This is a view of the palate of the new, small sparassodont from Bolivia. The front end is to the right. The scale bar is 1 cm.
A Case Western Reserve University student and his mentor have discovered an ancient kitten-sized predator that lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago -- one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta.
Third-year undergraduate student Russell Engelman and Case Western Reserve anatomy professor Darin Croft made the finding by analyzing a partial skull that had been in a University of Florida collection more than three decades.
The researchers report their finding in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
"The animal would have been about the size of a marten, a catlike weasel found in the Northeastern United States and Canada, and probably filled the same ecological niche," said Engelman, an evolutionary biology major from Russell Township, Ohio.
The researchers refrained from naming the new species mainly because the specimen lacks well-preserved teeth, which are the only parts preserved in many of its close relatives.
The skull, which would have been a little less than 3 inches long if complete, shows the animal had a very short snout. A socket, or alveolus, in the upper jaw shows it had large, canines, that were round in cross-section much like those of a meat-eating marsupial, called the spotted-tailed quoll, found in Australia today, the researchers said.
Although sparassodonts are more closely related to modern opossums than cats and dogs, the group included saber-toothed species that fed on large prey. This small Bolivian species probably fed on the ancient relatives of today's guinea pigs and spiny rats, the researchers said.
"Most predators don't go after animals of equal size, but these features indicate this small predator was a formidable hunter," Croft said.
The specimen had not been studied in detail after being collected. It was provisionally identified as belonging to a particular group of extinct meat-eating opossums, due in part to its small size. Further adding to the identity challenge, almost all small sparassodonts have been identified by their teeth and lower jaws, which this skull lacks.
Croft wanted to study the skull because its age is nearly twice that of the oldest known species of meat-eating opossum. The specimen was found in a mountainous site known as Quebrada Honda, Bolivia, in 1978, in rock layers dated 12 million to 13 million years ago.
Structurally, extinct meat-eating opossums and sparassodont skulls share a number of similarities due to their similar meat-eating diet, Engelman said.
"No single feature found in the skull was so distinctive that we could say one way or the other what it was," Croft said, "but the combination of features is unique and says this is a sparassodont."
One key was that a particular bone of the orbit, the boney socket of the eye, does not touch the nasal bone in an opossum but does in a sparassodont.
The short snout was a kind of red herring. While jaguar-sized sparassodonts had them, the smaller members of the order had fox-like faces. And this species was smaller than most of those.
These smaller sparassodonts also have gaps between their teeth that are absent in most larger species. The skull shows no gaps.
Stars like the sun may end up alone but they are born in stellar nurseries, with a thousand — or a hundred thousand — siblings. Over time, the family disbands, victims of gravitational nudges and other tidings after 4.5 billion years of life in the cosmos.
Astronomers have been on the hunt for solar siblings as part of a quest to learn more about how and where the sun was born and perhaps why our star became host to a life-bearing planet.
This week, a team headed by the University of Texas reports it has found a star that “almost certainly” formed from the same cloud of gas and dust that produced the sun.
The star, known as HD 162826, is about 15 percent bigger than the sun and located about 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules.
Scientists matched the star’s chemistry — telltale concentrations of the rare elements barium and yttrium proved particularly useful — with the sun’s chemical components. They also tracked HD 162826’s past orbits around the center of the Milky Way to discover its link with the sun.
Out of 30 potential sibling stars, “only the star HD 162826 satisfies both our dynamical and chemical criteria for being a true sibling of the sun,” lead author Ivan Ramirez writes in a paper to be published in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Fishermen off the coast of Japan hauled in a rare megamouth shark recently, marking the 58th time in history one of its kind were seen or caught by man, Japanese news outlets reported.
The Japan Daily Press reported Thursday that scientists performed an autopsy on the 1,500-pound female shark in front of onlookers at the Marine Science Museum in Shizuoka City. The shark was reportedly caught from a depth of about 2,600 feet. It's unclear precisely when it was nabbed, according to the report.
The first megamouth was discovered in Hawaii in 1976, prompting scientists to create an entirely new family and genus of sharks. The megamouths are docile filter-feeders with wide, blubbery mouths.
