NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft turned off its snooze alarm for the last time Saturday night to begin preparations for a long-awaited study of the dwarf planet and its Kuiper Belt neighbors.
Ground control teams at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a radio transmission around 9:30 pm. EST that the spacecraft woke up from electronic slumber, its 18th hibernation period since its 3-billion-mile voyage began in January 2006.
"This is really quite an epic journey," lead researcher Alan Stern told reporters at the American Astronomical Society meeting last month.
New Horizons spent a total of 1,873 days in hibernation, with periods ranging from 36- to 202 days, said mission operations manager Alice Bowman.
The downtime left the spacecraft free to collect dust particles and run science experiments without having a costly flight control team or needing to use NASA’s deep space communications network.
New Horizons pre-programmed wake-up call now gives the team about six weeks to calibrate the spacecraft’s instruments, load software, prepare recorders and check other systems before the main science mission begins Jan. 15.
The spacecraft will make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14.
Pluto, which was still considered a planet when New Horizons blasted off, is now known as a dwarf planet, one of thousands located beyond Neptune’s orbit in the unexplored Kuiper Belt region of the solar system.
Scientists believe Kuiper Belt-type objects were the building blocks of planets. New Horizons will be the first spacecraft to survey Pluto.
"Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meager ... despite the march of technology on the ground, even with the Hubble Space Telescope," Stern said. "New Horizons will write the textbook on the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt."
A "ghost ship" that has been lost beneath the waves for more than 60 years has been discovered nearly a half-mile below the ocean surface off the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
A small submersible vehicle came upon the shipwreck last year, researchers at the University of Hawaii announced today (Dec. 5). Despite being torpedoed after World War II, many parts of the ship, including the ship's wheel, are still in their original locations.
"The upper deck structures from the bow to the stern were well-preserved and showed no sign of torpedo damage," Terry Kerby, a submersible pilot with the university's Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory, said in a statement.
Vast submarine network
The ship, then called the Dickenson, first set sail in early 1923 as part of a fleet of ships that maintained the growing submarine telecommunications network at the time. The ship set out from Chester, Pennsylvania, as part of the Commercial Pacific Cable Company fleet, and arrived in Hawaii in July of that year.
The Dickenson ferried supplies and patched up cables at the remote Midway and Fanning Islands from 1923 to 1941. Then, soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Dickenson evacuated British employees of the telecommunications company Cable and Wireless Ltd., from Midway Island, ferrying them back to Oahu. Some of the evacuees even spotted a submarine tailing their ship, before American ships chased it away.
During the war, the Midway Island telecommunications hub stopped functioning, and the Dickenson was renamed the U.S.S. Kailua and was sent to maintain cables in other locales in the South Pacific.
After the war, the ship returned to Pearl Harbor, but neither the Navy nor its original owners wanted it. On Feb. 7, 1946, the ship was torpedoed and sunk into the deep waters off Oahu, but no one recorded its final resting place.
"From her interisland service to her role in Pacific communications and then World War II, Dickenson today is like a museum exhibit resting in the darkness, reminding us of these specific elements of Pacific history," said Hans Van Tilburg, a researcher with the maritime heritage program in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Marine Sanctuaries.
Easy ID
The team came across the WWII ship by accident last year. The shipwreck was about 2,000 feet (609 meters) below the water's surface and was still sitting upright, with its lone mast still pointing upward and the wheel still intact.
We’ve all seen the ads, banners, commercials and books hyping the benefits of “brain training,” offering games and puzzles that promise to keep your brain in tip-top shape as you age. Diseases such as dementia are terrifying, and millions of people do their best to stave it off though online games, crossword puzzles and so on.
As a recent Scientific American column noted, “cognitive training — better known as ‘brain training’ — is one of the hottest new trends in self improvement. Lumosity, which offers web-based tasks designed to improve cognitive abilities such as memory and attention, boasts 50 million subscribers and advertises on National Public Radio. Cogmed claims to be ‘a computer-based solution for attention problems caused by poor working memory,’ and BrainHQ will help you ‘make the most of your unique brain.’” It all sounds very impressive and scientific.
