Fresh evidence for how water reached Earth found in asteroid debris

Water delivery via asteroids or comets is likely taking place in many other planetary systems, just as it happened on Earth, new research strongly suggests.

Published by the Royal Astronomical Society and led by the University of Warwick, the research finds evidence for numerous planetary bodies, including asteroids and comets, containing large amounts of water.

The research findings add further support to the possibility water can be delivered to Earth-like planets via such bodies to create a suitable environment for the formation of life.

Commenting on the findings lead researcher Dr Roberto Raddi, of the University of Warwick's Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, said: "Our research has found that, rather than being unique, water-rich asteroids similar to those found in our Solar System appear to be frequent. Accordingly, many planets may have contained a volume of water, comparable to that contained in the Earth.

"It is believed that the Earth was initially dry, but our research strongly supports the view that the oceans we have today were created as a result of impacts by water-rich comets or asteroids."

In observations obtained at the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands, the University of Warwick astronomers detected a large quantity of hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf (known as SDSS J1242+5226). The quantities found provide the evidence that a water-rich exo-asteroid was disrupted and eventually delivered the water it contained onto the star.

The asteroid, the researchers discovered, was comparable in size to Ceres -- at 900km across, the largest asteroid in the Solar System.

"The amount of water found SDSS J1242+5226 is equivalent to 30-35% of the oceans on Earth," explained Dr Raddi.

The impact of water-rich asteroids or comets onto a planet or white dwarf results in the mixing of hydrogen and oxygen into the atmosphere. Both elements were detected in large amounts in SDSS J1242+5226.

Research co-author Professor Boris Gänsicke, also of University of Warwick, explained: "Oxygen, which is a relatively heavy element, will sink deep down over time, and hence a while after the disruption event is over, it will no longer be visible.

Read more at Science Daily

'Roswell Alien' Photo Likely a Baby Mummy

Earlier this week at a UFO conference in Mexico City two photographs claimed to have been found in a trunk in Sedona, Ariz., and depicting an alien body that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were revealed. It has created quite a buzz among UFO believers and others, but there are good reasons to question the claim.

According to the Daily Mirror, the photos “were found by former journalist Adam Dew, who has taken steps to verify the pair of alien snaps and said Kodak experts had dated the film to 1947….The photos were supposedly found in Arizona, hidden in a collection of snaps owned by oil geologist Bernard Ray and his wife Hilda Ray, who have both died.”

Assuming that a representative from Kodak authenticated the film as old stock dating back to the 1940s doesn’t mean that Kodak “authenticated” the subject of the photo; all it means is that it’s a genuine old photo, and not, for example, on film produced in the 1980s.

If it’s a genuine old photo, what could it be? An important clue about the real explanation can be seen in the photos, since the small figure appears to have been photographed in a display case (it even has what appears to be a sign explaining what it is, though the image is washed out and the quality is not good enough to read it).

It doesn’t look alien so much as a skeletal human with a large head, which is characteristic of a child’s body. And that’s likely what it is: a child’s mummified body. In fact, it is not the first time that a mummified child’s body has been mistaken for an alien. Long-dead bodies with deformed skulls have previously been mistaken for extraterrestrials, but there is nothing unusual about finding deformed skulls in the Americas; archaeologists have found them for years.

Cranial deformation is a widely known practice, and in 2012 archaeologists in Mexico found a burial ground of twenty-five skeletons; of those, more than half showed intentional skull deformation. Mummified fetuses and babies have been on display in museums around the world for decades, including in South America.

Mummified Mysteries

If it is indeed a mummified baby corpse, it would be only the latest of many to have been reinterpreted as something unknown or mysterious. Earlier this year a pair of mummified cats found in Chile was mistaken for the mysterious vampire creature called the chupacabra. The felines had disproportionately large heads compared to the rest of their bodies and were likely kittens.

Part of the reason that these objects seem so bizarre and mysterious is that very few people outside of the fields of archaeology and anthropology are familiar with the process and appearance of mummification.

