Historical Archive Found in Russian Birds' Nest

Restoration work on a 15th century Russian cathedral has brought to light one of the most unusual archives: a pile of historic scraps of papers collected by nest-building birds.

Found in the attic of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Zvenigorod, an old town 40 miles west of Moscow, the collection consists of beak-selected fragments of letters, banknotes, books, cigarette packs, candy wrappers, bus tickets, and even church documents.

“For several centuries swifts and jackdaws built their nests under the roof of the cathedral,” Dmitriy Sedov, deputy research director at Zvenigorod’s Historical and Architectural Museum, said in a statement.

“We found a thick layer made of dirt, branches, and fragments of papers stolen by birds to keep their chicks warm,” he added.

Sedov estimates the oldest fragments date to the 1830s, when the roof was last replaced.

Although most of the papers are torn and ruined by beaks, it is still possible to read their contents.

Most of the fragments are pieces of letters written in elegant calligraphy, mentioning in particular Count Karl Nesselrode, foreign minister of imperial Russia from 1822 to 1856.

A scrap of a calendar bears the date of December 6, 1917 with a note referring to Russian Emperor Nicolas II, the last tsar of Russia executed with his family by the Bolsheviks the following year.

Other documents include bus tickets, delivery contracts, students’ diplomas, church documents, birth certificates and scribbled down notes. One reads: “Good afternoon, Vera! I send you greetings.”

Read more at Discovery News

New NASA Tool Displays Earth's CO2

Until recently, efforts to measure and model climate change contained a greater degree of uncertainty than scientists would prefer. This was due to the limitations of ground-based monitoring stations and satellites that collect data about carbon dioxide.

But that's changing due to NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite, which is designed to provide a more precise and complete view of how carbon dioxide moves through the atmosphere, as well as between the atmosphere and plants, soil and the oceans.

"Carbon can't hide anymore," NASA climate scientist Lesley Ott explained in a telephone interview.

The satellite measures the number of molecules of CO2 and air between the surface and outer space by analyzing wavelengths of light that CO2 absorbs. It takes 24 readings each second and provides measurements that are accurate to 0.25 percent. It's also capable of providing information about regions where there's poor coverage by ground-based sampling.

Those capabilities allow climate researchers "to see the kind of gradients that we need for good science," Ott said.

The $465 million satellite, launched in 2014, has now amassed more than a year's worth of data, and it's helping scientists to see both the sources of carbon dioxide emissions and also the sinks -- that is, places where carbon is stored. OCO-2's information could help them to fill in some gaps in their knowledge, and to get a clearer idea of much the Earth's climate will change in the future.

"We already know that plants and the ocean absorb half of human carbon emissions, which is doing us a big favor," Ott said. "But we haven't understood where that CO2 is being sequestered, and what are the processes that do it."

One key question that scientists need to answer is how climate change will affect the carbon-storing capacity of forests, Ott said. In the short term, it may actually boost forests' ability to serve as carbon sinks, because the CO2 acts "like a fertilizer in the ground," causing more and bigger plants to grow. "But we know that can't happen indefinitely," she said. "That makes it important to understand the sensitivity of that process to moisture and higher temperatures."

Paul Wennberg, director of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science at California Institute of Technology, wrote in an email that OCO-2 already has provided new insights about atmospheric exchange of carbon dioxide with forests in the upper latitudes, whose growth is likely be affected by climate change.

"In particular, we are able to see much better the changing pattern of CO2 uptake during spring," Wennberg wrote. "One of the very exciting new products from OCO-2 is the so-called 'solar induced fluorescence (SIF)' -- a measure of the active hotosynthesis by plants. Combining the SIF and CO2 data from OCO-2 we can essentially image the onset of spring as it begins in Europe, spreads across Asia and finally arrived in North America."

