How evolutionary principles could help save our world

The age of the Anthropocene--the scientific name given to our current geologic age--is dominated by human impacts on our environment. A warming climate. Increased resistance of pathogens and pests. A swelling population. Coping with these modern global challenges requires application of what one might call a more-ancient principle: evolution.

That's the recommendation of a diverse group of researchers, in a paper published today in the online version of the journal Science. A majority of the nine authors on the paper have received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"Evolution isn't just about the past anymore, it's about the present and the future," said Scott Carroll, an evolutionary ecologist at University of California-Davis and one of the paper's authors. Addressing societal challenges--food security, emerging diseases, biodiversity loss--in a sustainable way is "going to require evolutionary thinking."

The paper reviews current uses of evolutionary biology and recommends specific ways the field can contribute to the international sustainable development goals (SDGs), now in development by the United Nations.

Evolutionary biology has "tremendous potential" to solve many of the issues highlighted in the SDGs, said Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, another Science author from the University of Copenhagen's Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate. The field accounts for how pests may adapt rapidly to our interventions and how vulnerable species struggle to adapt to global change. The authors even chose this release date to coincide with the upcoming meeting of the UN General Assembly, which starts September 24.

Their recommendations include gene therapies to treat disease, choosing drought-and-flood-resistant crop varieties and altering conservation strategies to protect land with high levels of genetic diversity.

"Many human-engineered solutions to societal problems have turned out to have a relatively short useful life because evolution finds ways around them," said George Gilchrist, program officer in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded many of the Science authors. "Carroll and colleagues propose turning the tables and using evolutionary processes to develop more robust and dynamic solutions."

Applied evolutionary biology just recently made the leap from an academic discipline to a more-practical one, spurred by an effort within the community to better synthesize and share research insights. And--above all--increasing environmental pressures.

"The fact that we're changing the world means that evolutionary processes are going to be affected," said Thomas Smith, of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and another Science author. The question is, according to Smith: Do we want to be engaged in this change, or not?

The paper also serves as a platform for establishing a cross-disciplinary field of applied evolutionary biology, Carroll said, and a way to promote the field as a path to sustainable development solutions.

"Evolutionary biology touches on many elements of the life sciences, from medicine to conservation biology to agriculture," said Smith. "And unfortunately, there hasn't been an effort to unify across these fields."

This disconnect exists despite the use of evolutionary tactics in many disciplines: treating HIV with a cocktail of drugs, for example, to slow pathogen resistance. And the effects of evolution already swirl in the public consciousness--and spark debate. Think of the arguments for and against genetically modified crops, or warnings about the increasing price of combating drug resistance (which costs more than $20 billion in the U.S. each year, according to the nonprofit Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics).

Seldom are these issues described in an evolutionary context, said Smith. "We're missing an opportunity to educate the public about the importance of evolutionary principles in our daily lives."

In conservation, evolutionary approaches are often disregarded because of the belief that evolution is beyond our ability to manage and too slow to be useful, according to a paper Smith co-authored in the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics (AREES).

That article, recently published online, also tackles applied evolution. It was co-authored by Carroll, University of Maine Biologist Michael Kinnison, Sharon Strauss--of the Department of Evolution and Ecology at University of California-Davis--and Trevon Fuller of UCLA's Tropical Research Institute. All are NSF-funded. Kinnison and Strauss are also co-authors on the Science paper.

Yet contemporary evolution--what scientists are observing now--happens on timescales of months to a few hundred years, and can influence conservation management outcomes, according to the AREES paper.

Considering the evolutionary potential and constraints of species is also essential to combat "evolutionary mismatch." This means the environment a species exists in, and the one it has evolved to exist in, no longer match.

Such disharmony can be "dire and costly," the authors write in Science, citing the increasingly sedentary lifestyles--and processed food diets--of modern humans. These lifestyles are linked with increasing rates of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disorders. Restoring our health requires greater physical activity and less refined carbohydrates: "Diets and activity levels closer to those of the past, to which we are better adapted," the Science paper said.

Read more at Science Daily

Worldwide study demonstrates accuracy of genetic analyses

Physicians envision a future in which genomic data from patients is heavily used to manage care, but experts have questioned the accuracy and reliability of these analyses. Now, a study by 150 researchers in 12 countries finds real strength and agreement across RNA genomic sequencing techniques and laboratories -- as well as ways to improve what little variability exists to set a new high standard.

