Scientists observe a new quantum particle with properties of ball lightning

This is an artistic impression of a quantum ball lighting.

Scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University have created, for the first time a three-dimensional skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally.

In an extremely sparse and cold quantum gas, the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of ball lightning, which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of electric currents. The persistence of such knots could be the reason why ball lightning, a ball of plasma, lives for a surprisingly long time in comparison to a lightning strike. The new results could inspire new ways of keeping plasma intact in a stable ball in fusion reactors.

'It is remarkable that we could create the synthetic electromagnetic knot, that is, quantum ball lightning, essentially with just two counter-circulating electric currents. Thus, it may be possible that a natural ball lighting could arise in a normal lightning strike,' says Dr Mikko Möttönen, leader of the theoretical effort at Aalto University.

Möttönen also recalls having witnessed a ball lightning briefly glaring in his grandparents' house. Observations of ball lightning have been reported throughout history, but physical evidence is rare.

The dynamics of the quantum gas matches that of a charged particle responding to the electromagnetic fields of a ball lightning.

'The quantum gas is cooled down to a very low temperature where it forms a Bose-Einstein condensate: all atoms in the gas end up in the state of minimum energy. The state does not behave like an ordinary gas anymore but like a single giant atom,' explains Professor David Hall, leader of the experimental effort at Amherst College.

The skyrmion is created first by polarizing the spin of each atom to point upward along an applied natural magnetic field. Then, the applied field is suddenly changed in such a way that a point where the field vanishes appears in the middle of the condensate. Consequently, the spins of the atoms start to rotate in the new direction of the applied field at their respective locations. Since the magnetic field points in all possible directions near the field zero, the spins wind into a knot.

The knotted structure of the skyrmion consists of linked loops, at each of which all the spins point to a certain fixed direction. The knot can be loosened or moved, but not untied.

'What makes this a skyrmion rather than a quantum knot is that not only does the spin twist but the quantum phase of the condensate winds repeatedly,' says Hall.

If the direction of the spin is changing in space, the velocity of the condensate responds just as would happen for a charged particle in a magnetic field. The knotted spin structure thus gives rise to a knotted artificial magnetic field that exactly matches the magnetic field in a model of ball lightning.

Read more at Science Daily

Unprecedentedly wide and sharp dark matter map

Hyper Suprime-Cam image of a location with a highly significant dark matter halo detected through the weak gravitational lensing technique. This halo is so massive that some of the background (blue) galaxies are stretched tangentially around the center of the halo. This is called strong lensing.

A research team of multiple institutes, including the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and University of Tokyo, released an unprecedentedly wide and sharp dark matter map based on the newly obtained imaging data by Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope. The dark matter distribution is estimated by the weak gravitational lensing technique. The team located the positions and lensing signals of the dark matter halos and found indications that the number of halos could be inconsistent with what the simplest cosmological model suggests. This could be a new clue to understanding why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

Mystery of the accelerated Universe

In the 1930's, Edwin Hubble and his colleagues discovered the expansion of the Universe. This was a big surprise to most of the people who believed that the Universe stayed the same throughout eternity. A formula relating matter and the geometry of space-time was required in order to express the expansion of the Universe mathematically. Coincidentally, Einstein had already developed just such a formula. Modern cosmology is based on Einstein's theory for gravity.

It had been thought that the expansion is decelerating over time because the contents of the Universe (matter) attract each other. But in the late 1990's, it was found that the expansion has been accelerating since about 8 Giga years ago. This was another big surprise which earned the astronomers who found the expansion a Nobel Prize in 2011. To explain the acceleration, we have to consider something new in the Universe which repels the space.

The simplest resolution is to put the cosmological constant back into Einstein's equation. The cosmological constant was originally introduced by Einstein to realize a static universe, but was abandoned after the discovery of the expansion of the Universe. The standard cosmological model (called LCDM) incorporates the cosmological constant. LCDM is supported by many observations, but the question of what causes the acceleration still remains. This is one of the biggest problems in modern cosmology.

Wide and deep imaging survey using Hyper Suprime-Cam

The team is leading a large scale imaging survey using Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) to probe the mystery of the accelerating Universe. The key here is to examine the expansion history of the Universe very carefully.

In the early Universe, matter was distributed almost but not quite uniformly. There were slight fluctuations in the density which can now be observed through the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. These slight matter fluctuations evolved over cosmic time because of the mutual gravitational attraction of matter, and eventually the large scale structure of the present day Universe become visible. It is known that the growth rate of the structure strongly depends on how the Universe expands. For example, if the expansion rate is high, it is hard for matter to contract and the growth rate is suppressed. This means that the expansion history can be probed inversely through the observation of the growth rate.

It is important to note that growth rate cannot be probed well if we only observe visible matter (stars and galaxies). This is because we now know that nearly 80 % of the matter is an invisible substance called dark matter. The team adopted the 'weak gravitation lensing technique.' The images of distant galaxies are slightly distorted by the gravitational field generated by the foreground dark matter distribution. Analysis of the systematic distortion enables us to reconstruct the foreground dark matter distribution.

This technique is observationally very demanding because the distortion of each galaxy is generally very subtle. Precise shape measurements of faint and apparently small galaxies are required. This motivated the team to develop Hyper Suprime-Cam. They have been carrying out a wide field imaging survey using Hyper Suprime-Cam since March 2014. At this writing in February 2018, 60 % of the survey has been completed.

Unprecedentedly wide and sharp dark matter map

The team is now presenting the dark matter map based on the imaging data taken by April 2016. This is only 11 % of the planned final map, but it is already unprecedentedly wide. There has never been such a sharp dark matter map covering such a wide area.

Imaging observations are made through five different color filters. By combining these color data, it is possible to make a crude estimate of the distances to the faint background galaxies (called photometric redshift). At the same time, the lensing efficiency becomes most prominent when the lens is located directly between the distant galaxy and the observer. Using the photometric redshift information, galaxies are grouped into redshift bins. Using this grouped galaxy sample, dark matter distribution is reconstructed using tomographic methods and thus the 3D distribution can be obtained. Data for 30 square degrees are used to reconstruct the redshift range between 0.1 (~1.3 G light-years) and 1.0 (~8 G light-years). At the redshift of 1.0, the angular span corresponds to 1.0 G x 0.25 G light-years. This 3D dark matter mass map is also quite new. This is the first time the increase in the number of dark matter halos over time can be seen observationally.