According to a news release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., OCO-2's data also shows the dynamic ebb and flow of atmospheric carbon according to the seasons. Between mid-May and mid-July, for example, it detected a "dramatic" reduction in atmospheric CO2 of 2 to 3 percent, as plants absorbed it from the atmosphere and used to form new leaves, stems and roots. Scientists were able to observe the "spring drawdown," as they call it, in detail, seeing week-to-week changes.

The satellite also detected increased concentrations of C02 in areas where fossil fuels are being burned by power plants and large cities, as well as in the Amazon, central Africa and Indonesia, where forests are being slashed and burned to clear fields for farming.

Read more at Discovery News

Weird Sea Mollusk Has Hundreds of Eyes Made of Armor

A marine mollusk built like a tiny tank can see with eyes made of the same material as its armor.

Acanthopleura granulata is a chiton, a pill bug of the sea. This animal has a shell made of overlapping plates, which allows it to roll up in defense if a predator manages to pry it from the tidal-zone rock it calls home. Researchers have long known that chitons have soft tissue embedded in their flexible suits of armor, and that some of this soft tissue is sensitive to light. Now, they've discovered that A. granulata has hundreds of actual eyes that can see an 8-inch-long (20 centimeters) fish from 6.5 feet (2 meters) away.

Even weirder, these eyes are made of the same calcium-carbonate mineral as the chiton shell. However, the animal does have to trade off some structural integrity in return for the sensory function.

"We think this system might provide design lessons for us to learn how nature is able to produce material structures with multiple different functions," said Ling Li, one of the authors of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Ling and the rest of the research team have studied multiple animals with bizarre multitasking armor and exoskeletons. Brittle stars, which are relatives of sea stars (also called starfish), have light-sensing lenses built into their exoskeletons. Some limpets have structurally special areas in their otherwise translucent shells that create colorful displays. Windowpane oysters have nearly transparent shells that nevertheless are extremely strong.

The goal, Li told Live Science, is to use nature's designs for improvements in engineering and technology. Windowpane oysters, for example, might inspire stronger windshields for combat vehicles. And chiton shells could provide a basis for creating self-monitoring materials, such as walls embedded with sensors that would detect cracks, Li said.

The new work, published in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Science, reveals that chiton eyes are very different from human eyes. Whereas human eyes are made of proteins, chiton eyes are made of aragonite, a mineral. Aragonite is a kind of calcium carbonate found in many mollusks. Pearls, created by oysters, are a mix of aragonite and a protein called conchiolin.

The researchers examined the microscopic structure of these aragonite eyes, comparing them with the surrounding armor structure. They also ran experiments and simulations to reveal that the eyes are more than just light-sensitive spots; they actually resolve images. From more than 6 feet away, chitons can see a blur representing a small fish. This gives them time to clamp down hard on the rock below so the potential predator can't dislodge them, Li said.

Sight has its costs, though. The researchers found that the aragonite eye structures are not as strong as the surrounding armor. Though the two are made of the same mineral, the aragonite in the eyes has a different crystalline structure. That different structure, along with a pore space beneath the eyes, makes them weaker. Thus, they fracture more easily.

"It's a compromise," Li said.

Chitons have come up with a few protective strategies, the researchers found. The eye structures are clustered in tiny "valleys" in the mollusk's armor, which help keep them safe. Their underlying layers seem to be hard and thick, so that any damage doesn't penetrate fully. And chitons have up to 1,000 eyes and can grow more throughout their lifetimes, replacing any that are damaged.

Read more at Discovery News

Trove of Antique Roman Coins Found in Swiss Orchard

A Swiss fruit-and-vegetable farmer stumbled across more than tree roots when inspecting his cherry orchard recently, uncovering a massive trove of coins buried some 1,700 years earlier, archaeologists said Thursday.

The trove of more than 4,000 bronze and silver coins dating back to Ancient Rome and weighing 15 kilos (33 pounds) was discovered in Ueken, in the northern canton of Aargau, the regional archaeological service said, describing it as one of the biggest such treasures ever found in Switzerland.

A farmer had made the spectacular discovery back in July, when he spotted a molehill with some shimmering green coins.

