theory of evolution, an intuitive "gut feeling" may be just as important as understanding the facts, according to a new study.

In an analysis of the beliefs of biology teachers, researchers found that a quick intuitive notion of how right an idea feels was a powerful driver of whether or not students accepted evolution -- often trumping factors such as knowledge level or religion.

"The whole idea behind acceptance of evolution has been the assumption that if people understood it -- if they really knew it -- they would see the logic and accept it," said David Haury, co-author of the new study and associate professor of education at Ohio State University.

"But among all the scientific studies on the matter, the most consistent finding was inconsistency. One study would find a strong relationship between knowledge level and acceptance, and others would find no relationship. Some would find a strong relationship between religious identity and acceptance, and others would find less of a relationship."

"So our notion was, there is clearly some factor that we're not looking at," he continued. "We're assuming that people accept something or don't accept it on a completely rational basis. Or, they're part of a belief community that as a group accept or don't accept. But the findings just made those simple answers untenable."

Haury and his colleagues tapped into cognitive science research showing that our brains don't just process ideas logically -- we also rely on how true something feels when judging an idea. "Research in neuroscience has shown that when there's a conflict between facts and feeling in the brain, feeling wins," he says.

The researchers framed a study to determine whether intuitive reasoning could help explain why some people are more accepting of evolution than others. The study, published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, included 124 pre-service biology teachers at different stages in a standard teacher preparation program at two Korean universities.

First, the students answered a standard set of questions designed to measure their overall acceptance of evolution. These questions probed whether students generally believed in the main concepts and scientific findings that underpin the theory.

Then the students took a test on the specific details of evolutionary science. To show their level of factual knowledge, students answered multiple-choice and free-response questions about processes such as natural selection. To gauge their "gut" feelings about these ideas, students wrote down how certain they felt that their factually correct answers were actually true.

The researchers then analyzed statistical correlations to see whether knowledge level or feeling of certainty best predicted students' overall acceptance of evolution. They also considered factors such as academic year and religion as potential predictors.

"What we found is that intuitive cognition has a significant impact on what people end up accepting, no matter how much they know," said Haury. The results show that even students with greater knowledge of evolutionary facts weren't likelier to accept the theory, unless they also had a strong "gut" feeling about those facts.

When trying to explain the patterns of whether people believe in evolution or not, "the results show that if we consider both feeling and knowledge level, we can explain much more than with knowledge level alone," said Minsu Ha, lead author on the paper and a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Teaching and Learning.

In particular, the research shows that it may not be accurate to portray religion and science education as competing factors in determining beliefs about evolution. For the subjects of this study, belonging to a religion had almost no additional impact on beliefs about evolution, beyond subjects' feelings of certainty.

These results also provide a useful way of looking at the perceived conflict between religion and science when it comes to teaching evolution, according to Haury. "Intuitive cognition not only opens a new door to approach the issue," he said, "it also gives us a way of addressing that issue without directly questioning religious views."

When choosing a setting for their study, the team found that Korean teacher preparation programs were ideal. "In Korea, people all take the same classes over the same time period and are all about the same age, so it takes out a lot of extraneous factors," said Haury. "We wouldn't be able to find a sample group like this in the United States."

Unlike in the U.S., about half of Koreans do not identify themselves as belonging to any particular religion. But according to Ha, who is from Korea, certain religious groups consider the topic of evolution just as controversial as in the U.S.

To ensure that their results were relevant to U.S. settings, the researchers compared how the Korean students did on the knowledge tests with previous studies of U.S. students. "We found that the both groups were comparable in terms of the overall performance," said Haury.

For teaching evolution, the researchers suggest using exercises that allow students to become aware of their brains' dual processing. Knowing that sometimes what their "gut" says is in conflict with what their "head" knows may help students judge ideas on their merits.

"Educationally, we think that's a place to start," said Haury. "It's a concrete way to show them, look -- you can be fooled and make a bad decision, because you just can't deny your gut."

Read more at Science Daily

Scientists Solve Mystery of Colorful Armchair Nanotubes

Rice University researchers have figured out what gives armchair nanotubes their unique bright colors: hydrogen-like objects called excitons.

Their findings appear in the online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Armchair carbon nanotubes -- so named for the "U"-shaped configuration of the atoms at their uncapped tips -- are one-dimensional metals and have no band gap. This means electrons flow from one end to the other with little resistivity, the very property that may someday make armchair quantum wires possible.

The Rice researchers show armchair nanotubes absorb light like semiconductors. An electron is promoted from an immobile state to a conducting state by absorbing photons and leaving behind a positively charged "hole," said Rice physicist Junichiro Kono. The new electron-hole pair forms an exciton, which has a neutral charge.

