First room-temperature magnetic skyrmion bubbles

New ideas are bubbling up for more efficient computer memory.

Researchers at UCLA and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory announced today a new method for creating magnetic skyrmion bubbles at room temperature. The bubbles, a physics phenomenon thought to be an option for more energy-efficient and compact electronics, can be created with simple equipment and common materials.

Skyrmions, discovered just a few years ago, are tiny islands of magnetism that form in certain materials. If you wrapped one up into a sphere, its magnetic fields would point away in all different directions—so they stay in neat little packages and don’t unravel easily.

Scientists found they could prod these skyrmions to move using electric currents, and an idea was born: could we use them to represent 1s and 0s in computer memory?

Transistors, which form the basis of today’s computing, are tiny devices that stop the flow of electric current (off and on, 1 and 0). But there’s a limit to how small we can make them, and we’re running up against it. Scientists want to find a way to create 1 and 0 by using physics phenomena that don’t actually change the atomic structure of the material—for example, making a line of skyrmions that could be read as 1s (skyrmion) and 0s (no skyrmion).

But the only way we knew how to make new individual skyrmion bubbles on demand was at very, very low temperatures (below -450 degrees Fahrenheit) with expensive equipment like spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopes—not practical for making consumer devices like laptops, and not even easy for most scientists to make so they could study them.

“Our new method is the simplest way to generate skyrmion bubbles thus far,” said Argonne postdoctoral researcher Wanjun Jiang, the first author on the study.

The team used a geometric structure to “blow” the bubbles into shape in a very thin film. Using the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne, they built a constricted wire out of a three-layered structure in which a tiny layer of magnetic material is sandwiched between tantalum and tantalum-oxide layers.

Long stripes of magnetic domains appear in the magnetic material on one side of a tiny channel. When the scientists applied an electric current to the metal layers, the stripes stretched through the channel and broke into tiny spherical skyrmion bubbles on the other side—much like how children blow soap bubbles.

By running a smaller electric current through the system, they could make the skyrmions move.

“These aren’t exotic materials—they’re widely used already in the magnetics industry,” said Argonne materials scientist Axel Hoffmann, the corresponding author on the paper. The electric current needed to move the skyrmions is much lower than what’s used in other experimental memory alternatives, like racetrack memory, he said.

“With this system we can explore many of the theoretical ideas on skyrmion physics that have been proposed over the past few years,” said Argonne physicist Suzanne G.E. te Velthuis, who co-authored the study.

Read more at Science Daily

Longstanding biology problem put to rest

Comparing the genomes of different species -- or different members of the same species -- is the basis of a great deal of modern biology. DNA sequences that are conserved across species are likely to be functionally important, while variations between members of the same species can indicate different susceptibilities to disease.

The basic algorithm for determining how much two sequences of symbols have in common -- the "edit distance" between them -- is now more than 40 years old. And for more than 40 years, computer science researchers have been trying to improve upon it, without much success.

At the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) next week, MIT researchers will report that, in all likelihood, that's because the algorithm is as good as it gets. If a widely held assumption about computational complexity is correct, then the problem of measuring the difference between two genomes -- or texts, or speech samples, or anything else that can be represented as a string of symbols -- can't be solved more efficiently.

In a sense, that's disappointing, since a computer running the existing algorithm would take 1,000 years to exhaustively compare two human genomes. But it also means that computer scientists can stop agonizing about whether they can do better.

"This edit distance is something that I've been trying to get better algorithms for since I was a graduate student, in the mid-'90s," says Piotr Indyk, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT and a co-author of the STOC paper. "I certainly spent lots of late nights on that -- without any progress whatsoever. So at least now there's a feeling of closure. The problem can be put to sleep."

Moreover, Indyk says, even though the paper hasn't officially been presented yet, it's already spawned two follow-up papers, which apply its approach to related problems. "There is a technical aspect of this paper, a certain gadget construction, that turns out to be very useful for other purposes as well," Indyk says.

