See the Red Planet with Your Own Eyes This Weekend

This Sunday morning (May 22), Mars reaches opposition with the sun. This means that the Red Planet will be exactly opposite the sun in Earth’s sky, making this weekend a great time to see it for yourself. In fact, Mars will soon be at its closest point to Earth in over a decade.

Because Mars is directly opposite the sun (in relation to Earth) during opposition, Mars rises as the sun sets, and sets as the sun rises. This also means that Mars is visible all night long this weekend. To mark the occasion, NASA scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture an absolutely stunning view of Mars as it nears opposition.

The exact time when Mars will be above the horizon depends on your location. For example, in New York, Mars rises in the East at 8:10 p.m. EDT and sets in the West at 5:35 a.m. EDT, so it is above the horizon for 9 hours and 25 minutes. Farther south, it will be visible longer, and farther north, for a shorter time.

The easiest way to spot Mars this weekend is to go out when the Red Planet is highest in the sky, close to midnight local time. Remember that if you live in a part of the world that is on daylight saving time, that “sweet spot” of viewing times will be close to 1 a.m. your local time.

If you live anywhere north of the equator, Mars will be due south at midnight local time. If you live south of the equator, Mars will be high overhead. On opposition night, Mars will be close to the nearly full moon, and will be the brightest object in the sky, except for the moon and Jupiter, over near the western horizon. Look for Saturn and the bright-red star Antares nearby.

What Mars looks like

The most striking thing about Mars’ appearance to the naked eye is its red color. This will be particularly clear if you compare it with Jupiter over in the west. They are almost equal in brightness, but Jupiter is a pale cream color, whereas Mars is noticeably red.

If you view Mars through a telescope, you are likely to be disappointed. All of the planets are much smaller than people expect, and this is particularly so with Mars, because it is one of the smallest planets in the solar system; only Mercury is smaller.

You may have heard an internet rumor that, on a particular date, Mars will appear as large as the moon. This is physically impossible, because Mars is always much farther away than the moon, and never appears larger than 1/70 ofthe diameter of the moon. On opposition night, Mars will be only 1/100 of the diameter of the moon. In other words, it will take a telescope magnifying 100 times to make Mars look as big as the moon as seen with the naked eye.

It takes a trained eye to see detail on a disk that small. Experienced planetary observers spend years sketching Mars at every opportunity, trying to catch the rare instants when Earth’s atmosphere steadies enough to reveal Mars’ secretive details. It takes patience and an optically excellent telescope.

Usually, Mars observers first look for the planet’s polar ice caps. However, this year, Mars is close to its equinox, so both polar caps are at their smallest, and thus hard to see. What may be visible is the pale haze that forms over the polar regions.

It is usually possible to see so-called albedo markings, variations of dark and light caused by the alternation of bedrock and desert sands. The darker areas appear grey-green, while the lighter areas are a pale peach color. The contrast between light and dark is very low but may be enhanced by using a red or orange filter.

Read more at Discovery News

Extreme Exoplanets Reveal Migration Mystery

At a distant star called Kepler-223, four gas giant planets orbit close in to their sun. It couldn’t be more different from our own solar system today, where all the big planets hang out far away. But could Kepler-223 be how our solar system was long ago?

Based on observations from the Kepler space telescope, a new study suggests yes. Perhaps Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were created close in to the sun. Over time, their gravities working together helped pull them away from the disc of gas and dust surrounding our sun. Once the giant planets cleared, this created room for the small planets living near the sun today: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

“Exactly how and where planets form is an outstanding question in planetary science,” said lead author Sean Mills, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, in a statement. “Our work essentially tests a model for planet formation for a type of planet we don’t have in our solar system.”

The new study comes from a combination of Kepler data — which showed how the four planets affect each other’s movements and block light from the star — and simulations of how planets migrate.

There are differences from our own solar system, however. Kepler-223 is older (4.6 billion years) and so its planets have stayed in place much longer than ours, if they did migrate.