For most people the word “mummy” evokes bandaged, slow-moving monsters from ancient Egypt. We typically think of bodies being reduced to a skeleton not long after death, but in fact bodies may be preserved for centuries or millennia, either through intentional preservation (such as mummification) or because the environment where a person died helps preserve the bodies (for example high in the cold Andes mountains, or in deserts where the lack of moisture inhibits decay-causing bacteria).

Adult mummies are strange enough, but baby mummies are even rarer and stranger looking. Because babies have disproportionally large heads as compared to the rest of their bodies, their dessicated remains seem all the more inhuman. A Reuters news story featured video of UFO proponent Richard Dolan at the conference claiming, without providing any evidence or documentation, that unnamed experts somehow ruled out the mummy explanation.

Of course extraterrestrials have never been proven to exist, and no photographs of alien bodies have ever been authenticated, and thus the belief or assumption that aliens would have disproportionately large craniums is sci-fi pop culture speculation promoted in entertainment media ranging from “The X-Files” to Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

If the “standard” alien depicted decades ago -- and since embraced by UFO buffs -- had an unusually small head and three legs, for example, this and other mummified babies would not be associated with anything extraterrestrial.

Even if it is a genuine extraterrestrial, there’s reason to doubt that the carcass was recovered in Roswell in 1947: None of the original eyewitnesses to the debris found on the New Mexico ranch described any alien bodies or even spacecraft. In fact the first person to find the wreckage described it as “made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.”

Read more at Discovery News

Ransacked Roman Temple Has Hidden Medieval Secrets

Despite damage from war, looters and agricultural activity, a Roman temple and settlement high in the Lebanese mountains still hold clues about the ancient and medieval people who once lived there, a new study finds.

Until now, little was known about Hosn Niha, a Roman-Byzantine village located in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, the researchers said. Built in approximately A.D. 200, the village was home to a Roman temple and a small settlement, they said.

In the early 1900s, German archaeologists studied the remains of the temple but paid little attention to the neighboring settlement, which they described in a 1938 study as “a picture of complete ransacking,” adding that hardly a trace remained of the settlement’s inhabitants.

During the Lebanese Civil War (1975 to 1990), military activity and looting took a heavy toll on the remains of Hosn Niha. In the late 1980s, treasure hunters riding bulldozers scraped through the village, moving and damaging ancient clues buried in the ground, according to the new study.

But “even though the core of the village has been irreparably damaged, a significant amount of the site remains in situ [in its original place] and with enough surviving features and structural evidence to warrant further investigation,” the researchers wrote in the new study, detailed in the April issue of the journal Antiquity.

Their diligence paid off. An analysis of pottery shards scattered around the village shows evidence of a large Greco-Roman settlement and a later medieval occupation, likely during the 13th or 14th centuries, the researchers said.

“What we were trying to do is show that sites that have been quite badly damaged by conflict shouldn’t just be ignored and forgotten,” said study researcher Ruth Young, a senior lecturer of archaeology at the University of Leicester in England. “I think that what we have now is a lot more knowledge about how villages operated and connection with the temple.”

‘Blimey, what a mess’

When the researchers arrived at Hosn Niha, they found bulldozed piles — some reaching 13 feet high (4 meters) — of pottery fragments mixed with dirt, the researchers said.

“When you first look at the site, you think, ‘Blimey, what a mess. Where do we even start?’” Young told Live Science.

But the bulldozers hadn’t pushed the pottery fragments far from their original spots, usually less than 164 feet (50 m), the researchers said. They quickly got to work, using a precise form of global positioning system (GPS) called differential GPS to map architectural fragments, such as door thresholds, columns and stone walls.

The researchers’ understanding of the settlement grew as they carefully mapped the structures and dated the pottery fragments. They suggest a settlement was firmly in place by A.D. 200, with a dense area of dwellings in the central village and more dispersed courtyard dwellings skirting the village, the researchers said.

The village likely diminished by the 600s during the early Islamic period, though it’s unclear why, they said. Today, the most complete remains of the site belong to the Roman temple, which still has walls standing 33 feet (10 m) high, the researchers said.