What the dark matter halo count suggests and future prospects

The team counted the number of dark matter halos whose lensing signal is above a certain threshold. This is one of the simplest measurements of the growth rate. It is suggested that the number count of the dark matter halos is less than what is expected from LCDM. This could indicate there is a flaw in LCDM and that we might have to consider an alternative rather than the simple cosmological constant.

The statistical significance is, however, still limited as the large error bars suggest. There has been no conclusive evidence to reject LCDM, but many astronomers are interested in testing LCDM because discrepancies can be a useful probe to unlock the mystery of the accelerating Universe. Further observation and analysis are needed to confirm the discrepancy with higher significance. There are some other probes of the growth rate and such analysis are also underway (e.g. angular correlation of galaxy shapes) in the team to check the validity of standard LCDM.

Read more at Science Daily

Previously unknown 'supercolony' of Adélie penguins discovered in Antarctica

The researchers found that the Danger Islands have 751,527 pairs of Adélie penguins--more than the rest of the entire Antarctic Peninsula region combined. They include the third and fourth largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world.

For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been steadily declining -- or so biologists have thought. A new study led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, is providing new insights on of this species of penguin. In a paper released on March 2nd in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown "supercolony" of more than 1,500,000 Adélie Penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip.

"Until recently, the Danger Islands weren't known to be an important penguin habitat," says co-PI Heather Lynch, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University. These supercolonies have gone undetected for decades, she notes, partly because of the remoteness of the islands themselves, and partly the treacherous waters that surround them. Even in the austral summer, the nearby ocean is filled with thick sea ice, making it extremely difficult to access.

Yet in 2014, Lynch and colleague Mathew Schwaller from NASA discovered telltale guano stains in existing NASA satellite imagery of the islands, hinting at a mysteriously large number of penguins. To find out for sure, Lynch teamed with Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, Mike Polito at LSU and Tom Hart at Oxford University to arrange an expedition to the islands with the goal of counting the birds firsthand.

When the group arrived in December 2015, they found hundreds of thousands of birds nesting in the rocky soil, and immediately started to tally up their numbers by hand. The team also used a modified commercial quadcopter drone to take images of the entire island from above.

"The drone lets you fly in a grid over the island, taking pictures once per second. You can then stitch them together into a huge collage that shows the entire landmass in 2D and 3D," says co-PI Hanumant Singh, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, who developed the drone's imaging and navigation system. Once those massive images are available, he says, his team can use neural network software to analyze them, pixel by pixel, searching for penguin nests autonomously.

The accuracy that the drone enabled was key, says Michael Polito, coauthor from Louisiana State University and a guest investigator at WHOI. The number of penguins in the Danger Islands could provide insight not just on penguin population dynamics, but also on the effects of changing temperature and sea ice on the region's ecology.

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," says Polito.

Being able to get an accurate count of the birds in this supercolony offers a valuable benchmark for future change, as well, notes Jenouvrier. "The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know," she says.

Read more at Science Daily

Permian carbo-loading: How starchy treats helped build an ancient world

Figure 2. Transmitted-light, cross-polarized-light, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of starch-bearing Lagenicula-type megaspore from the Baode section, north China. AL Details of the starch grain in D (rectangle) in transmitted light. Note the hilum (small depression) in center, and Y-shaped fissures. B: Another detail of the same grain under cross-polarized light. Note the Maltese-cross extinction in the center. C: Detail of compound starch grains under cross-polarized light. D: SEM image showing a complete starch-bearing Lagenicula-type megaspore. E: Detail of D, showing starch grains on the gula surface. Black arrow indicates the hilum appearing as a small depression.

Everyone loves a nice plate of pasta. After all, starch is the ultimate energy food. Now, we have proof that carbo-loading has been a thing for at least 280 million years.

A team of Chinese and German scientists has discovered the oldest unequivocal fossilized starch ever found, in the form of granular caps on the megaspores of a Permian-age plant called a lycopsid. They also found evidence that these high energy treats may have been the power bars of early spore spreading.

"We suggest that these starch caps were used to attract and reward animals for megaspore dispersal," explains lead author Feng Liu, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, in Nanjing, China. The study, published online ahead of print for the journal Geology, also provides early evidence for mutualism between plants and animals.

Lycopsids were vascular plants, ancestors of modern club mosses. They thrived in the teeming swamp forests of the Permian, about 280 million years ago. The fossil megaspores of lycopsids, with remarkably well-preserved starch granule toppings, were found in Permian-age coal in northern China.

Plant seeds store starch internally to nourish seedlings. But after analyzing the starch masses in the fossil megaspores using scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy, and comparing them to modern seeds, the scientists concluded that the starch caps were only outside, not inside, the megaspore. That means the starch wasn't part of the lycopsids' embryo nutrient system. Instead, the granules likely existed specifically as a spore-spreading device.

Ants, birds, and mammals weren't around 280 million years ago, so the authors speculate that snails, along with arthropods like millipedes and cockroaches, may have been the main consumers of the scrumptious starch snacks. In turn, they dispersed the lycopsid megaspores. While starch certainly existed long before the Permian, this discovery dishes up new insights into its ecological role, says Feng Liu. "It can help us better understand the terrestrial animal food habit and the complexity of biotic interactions in deep geological time." Plus, it shows that starchy food was a creature comfort long before the days of fettucine.

From Science Daily

Crowdsourced family tree yields new insights about humanity

In the above 6,000 person family tree cleaned and organized using graph theory, individuals spanning seven generations are represented in green, with their marital links in red.

Thanksgiving gatherings could get bigger -- a lot bigger -- as science uncovers the familial bonds that bind us. From millions of interconnected online genealogy profiles, researchers have amassed the largest, scientifically-vetted family tree to date, which at 13 million people, is slightly bigger than a nation the size of Cuba or Belgium. Published in the journal Science, the new dataset offers fresh insights into the last 500 years of marriage and migration in Europe and North America, and the role of genes in longevity.