A few months earlier, remains of an early Roman settlement were discovered in a dig in the nearby town of Frick, so the farmer suspected he may have found Roman coins.

He contacted the regional archeological service and his suspicions were confirmed.

The service announced Thursday that after months of discreet excavations, a total of 4,166 coins had been found in excellent condition.

Their imprints remain legible, allowing an expert to determine they date back to Ancient Rome, stretching from the rein of Emperor Aurelian (year 270-275) to that of Maximilian (286-305), with the most recent coins dated to year 294.

“The orchard where the coins were found was never built on. It is land that has always been farmed,” archeologist Georg Matter told AFP, explaining how the treasure could have laid dormant for so long.

The coins’ excellent condition indicates that their owner systematically stashed them away shortly after they were made, the archeologists said.

For some reason, the owner had buried them shortly after 294 and never retrieved them, the archeologists said.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Fossil Forests Discovered in the Arctic

What did some of the first trees on Earth look like? Earth scientists from Cardiff University digging around in Arctic Norway are closing in on an answer. And that answer is: weirdly familiar.

Fossilized stumps from a forest dating back 380 million years indicate that these trees must have resembled palm trees covered in fern-like leaves. They grew close together and reached about 13 feet in height.

Cardiff University paleobotonist Chris Berry and his colleagues found the fossils in Svalbard, an archipelago that would have been located close to the equator hundreds of millions of years ago. They identified the trees as a now-extinct lycopod with the zippy name Protolepidodendropsis pulchra.

The discovery of these strange forests could finally help explain a drastic drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the late Devonian time period. Just how drastic? It was a 15-fold reduction, a university press release said.

“It is rare fossil forests such as this that inform our understanding of the ecology and global distribution of large land plants during the transition to a forested planet,” the team wrote in the journal Geology.

This isn’t the first time Berry and his colleagues have pieced together an ancient forest. Back in 2012, he and his colleagues mapped out another Devonian forest that once grew in what is now Gilboa, N.Y., on the eastern side of the state.

“The fossil forest came to life in front of my eyes in a way that has never happened before,” he told Discovery News at the time.

These densely-packed ancient forests got me thinking. What if we could engineer a new tree with the powerful CO2-absorbing abilities of these early lycopods? They sound perfect for cities where space is at a premium. And with temperatures rising, I bet they’d thrive.

From Discovery News

'Dead' Galaxy May Hide Dark Matter Surprise

While measuring the speed of stars whirling around a nearby dwarf galaxy, astronomers have realized that a reservoir of dark matter may be lurking within.

Astronomers grew suspicious of Triangulum II when they tried to measure its mass. Using 6 stars as tracers, they measured their speed around the galaxy’s center. Known only to contain around a 1,000 stars, this particular galaxy is a welterweight by cosmic standards, but looks can be decieving. What they found was an amazingly dense galaxy apparently filled with dark matter.

“The total mass I measured was much, much greater than the mass of the total number of stars — implying that there’s a ton of densely packed dark matter contributing to the total mass,” said astronomer Evan Kirby, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. “The ratio of dark matter to luminous matter is the highest of any galaxy we know. After I had made my measurements, I was just thinking — wow.”

Indeed, dark matter is believed to account for the vast majority of matter in the entire universe — approximately 85 percent is thought to be composed of dark matter particles that do not interact with normal matter, except via the gravitational force.

After clocking the speeds of stars inside Triangulum II with the Keck Observatory, located on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, Kirby’s team found that to account for their high speed, there had to me more mass that can be explained by adding up all the stars’ masses. Even more, they realized that the tiny galaxy possibly possesses the highest concentration of dark matter yet discovered in any galaxy.

So what’s going on? One theory is that, for some reason, Triangulum II may be home to a dense cloud of Weakly Interacting Massive particles, or WIMPs. WIMPs are hypothetical particles that carry mass, but do not interact with normal matter. They are ghostly particles that exert a gravitational force and yet cannot be seen (i.e. they do not interact via the electromagnetic force). However, WIMPs do annihilate with one another should they collide, so if Triangulum II is stuffed full of dark matter particles, we should be able to observe an excess of gamma-ray radiation being emitted from the galaxy.