The early inhabitants likely farmed in the valley, possibly growing grapes for wine, the researchers said. “This might explain why they were able to build such big temples,” said study co-author Paul Newson, a professor of history and archaeology at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. “If they were doing wine, they could do it as a cash crop.”

The researchers also found glazed pottery shards, characteristic of the early medieval period, scattered around a stone structure, suggesting the structure was a medieval development, he said.

Looters had robbed a cemetery to the east of the settlement, but the archaeologists still studied the tomb types, including stone sarcophagi, individual cist (stone-lined) tombs and communal rock-cut tombs, they said.

Read more at Discovery News

Possible Captain Kidd Treasure Found off Madagascar

A team of American explorers on Thursday claimed to have discovered silver treasure from the infamous 17th-century Scottish pirate William Kidd in a shipwreck off the coast of Madagascar.

Marine archaeologist Barry Clifford told reporters he had found a 50-kilogram (110-pound) silver bar in the wreck of Kidd's ship the Adventure Gallery, close to the small island of Sainte Marie.

Captain Kidd, who was born in Scotland in about 1645, was first employed by British authorities to hunt pirates, but he turned himself into a ruthless criminal of the high seas.

After looting a treasure-laden ship in 1698, he was caught, imprisoned and questioned in front of the British parliament before being executed in Wapping, close to the River Thames in 1701.

The fate of much of his booty, however, has remained a mystery, sparking intrigue and excitement for generations of treasure-hunters.

Clifford, who was filmed by a documentary crew lifting the silver bar off the sea bed, handed it over to Malagasy President Hery Rajaonarimampianina on Sainte Marie. Soldiers guarded the apparent treasure at the ceremony, which was attended by the US and British ambassadors.

"We discovered 13 ships in the bay," Clifford said. "We've been working on two of them over the last 10 weeks. One of them is the Fire Dragon, the other is Captain Kidd's ship, the Adventure Galley."

Read more at Discovery News

Our Galaxy Could be Mixing With Andromeda's Supersized Halo

The Andromeda galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way, is sporting a massive halo of hot gas spanning a million light-years into intergalactic space.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope stumbled across this finding after archival data of distant quasars was analyzed.

“Halos are the gaseous atmospheres of galaxies. The properties of these gaseous halos control the rate at which stars form in galaxies according to models of galaxy formation,” said Nicolas Lehner, of the University of Notre Dame, Ind., lead author of the new study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

This halo is a big deal; it is estimated to contain half the mass of all the stars in the galaxy itself and is 1,000 times more massive than previous estimates suggested. Galactic halos are thought to form the same time as their host galaxies and Lehner’s team have determined that Andromeda’s halo is enriched with heavy elements.

These heavy elements came from periods of intense supernova activity — when massive stars run out of fuel and explode — within the galactic disk and powerful stellar winds blew the heavy element-laced gases into intergalactic space, into Andromeda’s halo. It is thought that nearly half of all the heavy elements generated by supernovae over Andromeda’s lifetime can be found in this extended halo.

Interestingly, if our galaxy also possesses a halo comparable to Andromeda’s it is conceivable that both halos are currently in contact and mixing galactic material. Both galaxies are currently on a collision course and expected to merge in 4 billion years time. Therefore, understanding halo dynamics may reveal that, well before galactic mergers, the respective galaxies’ halos merge quiescently.

The discovery of the Andromeda halo’s immense scale and mass came from the study of distant quasars. Over the past 5 years, Hubble has amassed a wealth of quasar data and the researchers were able to focus on quasar data in the direction of Andromeda. As Andromeda’s halo is dark, it was only detectable by the dimming of quasar emissions. As several quasars have been studied beyond Andromeda, a picture of the halo’s landscape could be constructed (as described in the diagram below.

Read more at Discovery News

The Spider Mother That Barfs Up Her Guts to Feed Her Kids

Someone get this lady a tiny "Mother of the Year" mug.