Squaring off

Edit distance is the minimum number of edits -- deletions, insertions, and substitutions -- required to turn one string into another. The standard algorithm for determining edit distance, known as the Wagner-Fischer algorithm, assigns each symbol of one string to a column in a giant grid and each symbol of the other string to a row. Then, starting in the upper left-hand corner and flooding diagonally across the grid, it fills in each square with the number of edits required to turn the string ending with the corresponding column into the string ending with the corresponding row.

Computer scientists measure algorithmic efficiency as computation time relative to the number of elements the algorithm manipulates. Since the Wagner-Fischer algorithm has to fill in every square of its grid, its running time is proportional to the product of the lengths of the two strings it's considering. Double the lengths of the strings, and the running time quadruples. In computer parlance, the algorithm runs in quadratic time.

That may not sound terribly efficient, but quadratic time is much better than exponential time, which means that running time is proportional to 2N, where N is the number of elements the algorithm manipulates. If on some machine a quadratic-time algorithm took, say, a hundredth of a second to process 100 elements, an exponential-time algorithm would take about 100 quintillion years.

Theoretical computer science is particularly concerned with a class of problems known as NP-complete. Most researchers believe that NP-complete problems take exponential time to solve, but no one's been able to prove it. In their STOC paper, Indyk and his student Art?rs Bačkurs demonstrate that if it's possible to solve the edit-distance problem in less-than-quadratic time, then it's possible to solve an NP-complete problem in less-than-exponential time. Most researchers in the computational-complexity community will take that as strong evidence that no subquadratic solution to the edit-distance problem exists.

Can't get no satisfaction

The core NP-complete problem is known as the "satisfiability problem": Given a host of logical constraints, is it possible to satisfy them all? For instance, say you're throwing a dinner party, and you're trying to decide whom to invite. You may face a number of constraints: Either Alice or Bob will have to stay home with the kids, so they can't both come; if you invite Cindy and Dave, you'll have to invite the rest of the book club, or they'll know they were excluded; Ellen will bring either her husband, Fred, or her lover, George, but not both; and so on. Is there an invitation list that meets all those constraints?

In Indyk and Bačkurs' proof, they propose that, faced with a satisfiability problem, you split the variables into two groups of roughly equivalent size: Alice, Bob, and Cindy go into one, but Walt, Yvonne, and Zack go into the other. Then, for each group, you solve for all the pertinent constraints. This could be a massively complex calculation, but not nearly as complex as solving for the group as a whole. If, for instance, Alice has a restraining order out on Zack, it doesn't matter, because they fall in separate subgroups: It's a constraint that doesn't have to be met.

Read more at Science Daily

Polar Bears Develop Taste for Dolphins as Arctic Warms

Norwegian scientists have seen polar bears eating dolphins in the Arctic for the first time ever and blame global warming for the bears expanding their diet.

Polar bears feed mainly on seals but Jon Aars at the Norwegian Polar Institute has photographed dolphins being devoured by a bear and published his findings in the latest edition of Polar Research this month.

“It is likely that new species are appearing in the diet of polar bears due to climate change because new species are finding their way north,” he told AFP.

The first incident he documented was in April 2014 when his team came across a polar feeding on the carcasses of two white-beaked dolphins.

Although dolphins are regularly seen in the Norwegian Arctic in the summer months when the ice has melted, they have never been observed during winter or spring when the sea is usually still covered in sheets of ice.

But Norwegian scientists have reported a strong retreat of ice and two nearly ice-free winters in recent years which they said could have attracted the dolphins further north, where they probably became trapped by the sudden arrival of dense ice blown into a fjord by strong northerly winds.

Aars said the bear he photographed had probably caught the two dolphins when they surfaced to breathe through a tiny hole in the ice.

“Even if they saw the bear, the dolphins did not necessarily have any other choice,” he said.

Saved one for later

In the photos, a visibly-skinny old male bear devours one of the dolphins and appeared to have stored a second one under snow for later -- something scientist had never seen before.

"We think that he tried to cover the dolphin in snow in the hope that other bears, foxes or birds would have less of a chance of finding it. Maybe to be able to eat it a day or two later, once he had digested the first one," said Aars.

After the first incident in 2014, a further five cases of dolphins stranded or captured and then eaten by bears have been reported.