"Through the hard work of many genealogists curious about their family history, we crowdsourced an enormous family tree and boom, came up with something unique," said the study's senior author, Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University and Chief Science Officer at MyHeritage, a genealogy and DNA testing company that owns Geni.com, the platform that hosts the data used in the study. "We hope that this dataset can be useful to scientists researching a range of other topics."

The researchers downloaded 86 million public profiles from Geni.com, one of the world's largest collaborative genealogy websites, and used mathematical graph theory to clean and organize the data. What emerged among other smaller family trees was a single tree of 13 million people spanning an average of 11 generations. Theoretically, they'd need to go back another 65 generations to converge on one common ancestor and complete the tree. Still, the dataset represents a milestone by moving family-history searches from newspaper obituaries and church archives into the digital era, making population-level investigations possible. The researchers also make it easy to overlay other datasets to study a range of socioeconomic trends at scale.

"It's an exciting moment for citizen science," said Melinda Mills, a demographer at University of Oxford who was not involved in the study "It demonstrates how millions of regular people in the form of genealogy enthusiasts can make a difference to science. Power to the people!"

The dataset details when and where each individual was born and died, and mirrors the demographics of Geni.com individuals, with 85 percent of profiles originating from Europe and North America. The researchers verified that the dataset was representative of the general U.S. population's education level by cross-checking a subset of Vermont Geni.com profiles against the state's detailed death registry.

"The reconstructed pedigrees show that we are all related to each other," said Peter Visscher, a quantitative geneticist at University of Queensland who was not involved in the study. "This fact is known from basic population history principles, but what the authors have achieved is still very impressive."

Marriage, Migration and Genetic Relatedness Industrialization profoundly altered work and family life, and these trends coincide with shifting marriage choices in the data. Before 1750, most Americans found a spouse within six miles (10 kilometers) of where they were born, but for those born in 1950, that distance had stretched to about 60 miles (100 kilometers), the researchers found. "It became harder to find the love of your life," Erlich jokes.

Before 1850, marrying in the family was common -- to someone who was, on average, a fourth cousin, compared to seventh cousins today, the researchers found. Curiously, the researchers found that between 1800 and 1850, people traveled farther than ever to find a mate -- nearly 12 miles (19 kilometers) on average -- but were more likely to marry a fourth cousin or closer. Changing social norms, rather than rising mobility, may have led people to shun close kin as marriage partners, they hypothesize.

In a related observation, they found that women in Europe and North America have migrated more than men over the last 300 years, but when men did migrate, they traveled significantly farther on average.

Genes and Longevity To try and untangle the role of nature and nurture in longevity, the researchers built a model and trained it on a dataset of 3 million relatives born between 1600 and 1910 who had lived past the age of 30. They excluded twins, individuals who died in the U.S. Civil War, World War I and II, or in a natural disaster (inferred if relatives died within 10 days of each other).

They compared each individual's lifespan to that of their relatives and their degree of separation and found that genes explained about 16 percent of the longevity variation seen in their data -- on the low end of previous estimates which have ranged from about 15 percent to 30 percent.

The results indicate that good longevity genes can extend someone's life by an average of five years, said Erlich. "That's not a lot," he adds. "Previous studies have shown that smoking takes 10 years off of your life. That means some life choices could matter a lot more than genetics."

Significantly, the study also shows that the genes that influence longevity act independently rather than interacting with each other, a phenomenon called epistasis. Some scientists have used epistasis to explain why large-scale genomic studies have so far failed to find the genes that encode complex traits like intelligence or longevity.

If some genetic variants act together to influence longevity, the researchers would have seen a greater correlation among closely related individuals who share more DNA, and thus more genetic interactions. However, they found a linear link between longevity and genetic relatedness, ruling out widespread epistasis.

"This is important in the field because epistasis has been proposed as a source of 'missing heritability,'" said the study's lead author, Joanna Thornycroft, a former graduate student at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, now at Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Adds Visscher: "This is entirely in line with theory and previous inference from SNP [variant] data, yet for some reason many researchers in human genetics and epidemiology continue to believe that there is a lot of non-additive genetic variation for common diseases and quantitative traits."

The dataset is available for academic research via FamiLinx.org, a website created by Erlich and his colleagues. Though FamiLinx data is anonymized, curious readers can check Geni.com to see if a family member may have added them there. If so, there is a good chance that they may have made it into the 13 million-person family tree.

In addition to his position at MyHeritage, a company that allows consumers to discover their family history through genetic tests and its genealogy platform, Erlich is a computer science professor at Columbia Engineering, a member of Columbia's Data Science Institute, and an adjunct core member of the New York Genome Center (NYGC).

Read more at Science Daily

Chimps and Bonobos Use the Same Body Language to Communicate

A chimpanzee in Uganda's Kibale National Park

Gestures are a form of visual communication that humans often use with seemingly little thought. For example, if a person wants someone to go away, the individual might fling their hand to shoo them off.

Similarly, if a person desires something, he or she might hold out a hand flat, with the palm up. These gestures connect us to other primates, since the moves are exactly the same in bonobos and chimpanzees.

"We don't have to learn them; they are part of the shared ape inheritance," Richard Byrne, an emeritus professor in the school of psychology and neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told Seeker.

Evidence for the shared forms of visual communication is presented in a new study by Byrne and his team. The research, reported in the journal PLOS Biology, focused on bonobo and chimpanzee gestures, and found that approximately 90 percent of them overlap. This suggests that the cognitive ability underlying such visual communication skills was inherited from their common ancestor.

Lead author Kirsty Graham of the University of York’s department of psychology told Seeker that bonobos and chimps are closely related. They are thought to have diverged around one million years ago along the Congo River.

For decades it was believed that chimpanzees were the closest living relatives of humans. Recent genetic studies, however, show that bonobos also have about 99 percent of our DNA, which means they are now thought to be as closely related to us as chimps.

Bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo

For the new study, Graham collected data on two neighboring communities of wild bonobos in the Luo Scientific Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Co-author Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews traveled to another part of Africa, the Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda, to gather data on a community of wild chimpanzees. Both researchers filmed interactions that took place between the primates.