Others megamouths — considered one of the rarest fish in the world — have been encountered in California, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Brazil, Ecuador, Senegal, South Africa, Mexico and Australia. It's known to inhabit the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
"As with the two other filter-feeding sharks, the basking and whale sharks, this species is wide-ranging," according to a profile of the animal on the museum's website. "However, the megamouth is considered to be less active and a poorer swimmer than the basking or whale sharks."
The megamouth primarily feeds on large quantities of krill and its maximum size is at least 17 feet long. The sperm whale is its only known predator, researchers say.
Here’s a phrase heard often in the winter, when temperatures are, naturally, colder than at any other time of year: “Global warming? Yeah right, more like global cooling.” But that reveals a basic misunderstanding of what “weather” and “climate” are.
The difference between weather and climate comes down to time. Weather refers to the state of the atmosphere at a particular time or over a few weeks and months. Temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloud cover, windiness and other factors make up a particular time period’s weather.
Climate refers to the average weather for a place over a period of many years. Climate scientists often use 30-year intervals to define a region’s climate, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
For example, sunny, cloudless and 62 degrees Fahrenheit describes the weather this morning here in central Missouri, in other words, a perfect spring day. However, yesterday’s weather was cloudy with scattered showers, while a few days before it was 90 degrees F. These were changes in the weather, not the climate.
The weather in Missouri varies greatly from day to day and even hour to hour. However, on average, the surface temperatures here have been increasing during the past several decades. Other places, especially the polar regions, experienced more dramatic average temperature increases during the same time period.
The gradual alteration of average weather patterns defines climate change. Earth’s climate changes naturally, which is why we no longer sit under a mile of ice in Missouri, nor do we have lush jungles anymore.
However, certain human activities can influence the climate. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide. Domesticated cattle release methane when they pass gas, as do the termites that devour wood scraps left by loggers. Methane and carbon dioxide can change the climate. Those gases allow the sun’s light to pass through the atmosphere. Yet after that light strikes Earth’s surface and transforms into heat, the gases trap that warmth, just like the glass or plastic panes of a greenhouse. Chemists define that process as the greenhouse effect.
Asteroids are in the news a lot these days, partially because we’re getting really good at detecting the flying chunks of space rock. But also, we’re pretty good at recording the impact of large meteors that seem to have a “thing” for hitting Russia. (Not really, Russia just has a really big landmass with lots of dashcams.)
However, as calls for improved detection techniques and asteroid impact mitigation strategies intensify, there’s one particularly worrisome class of asteroid that could hit us, unawares, in our blind spot — from the direction of the sun. But a celestial radar ‘tag team’ is on the case, having bounced radio waves off an asteroid that would have been invisible to optical telescopes.
Although asteroid 2006 SX 217 has a well-known orbit, on April 23, astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico took the opportunity to transmit radar pulses at the object as it made a close approach with Earth. Although Arecibo could transmit the radar, problems with the large dish’s receiver meant that the National Science Foundation's Goldstone radio telescope, located in West Virginia, had to step in to help out.
The space rock, which measures approximately a mile wide, came as close as 3 million miles from Earth (around 10 times the Earth-moon distance), but as it was approaching from the direction of the sun, the sun’s glare would have rendered any observation attempts by optical telescopes futile. The radar campaign, however, managed to resolve fantastic detail in the asteroid’s surface features, highlighting its boulder strewn landscape.
After pinging 2006 SX 217, astronomers noticed that the asteroid was abnormally dark and larger than previous estimates suggested.
“Ahhh!” cries the hagfish as it bombards
its captors with slime, “smiles … my only weakness! Also, admittedly,
I’m not so good at surviving out of water.”
The most loveable ghost ever has to be Slimer, mostly because I don’t buy Casper’s overdone friendliness shtick for a second. In Ghostbusters, Slimer introduces himself to Bill Murray with a hug, leaving him with a coating of ectoplasm. Few people realize that this harmless gesture is how ghosts show affection.
Bill was all bent out of shape about the whole thing, but it could have been much worse for him. He could have tangled with a real-life slimer: the hagfish, a bizarre, eel-like critter that asphyxiates the fish and sharks foolish enough to attack it by clogging up their gills with massive releases of goo. But this is no simple snot. It’s a deceptively complex substance that could one day gift us the supermaterial of our dreams.