"The excitons are created by the absorption of a particular wavelength of light," said graduate student and lead author Erik Hároz. "What your eye sees is the light that's left over; the nanotubes take a portion of the visible spectrum out." The diameter of the nanotube determines which parts of the visible spectrum are absorbed; this absorption accounts for the rainbow of colors seen among different batches of nanotubes.

Scientists have realized that gold and silver nanoparticles could be manipulated to reflect brilliant hues -- a property that let artisans who had no notions of "nano" create stained glass windows for medieval cathedrals. Depending on their size, the particles absorbed and emitted light of particular colors due to a phenomenon known as plasma resonance.

In more recent times, researchers noticed semiconducting nanoparticles, also known as quantum dots, show colors determined by their size-dependent band gaps.

But plasma resonance happens at wavelengths outside the visible spectrum in metallic carbon nanotubes. And armchair nanotubes don't have band gaps.

Kono's lab ultimately determined that excitons are the source of color in batches of pure armchair nanotubes suspended in solution.

The results seem counterintuitive, Kono said, because excitons are characteristic of semiconductors, not metals. Kono is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and of physics and astronomy.

While armchair nanotubes don't have band gaps, they do have a unique electronic structure that favors particular wavelengths for light absorption, he said.

"In armchair nanotubes, the conduction and valence bands touch each other," Kono said. "The one-dimensionality, combined with its unique energy dispersion, makes it a metal. But the bands develop what's called a van Hove singularity," which appears as a peak in the density of states in a one-dimensional solid. "So there are lots of electronic states concentrated around this singularity."

Exciton resonance tends to occur around these singularities when hit with light, and the stronger the resonance, the more distinguished the color. "It's an unusual quality of these particular one-dimensional materials that these excitons can actually exist," Hároz said. "In most metals, that's not possible; there's not enough Coulomb interaction between the electron and the hole for an exciton to be stable."

The new paper follows on the heels of work by Kono and his team to create batches of pure single-walled carbon nanotubes through ultracentrifugation. In that process, nanotubes were spun in a mix of solutions with different densities up to 250,000 times the force of gravity. The tubes naturally gravitated toward separated solutions that matched their own densities to create a colorful "nano parfait."

As a byproduct of their current work, the researchers proved their ability to produce purified armchair nanotubes from a variety of synthesis techniques. They now hope to extend their investigation of the optical properties of armchairs beyond visible light. "Ultimately, we'd like to make one collective spectrum that includes frequency ranges all the way from ultraviolet to terahertz," Hároz said. "From that, we can know, optically, almost everything about these nanotubes."

Co-authors of the paper include Robert Hauge, a distinguished faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice; Rice alumnus Benjamin Lu; and professors Pavel Nikolaev and Sivaram Arepalli of Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea.

Read more at Science Daily

Almost Perfect: Researcher Nears Creation of Superlens

A superlens would let you see a virus in a drop of blood and open the door to better and cheaper electronics. It might, says Durdu Guney, make ultra-high-resolution microscopes as commonplace as cameras in our cell phones.

No one has yet made a superlens, also known as a perfect lens, though people are trying. Optical lenses are limited by the nature of light, the so-called diffraction limit, so even the best won't usually let us see objects smaller than 200 nanometers across, about the size of the smallest bacterium. Scanning electron microscopes can capture objects that are much smaller, about a nanometer wide, but they are expensive, heavy, and, at the size of a large desk, not very portable.

To build a superlens, you need metamaterials: artificial materials with properties not seen in nature. Scientists are beginning to fabricate metamaterials in their quest to make real seemingly magical phenomena like invisibility cloaks, quantum levitation -- and superlenses.

Now Guney, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Technological University, has taken a major step toward creating superlens that could use visible light to see objects as small as 100 nanometers across.

The secret lies in plasmons, charge oscillations near the surface of thin metal films that combine with special nanostructures. When excited by an electromagnetic field, they gather light waves from an object and refract it in a way not seen in nature called negative refraction. This lets the lens overcomes the diffraction limit. And, in the case of Guney's model, it could allow us to see objects smaller than 1/1,000th the width of a human hair.

Other researchers have also been able to sidestep the diffraction limit, but not throughout the entire spectrum of visible light. Guney's model showed how metamaterials might be "stretched" to refract light waves from the infrared all the way past visible light and into the ultraviolet spectrum.

Making these superlenses would be relatively inexpensive, which is why they might find their way into cell phones. But there would be other uses as well, says Guney.