While it's important to stay both mentally and physically active in our later years, there's little evidence that most of the commercially-sold brain enhancement methods or pills do any good. In fact the scientific community pours cold water on these fanciful myths.
In late October the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Berlin Max Planck Institute for Human Development gathered many of the world's leading cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to examine these brain games and programs. It then issued a statement that read in part:
Computer-based “brain-games” claim a growing share of the marketplace in aging societies. Consumers are told that playing the games will make them smarter, more alert, and able to learn faster and better. The implied and often explicit promise is that adherence to prescribed regimens of cognitive exercise will reduce and potentially reverse creeping cognitive slowing and forgetfulness, improve everyday functioning, and help to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. … Advertisements also assure consumers that claims and promises are based on solid scientific evidence, as the games are “designed by neuroscientists” at top universities and research centers. We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles.
Working the Brain Gym
Though many of the “brain training” programs and commercials target older people, some are also marketed for children. One of the first and best-known commercially sold brain workout programs is called the Brain Gym. It was created in the 1970s and is marketed worldwide, used as a teaching program in Canada and the United States, in British state schools and elsewhere.
However the Brain Gym’s theoretical basis has been researched and fully discredited. There’s simply no evidence that the Brain Gym works — nor that it even could work. Dr. Ben Goldacre, the “Bad Science” columnist for “The Guardian” has long been a vocal critic of the Brain Gym, referring to it as “transparent pseudoscientific nonsense” with “a scientific explanatory framework that is barkingly out to lunch.”
An ancient Roman pond, surrounded by bits of Roman pottery, garbage pits and even a bronze fingernail cleaner, was unearthed in Barnham, a village in southern England. The discovery provides evidence that Romans once occupied the region.
The artifacts, uncovered over the past several weeks, date back earlier than A.D. 100. Archaeologists found the pond on the last day of a survey that was required before construction could begin on a new housing development on the site.
"All the archaeological features appear today as filled with pale grey silt, and it is usually easy to see that these must be silted-up ditches, pits and post-holes," John Mills, West Sussex County Council’s senior archaeologist, said in a statement.
But one patch of silt, which formed a round "splodge" on the site, puzzled the archaeologists. On the last day of the excavation, they dug into the silt and found a shallow depression measuring about 1 foot (0.3 meters) deep and about 30 feet (9 m) wide. Although it's not lined with clay, as other Roman ponds were, it likely held water during the rainy seasons, Mills told Live Science.
"It's unlined, so it couldn't have kept water all year round," Mills said. But the site is just a 5-minute walk from "a respectable stream," so the inhabitants likely didn't want for water, he added.
Perhaps the settlement's inhabitants used the pond as a watering source for livestock, such as cattle and sheep, he said. Archaeologists are now testing the soil to see what else they can learn about the site.
And while this was an unexpected find, unearthing ancient ponds is not all that infrequent, at least not on ancient Roman territory.
"In truth, I don't think that ponds are at all unusual on Roman rural settlement sites in Britain," Mills said. "On some Roman rural sites there were also waterholes, literally holes dug through natural clay down to the water table, sometimes with a step or two down to the standing water, to allow someone to pass up a bucket or other container from the surface of the water, just a few feet down."
The Romans are known for their sophisticated water management. Archaeologists suspect that the ditches on the site served to drain water. People would have to periodically dig out these ditches as rainwater, and possibly groundwater, caused silt to accumulate in the ditch.
If a ditch could no longer function, people likely dug new ditches alongside the old ones, Mills said.
Although much of the site's drainage system is reminiscent of Roman technology, the settlement may have predated the Roman conquest of Britain in A.D. 43, during the Late Iron Age. Moreover, life in the settlement likely continued until well after A.D. 200, experts said.