The hagfish cruises around deep ocean bottoms, feeding primarily on polychaete worms–save for the ferocious 10-foot bobbit worm, which luckily for the hagfish inhabits shallow waters. Every once in a while, though, it takes part in one of the sea floor’s most remarkable happenings: the arrival of a whale carcass (an event known somewhat epically as a whale fall).
Whale hides are quite tough, and the hagfish has nowhere near the bite force of a shark. But hagfish have been around for at least 300 million years, and they didn’t spend all that time not developing sweet adaptations for scavenging in the deep.
When they are lucky enough to come upon a whale fall, they “grab onto it with their teeth, which are sort of like a circular set of saw blades,” said Carol Bucking, a biologist at Toronto’s York University. “And they use this to latch on to the skin, and then they twist their body to bore a hole into the carcass. Then they live inside the carcass and they essentially eat it from the inside out.”
This picture of hagfish chompers is remarkably similar to the movie poster for Tremors,
starring Kevin Bacon. Therefore, the hagfish has no degrees of
separation from Kevin Bacon, which is more than a lot of people can say.
If they’re having trouble ripping off flesh, they can actually tie themselves in knots, then use that as leverage to excavate meat. Hagfish are afforded such flexibility because while they have a partial skull, they have no spine to speak of (accordingly, scientists have a hell of a time classifying this ancient species). And though they may look weak and squishy, hagfish are actually burly gnawing machines. “If you try to pick one up and hold onto it,” said Bucking, “it’s essentially like holding onto a boa constrictor. It’s almost impossible to sort of dictate what it does, because it’s a very strong, enormous, nightmare of a creature.”
Once the hagfish has muscled its way inside a carcass, simply swallowing its food is not enough: They’ve actually evolved a way to pull nourishment through their skin, utilizing the same kind of nutrient “transporters,” as they’re known, that you would find in your guts. So, really, they’re an inside-out intestine with another intestine inside, like Russian nesting dolls of the deep. And as the decaying whale’s proteins break down into amino acids, the hagfish happily soaks them right up into its bloodstream.
Hagfish are particularly drawn to good lighting, so the rays can play off their skin all romantic-like.
But first the hagfish has to find its quarry in the total blackness of the deep. For that, they rely not on their rudimentary eyespots, which are almost totally worthless, but on their extremely keen sense of smell, sniffing out the slightest of odors with the barbels around their mouths. Indeed, their forebrain, which processes smells, is highly enlarged to handle all of this information.
Without any real eyesight, though, and with its face buried in rotting whale, the hagfish is an easy target for predators. But if you take a bite out of this critter, you do so at your own peril. For the hagfish makes the world’s most disgusting, most dangerous Jell-O–except for the apricot kind. Seriously, who buys the apricot kind?
Slime and Punishment
Up and down the length of the hagfish’s body are some 150 separate slime glands. When a predator like a shark bites down on a hagfish, the tiny glands near the attacker’s strike instantaneously eject the goo. As soon as this hits water, it balloons into a huge gelatinous cloud, which biologist Douglas Fudge of Ontario’s University of Guelph reckons acts to clog up the attacker’s gills.
He’s fairly confident of this because he, well, did some experiments with disembodied fish heads. Fudge first measured water flow over the gills in a normal state, then applied hagfish slime. “If this stuff evolved to clog up gills,” he said, “then you’d expect it to really reduce the flow over the gills, and that’s exactly what it did. It increased the resistance of the gills by something like 200-fold.”
While no one has yet been able to pursue a predator choking on a mouthful of hagfish slime to see if it indeed suffocated to death–quite understandably, they tend to rapidly retreat, as demonstrated somewhat hilariously in the video above–Fudge thinks that if the victim isn’t able to somehow dislodge the goo from its gills, it will perish.
How, then, does the hagfish keep from suffocating itself? They have “beautiful, almost balloon-shaped gills, and so that really restricts anything getting into them,” said Bucking. The hagfish pumps water through a series of small holes into pouches, where “there’s all these channels and chambers that spread the water out and put it in contact with blood so they can exchange oxygen.” It can also clear the slime off its body with the same technique it uses to feed, tying itself in a knot and passing itself through it.
Hagfish are extremely flexible because they
lack a backbone, going so far as to tie themselves in knots in dogged
pursuit of Boy Scout badges.