"It could also be applied to lithography," the microfabrication process used in electronics manufacturing. "The lens determines the feature size you can make, and by replacing an old lens with this superlens, you could make smaller features at a lower cost. You could make devices as small as you like."

Computer chips are made using UV lasers, which are expensive and difficult to build. "With this superlens, you could use a red laser, like the pointers everyone uses, and have simple, cheap machines, just by changing the lens."

What excites Guney the most, however, is that a cheap, accessible superlens could open our collective eyes to worlds previously known only to a very few.

"The public's access to high-powered microscopes is negligible," he says. "With superlenses, everybody could be a scientist. People could put their cells on Facebook. It might just inspire society's scientific soul."

Read more at Science Daily

Monkey Feared Extinct Rediscovered

An elusive monkey feared extinct has shown up in the remote forests of Borneo, posing for the first good pictures of the animal ever taken.

The mug shots reveal a furry Count Dracula of sorts, with the monkey's black head, face tipped with white whiskers and a pointy collar made of fluffy white fur.

The Miller's grizzled langur, an extremely rare primate that has suffered from habitat loss over the last 30 years, popped up unexpectedly in the protected Wehea Forest in east Kalimantan, Borneo.

"We knew we had found this primate that some people had speculated was potentially extinct," said study researcher Stephanie Spehar, a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. "It was really exciting."

But the animal is still in grave danger, Spehar told LiveScience, and no one knows how many of these langurs are left. The researchers observed only two small groups of them.

Vanishing act

The shy monkey (Presbytis hosei canicrus) was seen in the 1970s in Kutai National Park in Borneo, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from where the new population lives. But as the years passed, fires and illegal logging devastated Kutai. By 2008, the Miller's grizzled langur seems to have vanished from the park. A survey that year found just five langurs living on the Sangkulirang Peninsula in East Kalitmantan, also about 50 miles (80 km) away from the newly discovered langur habitat. But by 2010, that group of primates had also disappeared.

"At this point, we didn't know if this animal still existed or whether it was still hiding out in little pockets," Spehar said.

Spehar has been working in the Wehea Forest of Borneo for four years, but she'd never seen a Miller's grizzled langur there. Last summer, however, one of her undergraduate students camped out by a mineral lick area for 10 days, a spot where animals come to get nutrients from mineral-rich soil and water. The student, Eric Fell, was conducting his own research project on animals' use of these licks, and was photographing the creatures that dropped by.

Upon returning from his stakeout, Fell showed Spehar his photographs. Among them were images of long-tailed, black-headed langurs.

"I knew this was something special," Spehar said. "I knew that it was something that was unexpected and we hadn't seen before."

Spehar, who credits the find to the work of local communities and governments that protect the forest and support her research, showed the photos to another researcher working in the woods, the director of the conservation organization Ethical Expeditions Brent Loken. The revelation surprised both parties: It turned out that Loken's group had also been staking out a mineral lick 5 miles (8 km) away from Fell's with a motion-triggered camera. They'd captured an image of the same type of primate.



"We realized that we had basically rediscovered this animal," Spehar said. Taxonomists confirmed the find as a Miller's grizzled langur. The researchers reported their find today in the American Journal of Primatology.

The simultaneous discovery suggests that there is a decent-size population of the langurs in Wehea, but Spehar cautioned that incredibly little is known about the species. No one knows how wide the langurs' range is, she said, how many there are, or their population density. That lack of knowledge isn't uncommon for many threatened species, according to Loken.

"This monkey represents a lot of species on the planet that we know very little about," Loken told LiveScience. "We don't know how many there are, we don't know where they live, what ecological requirements they need to live, and unless we get some of that information quickly, some of these species could slip into extinction before we know anything about them, or even realize that they're gone."

While Wehea itself is a more than 98,000-acre (40,000-hectare) oasis of protection, it is surrounded by forest used for logging, palm oil plantations and mining — the same sort of human uses that presumably drove the langurs out of the habitats where they once thrived. Additionally, the forest is only protected by the local community, Loken said, not the central government.

Read more at Discovery News

How a Diamond Is Like a Champagne Cork

Scientists have long known that a diamond’s trip from deep below Earth’s surface must be quick indeed: Lab tests show that at conditions found in the crust, the gems would burn up in a matter of days, if not hours. New experiments reveal the chemical secret behind such rapid ascent. The eruptions of diamonds to Earth’s surface may be driven by massive quantities of carbon dioxide fizzing from the molten rock that surrounds the gems.