The results of the study were published in Nature Biotechnology in three separate research articles.

These results should provide assurance to patients, clinicians and the research community that genomic sequencing is accurate, says E. Aubrey Thompson, Ph.D., a professor of cancer biology at Mayo Clinic in Florida, one of three institutions that led the study. Dr. Thompson is a study co-author and member of the project leadership.

"It seems very likely that decisions about patient care are going to be influenced by genomic data, derived from sequencing both RNA and DNA from patient samples, and we now know the extent to which these sequence-based analyses can be relied upon within a given laboratory or from laboratory to laboratory," he says.

"That means that results of a patient's sample, from which clinical management decisions will likely be made, will be accurate worldwide," says Dr. Thompson.

RNA sequencing is being used with increasing frequency to characterize a growing array of conditions -- everything from prenatal birth defects to disorders of the elderly.

The other institutions involved in the study are the Beijing Genomic Institute and Weill Cornell Medical School. All three institutions have extensive experience in sequencing RNA and have helped develop novel analytical tools for interpreting the data.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) funded the research, given its need to understand the accuracy of such data submitted in applications for approval of new drugs, clinical applications and genomic diagnostic procedures, Dr. Thompson says.

The purpose of this project, known as Sequence Quality Control (SEQC), was to rigorously define both the scope and the sources of variation in RNA sequencing data.

Laboratory groups at the three leading institutions sequenced the same two RNA samples multiple times.

More than 1 billion nucleotides of sequencing data were generated by each site. The data were then analyzed under the direction of the FDA with the assistance of a large group of academic and industrial statisticians. The researchers also examined the current technologies and major biochemical methods of 30 RNA-sequencing labs and hundreds of researchers. The researchers also found that RNA can be accurately extracted and analyzed from severely degraded genetic samples, such as from tissue samples that have been stored for many years.

Read more at Science Daily

Female Greek Guard Statues Fully Revealed

Two female statues partially unearthed in in a Greek tomb on Saturday are full body sculptures crafted with great skill, according to new pictures released by the Greek culture ministry.

The female sculptures were found inside a mysterious burial mound in Amphipolis that dates from the time of Alexander the Great.

Carved in high relief of Thassos marble, the twin guards stand between two marble pillars supporting a beam.

On Saturday, the archeologists led by Katerina Peristeri could only see the figures as busts, wearing a sleeved tunic and boasting long, thick hair covering their shoulders.

Indeed, the sculptures were “buried” in the ground, sandwiched between two walls, one sealing the statues off and the other closing another chamber.

As the first wall and sandy soil covering the sculptures was removed, the sculptures appeared in full glory, revealing the continuity of their robes.

“Their drapes bear exceptionally crafted folds,” the culture ministry said.

The archaeologists also found part of the face of one figure which was missing (the face of the other was found mostly intact).

According to Peristeri’s team, the sculptures appear to slightly lift their chitons -- a sleeveless garment from the Archaic period -- with the corresponding hand.

At the same time, they determined that the alternate inner arms of the statues were not raised to support the superstructure, as with those described by the first century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius.

“There are no indications of lead moldings or processing of the lower surface of the beam to justify such support,” the culture ministry said.

Read more at Discovery News

Armor Made of Bones Found in Bronze Age Grave

Archaeologists in Siberia have unearthed Bronze Age armor crafted from bones in an outfit that George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy character "Rattleshirt" might have worn.

Dating to between 3,900 and 3,500 years old, the armor was buried without its owner at a depth of 5 feet near the Irtysh River in Omsk. Analysis is underway to determine what kind of animal bones were used for the protective outfit, but it was likely assembled with bones from elk, deer and horse.

"At the moment we can only fantasize — who dug it into the ground and for what purpose. Was it some ritual or sacrifice? We do not know yet," Yury Gerasimov of the Omsk branch of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography told The Siberian Times.

A reconstruction of the Bronze Age bone armor.

He believes it's possible the site was a place of worship.

"Armor had great material value. There was no sense to dig it in the ground or hide it for a long time — because the fixings and the bones would be ruined," Gerasimov said.

The archaeological site is known for findings dating from the Early Neolithic to the Middle Ages.