To make things easier, Triangulum II is known as a “dead” galaxy — it lacks star forming regions and is very faint (in fact, the reason why Kirby’s team only tracked 6 stars is that only 6 stars are bright enough to be tracked by the Keck telescope). Therefore, the dwarf galaxy shouldn’t produce much in the way of high energy radiation, such as gamma-rays. So if we detect gamma-rays, perhpas this would be the “smoking gun” of WIMP annihilation.

Read more at Discovery News

Silly Caterpillar, You Shouldn’t Be Devouring Snails Alive

A snail-eating caterpillar in its characteristic silk burrito of protection, doing what it does best: tying a snail down before devouring it alive. Damn, now I want a burrito. Not of silk, of course–carnitas, I'm thinking.

That children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar is bullcrap. I mean, there’s no way a caterpillar could eat all that food, not to mention those kinds of foods. Ice cream? Give me a break. And chocolate cake? Now I’m kinda worried this little thing is hypoglycemic.

And sausage? Really? Wait, actually, scratch that. Caterpillars are diehard vegetarians, but no, not me, says Hawaii’s Hyposmocoma molluscivora. Incredibly, it’s got an appetite for snails, and a big appetite at that. As a snail slumbers, this creepy-crawly carefully approaches and spins silk over the snail’s shell, pinning it to a leaf. Then it crawls in there and devours the trapped victim alive.

The so-called snail-eating caterpillar joins just .13 percent of caterpillars that are predatory. And while other meat eaters go after insects, this species solely targets snails (even if it’s starving, it won’t touch plants). “That’s just ridiculous,” says entomologist Daniel Rubinoff of the University of Hawaii. “In an evolutionary sense, it’s like a vampire cow, essentially. You have all these other cows running around eating grass like they’re supposed to be, and then suddenly you discover one that is attacking and sucking the blood of fish. That’s how weird it would be. Not even other mammals, but fish.”

This caterpillar, which is only a bit over a quarter inch long, spins itself a little burrito-like case that it slips into and drags around for camouflage. But around 10 years ago, folks on Maui noticed that some of the caterpillars had stuck snail shells to these cases, perhaps as an extra fashion accessory to kick up their camo one more notch.

The assumption went that the caterpillars were just coming across empty shells. But then Rubinoff caught the things on video actually hunting snails. Even with the evidence Rubinoff still had a hard time coming to terms with the whole thing. “Even though I had video of it, I still really deep down couldn’t believe it,” he says. “It was just such a stretch, such a bizarre thing to see.”

A caterpillar pinning down a snail with its silk. Someone should really tell it that it’s not a spider. Break the news gently, though.

Snails may be slow, but a caterpillar burdened with a burrito is downright ungainly. So the hunter will only approach sleeping snails—if the target is active, the caterpillar won’t bother. If the snail is satisfactory, the caterpillar will start spinning silk over its shell, pinning it to the leaf below. Think of it like that scene in Gulliver’s Travels where our hero wakes up to find that the tiny Lilliputians have tied him to the ground, only Gulliver survives to go on other adventures. The snail won’t. The only adventuring it’ll be doing is sliding through a caterpillar’s guts.

And unlike the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Hyposmocoma molluscivora exercises a little thing called restraint. “We’ve actually got videos of snails waking up halfway through and trying to get away,” says Rubinoff. “The caterpillar doesn’t attack it, just waits. The snail gives up and goes back inside, and then the caterpillar finishes the spin, comes around, and goes into the snail shell.” It then proceeds to consume the victim alive in its own home.

The whole saga so dramatically departs from typical caterpillar behavior that it’s no wonder Rubinoff had trouble believing it. Caterpillars can’t be bothered with delayed gratification—they just gnaw at leaves and gnaw at leaves some more, as any gardener can tell you. Hyposmocoma molluscivora is a zen master of self-control, planning out a sophisticated attack and launching it only if it’s sure to succeed.