But there is something interesting about this system. The four planets are in resonance with each other, meaning that they orbit in a simple ratio to each other (such as 2 orbits for every 1). This is the first time four planets have been seen in resonance.

Saturn’s moons Io, Europa and Ganymede are in resonance.

“These resonances are extremely fragile,” said study co-author Daniel Fabrycky, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, in the same statement. “If bodies were flying around and hitting each other, then they would have dislodged the planets from the resonance.”

So in our own solar system, perhaps the four gas giants were in resonance — but then were hurled into new orbits over time after hitting asteroids, planets in formation and other debris in the inner solar system.

Read more at Discovery News

Cosmic heavy metals help scientists trace the history of galaxies

The origin of many of the most precious elements on the periodic table, such as gold, silver and platinum, has perplexed scientists for more than six decades. Now a recent study has an answer, evocatively conveyed in the faint starlight from a distant dwarf galaxy.

In a roundtable discussion, published today, The Kavli Foundation spoke to two of the researchers behind the discovery about why the source of these heavy elements, collectively called "r-process" elements, has been so hard to crack.

"Understanding how heavy, r-process elements are formed is one of hardest problems in nuclear physics," said Anna Frebel, assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and also a member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

"The production of these really heavy elements takes so much energy that it's nearly impossible to make them experimentally," Frebel continued. "The process for making them just doesn't work on Earth. So we have had to use the stars and the objects in the cosmos as our lab."

The findings also demonstrate how determining the contents of stars can shed light on the history of the galaxy hosting them. Nicknamed "stellar archaeology," this approach is increasingly allowing astrophysicists to learn more about conditions in the early universe.

"I really think these findings have opened a new door for studying galaxy formation with individual stars and to some extent individual elements," said Frebel. "We are seriously connecting the really small scales of stars with the really big scales of galaxies."

In the late 1950s, nuclear physicists had worked out that extreme conditions somewhere in the cosmos, full of subatomic particles called neutrons, must serve as the forges for r-process elements, which also include familiar substances such as uranium and lead. The explosions of giant stars and the rare mergings of the densest stars in the universe, called neutron stars, were the most plausible sources. But observational evidence was sorely lacking.

Researchers at the MKI have now filled this observational gap. An analysis of the starlight from several of the brightest stars in a tiny galaxy called Reticulum II, located some 100,000 light years from Earth, suggests these stars contain whopping amounts of r-process elements.

Since the stars could not have made the heavy elements on their own, some event in Reticulum II's past must have "seeded" and enriched the matter that grew into these stars. The abundances of elements in the stars squarely implicates the collision of two neutron stars.

Frebel's graduate student Alexander Ji discovered the enriched stars in Reticulum II while using the Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. He is first author on a paper about the findings, published March 31 in the journal Nature.

"When we read off the r-process content of that first star in our telescope, it just looked wrong, like it could not have come out of this galaxy!" said Ji, in the roundtable. "I spent a long time making sure the telescope was pointed at the right star."

Ji further commented on how the discovery helps to finally tell the tale of how r-process elements come to exist. "Definitely one of the things that I think attracts people to astronomy is understanding the origin of everything around us."

Read more at Science Daily

How Your Nose Got Its Shape

Ski-jump, hooked, piggy or snubbed — there are almost as many nose shapes as there are people in the world.

Now, new research has uncovered four genes that govern some of the variation in the human olfactory organ.

The new findings could help scientists understand the roots of this variation, the researchers said.

“Finding out the role each gene plays helps us to piece together the evolutionary path from Neanderthal to modern humans,” study co-author Kaustubh Adhikari, a cell and developmental biologist at University College London, said in a statement. “It brings us closer to understanding how genes influence the way we look, which is important for forensics applications.”

Although many people think of nose shape as a purely aesthetic feature, researchers suspect that different nose shapes evolved in different environments, for different reasons, the study authors said.