Wealthy neighbor
Pottery fragments found at the site in Barnham suggest that the inhabitants got their goods from a variety of places. Their pottery may have been forged in kilns from the local Arun Valley, known for its thriving industry, and other goods may have been acquired from the nearby Rowlands Castle and New Forest areas, the archaeologists said.
Some of the pottery may have come from France, which was also part of the Roman Empire. Anyone who could afford fine tableware pottery likely had money or, at least, affluent connections, Mills said.
"They're not just simple farmers," he said. "Someone with money is somewhere in the background, otherwise the imported pottery wouldn't be there."
The archaeologists also found a decorated fragment of bronze, likely used for manicuring, or cleaning, a person's fingernails.
"[It's] something you wouldn't expect to find on a poor farmer's farmstead," Mills said. "Something is going on at that site. People are using it who have a good bit of leisure time."
After several winters of little rainfall, California is close to being bone-dry. The third straight year of drought has some of the state’s 12 major reservoirs dipping to less than 50 percent of their historic average water levels, and has even raised fears that the state could run out of water.
For Californians, there’s been some comfort in the knowledge that the state has endured previous dry periods. But a new study by climate scientists published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that this particular drought’s combination of low rainfall and heat is the worst in 1,200 years.
Daniel Griffin, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota, and Kevin Anchukaitis, an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, studied tree-ring samples from blue oak trees in the southern and central parts of the state, which allowed them to reconstruct rainfall patterns back to the 14th Century A.D., before Spanish explorers first reached California.
The scientists augmented that with other data gleaned from sources such as the North American Drought Atlas, a spatial tree-ring-based reconstruction of drought developed by scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Griffin and Anchukaitis found that while California has often suffered through periods of meager rainfall, record-high temperatures in California have magnified the effects of this one.
This drought is much more severe than historical droughts that spanned decades, which the scientists believe were punctuated by wet years that partly mitigated their effects.
The study adds evidence to the argument that California’s drought is linked to human-induced climate change. Though some scientists have disputed the connection, Stanford University researchers in September published a study showing that persistent high atmospheric pressure hovering over the Pacific — more likely to occur due to greenhouse gas concentrations from burning of fossil fuels — diverted storms away from the California coast at a greater rate, resulting in drought.
NASA's new Orion spaceship nailed its orbital debut flight, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean after a 4.5-hour journey that took it past the Van Allen radiation belts, a key test of its ability to operate in deep space.
After a day's delay to iron out a problem with the Delta 4 Heavy rocket that booted Orion into orbit, the spacecraft, which flew without a crew for its first flight, flawlessly ran through an automated series of commands and maneuvers to test 13 different technologies needed to one day put astronauts on Mars.
"All the systems functioned to perfection," NASA mission commentator Rob Navias said as Orion neared the end of its trial run.
The test flight began at 7:05 a.m. EST with liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and ended four hours, 23 minutes later with a parachute landing 630 southwest of San Diego.
In between, Orion successfully fired explosive charges to discard spent components, steered in orbit and survived high levels of radiation as it passed up and back through the Van Allen belts of radiation that surround the planet.
At peak altitude, Orion was 3,604 miles from Earth -- farther than any spacecraft designed for humans has been since the last Apollo moon mission in 1972.
The most challenging part of the flight was yet to come: a 20,000 mph dive back into Earth's atmosphere, nearly as fast as a spaceship returning from lunar orbit.
"The moment of truth for Orion," Navias said as the spaceship begin its plunge back to Earth.
Orion's half-ton, 16.5-diameter heat shield bore the brunt of temperatures that reached 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- twice as hot as molten lava.
Eventually, NASA plans to use the capsule to fly astronauts to and from Mars.
It will take a lot more than an Orion capsule to land crews on Mars, but today's debut test flight of its new human spaceship is a critical first step, says NASA.
Another Orion capsule, also unmanned, is due to fly in 2018 on a second test flight that includes the debut of NASA's new heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket.