This is about where the snail’s life ends. It shall be remembered, though, as caterpillar turds.

And think about what’s going on physiologically with this caterpillar. It should have different mouthparts than a vegetarian caterpillar, yeah? Nope, as it turns out. They’re pretty much the same. Rubinoff is looking to do more work here, but it may be that snail-eating caterpillars don’t need all that different mandibles. For a vegetarian slicing through leaves, scissor-like mouthparts work great. And scissor-like mouthparts could work just as fine for meat eaters too. (Vampire cows, on the other hand, would need something other than a cow’s typical grinding molars.)

Another physiological conundrum is how the snail-eating caterpillar’s tummy is handling the switch to meat. “Vegans get sick when they eat a burger, and we’re programmed or able to eat meat pretty easily,” Rubinoff says. “If you’re a species that doesn’t eat protein like that, how do you make that kind of adjustment?” At the moment, it’s still a mystery.

Hawaii: The Land Where Snails Rule and Fish Poop Out Beaches

Then there’s the why. Why would Hyposmocoma molluscivora give up the vegan lifestyle? After all, Hawaii isn’t exactly hurting for lush vegetation.

The answer may be that the snails had it coming. Hawaii has historically been lousy with the things, scientists having described over 1,000 different species (many, though, have gone extinct thanks to humans, while many are in serious trouble). Island ecosystems tend to be a bit goofy like that: Not every kind of animal will make it there from the mainland—keep in mind that Hawaii is wildly isolated, and accordingly only has two native mammals, a bat and a seal. Among the animals that do get there, some will grow more successful than others by assuming niches they normally wouldn’t bother with.

“In other places, there are lots and lots of things that eat snails,” says Rubinoff. “There are beetles that eat snails and a range of other animals that will go and attack snails. And Hawaii happens to have a really high diversity of snails.” Because of this diversity, the snail-eating caterpillar would have done well to start hunting them, thus filling the niche that other predators may not have been around to fill themselves.

And it’s not just this species that got creative on the islands. The group the snail-eating caterpillar belongs to, Hyposmocoma, tallies some 400 species with all manner of lifestyles. “There are Hyposmocoma that are aquatic, that dive underwater, and eat algae and lichens around streams,” says Rubinoff. “So Hyposmocoma molluscivora is almost par for the course for Hyposmocoma, and that seems to be something that Hawaii brings out.”

Read more at Wired Science

Tiny Skin Structures Make Fish 'Invisible' to Predators

Some species of fish have a neat trick: They can seem to disappear, leaving predators thinking, "Whuzzuh?? Where'd my next meal go?" How they do this has been a bit of a mystery, but now scientists think they know the answer.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin suggest, in a new study just published in the journal Science, that the disappearing act is the work of microscopic structures in fish skin cells called platelets, which reflect polarized light to make the crafty swimmers look, well, "not there."

Polarized light -- light waves all moving in the same plane, like sunlight glare bouncing off water -- typically permeates the scenery underwater, and many fish are able to detect variations in it, using a heightened perception of contrast to help them spot prey.

"Fish have evolved the means to detect polarized light," said Molly Cummings, professor of integrative biology at UT Austin, in a statement. "Given that, we suggested they've probably evolved the means to hide in polarized light. If we can identify that process, then we can improve upon our own camouflage technology for that environment."

Cummings and her team studied five species of fish, using special video equipment in an open ocean setting to record each fish's efficacy at hiding itself in the ocean light.

Two fish -- a lookout and a bigeye scad -- were especially adept at camouflage, saving their best hiding skills for when they were viewed from key predator "chase angles": vectors going out in 45 degrees, in all directions, from the fish's head or tail.

Then came the "how." What allowed their skilled deception to take place? Lab study of the disappearing fish revealed platelets in their skin cells that scattered polarized light to varying degrees, depending on the angle.