During the Bronze Age, the region was inhabited by animal breeder members of the Krotov culture.

The armor, however, resembles artifacts from the Samus-Seyminskaya culture, whose members originated in the Altai Mountain, about 620 miles to the south east, and who later migrated to Omsk.

If this is the case, the bone outfit could have been a gift, an item obtained through trade, or a spoil of war.

Most likely it belonged to an elite warrior and would have offered protection from Bronze Age weapons such as bone and stone arrowheads, bronze knives, spears tipped with bronze, and bronze axes.

"It was more precious than life, because it saved life," Boris Konikov, curator of the excavations, said.

Read more at Discovery News

Quasar Diversity Mystery Solved

Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and display a mysterious diversity in their appearance that has puzzled astronomers for more than two decades.

Now, scientists find this mystery can be solved by looking at two simple features of quasars — how quickly matter is getting fed into the quasars and the direction from which the quasars are seen.

Quasars are supermassive black holes up to billions of times the mass of the sun that live at the hearts of distant, massive galaxies. They release extraordinarily large amounts of light as they rip apart stars and gobble matter.

Past studies of quasars have found that the physical properties of the objects follow definite, regular trends — for instance, a quasar's size is linked with its mass. However, despite such trends, for some puzzling reason, quasars can vary greatly in appearance in visible and ultraviolet light.

To help solve this mystery, scientists examined the largest sample of quasar observations yet — data from more than 20,000 quasars captured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The collaboration's statistical analyses revealed that the appearance of quasars could mostly be explained by two basic factors.

"Our work solves a two-decade-long mystery in quasar research," lead study author Yue Shen, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.,told Space.com.

The first factor is the so-called Eddington ratio — the luminosity of a quasar compared with its mass. This ratio predicts how quickly matter is falling into a quasar, and was long suspected to play a major role in why quasars often varied in appearance.

The other factor is the direction from which astronomers look at a quasar, which influences how much they can see of the clouds of gas closest to the black hole. This fast-moving gas produces a broad range of wavelengths of light, greatly affecting a quasar's appearance, and these findings suggest that these clouds are arranged in a flattened disk, explaining why the direction from which they are seen can matter so much.

"Our findings have profound implications for quasar research," Shen said in a statement. "This simple unification scheme presents a pathway to better understand how supermassive black holes accrete matter and interplay with their environments."

Read more at Discovery News

The Naked Mole Rat Could One Day Save Your Life

The naked mole rat’s teeth are situated outside of its lips, preventing the critter from eating dirt. Which is quite lucky—I’ve eaten dirt before. It’s nothing to write home about.

“Sic semper tyrannis,” Brutus supposedly yelled as he helped assassinate Julius Caesar: Thus always to tyrants. John Wilkes Booth exclaimed the same to the panicked crowd in Ford’s Theater after he shot Lincoln. And in dark underground burrows in east Africa, I’m willing to bet the homely yet somehow charming naked mole rat is yelling the exact same thing. Only in a much squeakier voice and not in Latin, I’d assume.

You see, this nearly hairless critter, which is indeed a rodent but not technically a rat, is one of only two mammals on Earth that live in what are known as eusocial societies—think bee and ant colonies ruled by a queen, with multitudes of workers underneath. But instead of being born into royalty, female naked mole rats fight to the death to take the throne, using their enormous chompers to puncture the lungs and other vital organs of their foes.

For a queen, it’s an existence fraught with hazard. But for all of her subjects, there’s little to worry about. They live their entire lives underground, well beyond reach of predators. As such, their lifespans are ridiculously long for so tiny a creature: up to 30 years (if that doesn’t sound high to you, consider that British men in the Middle Ages had the same life expectancy, and probably did the same amount of toiling in mud). Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that they never get cancer. And that nice little trick, ladies and gentlemen, could one day teach us how to eradicate the disease from our own bodies.

Biologist Vera Gorbunova studies these creatures at the University of Rochester. She says naked mole rat societies, which can reach 300 individuals, are more like dictatorships than monarchies because anyone with the gumption can ascend the throne, even if she doesn’t have a fancy III or IV after her name. Any female can, in theory, depose the queen, and males can rise up to become one of just two or three allowed to breed with her. Most females are perfectly happy not ovulating, “but occasionally,” Gorbunova says, “especially if the queen is getting weak, either from a disease or for example she’s just given birth—then another female may start ovulating all of a sudden.”