The scientists next analyzed the 2,321 instances of intentional gestures that they recorded. Such gestures included movements of the body, limbs, and head that are directed to a recipient and do not achieve a goal through force.

Most, but not all, of the gestures mirror the physical form of the corresponding behaviors.

"Humans can often guess the meanings correctly, but that is likely to be because we too have inherited the potential to use and understand many or most of the gestures found in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, from the shared common ancestor," Byrne said.

Videos showing these and other non-human primate gestures are at The Great Ape Dictionary.

Big Loud Scratch: In nearly all cases, this gesture among bonobos and chimps communicated that the signaler wished to initiate grooming.

Graham added that she does not think the gestures are iconic.

"To be really iconic, a bonobo would have to know that their gesture looked like the thing that they're communicating about and know that the other bonobo would understand them because it looks like that thing," she said. "That would be a lot to unpack, and we don't have any evidence suggesting that that's how their gestures work. ... If the gestures resemble the actions, it's maybe for different reasons."

Humans often create symbols that bear little resemblance to their corresponding behaviors or meanings. Examples include giving a thumbs up for approval and lifting the middle and index fingers to form the v-shaped "peace sign."

"Sign languages and symbolic gestures like 'thumbs up' or the 'peace sign' are quite different because they are acquired culturally by social learning, not from genetic hard-wiring, and are therefore culturally specific," Byrne said.

"In some cultures," he noted, "the peace sign is not understood, and thumbs up is an insult."

Bonobos, chimps, and humans all raise their arms as a gesture, but in humans this usually is a non-vocal way to draw attention to oneself. Students in class might raise their hand, for example, signaling a desire to be called upon. Byrne said that this gesture was taught to him and to others.

"It did not come naturally," he explained.

Some human gestures were therefore inherited from our primate ancestors, but others were not, the research suggests.

Rocking: In chimps, this move initiated either copulation or genital rubbing.

Graham said that while she and her colleagues are always careful to keep their distance from the wild primates they are studying, sometimes their inquisitive subjects break that intended barrier.

She recalls a young bonobo named Natsuko who would teasingly run up to the researchers, shake branches, and then run away. Bonobos appear to do this amongst themselves to get attention.

"'Object shake' is a somewhat ambiguous gesture, so I don't know what she wanted from us, but it definitely wasn't for us to ignore her," Graham said.

Robert Seyfarth is one of the world's leading experts on primate communication and other primate social behaviors. He and his wife Dorothy Cheney have conducted decades of fieldwork on various non-human primates. The pair were mentored by Robert Hinde (1923–2016), the noted animal behaviorist who supervised Jane Goodall's dissertation on the behavior of chimpanzees in the mid-1960s.

Seyfarth told Seeker that he was not surprised by the discovery that bonobos and chimps share many gestures, and that physically similar gestures in the two species have roughly the same meaning.

"Chimps and bonobos, after all, share many things: They live in similar habitats and have similar anatomy, social organizations, and social relationships," Seyfarth explained.

Read more at Seeker

The Global Virome Project Is Hunting Hundreds of Thousands of Deadly Viruses

A researcher displays Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.

In virology, as in sports, sometimes the best defense is a good offense.

This week, an international team of scientists and front-line physicians launched a major new global initiative to prevent the next viral pandemic. The strategy: to hunt down potentially deadly viruses in animal populations before they jump species and infect humans.

It's an ambitious plan, but researchers backing the Global Virome Project believe it can be done — and can pay additional research benefits along the way. In a report published last month in the journal Science, the authors drop some crazy numbers.

An estimated 1.6 million viral species are yet to be discovered in mammal and bird populations. Of those, an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 may have the capacity to jump species and cause diseases in humans. That's a lot of viral trouble.

But by studying the disease vectors of previous outbreaks like Ebola, SARS, and Zika, scientists believe they can eventually track down all potentially dangerous viruses before they spill over into human populations. Ideally, the GVP's aggressive approach will essentially stop outbreaks before they even start.

“I think what's important and exciting is that we now have the tools and the ability to know as much about viruses as we do about bacteria and other disease-causing organisms,” said Jonna Mazet, an author of the report and executive director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. “They were just a little bit tougher problem to crack than other pathogens that cause death and destruction.”

For the last eight years, Mazet has served as director of the PREDICT program, a similar but smaller-scale initiative operated by the United States Agency for International Development. The PREDICT program has found more than 1,000 unique viruses in animals and humans.

“PREDICT showed us that we are ready to do this on a much larger scale,” Mazet told Seeker. “It served as a proof of concept.”

A core concept of both the PREDICT program and the Global Virome Project, Mazet said, is that scientists must broaden their approach to disease prevention.

“The idea is to think about people, animals, and the environment all at once,” she said. “That approach helps us to find viruses in the first place and understand their potential for spilling over. Then we can design interventions.”

The GVP program is already being compared to another ambitious global research effort — the Human Genome Project. Mazet believes that the GVP, like HGP, is a chance for the world's scientists to join together and make a great leap forward.

“It's just the right time,” she said. “We can know, and we should know this. The HGP was also a big audacious goal that looked to be financially and technologically insurmountable to outside observers. But form the inside the science community, we knew we could do this.”

The first stage of GVP research is dedicated to identifying and cataloging unknown viruses, which will then be used, ideally, to develop vaccines, pharmaceuticals, or other. The GVP will work with the United Nations, dozens of international health organizations, local governments, and industry partners such as Merck.

“And then, of course, individual scientists are pitching in from all over the world —Asia, Africa, the US, Canada, and Europe ” Mazet said.

Latin America, in particular, has contributed a good deal of resources following the 2015-2016 Zika epidemic.

“Brazil has been a major player in all this effort,” Mazet said. “They've been very sensitized after their experiences with Zika.”

Read more at Seeker

Brightly Colored Bacteria Engineered Into Living Paint

The image shows a colony of the Flavobacterium IR1, 2 cm in diameter, growing on a nutrient agar plate. The cells in the colony are highly organized, thus forming a 2-D photonic crystal that interferes with light. This results in structurally colored bright and angle-specific hues with a concentric ring pattern indicating subtle changes in organization. The older cells of IR1 in the colony centre are more disorganized and therefore loses color. IR1 can be genetically modified from this wild-type strain to create new, living photonic structures.