Many diamonds are embedded in a dense volcanic rock called kimberlite, which gets its name from the town of Kimberley, South Africa, where several of the world’s first diamond mines were discovered. It’s difficult to explain how relatively heavy, crystal-rich magma becomes buoyant enough to rapidly rise through Earth’s crust, so researchers have long suspected that volatile substances dissolved in the rock, such as water and carbon dioxide, play a major role in kimberlite eruptions, says Kelly Russell, a volcanologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Nevertheless, scientists have been baffled about how and why these substances begin to froth out of material in the mantle. Pressures there are typically so high that they would keep gases locked in the molten rock, just as pressure keeps carbon dioxide dissolved in a carbonated drink.

New lab tests by Russell and his colleagues provide hints about how the fizz gets started. The experiments show that in molten rock that’s rich in carbonates, carbon dioxide is exceptionally soluble. But the researchers found that in molten rock that’s rich in silica, carbon dioxide is only between one-fourth and one-third as soluble, regardless of the pressure. In the team’s early tests, the researchers used a salt shaker to sprinkle a silica-rich mineral called orthopyroxene onto a puddle of molten, carbonate-rich rock. As the mineral dissolved into the puddle over the course of 20 minutes or so, the carbon dioxide vigorously bubbled out: “It foamed right in front of our eyes,” Russell says. “It blew me away.”

The lab tests mimic what goes on in the earliest phase of a kimberlite eruption deep inside Earth, the researchers speculate. First, a pocket of carbonate-rich molten rock comes into contact with silica-rich minerals somewhere in the upper mantle, where rocks contain between 15% and 27% orthopyroxene. Carbon dioxide fizzes out of the molten material, rendering the dense magma buoyant. As the magma surges upward from the upper mantle at speeds up to 14 kilometers per hour, it pummels its way into overlying rocks that contain even more silica, which accelerates the fizzing even further. At such rates, the frothy kimberlite lava could reach Earth’s surface from a depth of up to 120 kilometers in between 3 and 8 hours, Russell estimates.

The chemical reaction that drives the fizzing is largely self-sustaining, Russell says. The heat needed to keep the reaction going comes from the crystallization of other minerals such as olivine, he notes.

“This is an excellent paper that really helps fill in some important parts of the kimberlite puzzle,” says James Head III, a planetary geologist at Brown University. For instance, because kimberlites are readily eroded and easily altered by long-term exposure to the elements at or near Earth’s surface, clues about the original chemical composition of kimberlites in their molten state are rare.

Read more at Wired Science

Sumerian Beer a Non-alcoholic Brew?

Brewers like to trace the history of their art back to ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, but cuneiform writing scholar Peter Damerow of the Max Planck Institute might have burst the bubble on their beer foam.

“Given our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol”, wrote Damerow in the Cuneiform Digital Library Journal.

Many 4,000 year old cuneiform tablets refer to deliveries of wheat, barley, and malt to Sumerian breweries, and the Hymn of Ninkasi from about 1800 BC praises brewing. But there are no hard details about the process.

Beer historians believed that the Sumerians first prepared bread, then used that to make “bappir,” Sumerian for bread beer. But Damerow notes that cuneiform tablets never make this clear and only record measurements of the raw ingredients.

Archaeologists from the Ludwig Maximilian Universität together with brewing experts from the Technische Universität München carried out an experiment near the archeological site of Tall Bazi, Syria in an attempt to replicate the bygone beer of Sumer.

Damerow believed that although the experiment produced a brew, it only demonstrated that modern methods can produce a beer under the conditions at Tall Bazi. But he did think the Tall Bazi experiment was a step in the right direction towards understanding how the Sumerians got their drink on.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Does Our Universe Have Three Dimensions?

Why does our universe look the way it does? In particular, why do we only experience three spatial dimensions in our universe, when superstring theory, for instance, claims that there are ten dimensions -- nine spatial dimensions and a tenth dimension of time?

Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged from the original nine dimensions of space. They describe their new supercomputer calculations simulating the birth of our universe in a forthcoming paper in Physical Review Letters.

Before we delve into the mind-bending specifics, it's helpful to have a bit of background.

The Big Bang theory of how the universe was born has been bolsted by some pretty compelling observational evidence, including the measurement of the cosmic microwave background and the relative abundance of elements.

But while cosmologists can gaze back in time to within a few seconds of the Big Bang, at the actual moment it came into existence, when the whole universe was just a tiny point -- well, at that point, the physics we know and love breaks down. We need a new kind of theory, one that combines relativity with quantum mechanics, to make sense of that moment.

Over the course of the 20th century, physicists painstakingly cobbled together a reasonably efficient "standard model" of physics. The model they came up with almost works, without resorting to extra dimensions. It merges electromagnetism with the strong and weak nuclear forces (at almost impossibly high temperatures), despite the differences in their respective strengths, and provides a neat theoretical framework for the big, noisy "family" of subatomic particles.