A good look at the many fine hairs that the naked mole rat uses to feel its way around its burrow. It’s hard to tell if this is a live or taxidermy specimen, which says a lot about the naked mole rat.

The ovulating challenger sometimes will even conspire with a male to murder the queen and take the throne together (I feel like this came up in Game of Thrones, but I can’t for the life of me remember which of the 4,583 characters it could have been). Once she’s in power, the new queen’s body will begin to elongate as the spaces between her vertebrae expand (also from Game of Thrones?), and from here on out she’ll use brute force to maintain order in the colony. It sounds like a crummy state of affairs, but the dictatorship is so tight that peace usually reigns supreme. “So the colony for the most part is very peaceful,” said Gorbunova. “But when there is this social unrest, then they fight, and they fight for life or death.”

Death matches and punctured lungs aside, Gorbunova insists naked mole rats are quite pleasant toward the humans in her lab, unlike typical lab rats, which “bite viciously when they’re upset.” But in the wild, naked mole rats from other colonies are less than welcome—to say the least. Just like in ant societies, each colony has soldiers that aggressively defend entrances to the burrow, snapping and maiming with their huge incisors.

Sometimes, though, they’ll make an exception for a certain kind of intruder: the disperser male. It’s pretty rare, but from time to time a male in a colony will start packing on fat, then up and wander out of the borrow in search of another colony. If he finds one that accepts him, he’ll usually become a breeder there. Scientists don’t understand the hormonal changes that trigger a male to leave, or why this makes evolutionary sense. The odds of surviving above ground are, after all, quite slim for a nearly blind creature with almost no fur to protect it from the elements, or the sharp teeth of predators for that matter.

But more often than not, naked mole rats are perfectly content in their societies, continuously digging out their burrows with those marvelous teeth, which actually grow outside their mouths, saving them the trouble of mouthfuls of dirt. With these they’ll also attack their favorite food, tubers, and the occasional insect larva, not to mention the inevitable intruder. And to keep from accidentally assaulting friends, they identify each other by smell—indeed, they hardly use their eyes at all. Over evolutionary time their peepers have grown nearly useless, only capable of detecting light and dark without any detail, so instead the animals make sense of their surroundings with fine hairs all over their bodies that act like whiskers.

The Nudie Medical Miracle

For all their eusocial weirdness (it’s seriously weird for a mammal, but equally weird for the ornery pistol shrimp, the only marine animal that forms such societies), naked mole rats belong to another extremely exclusive club in nature: Like the remarkable salamander known as the axolotl, they don’t develop cancer. Even if you pump them with carcinogens, nothing happens. Their secret, Gorbunova has found, is a starch called hyaluronan. Engineer a naked mole rat’s cells to stop producing this compound and suddenly a cancer-free critter is capable of developing tumors.

Naked mole rats sleeping, photographed with a nice soap opera filter.

Now, we have the same stuff in our bodies—it forms the extracellular matrix, a kind of scaffolding where cells live—except hyaluronan molecules in naked mole rats are 10 times longer than ours. And strangely, these vastly different lengths convey opposite traits. Whereas short hyaluronan molecules tell cells to divide, while also promoting inflammation, the longer molecules in the naked mole rat have anti-inflammatory properties and, importantly for cancer research, keep cells from dividing too much. Cancer is, after all, the runaway division of cells as they stop properly communicating with their neighbors.

But why would this evolve in the first place? It’s entirely uncommon in the rest of the animal kingdom. So what makes the naked mole rat different?

The answer could be its stretchy, pale, flabby skin—and another burrowing mammal called the blind mole rat (which, by the way, has found its eyes to be so useless that they’re now completely covered over with skin and fur). Despite their names, these creatures are unrelated, but blind mole rats also are long-lived, call the underground their home, and don’t get cancer. “And when we took their cells they also make very long molecules of hyaluronan,” said Gorbunova. “So how come these species are not related at all, but they independently both evolved this unusual molecule?”

Blind mole rats have lost their eyes entirely, and therefore never need to worry about getting red eyes in photographs like this one.