Did you know that most of Hawaii’s beautiful sand is parrotfish poop? It’s just one of the many ways that nature goes and ruins things that humans hold so dear. Take motherhood. A human mother is great and sweet and beautiful and hardly ever dissolves her own intestines and vomits them up for her kids until she dies, at which point the young open up her abdomen and consume the rest of her. So … happy Mother’s Day?

Such is the life of the Stegodyphus lineatus spider. It’s springtime in Israel’s Negev Desert, and mom has built a cylinder-shaped web in a bush, with sheets of silk extending from the entrance. This time of year, the hunting is good, as insect populations peak—and inevitably stumble into the spider’s silk sheets. Mother spider grows fat, standing guard over 80 or so eggs, all bundled up in a silk disk, keeping an eye out for infanticidal males, which, like male lions, will kill her young so she’s available to mate again.

But these young ‘uns make it. “The point that she opens the egg sac is the point that she stops feeding,” says Mor Salomon, a biologist at the Israel Cohen Institute for Biological Control. “We have tried giving them food in the lab, but it just doesn’t work—they just don’t feed.”

Feeding time, as a mother spider gives whole new meaning to the term “baby-faced.”

It isn’t that she’s just not very hungry, though: Her intestines already have begun dissolving. By the time the eggs hatch, she already has a meal for her young, in the form of a thin, clear liquid dribbling out of her mouth. They gather around and lap it up for two weeks, and indeed, they’re absolutely dependent on her for food, as their mouthparts aren’t yet developed enough to take on prey. The dissolving of their mother’s intestines intensifies, and toward the end her other organs, save for the heart (which she kinda needs, thank you very much), go as well, until most of her abdomen is filled with sludge.

That is, unless something goes wrong with her young within the first five days. Should they fall victim to an infanticidal male spider, she can actually shut down the dissolving. And with her ovaries still intact, she can mate with him and start the process anew.

But if her young make it those two weeks, she’ll have digested and regurgitated herself to death, losing 41 percent of her body mass. She leaves them with one last gift, though: the rest of her. They clamber over her abdomen and pierce it and suck out the remaining fluid, gorging themselves. “So when they finish her,” Salomon says, “you can see they are very tiny, tiny heads on this very big balloon of an abdomen swollen from all the food they took from her.”

Their mother, on the other hand, isn’t looking so well after losing an additional 54 percent of her body mass, bringing the grand total loss of flesh to 95 percent. “When they finish her, you can see only a hollow exoskeleton,” says Salomon. “You see the abdomen is shrunken, like a balloon whose air came out.”

A dead mother. Notice her abdomen at bottom, shrunken like a deflated balloon. I’m even ruining balloons now, aren’t I.

It’s grotesque, but it’s a brilliant adaptation in the harsh desert. Sure, insects may typically be more abundant in the spring than other seasons, but their numbers still can be unpredictable, given changes in rainfall and temperature. Instead of setting her young loose in a world that isn’t swarming with bugs, she stuffs her face while she can, then gifts her young with dissolved intestines to give them a head start. She’s actually converting that abundant food into tissue and storing it like a refrigerator … that leaks liquified guts instead of freon.

Now motherless, the young stick around for a few weeks to a month, fighting among themselves for insects that get caught in the silk. Unable to compete, the smaller siblings must find other means of feeding. “So what happens is that the small spiderlings leave first; they disperse from the female’s nest,” Salomon says. “And each one sits on a different branch or a different bush and starts its solitary life, making its own nest and web.” For the females among them, life will be short: They mate the next spring and consequently dissolve themselves.

If you see this in the Negev Desert in the springtime, something very weird is about to happen.

This all seems rather short-sighted—committing suicide and all that. But any organism’s overriding drive is to reproduce, sometimes at whatever cost. These devoted mother spiders may perish, but not before giving their kids a huge advantage as they head out into a world where feeding isn’t always a given. Thus mom’s genes carry on to the next generation.