"I don't think that this signifies a great upheaval" in the diet of the carnivores, said Aars.

"It's just that the polar bear is coming into contact with species they have not been used to meeting until now."

Read more at Discovery News

Penis Disorder Found in Fertility God Pompeii Portrait

One of Pompeii's most recognized frescoes, the portrait of the Greek god of fertility Priapus, holds an embarrassing truth, according to a new study of the 1st-century A.D. wall painting.

Found in the entrance hall to the House of the Vettii, perhaps the most famous house to survive Mount Vesuvius's devastating eruption, the fresco shows the ever-erect Priapus with his engorged penis.

But this phallus-flaunting symbol of male potency and procreative power shows signs of a condition which can result in difficult sexual relations and infertility, says a study published in Urology journal.

"The disproportionate virile member is distinctively characterized by a patent phimosis, more specifically a shut phimosis," Francesco Maria Galassi told Discovery News.

Galassi is an M.D. now back in Italy who recently worked at Imperial College London. He co-authored the paper with his father Stefano, also an M.D.

An inability to fully retract the foreskin, phimosis was treated only with circumcision or prepuceplasty before the introduction of topical corticosteroids.

"This condition presents different grades of severity, and in this specific case appears to be of the highest grade, in which there is no skin retractability on the glans," Galassi said.

Defects of the genitourinary tract, including phimosis, have been depicted in artistic representation since prehistory, showing a high degree of precision.

But why someone would portray the god of fertility with a severe phimosis?

"It is not unlikely the painter might have desired to report objective evidence of a high prevalence of that anatomic defect in Pompeii, at a time mixing it with fertility attributes traditionally ascribed to Priapus," Galassi said.

In this view, widespread among the male population in Pompeii, phimosis might have been the reason for the abundance in Pompeii of anatomical votive artifacts used to dispel that anatomical and functional defect.

"Anatomical votive offerings made in Italy between the fourth to second centuries B.C. do often show the penis with the foreskin closed around the top, as in the later Priapus painting from Pompeii," Jessica Hughes, lecturer in classical studies at UK’s Open University, told Discovery News.

Read more at Discovery News

Bones in Alexander the Great Tomb Give Up Few Secrets

It’s a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes, with a backstory that puts “Game of Thrones” to shame: Who was laid to rest in a lavish, gold-filled Macedonian tomb near Vergina, Greece? The tomb, discovered in 1977, might be the final resting place of Philip II of Macedon, conqueror of Greece and father of Alexander the Great, who would push his father’s empire to the edge of India.

Or, it might be the grave of the distinctly less impressive Philip III Arrhidaios (also written as Arrhidaeus), the half brother of, and figurehead successor to, Alexander the Great.

The latest volley in the debate over which Philip occupies the tomb makes a case for the illustrious Philip II, arguing that the woman found interred alongside the much-debated male body was too old to have been the younger Philip’s wife. But this new research seems unlikely to resolve the great Macedonian tomb mystery.

A complicated history

Archaeologists discovered the contentious tomb in 1977. Amid paintings and pottery was a gold sarcophagus containing a man’s cremated bones. Nearby were the even-more-fragmentary burned bones of a woman.

The tomb’s discoverers declared the man was Philip II, who took the throne of Macedonia in 359 B.C. as regent for his infant nephew. Displaying the kind of initiative that defined the Macedonian royal family, Philip II quickly took the throne for himself and started conquering his neighbors.

This went well until 336 B.C., when one of Philip II’s bodyguards assassinated him as he walked into a theater in the Macedonian capital of Aegae. It’s not entirely clear why the king was murdered; ancient historians told various tales, including one in which the murderer was a former male lover of Philip who had hounded another of Philip’s male lovers to suicide and then was himself subjected to sexual assault by one of Philip’s in-laws as revenge for that suicide. Some argued that Philip’s fourth wife, Olympias, who was rumored by the historian Plutarch to sleep with snakes, had something to do with it.