Now here's a bright idea.

Researchers in Europe have developed a technique for growing genetically modified bacteria that can be used as brightly colored “living paints” in manufacturing and art.

The colors generated by the bacteria, shiny and metallic, are actually generated by the same optical process that makes peacock feathers and butterfly wings so visually striking. The color comes not from organic pigments, but rather the very molecular structure of the bacterial colony.

In a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Dutch company Hoekmine BV, researchers developed the unique process by genetically modifying colonies of flavobacteria, a kind of bacteria that produces colors as a byproduct of its own internal structure. Depending on how the genetics are manipulated, the bacteria reflect light at different wavelengths, potentially including all colors of the visual spectrum.

The new research could provide manufacturers with biodegradable, non-toxic paints that are grown instead of synthesized.

The new technique is a result of collaboration among researchers in several scientific disciplines, said co-lead author Silvia Vignolini, professor in Cambridge's department of chemistry.

“I am particularly proud of this work not only for the potential applications, but also for its fundamental point of view,” Vignolini told Seeker. “It is the first time that the structural coloration of any living organism has been genetically controlled.”

To develop the new process, researchers compared the genetic information, optical properties, and anatomy of multiple natural and mutated bacterial colonies. By mixing and matching elements of different colonies, researchers found they could generate different optical effects.

For instance, researchers changed the genetics of one particular colony to alter the way individual bacteria move around. That change altered the geometries within the colony, which in turn changed the color from green to blue, then eventually to red. The research team was also able to create brighter or duller coloration, or even make the color disappear entirely.

“We mapped several genes with previously unknown functions and we correlated them to the colonies' self-organizational capacity and their coloration,” senior author Colin Ingham, CEO of Hoekmine BV, said in a statement released with the new research.

As to practical applications of the technology, any large-scale deployment is still several years away. But Vignolini said the time may come when such “living paints” are available in car dealership showrooms and on hardware shop shelves.

“The future is open for biodegradable paints on our cars and walls, simply by growing exactly the color and appearance we want,” she said.

Interestingly, one of the first consumer products might be aimed at kids, Ingham said.

"We did actually consider making a sort of science kit, maybe for schools, but it's not yet available,” she said. “The bacteria are not harmful and pretty robust.”

The living paints might have other useful applications, too. Because the living bacteria can react to other molecules, they could be used to make materials and surfaces that change color under designated circumstances.

“I think a possible application would be to get something that exploits the unique sensing ability of these colonies,” Vignolini said. “We could genetically engineer them to detect pollution or specific molecules.”

Read more at Seeker

Terrestrial Plants Emerged 100 Million Years Earlier Than Thought

Early life on land resembled cryptogamic ground covers like this lava field in Iceland. Researcher Silvia Pressel, co-author of a new paper on plant evolution, appears in the right of the picture.

The Cambrian Period (541–485 million years ago) is known for its explosion of life, resulting in the emergence of the first representatives of all modern animal phyla. Scientists for decades, however, envisioned that the land then was comparatively bereft of plant life, with little more than microbial soil crust covering it.

That view has since been dramatically revised. The middle Cambrian is now thought to have been rocky, very green, and a lot like parts of modern-day Iceland.

Silvia Pressel of the Natural History Museum in London recently returned from Iceland and told Seeker that many of its rugged "landscapes might appear barren to the untrained eye, but when you consider that this is how life on land probably looked 500 million years ago, it is very inspiring."

She added that places like Iceland with seedless plant ground covers "are windows into the past and provide us with unique opportunities to understand how early terrestrial ecosystems might have functioned" and what their impacts were "on both the atmosphere and the terrestrial environment."

The land plants that first greened the continents evolved and spread across the globe between 515-473 million years ago, according to the new research conducted by Pressel and her colleagues. The new estimate, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is significant because it extends the date of this influential event by 100 million years.

Moss, a living representative of one of the earliest emerging land plant lineages

Plants not only provide food and shelter for animals, but they are also major contributors to the chemical weathering of continental rocks, co-lead author Jennifer Morris of the University of Bristol told Seeker. She explained that this is a key process in the carbon cycle, which regulates Earth's climate.

Morris, co-lead author Mark Puttick, Pressel, and their team used a "molecular clock" methodology to overcome prior challenges in establishing a more accurate timeline for early land plant evolution. Fossils for early plants are sparse and only date back to about 420 million years ago, so they do not provide a complete picture of what actually happened beyond that time.

The molecular clock technique instead focuses on the average rate at which a species' genome accumulates mutations.

"Mainly, we used much more genomic data than ever before to estimate the genetic distance between living species," Puttick told Seeker, adding that he and his colleagues took into account evidence, not only of the presence of land plant fossils, but also evidence of their absence. The latter was based on the occurrence in ancient strata of non-land plant fossils with the same fossilization potential.

It is believed that aquatic plants preceded terrestrial ones, meaning the last common ancestor of living land plants "would have required water for reproduction, but it would otherwise have been effectively terrestrial," co-author James Clark said.

In addition to determining when the first terrestrial plants emerged, the researchers also now have a better idea of what they looked like.

Liverwort

For many years, scientists thought that the earliest land plants resembled liverworts, which are small and flowerless green plants with leaf-like stems or lobed leaves. Liverworts tend to occur in very moist habitats.

Senior author Philip Donoghue told Seeker that, because of this assumption about liverworts, "huge amounts of time and money have been invested in studying their genomes and developmental biology and physiology, as though they are effectively living museums. This is based largely on the basis that living liverworts lack many of the key features present in all other living land plants, like stomata."

The team's new research instead shows that today's liverworts lack these key features because they lost them over evolutionary time. While liverworts were part of one of the earliest land plant lineages, the ancestral terrestrial plant would have been more like moss, they believe.

It remains unclear what precise factors led to plants first colonizing land, but Morris said that plant evolution must always "strike a balance between opportunities of open real estate for photosynthesis and enhanced carbon sequestration, while also dealing with the greater challenges of UV radiation, dehydration, gas exchange, and reproduction out of water."