“For example, the comparatively narrower nose of Europeans has been proposed to represent an adaptation to a cold, dry climate,” said study lead author Andrés Ruiz-Linares, a biologist at University College London. “Identifying genes affecting nose shape provides us with new tools to examine this question, as well as the evolution of the face in other species.”

To figure out what makes a nose, the researchers studied nearly 6,000 people from Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile and Mexico who had participated in the CANDELA study, an ongoing study of the biological diversity of people living in Latin America. The people in the study have a mix of Caucasian, African and Native American ancestry, creating a wide range of facial features. Past research from this population has identified genes that make people go gray.

The team analyzed the participants’ facial features, and also did 3D reconstructions for 3,000 of the participants, to get exact measurements of their facial features.

Read more at Discovery News

How to Form Io's Mountains? Just Squeeze!

Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io is full of mysteries, including how its mountains were formed. They have puzzled scientists for decades because they look nothing like mountains on Earth.

At home, we see mountains grow in ranges that can stretch across thousands of miles. But on Io, the more than 100 cataloged mountains mostly grow in isolation. What mysterious tectonic forces are at play here?

Io is so active that it’s hard to look at the tectonics from space; molten lava coats the surface at an incredible rate of five inches per decade. So to answer the question, a new study used simulations to figure things out.

A close-up of Mongibello Mons at sunset. The mountain is about 8.6 kilometers (5 miles) high. Io has mountains that are as high as 10 miles above the plain, which is taller than Earth mountains.

“The planetary community has thought for a while that Io’s mountains might be a function of the fact that it is continuously erupting lava over the entire sphere,” lead author William McKinnon, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. He co-wrote a paper about this in 2001.

“All that lava spewed on the surfaces pushes downward and, as it descends, there’s a space problem because Io is a sphere, so you end up with compressive forces that increase with depth.”

The new work simulates this hypothesis, but focuses on the fact that Io’s compression gets stronger as you go deeper into the moon. This creates strain in a single fracture created deep inside of Io and then erupting to the surface, creating a cliff. The scientists also suggest this could explain why so many recent eruptions are found near the mountains.

The south polar region of Io as seen by Voyager 1. This includes the mountain Haemus Mons, which is 10 kilometers (32,000 feet) high. It is visible at bottom.

“The compressive forces deep in the crust are incredibly high,” McKinnon said. “When these faults breach the surface, those forces are released, and the entire stress environment around the fault changes, providing a pathway for magma to erupt.”

Read more at Discovery News

LHC Opens the Quantum Physics Floodgates

The Large Hadron Collider is the most complex machine ever built by humankind and it is probing into deep quantum unknown, revealing never-before-seen detail in the matter and forces that underpin the foundations of our universe. In its most basic sense, the LHC is a time machine; with each relativistic proton-on-proton collision, the particle accelerator is revealing energy densities and states of matter that haven’t existed in our universe since the moment after the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago.

The collider, which is managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is located near Geneva, Switzerland.

With the countless billions of collisions between ions inside the LHC’s detectors comes a firehose of data that needs to be recorded, deciphered and stored. Since the 27 kilometer (17 mile) circumference ring of supercooled electromagnets started smashing protons together once more after its winter break, LHC scientists are expecting a lot more data this year than what the experiment produced in 2015.

“The LHC is running extremely well,” said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry in a statement. “We now have an ambitious goal for 2016, as we plan to deliver around six times more data than in 2015.”

And this data will contain ever more detailed information about the elusive Higgs boson that was discovered in 2012 and possibly even details of “new” or “exotic” physics that physicists could spend decades trying to understand. Key to the LHC’s aims is to attempt to understand what dark matter is and why the universe is composed of matter and not antimatter.

In fact, there was already a buzz surrounding an unexpected signal that was recorded in 2015 that could represent something amazing, but as is the mantra of any scientist: more data is needed. And it looks like LHC physicists are about to be flooded with the stuff.