It gets rather more intriguing when you consider that there’s a related species of spider, called Stegodyphus dumicola, that forms into social groups—quite the rarity for arachnids, which typically are lone guns. Only about half the females in this group will feed enough to mature into breeding adults; the other half plays an interesting role. When the group’s eggs hatch, not only will the moms dissolve and regurgitate their insides, but their immature sisters will do so as well, giving up their lives for their nieces and nephews.

If it doesn’t seem to make sense for a mother to kill herself for her young, it would seem to make even less sense for her sisters to sacrifice themselves when the brats aren’t even theirs. But behaviors don’t evolve to the detriment of a species (well, maybe except Juggalo culture—could have gone without that one). It turns out that this actually makes good evolutionary sense. It’s known as kin selection: By helping guarantee their nieces and nephews survive, the sisters are indeed helping pass some of their genes along.

Sure, not as many of those genes if they’d given birth themselves, but still, it’s better than passing along none at all. The same principle goes for other cooperative species like bees and ants. Evolution should drive species to be selfish in the pursuit of siring the next generation, but in fact banding together can be a good evolutionary strategy in its own right.

Read more at Wired Science

Ancient Brain Shows How Animals Evolved Heads

One of the oldest brains ever discovered is providing clues on how the world's first heads evolved.

The over 500-million-year-old brain, described in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, suggests that rudimentary brains emerged before defined heads. Defined heads likely emerged later to protect brains.

The ancient brain belonged to a crustacean called Odaria alata, which had a pair of large eyes on stalks that made it look like the tiny organism was wearing deely boppers. Scientists also often say that Odaria alata looked like a submarine. You can see the resemblance more in this video.

Javier Ortega-Hernández, who authored the study, determined that the eye-like features were connected to a hard, thin and flat body part called the "anterior sclerite." The connection was made possible via nerve endings originating from the front part of the brain.

"The anterior sclerite has been lost in modern arthropods (insects, spiders and crustaceans), as it most likely fused with other parts of the head during the evolutionary history of the group," Ortega-Hernández, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, explained in a press release.

For the study, he compared the remains of Odaria alata with another very ancient creature: a soft-bodied trilobite. Trilobites were marine creatures that were abundant during the Paleozoic Era, 542–251 million years ago. Fossil collectors love trilobites, due to their incredible age, relative commonness, different types and other factors.

Ortega-Hernández next compared the creatures with anomalocaridids, a group of large swimming predators that lived at around the same time as the other studied species. These larger organisms, like Odaria alata, were found to have a natural plate in the brain region.

"What we're seeing in these fossils," he said, "is one of the major transitional steps between soft-bodied worm-like creatures and arthropods with hard exoskeletons and jointed limbs–this is a period of crucial transformation."

Read more at Discovery News

Fire Ants Build Tunnels Like Jenga Blocks

Nature’s top excavator may be the red fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, the invasive, stinging creature that has taken over the lower third of the United States with its intricate mounds, tunnels and homes built with precision in nearly any kind of soil.

The fire ant’s digging prowess taps the same concepts behind kids’ building blocks, according to a new study that looks at the micro-mechanics of their ability to move giant particles in tiny spaces.

“They love to dig,” said Daniel Goldman, physics professor at Georgia Tech and an author on the paper in this week’s Journal of Experimental Biology.

“You can get them to dig in anything. When the particles are big, they grab a grain and remove it. It’s not a trivial task. They have to carefully to hold the particle in their jaw. They have another mode of digging where they can rake and scrape the soil into a pellet, and use their mandibles and antennae in a new way to help shape that pellet.”

Goldman and his colleagues conducted several lab experiments with fire ants using different size particles of sand and tiny glass pellets. They also took X-rays of the ants’ tunnels and found something surprising. The ants carefully constructed the tunnel walls like Jenga blocks, each particle precariously supporting the one on top. When the researchers probed the tunnels with a metal rod, they collapsed, just like the kids’ wooden tower.

“They are doing some nice manipulations that we don’t understand yet,” Goldman told Discovery News.

The research team – which included lead author and postdoctoral researcher Daria Monaenkova – also noticed that the ants built tunnels faster in coarser soils, and didn’t do as well in extremely dry soil as compared to wetter soil.