Hyaluronan gives both species their stretchy skin, which Gorbunova reckons allows them to better squeeze through their burrows. “But we’re now looking at more species that are subterranean to prove that for these animals, first they needed hyaluronan to squeeze through the tunnels because their skin is rubbing underground all the time,” she said. “And then it was co-opted for other useful purposes”—that is, keeping the animals cancer-free.

And that is very interesting indeed to cancer researchers. There is still much work to be done on understanding hyaluronan, not to mention figuring out how to develop drugs to exploit it, “but I think there is a very good potential here,” said Gorbunova. “Because if we find a way … to increase levels of hyaluronan in human bodies, we may be able to stop tumors from growing.” Consider families with high hereditary cancer expectancy: Doctors might one day use hyaluronan to stop their tumors from growing in the first place.

Read more at Wired Science

Faces of 9/11: Where are they now?

A voice on the phone. A cry in the dark. A flag raised amid death and devastation.

These are the stories forever linked with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York, Washington and western Pennsylvania.

In some cases, they are tales of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances -- people who became symbols of comfort and hope for a grieving nation.

Then there were those who were behind the attacks, people who have become the emblem of evil.

On the 13th anniversary of the attacks, here is a look at some of those people -- then and now:



Lisa Jefferson, the voice

Then:

Hers was the voice on the other end of the line for Todd Beamer, the passenger aboard United Flight 93 whose last purported words -- "let's roll" -- became a rallying cry for the nation in the days following the terror attacks.

It was 9:45 a.m., when Beamer placed a call to an operator at a Verizon Airfone call center in Chicago and relayed that the airplane bound for San Francisco had been hijacked. The operator turned the call over to Jefferson, the supervisor on duty.

Beamer was calm as he detailed how three men had taken over the flight. Two had knives and had locked themselves in the cockpit, and one had a bomb strapped to his waist.

He told Jefferson about his children and his wife, Lisa.

"I had asked him, did he want me to place his call through to his wife for him. He told me that he didn't want me to put him through to her in case he didn't have to. He had hoped on landing that plane safely. And he told me if I didn't make it, would I please call her and let her know how much he loved her and his family," she told CNN in 2002.

"... After we said 'The Lord's Prayer,' the plane took another dive. And Todd said they had a plan. The next thing he said, 'Are you ready? OK, let's roll,'" she told CNN in 2001.

"And that's the last I heard from him.''

In the days that followed, she relayed Beamer's message to his wife.

Now:

Jefferson, 57, no longer answers telephone calls at the call center. She's changed jobs.

Most of her colleagues now don't know that she was the calm, caring voice who prayed with Beamer in his final minutes.

Sure, she's talked about it in the years since. At the urging of others, she even told her story in the book "Called: Hello, My Name is Mrs. Jefferson, I Understand Your Plane is Being Hijacked?"

The story of that conversation has been told and retold -- in books and articles, in movies and television shows.

But during a recent interview, Jefferson asked that no details about her current job or employer be made public.

"Every time I tell the story, it's like the first time," she said. "... I'm not a hero. I was just doing my job."

That day, after she took over the call, she said she turned around to hand off the phone to someone else. But, she says, there was no one there.

"I had to stay on the line," she said. "I stayed with him until the end."

She has credited her faith with giving her the strength to offer comfort and care during that 15-minute call.

"God had a purpose for me with the Beamer family," she said.



 Josephine Harris, the angel

Then:

Her story of survival is wrapped up with six firefighters who say they made it through the collapse of the World Trade Center's North Tower because they were trying to rescue her.

Harris, like so many, was trying to make her way down the stairwell of the North Tower.

Flight after flight, she descended. She stopped on the 20th floor, physically unable to take another step on her own.

The firefighters of Ladder Company 6 were on the 27th floor or so of the building and still climbing when then-Capt. Jay Jonas got a call on the radio that the South Tower had collapsed and he needed to get his men out of the North Tower.

"It was an almost empty feeling that we couldn't help anyone," Jonas, now a deputy chief, said this week.

As they were making their way down the stairwell, they found Harris. There she was, crying in the doorway, Jonas said.

"Hey Cap, what do you want us to do?" one of the firefighters asked. "Take her with us," Jonas said.

Half-carrying Harris, the firefighters continued to make their way down, slowly.

The clock was ticking.

By the time they made it to the fourth floor, Harris fell to the ground.