Central to the LHC’s recent upgrades is the sheer density of accelerated “beams” of protons that are accelerated to close to the speed of light. The more concentrated or focused the beams, the more collisions can be achieved. More collisions means more data and the more likelihood of revealing new and exciting things about our universe. This year, LHC engineers hope to magnetically squeeze the beams of protons when they collide inside the detectors, generating up to one billion proton collisions per second.

Add these advances in extreme beam control with the fact the LHC will be running at a record-breaking collision energy of 13 TeV and we have the unprecedented opportunity to make some groundbreaking discoveries.

“In 2015, we opened the doors to a completely new landscape with unprecedented energy. Now we can begin to explore this landscape in depth,” said CERN Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen.

Read more at Discovery News

City Bees Skip the Junk Food, Prefer Flowers

Do bees in urban settings eat differently than their country counterparts? With increased urbanization and fewer places to forage naturally, would the city slickers feast more readily on processed-sugar junk foods than on the nectar of flowers?

Those were the questions underpinning a new study out of North Carolina State University just published in the Journal of Urban Ecology.

To get some answers, N.C. State researchers gathered worker honey bees from colonies in both urban and rural areas within 30 miles of Raleigh, N.C. All told, they collected bees from 39 colonies – 24 run by beekeepers and 15 that were wild.

To gauge how much of the bees’ diet came from processed sugars vs. flower nectar, the scientists studied them for their levels of carbon-13, an isotope whose presence in their bodies would indicate how much human food each bee was taking in.

It turned out that the scientists were in for a surprise.

The researchers say they turned up no evidence that urban bees had consumed more processed sugar than their rural counterparts.

“Basically, bees are relying on flowers in cities and are not turning to human foods to supplement their diet,” Clint Penick, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

“This is good news for urban beekeepers,” he said. “The honey in their hives is mostly coming from flower nectar and not old soda, which is what we originally guessed.”

The finding, the research team wrote, “suggests an important role for urban flowers and green spaces in maintaining healthy pollinator populations in cities.”

Penick said further study would be needed to test if their results would apply to cities much larger than Raleigh, which is mid-sized, at just under 440,000 residents.

From Discovery News

Orchid Bees Blend Their Own Perfume

Humans aren’t the only ones that create intoxicating perfume blends, as new research finds that male orchid bees also practice this time-honored craft.

The bees from the genus Euglossa formulate their unique perfumes for reasons similar to ours: to attract mates, establish a signature identity, and smell good in a crowd. They do this by gathering a variety of carefully selected scents from their environment, and then douse their bodies with the perfume.

“The males expose them at the places where mating occurs,” said co-author Thomas Eltz of Ruhr-University Bochum, “so the perfumes may be chemical signals to females.”

For the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Eltz and his colleagues collected several species of orchid bees during a trip to Panama. They enticed the bees with scents such as vanilla and cinnamon, applied to strips of filter paper that were attached to trees.

“It is quite a spectacular sight to have dozens of green, blue or red metallic bees appear out of nowhere around a bait,” Eltz said.

The researchers next analyzed the scents blended by males and also studied how the bees responded when presented with various fragrances.

Some of the bee-made scents turned out to be unique compounds that are not even commercially available to human shoppers. Co-author Erik Hedenström recreated one of them in the lab: 6-(4- methylpent-3-enyl)-naphtalene-1,4-dione.

When comparing how orchid bee species reacted to multiple fragrances, the scientists determined that the most closely related bee species had similar sensitivity to odor. Conversely, distantly related species showed the greatest differences.

This means that, instead of evolving dramatically different senses of smell to accompany their individual scents, the bees’ senses of smell had diverged more gradually over time.

Read more at Discovery News

Why 9/11 Conspiracy Crowdfunding Project Will Fail

An entrepreneur named Paul Salo has launched a crowdfunding project which he claims will prove once and for all whether the conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are true. However, for a number of reasons, the plan won't work.