It is intriguing to consider that, as plants were first becoming terrestrial, land-based arthropods emerged, according to recent research conducted by the University of Bristol’s Davide. The large phylum Arthropoda includes insects, spiders, and crustaceans.

As animal life expanded and diversified after the Cambrian explosion, so too did plants. By the time the first dinosaurs walked the earth about 247 million years ago, plants with roots, stems, and seeds had evolved.

Read more at Seeker

Milestone Achieved in Quest to Grown Human Organs Inside of Animals

More than 115,000 people in the United States are on waiting lists for an organ transplant, and 20 Americans die each day, on average, from a shortage of donated organs.

While scientists have tried to culture organs in the lab from stem cells, the process is slow and biologically fragile. Another option is to grow human organs inside animals like pigs and sheep by implanting their embryos with bits of human DNA. Think of them as four-legged organ farms.

Although the work has been slow and somewhat controversial, scientists recently announced that they reached a new milestone in the quest to grow human organs in animals — a human-sheep embryo in which one out of every 10,000 cells contains human DNA.

Growing human organs in animals sounds exotic, but the process is relatively straightforward. Using the gene-editing tool Crispr, scientists delete the DNA from an early-stage pig or sheep embryo that controls for organ growth, say a pancreas or liver. In its place, researchers inject human pluripotent stem cells into the embryo — undifferentiated cells that can fill the genetic gap and grow a human organ instead.

The resulting hybrid creature, which contains DNA from two different individuals or species, is known as a chimera, a nod to the mythological three-headed monster that was part lion, part goat, and part serpent. But the biology behind modern chimeras is very real.

Scientists from Japan and the United States have already created fully functional mouse-rat chimeras with the eyes, heart, and pancreas of a rat grown inside mice. One group even grew a mouse pancreas in a rat, then successfully transplanted it back into a diabetic mouse, where the new organ cured the critter’s diabetes. There was no danger of the mouse rejecting the pancreas, because it was made from the DNA of its identical twin.

To grow human organs from chimeras, however, we’ll need an embryonic host a lot bigger than a mouse or rat. That’s why there’s been so much interest in pigs and sheep, which could conceivably grow a genetically matched, human-size heart, kidney, or liver from a chimera embryo in as few as nine months.

But coaxing human cells to grow in a foreign embryonic environment is far more complicated than swapping DNA between a mouse and a rat, which are nearly identical genetically. Plus, there are the ethical questions raised by crossing human DNA with other species. At what point does a human-pig chimera become something more than just an animal?

Pablo Ross at the University of California, Davis is a member of the research collaboration that announced its progress toward a human-sheep chimera at a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas. In previous work with pigs, Ross and his colleagues had created chimera embryos with one human cell for every 100,000 pig cells. The human-sheep embryo represented a 10-fold increase in human genetic contribution.

Still, Ross told Seeker, one human cell for every 10,000 sheep cells is way too low of a concentration to be able to take over organ development in an embryo.

“For organ generation, we’re going to need human cells with the potential to contribute about one percent [of the embryo],” said Ross. “We’re still 100 times short of that goal.”

One of the greatest challenges for increasing those concentrations is that researchers still don’t know what strains of human pluripotent stem cells, or what combinations of different cell types, work best in a chimera embryo.

The problem is essentially an ethical one, explained Ross. With mice, you can take stem cells from one animal, implant them into another mouse’s embryo and see how effectively they propagate. By doing that over and over again, with different types and concentrations of stem cells, scientists now know exactly which mouse stem cells work best in chimeras.

“With human stem cells, obviously we can’t do that kind of experiment for ethical reasons,” said Ross. “We can’t put human stem cells in human embryos and see if we get a chimeric person."

The result is a much slower trial-and-error process that’s also hampered by a lack of funding. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which provides research grants to more than 30,000 projects each year, imposed a moratorium on funding for chimera research in 2015. Despite proposing a lift on that ban a year later, the funding freeze remains.

One reason the NIH imposed the original funding ban was concerns over potential “off-target” effects of implanting human stem cells in animal embryos. What if, for example, human stem cells migrated to a pig’s developing brain resulting in a chimera with human-grade cognition? Such a creature would permanently blur the moral and ethical lines between humans and non-humans, calling into question everything from scientific experimentation to raising animals for food.

Read more at Seeker

Dark Matter May Have Kept the Early Universe Cool

Artist's rendering of how the first stars in the universe may have looked

Astronomers have used a small radio telescope to find faint radio waves emitted by clouds of primordial hydrogen gas formed just 180 million years after the Big Bang. These are the earliest signals of hydrogen ever observed. They also found evidence that the first stars were already shining at this point in the early universe. While their observations match most theoretical predictions for the origins of our universe, there also is a bit of a mystery: The hydrogen gas was colder than expected.

“Our observations are consistent with the big bang,” Judd Bowman from Arizona State University told Seeker. He is the lead author of one of two papers on the research published in the journal Nature. “They are also consistent with our expectations about when the first stars form in the universe, too. But they suggest that we are missing at least one piece of the puzzle — either something else is present at this time to make more radio waves, or some mechanism cooled the gas more than expected.”

Bowman said that prior to these observations, astronomers expected that they knew the temperature of the primordial gas quite well based on physical modeling and previous observations of the cosmic microwave background — the remnant, electromagnetic radiation from the earliest stages of the universe.

“We expect that gas cools slowly from the time it is formed 380,000 years after the big bang until stars started to appear,” he said. “However, the strength of the signal we detect requires either the intensity of background radio waves in the early universe to be larger than predicted or the gas to be colder than expected.”

A timeline of the universe, updated to show when the first stars emerged. This updated timeline of the universe reflects the recent discovery that the first stars emerged by 180 million years after the Big Bang. The research behind this timeline was conducted by Judd Bowman of Arizona State University and his colleagues, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

While astronomers typically rely on light to make their observations, the most useful for observing the early universe are radio waves — specifically microwaves. By studying this part of the electromagnetic spectrum, they can measure the cosmic microwave background, which is the oldest light still in existence. Before this was emitted, the universe was effectively opaque: Light couldn't travel freely because the universe was so hot and dense.