Leave me, she ordered the firefighters. They, of course, refused.

Then it happened. The 110-story building collapsed.

"It seemed like forever," Jonas said. It was only 13 seconds.

When it was over, Harris and the men of Ladder 6 were alive, entombed in the debris.

"There was only one time she lost her composure," Jonas said. "She said she was afraid, and she started to cry."

Without orders from the captain, the firefighters took turns caring for Harris until hours later when the thick dust settled and they were able to see a way to get out and get help.

"She was definitely alive because of us," Jonas said.

And they were alive because of her.

"She chose the fourth floor to stop, to fall to the floor," he said. "... Nobody survived above the fifth floor or on the first floor. If we hadn't stopped there, who knows? We probably wouldn't have survived."

Now:

In the years that followed, Harris became known at the "Angel of Ladder Company 6," and she and the firefighters stayed in contact.

Their story resonated with many people post-September 11, and they made appearances together at parades and dedications.

"If Josephine got a call to do an interview or an appearance, she would always call and make sure we were OK with it," Jonas said. "We would always tell her yes, and we'll be there with you."

On Jan. 12, 2011, Harris called 911 from her Brooklyn apartment.

By the time firefighters arrived, she had died of an apparent heart attack.

Jonas got the news in a telephone call from a firefighter. "It was like losing a member of your family, and she really was a member of the (Ladder 6) family," he said.

What neither he nor the other firefighters knew was that Harris was destitute. "She was an intensely private person," Jonas said.

For days, her body lay uncollected at the city morgue. Her family didn't have enough money to bury her.

"I thought 'Man, she's going to Potter's Field, if we don't do something," Jonas said.

So he got on the phone to the other firefighters, and they started to spread the word across the city.

They were soon contacted by the owner of Greenwich Village Funeral Home, who had heard of Harris' death. He remembered the story of the "guardian angel" of Ladder 6 and offered to pick up the entire cost of the service.

Jonas and the firefighters carried Harris one last time. They served as pallbearers, carrying her casket engraved with the words "guardian angel.''



http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/09/04/missing-911-flag-carroll-newday.cnn.html

George Johnson, Daniel McWilliams and William Eisengrein, the firefighters

Then:

It was late afternoon, hours after the attacks, and the three firefighters joined the rush to what would become known as ground zero.

Eisengrein was sitting on his truck when he saw McWilliams carrying an American flag, he told ABCNews.com in 2011. Walking alongside McWilliams was another firefighter, Johnson.

Eisengrein knew McWilliams but had never met Johnson.

It is believed McWilliams found the flag from a yacht, "Star of America," docked nearby on the Hudson River, according to the CNN documentary "The Flag."

Eisengrein told ABC News he just knew McWilliams was going to hang it somewhere, and shouted out to him: "Do you need help?"

The three men found a flagpole leaning against a construction trailer, he said.

"So we put a piece of tin on the ground up to the trailer and hiked up that, and raised it," Eisengrein said.

"... We stood there and looked at it for a second and went about our ways."

None of them knew that their picture had been taken by Tom Franklin, a photographer with The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey.

Soon the picture was picked up by The Associated Press and splashed across newspaper front pages, becoming one of the iconic images associated with September 11.

Now:

Much has been made about the flag, and its whereabouts.

Within hours of its raising, the flag disappeared from the World Trade Center site.

The makers of "The Flag" spoke with several photographers about going to ground zero and the heartbreaking scenes that awaited.

Among those interviewed was the couple who owned the yacht from which the flag was taken.

The couple wanted to donate the flag to the Smithsonian Institution and asked about a year after the attacks to borrow the signed flag briefly for a ceremony.

"When we got the flag, we were quite stunned that it was the wrong flag," said Shirley Dreifus. "... This wraps around the two of us, and we're not the thinnest people on Earth ... So we knew right away it was the wrong flag."

While the search for the flag continues, Johnson, McWilliams and Eisengrein rarely talk publicly about that day and the flag. They have routinely declined media requests for interviews over the years.

The firefighters "in question have repeatedly expressed no interest in interviews or additional media coverage," the FDNY said in an email response to a CNN request this week.

Maybe we know all we need to know about the three men: They did their job, and they reminded everyone by raising the flag that the country was still standing.