On his Indiegogo campaign Salo writes:

“Many people want to know more about 9-11. We are like a Mythbusters for September 11th. It’s an important project for many reasons. Many people doubt various details of 9-11. As the world has changed our trust in government and media has declined significantly. We want to see for ourselves. We don’t need people to guide our thinking. In this project we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability given the funds raised. Our ultimate goal is a fully loaded 767 and a similar structure to the WTC. We will crash the fully loaded (with fuel) plane (complete with black box) into the building using autopilot at 500 MPH.”

 Salo aims to test the widely challenged (in conspiracy circles anyway) claim that jet fuel can burn hot enough to sufficiently weaken a building’s steel structure that it collapses -- instead of, for example, the Twin Towers coming down due to hidden explosives. Some people believe the project to be in bad taste, while others see it as a legitimate grassroots effort to get at a truth long covered up by the government.

Science and Anomaly Hunting

Conspiracy theorists thrive on what is known as anomaly hunting: Looking for any evidence that doesn’t fit the “official story.” For example: In the confusion after a mass shooting, if police or eyewitnesses report details incorrectly -- perhaps mistaking a car backfire for a gunshot -- this provides grist for the conspiracy mill, “evidence” that a cover up is in effect.

To see the problem that anomaly hunting poses, consider the following example. A college student reads that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Being a naturally inquisitive person, he decides to try it for himself. The student fills a cup with water and puts it, along with a thermometer, in a freezer and sets the freezer’s temperature. The next day he opens the freezer door and finds that the water is very cold but not frozen. This information -- this anomaly -- contradicts widely accepted knowledge about the freezing temperature of water. The thermometer reads below 32 degrees, yet the water is not frozen.

What the student perceives as an anomaly is in fact nothing of the sort. The error is not with accepted science, but with his procedures or understanding of the phenomenon.

But before he concludes that “the official story” is wrong and he’s disproven basic physics, he should read the fine print for a better understanding of what he was looking for. Pure water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level. If the water was not pure, or if the thermometer was not exact enough for scientific purposes, or if he’s not at sea level, or if there was a bit of oil or another contaminant in the cup -- or any number of other factors he didn’t think of -- then he will not necessarily get an accurate reading or the expected result.

Replication Investigation

The idea of replicating a controversial event or project to test its validity sounds simple in theory. For example some people claim that the Egyptian pyramids were made -- or designed -- by aliens or ancient astronauts. The (ahistorical) assumption is that people at the time didn’t have the intelligence or technology to move the stones and build a pyramid shape.

Since the pyramids were built around 2560 B.C. there are no photographs or depictions of them being created, though in 2015 papyrus records were found of pyramid construction tools.

Egyptologists have a pretty good idea of where the rocks were quarried and how they were cut and moved, but doubters are fond of noting that scientists have never actually replicated the pyramids. They claim that skeptics or scientists must build an entire pyramid to prove how it could have been done, using materials and tools of that era.

This seems like a reasonable challenge until you realize that such an effort would never be done -- not because it can’t be done but because it would be impractical. Duplicating the great Ghiza pyramid would take many years and cost tens of millions of dollars. Who’s going to pay for it? It would also be pointless, since such a replication experiment would not be valid unless you used tens of thousands of workers -- estimates range from 15,000 to 40,000 -- and spent a decade or more building it, as the original did.

If some eccentric billionaire wants to fund it he or she should feel free, but scientists recognize it as an enormous cost and effort just to disprove some wild theories about aliens.

Thus while Salo’s scheme to duplicate the Twin Towers attack has a simple and populist appeal, actually pulling it off as a valid scientific experiment would be incredibly difficult and expensive, if not impossible. For a real science experiment you need to control for variables that could affect the results; in this case there are many variables including size and weight of the plane, the building type, and so on.