Regardless of whether Olympias was that diabolical, she certainly knew how to play politics — with bloody results. The queen moved quickly to put her own son, Alexander, on the throne. She arranged for Philip’s two children by another wife, Cleopatra Eurydice, to be killed; Cleopatra Eurydice committed suicide by force soon after. Archaeologists who argue that the tomb at Vergina contains Philip II’s bones have argued that the female remains found in the tomb belong to Cleopatra Eurydice.

But not everyone believed the bones matched those of Philip II. In 1981, a further examination of the remains led to claims that the body instead belonged to Philip III Arrhidaios. After Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C. (under mysterious circumstances, naturally), Philip III Arrhidaios took the throne as a figurehead, with his niece and wife Eurydice (not the same person as his father’s seventh wife) as queen. Ancient historians described Philip III Arrhidaios as mentally unfit. Plutarch blamed Olympias for the mental issues, claiming she’d tried to poison Arrhidaios as a child, but Plutarch clearly was not Olympias’ biggest fan, and modern historians are skeptical.

Eurydice, however, was a force to be reckoned with. Her attempts to grab real power put her on a collision course with Olympias and her allies. In 317 B.C., during a war over secession, Olympias’ forces defeated the king and queen — Philip III Arrhidaios and Eurydice. He was executed, and she was forced to commit suicide. As if that weren’t enough indignity, their bodies were dug up more than a year later and cremated for a royal funeral meant to shore up legitimacy for the next king.

Archaeological arguments

Much of the debate around whether the tomb belongs to Philip II or Philip III Arrhidaios has focused on the burned bones. In the 1980s, Jonathan Musgrave, an anatomist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, created a facial reconstruction of the skull and argued that a notch in the bone over one eye matched historical descriptions of one of Philip II’s battle wounds. In 2000, Greek paleoanthropologist Antonis Bartsiokas published a paper in the journal Science arguing that the bone notch and other features Musgrave had highlighted were simply incidental to cremation. (Musgrave does not agree.)

Another line of debate questions whether the bones show signs of warping, which occurs when flesh-covered bodies are cremated. If the bones of Philip III Arrhidaios were dug up and cremated months after the king’s death, they might show less warping, or at least a different warping pattern compared with what would be found if the bones were cremated immediately.

Much of this argument falls by the wayside in the new paper, recently accepted for publication by the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. The researchers, led by Theodore Antikas of Aristotle University in Greece, conducted a five-year forensic study of the bones, including computed tomography (CT) scans.

The researchers argue that the bones of the man and the woman were, in fact, cremated with the flesh still on; however, because Philip III Arrhidaios was not in the ground long enough to become completely skeletal before exhumation, this does little to distinguish the two men.

The new study likewise fails to find any evidence of an eye wound in the male skull, though the researchers did find a healing wound in the hand that might match one of Philip II’s battle injuries. The male body also had growths called Schmorl’s nodes on his lower vertebrae, a telltale sign of bone stress from horseback riding.

With no smoking guns to identify the male skeleton, the team turned to the female bones. Here, they argue, was a 30- to 34-year-old woman, also a horseback rider, who had a fractured leg bone that would have caused her left leg to be shorter than her right. Tellingly, a set of leg armor, or greaves, found in the tomb appears to be made to fit someone with a shortened left leg, Antikas wrote.

This suggests the tomb artifacts, including a quiver holding 74 arrowheads, belonged to the woman buried in the tomb, pointing to her identity as a Scythian princess married to Philip II in 339 B.C. Scythia was a kingdom comprising what is now Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

“The gorytus, arrowheads, spears and everything in the antechamber belong to a Scythian warrior woman and NOT to Philip or any other woman but the seventh wife/concubine, namely the daughter of King Ateas,” Antikas wrote in an email to Live Science. (A gorytus is a case for bows and arrows.) Antikas declined to comment on other aspects of the study. If he’s right, however, the woman in the tomb is not the Macedonian Cleopatra Eurydice, but another, foreign bride of Philip II’s.

Bone backlash

But the move toward identifying the tomb’s occupants based on the female skeleton rather than the male one brings its own controversy.

“Frankly, I am disappointed that the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology has published this article,” said Maria Liston, an anthropologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who studies cremated remains in Greece. “I don’t think it makes a substantive contribution to this debate, and it certainly does not refute the position of those who say the skeleton is not Philip II.”