Since arriving from South America in the 1930s, fire ants have spread throughout the southern United States. In recent years, they have spread westward to Texas, New Mexico and Southern California, occupying an estimated 300 million acres of territory. Their massive colonies contain several hundred thousand individuals, and extend several feet below ground.

Their colonies are considered a “superorganism,” a group of individuals that acts as a single creature. Part of their success is linked to their incredible tunneling abilities, Goldman says, and their ability to squeeze past each other in tiny spaces while carrying big chunks of soil.

Read more at Discovery News

Mercury's Magnetic Field Got Switched On Early

A robotic spacecraft that circled Mercury detected magnetized rocks, evidence that planet’s still-roiling, liquid metal core likely spawned a global magnetic field as far back as about 3.8 billion years ago.

MESSENGER’s four-year mission at Mercury ended last week with the spacecraft, out of fuel to raise its orbit, crashing into the planet’s surface. But for months before its demise, MESSENGER gave scientists a parting gift: unprecedented, close-up images and data about the solar system’s innermost planet.

Mercury, situated just 36 million miles from the sun (compared to Earth’s 93 million-mile roost) has proven to be an odd world, both scorchingly hot and frigidly cold, and the only planet in the solar system besides Earth that has a global magnetic field generated by a dynamo – motions of metallic fluids in the core.

MESSENGER’s close-ups allowed scientists to pick up trace signals of magnetization in Mercury’s crust. Based on the number of impact craters, the magnetized regions are very old, dating back 3.7 billion to 3.9 billion years. (Counting craters is a common technique to approximate the age of a planet’s surface, with younger areas showing fewer impacts than older ones.)

The findings push back the clock for the start of Mercury’s magnetic field to about 700 million years after the planet’s formation. Researchers, however, cannot yet say if Mercury’s magnetic field has been operating continuously since then.

“The simplest possible explanation is that you switched a magnetic field on and then it just continued to the present day … but it may turn out that it would have been easier for that field to have switched on and off,” MESSENGER guest investigator Catherine Johnson, a geophysicist with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, told Discovery News.

“At the moment we don’t know anything about (the magnetic field) between 4 billion years ago and today. Obviously, that’s something that we’re going to be looking at,” she added.

Read more at Discovery News

The Geysers of Enceladus May be an Illusion

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a subsurface ocean that vents the liquid water through long cracks in its icy crust, but as planetary scientists get more familiar with the geysers blasting from the moon, new subtleties are presenting themselves.

Through the analysis of observational data from NASA’s Cassini Saturn-orbiting spacecraft and computer modeling, scientists are beginning to realize that when it comes to Enceladus’ geysers that erupt from the moon’s polar “tiger stripes”, there’s more than meets the eye.

“We think most of the observed activity represents curtain eruptions from the ‘tiger stripe’ fractures, rather than intermittent geysers along them,” said Joseph Spitale, a participating scientist with the Cassini mission at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. “Some prominent jets likely are what they appear to be, but most of the activity seen in the images can be explained without discrete jets.”

In short, in new research published today (May 7) in the journal Nature, Spitale’s team think that Enceladus’ discrete geysers are an illusion.

Called “curtain eruptions”, the researchers believe that vapor is being ejected along Enceladus’ tiger stripes, which are often wavy fissures. As the vapor is ejected along these wavy features, depending on the angle you’re viewing the eruptions from, you will sometimes be looking through the bend or ‘fold’ in the curtain of vapor. These folds will make the scattered light from the vapor appear more intense, giving the illusion of being a discreet geyser.

“The viewing direction plays an important role in where the phantom jets appear,” said Spitale. “If you rotated your perspective around Enceladus’ south pole, such jets would seem to appear and disappear.”

Curtain eruptions occur on Earth in regions of volcanic activity — such as Hawaii, Iceland and the Galapagos Islands. Molten rock can erupt from long fissures, often creating impressive curtains of fire.

Read more at Discovery News