Let’s just admit it: We all have body issues to some degree. I, for instance, was informed a few years back by a drunk lady in a bar that I am in fact slightly bow-legged, which was the first I’d heard of it. The revelation was enormous, and still remains a source of some anxiety for me.
But our image issues are mere trifles compared to what must be going through the minds of the treehoppers. These are without a doubt nature’s most bizarre insects, having evolved into a huge range of shapes: some with jutting, curling heads, others that look like they have ants on their backs, and still others that do a spot-on impression of a fungus that invades other insects and erupts from their bodies.
What you’re seeing is a highly modified pronotum, the segment just behind an insect’s head. But the problem, at least for the time being, is scientists would have a hard time telling you definitively what purpose they serve. “That’s actually a really big question that we haven’t solved,” said entomologist Matthew Wallace of East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. “It’s kind of interesting, because it’s what they’re known for. Some are just so strangely shaped that you look at it and say, ‘How could they survive like that?’”
But no creature evolves to suck at survival. Quite the opposite. Those best adapted to their environment pass down their genes for, say, goofy-yet-beneficially-shaped bodies. Scientists like Wallace are trying to piece together exactly how these ridiculous pronota are helping the treehoppers survive. What seems evident, though, is different species of treehoppers probably have adopted different strategies with those weird bodies, from camouflage to mimicry to defense.
That’s no radio antenna. It could well be
that this treehopper is mimicking a fungus that invades other insects
and erupts out of their bodies. And if that’s not something to strive to
be in life, I don’t know what is.
Perhaps the most remarkably complex among them are the species of the tropical genus Bocydium, shown above. That pronotum will look miiiiighty familiar to those acquainted with the Ophiocordyceps fungus, which invites itself into ants’ brains and mind-controls them, instructing them to bite down on a leaf. The fungus then kills its host and erupts from the back of the ant as a stalk and globes, which rain spores on the poor thing’s comrades below.
This treehopper, some scientists think, could have evolved to mimic that fungal structure erupting from ants, as well as other bugs they attack, “so it wouldn’t be palatable to predators” that know to avoid diseased insects, said Wallace. Even if the predator doesn’t buy it and goes for a nibble, the towering structure can break off in its mouth, leaving the treehopper unharmed and decidedly less top-heavy. The predator gets nothing but a non-nutritious chunk of exoskeleton.
Other species of treehopper look like ants sans fungi—insects that are more than capable of defending themselves with stings and nasty mandibles, which the treehoppers lack. They could therefore be mimicking the ants to exploit their reputation as scrappy fighters. “And then some of those species in that same genus, they have the coloration of a wasp,” said Wallace. “And so they kind of combine that warning coloration with the ant structures.”
This one is probably imitating an ant. That
may not seem like it’s choosing a very ferocious animal to mimic and to
therefore scare potential predators away, but you do not want to mess with ants. I messed with ants once. It’s probably why I’m bow-legged.
Treehoppers aren’t just ripping off the ants’ style, though. They’re employing the creatures. Sap-feeding insects like treehoppers and the related aphids produce a sugary excrement called honeydew, which you’ll now think about whenever you eat honeydew, and which ants are crazy for. In exchange for tolerating the ants drinking the honeydew from their bums, the treehoppers get a security detail. The ants are, in essence, running a protection racket.
“It’s funny, if you try to collect some of these treehoppers the ants will be very aggressive toward you, they’ll try to bite,” said Wallace. “And so it’s just amazing to think about all of these relationships and how dependent the ants are on the treehoppers, and the treehoppers on the ants.” Word of the bounty gets around, though: Bees, wasps, and even geckos will seek out treehoppers for their honeydew, which provides valuable carbohydrates.
Here’s some nice thorns. JK they’re treehoppers too. Almost had you there.