Among the problems with the new research, Liston said, is an overconfident approach to aging the skeletons. The researchers looked at the pubic symphysis, the cartilage-padded joint of the pubic bone, to peg the woman’s age at between 30 and 34 years. But the method they used can’t possibly determine age to that level of precision, Liston said. Rather, it can pinpoint the woman’s age only to between 21 and 53 years old, she said.

The researchers also found that the sternal end of the clavicle, the end near the breastbone, was fused. But that fusion blows their case out of the water, Liston said, because the bones begin to fuse by 19 or 20 years old and are usually done fusing within a few years, and are always fused entirely by age 29.

“It can’t be the age they’re saying,” Liston told Live Science. If the woman was younger than 29, as the clavicle fusion suggests, she could well be Philip III Arrhidaios’ wife Eurydice, who was only about 20 when she died.

Even the broken leg doesn’t seal the case, Liston said. She’s not convinced the asymmetrical greaves are made for someone with legs of two different lengths — one may simply have a lengthened flange that flared over the ankle, providing the leading leg with an extra bit of protection. Thus, the greaves may not belong to the woman in the tomb at all.

Other archaeologists contacted by Live Science declined to comment, citing the preliminary nature of the paper (the journal has not yet released a final version of the publication) or unfamiliarity with the burial context.

The tombs at Vergina are an important cultural and tourist site in Greece and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which raises the stakes of what would otherwise be a largely academic debate. The museum at Aigai, which oversees the tombs, refers to the tomb as Philip II’s without caveat, as does UNESCO. But among archaeologists, nothing is settled.

Read more at Discovery News

Has Rosetta's Lost Philae Lander Been Found?

After all the excitement of the dramatic bouncy landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the little Philae lander was able to take a quick look around its surroundings and even do some science before it shut down, running out of battery power.

But where did the lander end up? Philae’s final landing spot was far from ideal, having skipped across the dusty surface and settled next to a shady overhang. Without sunlight to recharge its batteries, the lander fell silent. There are still hopes, however, that Philae may reawaken as the comet’s orientation changes to allow more sunlight to fall on its solar array.

To make matters perplexing, Philae’s final resting place was not known and for months European Space Agency scientists have been studying high-resolution imagery of 67P’s terrain in the hope of picking out the tiny lander. Since December, the orbiter has not been able to make a close enough pass of the comet’s surface as cometary activity has been high — the jets of gas and dust have become a hazard for Rosetta’s navigation systems.

In a new analysis, however, mission scientists think they may have found Philae in the frigid terrain, a bright patch glinting in sunlight that is being described as “a good candidate for the lander.”

From Discovery News

The Lowly Clam That Almost Sank Two of Columbus’ Boats

If your boat looks like this, you're up shit creek without a paddle, so...hopefully that thing has an engine?

It was the year 1731, and the Dutch economy was at the mercy of a clam. But not just any clam, mind you—give the Dutch some credit. This was a true oddity, or at the very least an eccentric. While your typical clam lives a life of security in its shell, the so-called shipworm has a tiny calciferous casing, from which erupts a skinny tube of flesh up to two feet long. Swarms of the things burrow into wood, be it ship hulls or piers or, unfortunately for the Dutch, wooden dikes.

The strange invertebrate had destroyed over 30 miles of Dutch dikes, and threatened another dozen miles. The Netherlands were in serious danger of flooding, and the economy was spooked. Peasants fled their farms and entered the cities, where they could find no jobs. Crews tried switching the wood out for tropical hardwood, to no effect. The only solution was to import stones and build dikes that way, at no small taxpayer expense.

It wasn’t the first time the shipworm had menaced humans, and it wouldn’t be the last. The things had already terrorized the ancient Greek and Roman navies, and ate away so badly at two of Columbus’ ships on his fourth voyage to the Caribbean that he had to abandon the vessels. Later on in the 1910s, a shipworm infestation hit the docks of San Francisco Bay, causing what would today be billions of dollars in damages.