The prevailing theory is that when the first stars turned on, they provided ultraviolet radiation that caused changes to the distribution of hydrogen atom. The transition is what astronomers call the 21-cm hyperfine line. This means that the hydrogen gas would absorb photons from the cosmic microwave background, imprinting a signature in the radio spectrum that should be observable today at radio frequencies below 200 megahertz. The intensity of waves from this early era would provide indications of the temperature of the gas.

Bowman and his colleagues used a small ground-based radio antenna located in western Australia called EDGES, short for Experiment to Detect Global EoR [Epoch of Reionization] Signature. They detected the signature at 78 megahertz, which was within the range they expected, but the signal had a larger amplitude, indicating that the primordial gas was colder than expected.

EDGES ground-based radio spectrometer, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia

Bowman said they investigated possible explanations and reached out to close colleagues for assistance and ideas.

“It is difficult to find mechanisms that could increase the radio background at this age in the universe, whereas an explanation for how the gas might be cooler than expected was more assessable,” he said.

One colleague, Rennan Barkana from Tel Aviv University had an intriguing idea based on previous observations. The gas could have been cooled through the interaction of hydrogen with something quite cold: dark matter.

“Barkana realized that previous work exploring the possible effects of dark matter interacting with baryons — atoms, for example — could be applied to the era probed by our observations and would provide a mechanism for cooling the gas to the needed temperature,” Bowman said. “In essence, if the gas interacts — even weakly — with dark mater, it could lose energy to the dark matter and cool. This is the best explanation we have at the moment and it is very exciting if it holds.”

Read more at Seeker

'Obesity paradox' debunked

Doctor measuring man's stomach.

Put down that second helping of chocolate cake.

A new study debunks the "obesity paradox," a counterintuitive finding that showed people who have been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease live longer if they are overweight or obese compared with people who are normal weight at the time of diagnosis.

Obese people live shorter lives and have a greater proportion of life with cardiovascular disease, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

The paper will be published Feb. 28 in JAMA Cardiology.

The new study shows similar longevity between normal weight and overweight people, but a higher risk for those who are overweight of developing cardiovascular disease during their lifespan and more years spent with cardiovascular disease.

This is the first study to provide a lifespan perspective on the risks of developing cardiovascular disease and dying after a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease for normal weight, overweight and obese individuals.

"The obesity paradox caused a lot of confusion and potential damage because we know there are cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular risks associated with obesity," said Dr. Sadiya Khan, an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine cardiologist.

"I get a lot of patients who ask, 'Why do I need to lose weight, if research says I'm going to live longer?''' Khan said. "I tell them losing weight doesn't just reduce the risk of developing heart disease, but other diseases like cancer. Our data show you will live longer and healthier at a normal weight."

Obesity is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 to 39.9; overweight is 25 to 29.9. BMI is a person's weight divided by his or her height. An overweight individual, who is 5'4" and weighs 160 pounds, for example, would be considered overweight; a 5'4" person who weights 190 pounds is considered obese.

Higher odds of a stroke, heart attack, heart failure or dying from heart disease, according to the study:

• The likelihood of having a stroke, heart attack, heart failure or cardiovascular death in overweight middle-aged men 40 to 59 years old was 21 percent higher than in normal weight men. The odds were 32 percent higher in overweight women than normal weight women.
• The likelihood of having a stroke, heart attack, heart failure or cardiovascular death in obese middle-aged men 40 to 59 years old was 67 percent higher than in normal weight men. The odds were 85 percent higher in obese women than normal weight women.
• Normal weight middle-aged men also lived 1.9 years longer than obese men and six years longer than morbidly obese. Normal weight men had similar longevity to overweight men.
• Normal weight middle-aged women lived 1.4 years longer than overweight women, 3.4 years longer than obese women and six years longer than morbidly obese women.

"A healthy weight promotes healthy longevity or longer healthspan in addition to lifespan, so that greater years lived are also healthier years lived," Khan said. "It's about having a much better quality of life."

The study examined individual level data from 190,672 in-person examinations across 10 large prospective cohorts with an aggregate of 3.2 million years of follow-up. All of the participants were free of cardiovascular disease at baseline and had objectively measured height and weight to assess BMI. Over follow-up, researchers assessed for cardiovascular disease overall and by type, including coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure and cardiovascular death, as well as non-cardiovascular death.

Read more at Science Daily

Genetics or lifestyle: What is it that shapes our microbiome?

Understanding the factors that shape our microbiome may be key to understanding and treating many common health problems.

The question of nature vs nurture extends to our microbiome -- the personal complement of mostly-friendly bacteria we carry around with us. Study after study has found that our microbiome affects nearly every aspect of our health; and its microbial composition, which varies from individual to individual, may hold the key to everything from weight gain to moods. Some microbiome researchers had suggested that this variation begins with differences in our genes; but a large-scale study conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science challenges this idea and provides evidence that the connection between microbiome and health may be even more important than we thought.

Indeed, the working hypothesis has been that genetics plays a major role in determining microbiome variation among people. According to this view, our genes determine the environment our microbiome occupies, and each particular environment allows certain bacterial strains to thrive. However, the Weizmann researchers were surprised to discover that the host's genetics play a very minor role in determining microbiome composition -- only accounting for about 2% of the variation between populations.

The research was led by research students Daphna Rothschild, Dr. Omer Weissbrod and Dr. Elad Barkan from the lab of Prof. Eran Segal of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, together with members of Prof. Eran Elinav's group of the Immunology Department, all at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Their findings, which were recently published in Nature, were based on a unique database of around 1,000 Israelis who had participated in a longitudinal study of personalized nutrition. Israel has a highly diverse population, which presents an ideal experimental setting for investigating the effects of genetic differences. In addition to genetic data and microbiome composition, the information collected for each study participant included dietary habits, lifestyle, medications and additional measurements. The scientists analyzing this data concluded that diet and lifestyle are by far the most dominant factors shaping our microbiome composition.

If microbiome populations are not shaped by our genetics, how do they nonetheless interact with our genes to modify our health? The scientists investigated the connections between microbiome and the measurements in the database of cholesterol, weight, blood glucose levels, and other clinical parameters. The study results were very surprising: For most of these clinical measures, the association with bacterial genomes was at least as strong, and in some cases stronger, than the association with the host's human genome.