But back to the pronota. Still other treehoppers choose to use theirs to blend in with their surroundings, mimicking leaves or twigs or buds. And those that mimic thorns have the added bonus of being essentially a living spike, which doesn’t go down a predator’s throat so easy. Such species can pull off this disguise because treehoppers are largely sedentary, drilling into tree branches with what are appropriately known as “piercing-sucking” mouthparts and slurping out the sap—and just kinda hanging out there all motionless and peaceful-like. That is not to say, though, that treehoppers are lazy. If threatened, they can pull off some pretty decent flight. Decent, that is, considering the outrageous structures they’re schlepping around.
What doesn’t seem to be a factor in the evolution of the pronotum is what is known as sexual selection. This is when males use flamboyant features or dances or calls to win the affection of females (though there are very rare exceptions where the dynamic is switched, such as a species of cave insect whose females have the penises and compete for males, who give them not only sperm but highly coveted and nutritious “nuptial gifts”). Typically when sexual selection is at work, you’ll see a good amount of sexual dimorphism—very obvious physical differences between males and females. But for all of the flamboyance of treehoppers, there isn’t much variation between the sexes, so Wallace doesn’t think that sexual selection is at play here.
Beyond the camouflage and mimicry and defensive benefits, there’s evidence to suggest the treehopper pronotum is in fact a sensory structure as well. “If you look at them underneath the ‘scope they’re loaded with hairs and pits and things,” said Wallace, “and that would seem to hint toward some type of reception, whether it’s chemicals or sounds.” One paper has suggested that the enormous structures could even be dispensing pheromones to bring boys and girls together for sexy time.
Treehoppers have another method of rather unconventional communication, at least to us humans. To warn their branch-mates of danger or to clue them into food, they send out vibrations, which other treehoppers pick up with their legs. And even though treehoppers are related to the patently obnoxious cicadas, we can’t hear the vibrations of the treehoppers.
Well, not without help, at least. Lucky for us, an enterprising scientist named Rex Cocroft spends his days strapping microphones to branches to listen in on treehopper conversations. While cicada calls make you want to pull your ears off and burn down forests, amplified treehopper calls are positively enchanting—and at times creepy. Listen to examples here, here, and here, and check out an archive of more here.
Among the billions and billions of stars in the sky, where should astronomers look for infant Earths where life might develop? New research from Cornell University's Institute for Pale Blue Dots shows where -- and when -- infant Earths are most likely to be found. The paper by research associate Ramses M. Ramirez and director Lisa Kaltenegger, "The Habitable Zones of Pre-Main-Sequence Stars" will be published in the Jan. 1, 2015, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"The search for new, habitable worlds is one of the most exciting things human beings are doing today and finding infant Earths will add another fascinating piece to the puzzle of how 'Pale Blue Dots' work" says Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences.
The researchers found that on young worlds the Habitable Zone -- the orbital region where water can be liquid on the surface of a planet and where signals of life in the atmosphere can be detected with telescopes -- turns out to be located further away from the young stars these worlds orbit than previously thought.
"This increased distance from their stars means these infant planets should be able to be seen early on by the next generation of ground-based telescopes," says Ramirez. "They are easier to spot when the Habitable Zone is farther out, so we can catch them when their star is really young."
Moreover, say the researchers, since the pre-main sequence period for the coolest stars is long, up to 2.5 billion years, it's possible that life could begin on a planet during its sun's early phase and then that life could move to the planet's subsurface (or underwater) as the star's luminosity decreases.
"In the search for planets like ours out there, we are certainly in for surprises. That's what makes this search so exciting," says Kaltenegger.
To enable researchers to more easily find infant earths, the paper by Kaltenegger and Ramirez offers estimates for where one can find habitable infant Earths. As reference points, they also assess the maximum water loss for rocky planets that are at equivalent distances to Venus, Earth and Mars from our Sun.
Ramirez and Kaltenegger also found that during the early period of a solar system's development, planets that end up being in the Habitable Zone later on, when the star is older, initially can lose the equivalent of several hundred oceans of water or more if they orbit the coolest stars. However, even if a runaway greenhouse effect is triggered -- when a planet absorbs more energy from the star than it can radiate back to space, resulting in a rapid evaporation of surface water -- a planet could still become habitable if water is later delivered to the planet, after the runaway phase ends.