But have shipworms ever actually sunk a boat out at sea? “More or less,” laughs molecular ecologist Luísa Borges of Germany’s Helmholtz Center for Material and Coastal Research. “If you believe in the historical reports, apparently they sunk quite a lot of ships, when they undertook these long voyages.” The loss of several vessels in the Spanish Armada, for instance, have been blamed on shipworms, which the Brits no doubt appreciated.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

The first question to ask here isn’t how the shipworm manages to bore into wood—and in such numbers that it can threaten national economies, for that matter—but how the hell a marine creature could evolve to rely on a terrestrial material in the first place. Shipworms subsisting on trees that happen to wash out to sea is a bit like you trying to survive solely on dead things that wash ashore.

Shipworms are tireless advocates of recycling—as long as the material is wood, and they’re eating it. They’re somewhat meh about plastic.

But there are marine habitats where plenty of wood grows right in the saltwater: mangrove forests. Mangrove trees are incredible survivors. Saltwater would kill any other kind of tree, but the mangrove’s roots can filter out the salt, and some species have roots that grow vertically up out of the water to take in more oxygen. It was among these trees that the first shipworms likely evolved. But now, thanks to the global economy, the clams have hitched rides to coastal cities all over the world.

The shipworm’s life cycle begins as a larva that settles onto wood, be it a mangrove root or pier or ship. While the adult clam’s shell covers only a tiny fraction of its body, the larva looks like a regular bivalve. It begins drilling a tiny hole into the wood, either by releasing enzymes to break down the tissue or by rasping away with its shell, or a combination of the two methods. “So it’s mechanical, most of it,” says Borges. “But some people think there might be some enzymatic action there too. It’s not entirely known.”

“The animal has a very strong foot,” she adds, “as most bivalves and gastropods and so on have. And it uses it like a suck, and moves the shell sideways and uses it as a rasp and file device.”

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ve gone your whole life without ever licking a two-by-four. But it’s safe to say that mucousy flesh does not get along well with the abrasiveness of wood, so this leaves the shipworm with a problem: As it grows and elongates and continues to bore deeper into the wood, the shipworm risks stripping its own delicate flesh away. To avoid this, it excretes a calcareous lining—the same calcium carbonate material that makes up its shell—along its worm-like body. Pull a shipworm out of some wood and it’ll leave the calcareous tube behind.

The business end of a shipworm. And business is booming.

Gut Instincts

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ve also gone your whole life without eating mangrove trees. It’s safe to say that they’re indigestible for humans, but not for the shipworm. It can digest wood just fine with the help of some very special symbiotic bacteria. But here’s the strange thing: That bacteria doesn’t live in the shipworm’s gut. Instead, it lives in the gills and produces enzymes that make their way to the gut, where they break down the wood’s cellulose into sugars. Plenty of creatures use bacteria like this to digest weird foods, but the shipworm is alone in storing the microbes outside of its digestive system.

A diet of wood, though, leaves the shipworm wanting for protein. So out of that tiny hole it first bored when it was a larva, the shipworm extends fan-like structures that it uses to catch plankton floating by. “So imagine that you have a lot of shipworms in a piece of wood, and they don’t have much wood to eat,” says Borges. “They actually filter-feed more than they eat wood. Otherwise they destroy their own environment. So they can kind of adjust their diet to survive.”

Read more at Wired Science

IQ Tests Suggest Pigs Are Smart as Dogs, Chimps

Pigs can often outsmart dogs and are on about the same intellectual level as our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, according to a new paper.

The research project, described in a paper published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, aims to put a face on animals that are traditionally just viewed as sources of meat.

“We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans,” neuroscientist Lori Marino of Emory University and The Nonhuman Rights Project said in a press release. “There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them.”

Marino and co-author Christina Colvin, also from Emory, came to that conclusion after reviewing dozens of studies conducted on pigs and other animals. Often studies on cognition and behavior focus on only a single characteristic, so the researchers in this case compiled the findings into a single document.