Rudy Giuliani, the mayor

Then:

Giuliani was in the final days of his second term as mayor when an airplane crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower. Giuliani was at the World Trade Center, getting an update on the rescue effort, when a second plane struck the South Tower.

The mayor, like many that day, was forced to run for his life when the tower came down.

He was engulfed in a cloud of debris, but famously kept his composure.

"This is a vicious, unprovoked act, a horrible attack on innocent men, women and children. It's one of the most heinous acts, certainly, in world history," he told CNN that day.

As New York mourned the loss of thousands of lives and cleaned up the debris, Giuliani seemed to be everywhere -- holding news conferences, giving interviews and attending funerals and fundraisers.

In the aftermath of the attacks, he earned the moniker "America's mayor" for the comfort he offered not only to city of more than 8 million, but to a shell-shocked nation.

Now:

Giuliani's popularity soared, spurring him to make a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

But his campaign stumbled, badly.

Giuliani skipped the early primary states, staking his bid on a win in Florida. He finished third and pulled out of the campaign.

He quickly reinvented himself as a political pundit, becoming a regular on television news programs.

These days, the former mayor balances running Giuliani Partners, a security consulting firm, and working as a managing partner in the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm.

He even did a stint as a pitchman for LifeLock, the identify theft protection company. The company was a client of Giuliani Partners, he has said.

Even now, more than a decade later, the events of September 11 are never far from his thoughts.

"I think the most difficult moment I had as mayor of New York City was when I arrived at the World Trade Center," Giuliani said during a 2013 interview on "Oprah: Where Are They Now."

"Not really knowing how bad it was, not really emotionally grasping all of that until I saw a man throw himself out of the 100th floor. And that's an image -- that's an image that stayed with me forever, almost every day it comes up in my mind somehow. And then, after that, I just decided well, it's part of me and I have to live with it."

Read more at CNN

See What Our Earliest Mammal Ancestors Looked Like

New fossil finds suggest that several Jurassic Era mammals resembled common critters alive today: squirrels.

The fossils, described in the latest issue of the journal Nature, belonged to three newly named mammals that lived 160 million years ago in China.

Given the animals' relationship to other early known species, researchers now believe that mammals as a whole originated at least 208 million years ago during the Triassic. This corresponds with some other studies that used DNA data.

Most prior studies based on the fossil record, however, previously concluded that mammals originated during the middle Jurassic, between 176 and 161 million years ago.

"For decades, scientists have been debating whether the extinct group, called Haramiyida, belongs within or outside of Mammalia," co-author Jin Meng, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology, said in a press release.

"Previously, everything we knew about these animals was based on fragmented jaws and isolated teeth," he continued. "But the new specimens we discovered are extremely well preserved. And based on these fossils, we now have a good idea of what these animals really looked like, which confirms that they are, indeed, mammals."

The three new species -- Shenshou lui,Xianshou linglong and Xianshou songae -- weighed only 1 to 10 ounces and had tails and feet that indicate they were tree dwellers. If you saw one in a tree today, you’d probably mistake it for a squirrel.

"They were good climbers and probably spent more time than squirrels in trees," Meng said. "Their hands and feet were adapted for holding branches, but not good for running on the ground."

They, and other members of their clade Euharamiyida, likely ate insects, nuts, and fruit with what the researchers say were "strange" teeth. Their teeth had many cusps, or raised points, on the crowns.

Mammals are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor that had three cusps; human molars can have up to five. The newly discovered species, however, had two parallel rows of cusps on each molar, with up to seven cusps on each side. No one knows yet how this complex tooth pattern evolved in relation to those of other mammals.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient 'Toothy' Dolphin Fossils Found in Peru

The dusty Pisco-Ica desert stretches along the coast of southern Peru, but more than 16 million years ago it may have been covered with sparkling water and home to a now-extinct family of dolphins, known as squalodelphinids, according to new findings.

The desert is a haven for marine fossil hunters — paleontologists have found whales with fossilized baleen, a giant raptorial sperm whale and a dolphin that resembles a walrus, researchers say.

The new findings include the fossils of three dolphins, two of which have well-preserved skulls. A thorough skeletal analysis suggests the dolphins are not only a new species but also related to the endangered South Asian river dolphins living in the Indus and Ganges rivers in India today, the researchers found.