Salo writes that “You will be able to see for yourself what happens under these extreme circumstances. I’m not sure (from) which country we will purchase the aircraft and building but it doesn’t really matter much.” Actually Salo will find when talking to engineers that it matters greatly where the building is, since building codes vary wildly by country and region.

Buildings in earthquake-prone regions are built differently -- and able to sustain greater structural damage without collapsing -- than those built elsewhere. Variations in construction materials will also complicate comparisons.

Salo has another problem: Each building’s architecture is different, and will not necessarily react the same way to the same structural damage. In order for the experiment to be valid, he would need to build an exact replica of the Twin Towers; not just any tall building will do, since the load-bearing structures vary from building to building.

Despite his enthusiasm, Salo, like the public generally, greatly underestimates the rigor needed to conduct a valid scientific experiment. He says he plans to “recreate as best as we can” the circumstances of the World Trade Center attacks.

The problem is that “as best as we can” will leave an enormous margin of error, one so big as to make any results invalid and pointless. His results, should he pull it off, will be dramatic and sensational but hold no evidentiary value at all. He wouldn’t be comparing apples to apples -- or even apples to oranges -- but apples to astronauts.

Read more at Discovery News

Migration or Vacation? Humans Left Africa, Returned

At least one lineage of early humans migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe, likely mated with Neanderthals during their travels, and then journeyed back to Africa for better weather, new DNA evidence suggests.

The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, help to explain why native North Africans today are genetically related to people from Europe and Asia, in addition to other Africans. It also offers strong evidence that "Out of Africa" was not a one-way trip for some human lineages that traveled back to North Africa starting around 45,000 years ago.

At the center of it all is a prehistoric individual named the Pestera Muierii Woman, or PM-1 for short. Her skull, dated to 35,000 years ago, was unearthed in the Pestera Muierii cave of Romania.

Her "mosaic of modern human and archaic Neanderthal morphological (physical) features may be the result of Neanderthal interbreeding," senior author Concepcion de-la-Rúa of the University of the Basque Country's Department of Genetics told Discovery News.

de-la-Rúa and her colleagues extracted DNA from two of the woman's teeth and determined the ancient female's mitochondrial genome (mitogenome), i.e., a complete set of particular genes that are passed down from mothers to their daughters. The researchers noted that one component of this set, named "U6 basal," had not previously been identified in any ancient or existent humans.

Investigating the U6 mystery further, the scientists discovered that an evolved version of U6 does indeed exist today.

"U6 is found predominantly in present-day North African populations," de-la-Rúa said, adding that the form in Pestera Muierii Woman dates to a much earlier time and therefore is "basal," or at the root of U6's emergence.

Putting the clues together, the researchers believe that the woman's Homo sapiens ancestors migrated out of Africa and, at some point, mated with one or more Neanderthals, since she appears to have been part Neanderthal. This is actually true of all people of Asian and European heritage today, who retain Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.

Individuals from the woman's lineage then migrated back to Africa, landing in the northern region of the continent, where they mated with locals, thereby continuing the evolution of U6.

The woman then "represents an offshoot to South-East Europe, i.e. Romania, of this back migration starting in the Early Upper Paleolithic period about 40–45,000 years ago," de-la-Rúa said.

As for why Romanians today do not have U6 basal, the researchers think this early form of U6 could have gone extinct hundreds or even thousands of years after the woman lived. de-la-Rúa explained that "mitochondrial lineages may disappear when a woman does not have children or if she only has male descendants."

The "Out of Africa" migrants clearly went to a lot of trouble to travel to Asia and then to Europe, so why would many of their not-too-distant later relatives have been so eager to return to Africa? The researchers offered a two-word answer: a "difficult climate."

De-la-Rúa explained that "between 50,000–20,000 years ago, it was (often) very cold due to climatic fluctuations" in Europe.

Vicente Cabrera, professor at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, Spain, said that "a migration from Eurasia is the best explanation for the radiation of U6 in Africa."

Read more at Discovery News