Those are no ordinary gills, because this is no ordinary snot. Inside each slime gland are two kinds of cells. One produces a whole lot of mucus. The other–the really interesting one for materials scientists–produces entirely remarkable threads. These are 6 inches long, intricately coiled into a single cell that’s just four-thousandths of an inch long. That, quite frankly, is insane. As a loose metaphor, it’s like packing 10,000 years’ worth of clothes into one suitcase that you’ll then, uh, break open and throw at something that’s attacking you.
When the slime glands are emptied, the fibers (25,000 in just four cups of goo) mix with the mucus and unravel in a fraction of a second. “What we think is going on is that there’s a glue that we haven’t yet identified, but we have good evidence for, that holds the fiber bundles together, and it’s a seawater-soluble glue,” said Fudge. When the glue dissolves, the fibers release like springs, providing the energy to greatly inflate the cloud. The fibers further unravel and expand the mucus as the hagfish thrashes about in the predator’s jaws.
Polar scientists said Thursday they had successfully drilled a 2,000-year-old ice core in the heart of Antarctica in a bid to retrieve a frozen record of how the planet's climate has evolved.
The Aurora Basin North project involves scientists from Australia, China, France, Denmark, Germany and the United States who hope it will also advance the search for the scientific "holy grail" of the million-year-old ice core.
The five-week expedition, in a hostile area that harbours some of the deepest ice in the frozen continent, over 3 kilometers (1.9-miles) thick, will give experts access to some of the most detailed records yet of past climate in the vast region.
About 2 tons of ice core sections drilled at Aurora Basin, 500 kilometers (310 miles) inland of Australia's Casey station, is now being distributed to Australian and international ice core laboratories.
They will conduct an analysis of atmospheric gases, particles and other chemical elements that were trapped in snow as it fell and compacted to form ice.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist and project leader Mark Curran said it will help fill a gap in the science community's knowledge of climate records.
"Using a variety of scientific tests on each core, we'll be able to obtain information about the temperature under which the ice formed, storm events, solar and volcanic activity, sea ice extent, and the concentration of different atmospheric gases over time," he said.
The team, working in temperatures of minus 30 Celsius, used a Danish Hans Tausen drill to extract the main 303-meter-long ice core, which will provide annual climate records for the past 2,000 years.
"There are only a handful of records with comparable resolution that extend to 2,000 years from the whole of Antarctica, and this is only the second one from this sector of East Antarctica," added Curran.
Additionally two smaller drills were used to take out 116 and 103-meter cores spanning the past 800 to 1,000 years.
The man in the moon. Jesus in toast. The Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Faces are everywhere — even when they're not, strictly speaking, supposed to be.
Now, new research reveals the brain processes that underlie these facial false alarms, a phenomenon called "face pareidolia." The findings suggest that expectations matter. When people expect to see a face, these expectations may activate a brain region responsible for processing faces, the researchers report in the April issue of the journal Cortex.
Pareidolia is a well-known phenomenon, responsible for turning a rocky landform on Mars into a face and a water stain on a Chicago underpass into the Virgin Mary. Not all instances of pareidolia result in visions of faces. For example, in 2013, eagle-eyed Internet sleuths swore up and down that NASA's Curiosity Rover had caught a snapshot of a rat on Mars.
Tricking the brain
The neural basis of this phenomenon is less understood, however, researchers from the University of Toronto and several institutions in China report in Cortex. To study what goes on in the brain during these misidentifications, the researchers recruited 20 Chinese men and asked them to look at imagery while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The fMRI measures changes in the magnetic properties of oxygen-rich and oxygen-depleted blood, which enables researchers to tell which areas of the brain are getting an influx of blood flow at any given time. This blood flow signals increased neuron activity in those regions.
The researchers first asked the men to look at a series of images, all of which were obscured with the kind of static-y visual "noise" you might see on a television with a bad cable connection. Two images showed male faces, one easy to discern and the other camouflaged. Two others showed letters, again with one easy to see and one difficult to spot. The final image was pure black-and-white, splotchy noise.
The face and letter experiments were done separately, a week apart for each participant, but the set-up was the same. The men were asked to push one handheld button if they saw a face (or letter) and another if they could not.