But there is a gaping hole. The standard model doesn't include the gravitational force. That's why Jove, the physicist in Jeanette Winterson's novel, Gut Symmetries, calls the Standard Model the "Flying Tarpaulin" -- it's "big, ugly, useful, covers what you want and ignores gravity.” Superstring theory aims to plug that hole.

Pulling Strings

According to string theorists, there are the three full-sized spatial dimensions we experience every day, one dimension of time, and six extra dimensions crumpled up at the Planck scale like itty-bitty wads of paper. As tiny as these dimensions are, strings -- the most fundamental unit in nature, vibrating down at the Planck scale -- are even smaller.

The geometric shape of those extra dimensions helps determine the resonant patterns of string vibration. Those vibrating patterns in turn determine the kind of elementary particles that are formed, and generate the physical forces we observe around us, in much the same way that vibrating fields of electricity and magnetism give rise to the entire spectrum of light, or vibrating strings can produce different musical notes on a violin.

All matter (and all forces) are composed of these vibrations -- including gravity. And one of the ways in which strings can vibrate corresponds to a particle that mediates gravity.

Voila! General relativity has now been quantized. And that means string theory could be used to explore the infinitely tiny point of our universe's birth (or, for that matter, the singularity that lies at the center of a black hole).

Shattered Symmetry

There's one more wrinkle, and that's this whole business of extra dimensions, when our world as we currently experience it has only three. Physicists have hammered out a pretty convincing hypothetical scenario for how this might have come about.

Before the Big Bang, the cosmos was a perfectly symmetrical nine-dimensional universe (or ten, if you add in the dimension of time) with all four fundamental forces unified at unimaginably high temperatures. But this universe was highly unstable and cracked in two, sending an immense shock wave reverberating through the embryonic cosmos.

The result was two separate space-times: the unfurled three-dimensional one that we inhabit, and a six-dimensional one that contracted as violently as ours expanded, shrinking into a tiny Planckian ball. As our universe expanded and cooled, the four forces split off one by one, beginning with gravity. Everything we see around us today is a mere shard of the original shattered nine-dimensional universe.

Physicists who espouse this view aren't sure why it happened, but they suspect it might be due to the incredible tension and high energy required to maintain a supersymmetric state, which could render it inherently unstable.

Imagine that you are trying to making the bed on laundry day, but the bed sheet has shrunk slightly in the wash. You manage to get it to fit around all four corners of the bed, but the sheet is stretched so tightly that it just won't stay in place.

There is too much strain on the fabric, so one corner inevitably pops loose, causing the bed sheet to curl up in that spot. Sure, you can force that corner back into place, but again, the strain will prove to be too much and another corner will pop.

Like the bed sheet, the original ten-dimensional fabric of space-time was stretched tight in a supersymmetric state. But the tension became too great, and space-time cracked in two. One part curled up into a tight little ball, while the aftershock from the cataclysmic cosmic cracking caused the other part to expand outward rapidly, a period known as inflation. This became our visible universe.

Read more at Discovery News

NASA Debunks Mysterious Triangular 'UFO'

Once again, alien conspiracy theorists have attempted to use publicly available NASA images to prove that the space agency must be engaging in an elaborate UFO cover-up. And, once again, they've been foiled by the laws of physics.

This time, they called attention to peculiar new footage captured by a telescope onboard NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft — one of a pair of probes parked on either side of the sun which, together, provide a 360-degree view of the inner solar system. The footage shows Venus, Earth and, on the opposite side of the field-of-view, a mysterious triangular object headed our way.

"Comparing it for size to the planetary objects that are seen in this telescope, if my calculations are correct, that thing is enormous," said YouTube user 'BeePeeOilDisaster' in his video commentary on the footage, which was captured Dec. 27 -29. Talk of a cover-up quickly followed when, a few days later, NASA scientists updated the STEREO website to display newer images.

This is not the first time alien hunters have found what they believe to be enormous UFOs in images captured by the STEREO probes. (Mysterious Planet-Size Object Spotted Near Mercury)

But this time, the team of scientists who work with data from the probes decided to address the claim directly. In a post on the STEREO website, the researchers offered up an explanation of the triangular feature in the December footage. The researchers say its no more than a trick of the light.

"The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image," the scientists wrote. "At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the [telescopic camera's] field-of-view from the lower left."

The scientists note that Venus and the triangle, opposite each other across the middle of the camera plane, stay in step as they move. "This is not a coincidence. The strange-looking geometrical 'object' is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before."

Read more at Discovery News