The electric eel is one of those animals that can strike fear into people's hearts, even though it lives a relatively peaceful life in the tepid waterways of South America. Now scientists have figured out how it uses its electric shock to both detect and stun its prey -- a brand new finding for an animal that has been a curiosity of science since the 18th century.
It turns out the eel emits a low-level charge that takes over the nervous system of any nearby animal, say a frog or a fish, and causes it to involuntarily twitch. This twitch alerts the eel that it has found live prey (and not a rock or branch).
After detecting its prey, the eel uses volleys of high-voltage pulses combined with a suction strike to kill its prey -- the hapless fish is gobbled up by the eel's enormous mouth.
Kenneth Catania, professor of biology at Vanderbilt University, presented this finding in this week's journal Science. Catania is an expert in mammal sensory systems and brain organization. He is known for his work on star-nose moles, the cute/ugly critters who use big, fleshy appendages on their nose to find their way underground.
After writing a book chapter on animal behavior, he recently got interested in electric eels and began photographing their behavior in his lab's aquarium.
"They have two modes," Catani said. "If they are hunting for hidden prey and don't know where it is, they give out a little blip of the electricity just briefly, and the animal twitches. It's a perfect way to cause the prey to reveal themselves."
The second mode remotely activates the prey's muscles.
"You would have maximal muscle contractions, it completely immobilizes you," Catania said. "The eel can catch you when normally you could escape."
Most of the electric eel's body is composed of electrocytes, which are muscle-derived biological batteries, that can provide a combined discharge of up to 600 volts.
"It's the same way the Taser acts," he said. "When someone gets Tased, they are not getting stunned by brain activity; their peripheral nervous system is being activated."
Catania says the electric eel lives only in South America and can reach two meters (nearly 7 feet). He's checked existing records and could find no human deaths, although they likely have given cattle and other large mammals a pretty bad shock.
"I would imagine that the eel would be able to inactivate anything it would fit in its mouth," he said. Some of them get quite big. I have a four-foot one that is as big around as my leg."
Eels were used in early attempts to understand electricity and more recently, eels were important for identifying acetylcholine receptors and for providing insights into the evolution of electric organs.
Italian archaeologists have unearthed the largest Roman water basin ever found, right in the heart of modern Rome.
Found some 65 feet down near St. John in Lateran Basilica during the excavation of the new metro C line, the huge irrigation basin measures 115 feet by 230 feet.
“It’s so big that it goes beyond the perimeter of the metro work site. It has not been possible to uncover it completely,” Rossella Rea, the dig’s director, said at a news conference in Rome.
Rea, who led an all-woman team of archaeologists, noted the basin was lined with hydraulic plaster and most likely extends, still preserved, beyond the work site toward the ancient city walls.
“On the basis of the size that had been determined so far, it could hold more than four million liters (1 million gallons) of water,” Rea said.
The massive basin was part of a farm dating to the third century B.C. In the first century A.D., the basin was added to existing structures, such as water wheels, used to lift and distribute the water along canals.
“Most likely it served as a water reservoir for crops as well as an area that made it possible to cope with overflows from the nearby river,” Rea said.
She believes the basin also extends towards the existing metro station of the A line, although most of the structure has been almost certainly destroyed.
The excavation, carried out by archaeologists Francesca Montella and Simona Morretta, also brought to light various agricultural related items, such as a three-pronged iron pitchfork, and remains of storage baskets made from braided willow branches.
Lined up jars with their ends cut open were recycled as water conduits. Used tiles were also recycled to make canals. They were inscribed with the encircled initials “TL” — evidence that the farm belonged to a single owner.
Peach pits revealed the agricultural plant featured the first cultivation of peach trees, imported from the Middle East.