After this initial test, the men saw another series of images and were told half contained faces (or letters). This time, however, all of the images were secretly just visual noise. The men were again asked to press a button to indicate whether they saw a face or letter in the pattern.
Your mind on pareidolia
The results revealed that priming people to look for identifiable objects in random patterns is bound to create a few hits. The participants reported seeing faces 34 percent of the time and letters 38 percent of the time, despite there being none in the images they saw.
Because the researchers asked participants about letters as well as faces, they were able to tease out differences in brain activity associated with mistaken identification of a letter and those associated with mistaken identification of faces. They found those differences in the fusiform face area (FFA), a small region on the side of the brain, behind the ear. This region has long been known to be involved in the recognition of faces, though recent research suggests that it helps people identify the differences between any objects of expertise. A birdwatcher, for example, might use the FFA to tell the difference between a sparrow and a wren.
When comedian Jimmy Kimmel sent a camera crew to ask people who ate gluten-free diets what, exactly, gluten is, responses ranged from “It’s like a grain…right?” to “wheat” that should be avoided because “it makes you fat.”
“Here in L.A., it’s comparable to Satanism,” Kimmel riffed.
Actually, gluten is a combination of two proteins — and, as those who eat gluten-free diets do know, it is found primarily in wheat. The proteins (gliadin and glutenin) are also found in rye, barley, spelt, triticale, kamut, farro, and einkorn.
Gluten feeds plant embryos. If you bake wheat bread, you may buy vital wheat gluten at the grocery store: It gives wheat bread dough its elasticity, and gives wheat bread its traditional texture.
Some people avoid gluten because they have Celiac disease or because they have a lesser sensitivity that can cause abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, headaches, and other symptoms. But most Americans who eat gluten-free diets do so because they think it will make them healthier or thinner.
While many nutritionists don’t advocate restricting diet unless necessary, they encourage people who do try it to choose naturally gluten-free foods, like fruits and vegetables. Replacing processed foods with gluten-free processed foods probably won’t give you any sort of health boost. Or help you lose weight.
When you embark on a gluten-free diet, nutritionists recommend making sure you get enough iron, calcium, B-vitamins, vitamin D, and fiber.
Astronomers have a pretty good idea how the universe began and the near-14 billion years of evolution after, but throwing all our knowledge behind one grand computer simulation has been hard. The task at hand has simply too huge for any one computer to handle.
Today, however, astronomers have announced the results of three months of computer number-crunching, combining 8,000 CPUs all running in parallel, modeling our evolving universe. If the same simulation was carried out on your office desktop computer, the simulation would take 2,000 years to recreate.
“Until now, no single simulation was able to reproduce the universe on both large and small scales simultaneously,” said Mark Vogelsberger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead scientist of the study.
Previous work has either focused on a tiny portion of cosmic volume or had been too low a resolution. This study, however, has created a cube 350 million light-years across and over 13 billion years of simulated time at an unprecedented resolution. This work has been published in the May 8 edition of the journal Nature.
In the model, the effects soon after the Big Bang are considered where the hot soup of primordial matter cools to form the first stars and young galaxies. Dark matter is also included in the calculations, which dominates the “cosmic web,” anchoring clusters of galaxies at its gravitational nodes.
The effects of supernovae enriching the interstellar and intergalactic volume with increasingly heavier elements is also modeled, providing us with an insight as to the building blocks of other stars, planets and, eventually, the organic chemistry that is the foundation for life.
The most striking thing about this virtual universe is its uncanny resemblance to observations made by today’s observatories. The recreation of the array of galaxies we see deep in the furthest-most reaches of the universe form in strikingly familiar shapes and sizes.
The model only uses equations from theories constructed from decades (even centuries) of astronomical observations and allowed to evolve with time. The result is nothing short of breathtaking and it can be hard to distinguish the model from real observations.
The model, called Illustris, created a 3-D space filled with 12 billion pixels, all calculating the fundamental equations that govern normal (and dark) matter. The researchers can now zoom in on regions of interest to focus on different mechanisms as they unfold. When they kicked off the simulation 12 million simulated years after the Big Bang, some 41,000 galaxies condensed into numerous galactic cluster from the seemingly chaotic churning of matter.