"The quality of the fossils places these specimens as some of the best-preserved members of this rare family," lead study author Olivier Lambert, of the Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, said in a statement.

River dolphins are an unusual breed. Unlike other dolphins, they live in muddy freshwater rivers and estuaries, and they have a long, narrow, toothy beak and small eyes with poor vision, said Jonathan Geisler, an associate professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study.

The three fossils do not appear to be ancestors of other river dolphins, including those of the Amazon or the Yangtze rivers, the latter of which may be extinct, said John Gatesy, an associate professor of biology at University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study.

"They're three of a kind," Gatesy said. "Three independent lineages."

Researchers have long tried to determine how river dolphins fit into the family tree. "It's not normal for a whale or a dolphin to live in freshwater these days," Gatesy said. "What seems to have happened is they've independently adapted to living in freshwater conditions."

The new findings help answer that question, at least for the South Asian river dolphins, experts say.

"It's helping flesh out this pretty poorly known extinct family that helps tie this oddball living species into the evolutionary tree," Geisler said.

Researchers have uncovered other squalodelphinid specimens in Argentina, France, Italy and on the East Coast of the United States, but fossils of these medium-size dolphins are still rare. The modern families of tooth whales, porpoises and dolphins diverged in the early Miocene epoch, about 20 million to 24 million years ago, making any marine fossils from that time period valuable, Geisler said.

The new, extinct species was named Huaridelphis raimondii, after the ancient Huari culture of the south-central Andes and coastal area of Peru that existed from A.D. 500 to 1000, and "delphis," which is Latin for dolphin. The species name celebrates Italian scientist Antonio Raimondi (1826-1890), who found fossils of whales in Peru, the study reports.

Read more at Discovery News

Possible Europa Tectonics Could be Boon for Alien Life

Jupiter’s intriguing moon Europa may have a very Earth-like quality — its thick, icy crust appears to act like Earth’s tectonic plates. And that could be a very positive thing for the little world’s life-giving potential.

During studies of photographs taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft that orbited the gas giant from 1995 to 2003, planetary geologists have found it hard to explain why most of the crust was relatively new ice (on average, the icy surface is 40-90 million years old) and yet there was little evidence of old ice that had been crushed up on the surface to make way for the new material.

“We have been puzzled for years as to how all this new terrain could be formed, but we couldn’t figure out how it was accommodated,” said Louise Prockter, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “We finally think we’ve found the answer.”

Prockter and co-investigator Simon Kattenhorn, of the University of Idaho, Moscow, were able to seek out some curious features in the Galileo imagery that may explain what is going on. Their research was published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Their conclusion is that, like Earth’s rocky crust, there must be subduction zones where old material is pushed against plate boundaries, making the ice sink into the subsurface ocean, where it melts and gets cycled.

On Earth, subduction zones are associated with mountain ranges, volcanoes and earthquakes — e.g. the Andean Volcanic Belt that stretches down the west coastal region of South America where the Nazca Plate and Antarctic Plate is continually being subducted under the South American Plate. One plate edge is pushed under a neighboring plate, causing the rock to be melted by the Earth’s interior and recycled. The motion of the two plates rubbing along one another triggers quakes and provides energy for volcanic eruptions.

Like the Earth example, the researchers discovered features that provide evidence for subduction zones on Europa, including subsumption bands (where the ice gets bunched up, much like a mountain range) and “ice volcanoes” (where melt-water from the diving ice plate is forced to the surface to create “cryolava”):

Although it has been surmised that Europa’s icy plates shift along one another — like California’s San Andreas fault — and it is obvious that new ice is being continuously formed by the upwelling of liquid water from Europa’s interior, it has been hard to understand where the old ice was removed to make room for the new ice.

By carefully reconstructing the configuration of Europa’s plates, Kattenhorn and Prockter were able to determine that the old ice was being forced under neighboring plates, causing it to dive deep into the crustal ice below or even completely entering the subsurface ocean.

“Europa may be more Earth-like than we imagined, if it has a global plate tectonic system,” said Kattenhorn. “Not only does this discovery make it one of the most geologically interesting bodies in the solar system, it also implies two-way communication between the exterior and interior — a way to move material from the surface into the ocean — a process which has significant implications for Europa’s potential as a habitable world.”

Read more at Discovery News