They found that pigs:

• have excellent long-term memories
   
• are whizzes with mazes and other tests requiring location of objects
   
• can comprehend a simple symbolic language and can learn complex combinations of symbols for actions and objects
   
• love to play and engage in mock fighting with each other, similar to play in dogs and other mammals
  
  live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and learn from one another
   
• cooperate with one another
   
• can manipulate a joystick to move an on-screen cursor, a capacity they share with chimpanzees
   
• can use a mirror to find hidden food
   
• exhibit a form of empathy when witnessing the same emotion in another individual

Contrast these abilities with the way that pigs are often treated in factory farms. PETA reports that mother pigs (sows) spend most of their lives in what are known as “gestation crates,” which do not even allow the pigs to turn around. Once they give birth, they are impregnated again, with the cycle continuing for three or four years before the mother is slaughtered.

PETA goes on to mention that “in extremely crowded conditions, piglets are prone to stress-related behavior such as cannibalism and tail-biting, so farmers often chop off piglets’ tails and use pliers to break off the ends of their teeth–without giving them any painkillers.”

Read more at Discovery News

1,500-Year-Old Church Found Near Israel's Main Highway

Workers widening Israel’s main highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have stumbled upon the remnants of a 1,500-year-old church, Israel officials said on Wednesday.

Located at the entrance to Abu Gosh, a village some eight miles west of Jerusalem, the church was part of a Byzantine period road station which provided spiritual and material refreshments to those traveling between Jerusalem and the coastal plain.

“Along this road, which was apparently already established in the Roman period, other settlements and road stations have previously been discovered that served those traveling the route in ancient times,” Annette Nagar, director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said.

Measuring about 52 feet in length, the church featured a white mosaic floor and a side chapel 21 feet long and 11 feet wide.

A baptismal font in the form of a four-leafed clover, symbolizing the cross, was found in the chapel’s northeast corner, the Israel Antiquities Authority said.

Fragments of red-colored plaster suggest the church walls had been decorated with frescoes.

Next to the church, the archaeologists found rooms that were probably used as dwelling quarters and for storage. One of them contained a large amount of pottery tiles.

The site had a water source — the ‘Ain Naqa’a seep spring — and likely witnessed intense activity, as shown by numerous findings which include oil lamps, coins, special glass vessels, marble fragments and mother-of-pearl shells.

“The road station ceased to be used at the end of the Byzantine period, although the road beside which it was built was renewed and continued to be in use until modern times,” Nagar said.

The road station and church remnants will soon disappear from view. Archaeologist Pablo Betzer said a decision was made “to cover over the site and preserve it for future generations.”

From Discovery News

Excess Trees in Japan are Harming the Environment

Can trees cause pollution?

Short answer: yes -- mismanaged forests can cause nutrient pollution. Cypress and cedar trees in Japan are causing massive amounts of nitrogen runoff into local streams, resulting in harmful algae blooms.

But, it's not exactly their fault. The trees are planted in massive, commercial plantations, many of which have mostly fallen into a state of disrepair since their establishment half a century ago, during a period of high demand for wood within Japan. For a variety of reasons, Japanese companies began to increasingly import wood in subsequent decades. The shift in the market left in its wake an overabundance of humungous wood plantations, which are now causing major problems for adjacent wildlife in their sad state of ruination.

The older, slowly growing trees use notably less nutrients (namely nitrogen) than younger trees, which grow faster and require more nutrients. Very few new trees are growing in the plantations because the land has become so densely populated with older trees, which prevent sunlight from nourishing the shorter, nascent trees.

As such, there is an unusually high concentration of nitrogen in the soil on the plantations, which is left to run off into neighboring waterways. Algae blooms have begun to form in the highly nitrogenous marine habitats, and are problematic for existing wildlife: The algae sucks oxygen out of the water, and other marine wildlife are unable to survive (a process known as eutrophication).

According to the American Society of Agronomy, the problem is widespread: these large plantations account for up to 30 percent of forestland across Japan.

Kyushu University's Masaaki Chiwa, who penned a new study about the issue, says that the process can be prevented by adequate forest management. Chiwa is encouraging the owners of the large plantations to thin them out, creating room for new, smaller trees to grow and utilize the abundant nutrients in the soil. His team is already investigating the impact of recent trimming operations on local waterways.

"We have been measuring water quality to evaluate the effect of forest thinning on water quality including nitrogen loss," he says.

From Discovery News