Read more at Discovery News

Largest Diamond in More Than a Century Found in Botswana

A 1,111 carat "high quality diamond" has been discovered at a mine in Botswana, said to be the biggest find in more than a century, according to the mine company.

The gem, only second in size to the Cullinan diamond which was unearthed in South Africa in 1905, was mined by Lucara Diamond Corp.

"The magnificent stone, which originated from the south lobe of Lucara's Karowe Mine, is the world second largest gem quality diamond ever recovered and largest ever to be recovered through a modern processing facility," the Stockholm listed company said a statement.Shares in Lucara shot up 34 percent to 14.2 kronor in morning Thursday trading in Stockholm.

Botswana is the world's second biggest diamond producer, and Lucara said the gem was the largest ever to be recovered in the country.

"The significance of the recovery of a gem quality stone larger than 1,000 carats, the largest for more than a century....cannot be overstated," said William Lamb, the President and chief executive of Lucara.

The biggest diamond discovered is the 3,106-carat Cullinan, found near Pretoria in South Africa in 1905.

It was cut to form the Great Star of Africa and the Lesser Star of Africa, which are set in the Crown Jewels of Britain.

Lucara indicated on its website that the Karowe Mine had also this week turned up further finds -- an 813 carat stone and a 374 carat stone, prompting Lamb to laud "an amazing week" for the company.

From Discovery News

You Share 70% of Your Genes with This Slimy Worm

People have more in common with deep-sea worms than one might suspect. Over 500 million years ago, humans and certain worms shared a common ancestor, and people still share thousands of genes with the worms, said scientists who recently sequenced genomes from two marine worm species.

The results suggest humans and acorn worms, so called because of their acorn-shaped “heads,” are distant cousins, said the researchers, led by Oleg Simakov of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Okinawa, Japan. The researchers analyzed genes from two acorn worm species: Ptychodera flava, collected off Hawaii, and Saccoglossus kowalevskii, from the Atlantic Ocean.

Clearly, acorn worms look nothing like people; the worms have no limbs and breathe through slits in their guts. But they share approximately 14,000 genes with humans, scientists found, comprising about 70 percent of the human genome. These genes can be traced back to an ancestor of both acorn worms and humans that lived more than 500 million years ago, during a period known as the Cambrian explosion.

Genes from this ancient ancestor exist today not only in humans, but also in sea stars and their relatives, in cephalopods (octopuses and squid), and in all animals with backbones. The animals in this lineage are called “deuterostomes” (pronounced DOO-teh-roe-stomes.)

Of all deuterostomes alive now, acorn worms have been around the longest. “Acorn worms are our most ancient deuterostome relatives, dating back to the origin of deuterostomes, around 570 million years ago,” Simakov told Live Science in an email.

Species like the acorn worms can help scientists understand how genes that first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago control the development of different but related physical features across animal species. This happens even in species as different as acorn worms and humans.

As deuterostomes evolved, many species emerged that were more complex than their acorn-worm cousins. But even in later species, some physical features can still be linked to genes in acorn worms for simpler structures that perform the same jobs, Simakov and his colleagues found.

“The genomic data fills in the gaps in our understanding of their evolution,” Simakov explained.

After sequencing the worms’ genomes and comparing them with genomic data from a range of diverse animals, scientists found 8,716 gene families, or sets of similar genes, in the acorn worms that are shared across all deuterostomes.

One family contained a gene cluster unique to deuterostomes, linked to feeding and breathing in acorn worms. These genes were particularly interesting to the scientists, they said. Acorn worms feed using specialized slits near their gut regions, located between the mouth and the esophagus. The slits allow water to pass through the worm’s mouth but bypass the animal’s digestive tracts. No animal outside the deutorostome group has structures like these, so the scientists took a closer look at the genes that controlled them.

The researchers found that these genes could be linked to gill development in deuterostomes. Even in humans, the researchers suggest, these genes could play a part in the development of the pharynx, the tube connecting the esophagus with the nose and mouth.

Read more at Discovery News