According to the scientists, these findings provide solid evidence that understanding the factors that shape our microbiome may be key to understanding and treating many common health problems.

Segal: "We cannot change our genes, but we now know that we can affect -- and even reshape -- the composition of the different kinds of bacteria we host in our bodies. So the findings of our research are quite hopeful; they suggest that our microbiome could be a powerful means for improving our health."

Read more at Science Daily

Within 180 million years of the Big Bang, stars were born

A timeline of the universe, updated to show when the first stars emerged. This updated timeline of the universe reflects the recent discovery that the first stars emerged by 180 million years after the Big Bang. The research behind this timeline was conducted by Judd Bowman of Arizona State University and his colleagues, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Long ago, about 400,000 years after the beginning of the universe (the Big Bang), the universe was dark. There were no stars or galaxies, and the universe was filled primarily with neutral hydrogen gas.

Then, for the next 50-100 million years, gravity slowly pulled the densest regions of gas together until ultimately the gas collapsed in some places to form the first stars.

What were those first stars like and when did they form? How did they affect the rest of the universe? These are questions astronomers and astrophysicists have long pondered.

Now, after 12 years of experimental effort, a team of scientists, led by ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration astronomer Judd Bowman, has detected the fingerprints of the earliest stars in the universe. Using radio signals, the detection provides the first evidence for the oldest ancestors in our cosmic family tree, born by a mere 180 million years after the universe began.

"There was a great technical challenge to making this detection, as sources of noise can be a thousand times brighter than the signal -- it's like being in the middle of a hurricane and trying to hear the flap of a hummingbird's wing." says Peter Kurczynski, the National Science Foundation program officer who supported this study. "These researchers with a small radio antenna in the desert have seen farther than the most powerful space telescopes, opening a new window on the early universe."

Radio Astronomy

To find these fingerprints, Bowman's team used a ground-based instrument called a radio spectrometer, located at the Australia's national science agency (CSIRO) Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia. Through their Experiment to Detect the Global EoR Signature (EDGES), the team measured the average radio spectrum of all the astronomical signals received across most of the southern-hemisphere sky and looked for small changes in power as a function of wavelength (or frequency).

As radio waves enter the ground-based antenna, they are amplified by a receiver, and then digitized and recorded by computer, similar to how FM radio receivers and TV receivers work. The difference is that the instrument is very precisely calibrated and designed to perform as uniformly as possible across many radio wavelengths.

The signals detected by the radio spectrometer in this study came from primordial hydrogen gas that filled the young universe and existed between all the stars and galaxies. These signals hold a wealth of information that opens a new window on how early stars -- and later, black holes, and galaxies -- formed and evolved.

"It is unlikely that we'll be able to see any earlier into the history of stars in our lifetimes," says Bowman. "This project shows that a promising new technique can work and has paved the way for decades of new astrophysical discoveries."

This detection highlights the exceptional radio quietness of the MRO, particularly as the feature found by EDGES overlaps the frequency range used by FM radio stations. Australian national legislation limits the use of radio transmitters within 161.5 miles (260 km) of the site, substantially reducing interference which could otherwise drown out sensitive astronomy observations.

The results of this study have been recently published in Nature by Bowman, with co-authors Alan Rogers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory, Raul Monsalve of the University of Colorado, and Thomas Mozdzen and Nivedita Mahesh also of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Unexpected results

The results of this experiment confirm the general theoretical expectations of when the first stars formed and the most basic properties of early stars.

"What's happening in this period," says co-author Rogers of MIT's Haystack Observatory, "is that some of the radiation from the very first stars is starting to allow hydrogen to be seen. It's causing hydrogen to start absorbing the background radiation, so you start seeing it in silhouette, at particular radio frequencies. This is the first real signal that stars are starting to form, and starting to affect the medium around them."

The team originally tuned their instrument to look later in cosmic time, but in 2015 decided to extend their search. "As soon as we switched our system to this lower range, we started seeing things that we felt might be a real signature," Rogers says. "We see this dip most strongly at about 78 megahertz, and that frequency corresponds to roughly 180 million years after the Big Bang," Rogers says. "In terms of a direct detection of a signal from the hydrogen gas itself, this has got to be the earliest."

The study also revealed that gas in the universe was probably much colder than expected (less than half the expected temperature). This suggests that either astrophysicists' theoretical efforts have overlooked something significant or that this may be the first evidence of non-standard physics: Specifically, that baryons (normal matter) may have interacted with dark matter and slowly lost energy to dark matter in the early universe, a concept that was originally proposed by Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University.

"If Barkana's idea is confirmed," says Bowman, "then we've learned something new and fundamental about the mysterious dark matter that makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, providing the first glimpse of physics beyond the standard model."

The next steps in this line of research are for another instrument to confirm this team's detection and to keep improving the performance of the instruments, so that more can be learned about the properties of early stars. "We worked very hard over the last two years to validate the detection," says Bowman, "but having another group confirm it independently is a critical part of the scientific process."

Bowman would also like to see an acceleration of efforts to bring on new radio telescopes like the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) and the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA).

"Now that we know this signal exists," says Bowman, "we need to rapidly bring online new radio telescopes that will be able to mine the signal much more deeply."

Read more at Science Daily

The moon formed inside a vaporized Earth synestia

This artist's rendering shows the hot, molten Moon emerging from a synestia, a giant spinning donut of vaporized rock that formed when planet-sized objects collided. The synestia is in the process of condensing to form the Earth. This new model for the Moon's origin answers outstanding questions about how the Moon's composition compares to that of Earth.

A new explanation for the Moon's origin has it forming inside the Earth when our planet was a seething, spinning cloud of vaporized rock, called a synestia. The new model led by researchers at the University of California, Davis and Harvard University resolves several problems in lunar formation and is published Feb. 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- Planets.

"The new work explains features of the Moon that are hard to resolve with current ideas," said Sarah Stewart, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis. "The Moon is chemically almost the same as the Earth, but with some differences," she said. "This is the first model that can match the pattern of the Moon's composition."

Current models of lunar formation suggest that the Moon formed as a result of a glancing blow between the early Earth and a Mars-size body, commonly called Theia. According to the model, the collision between Earth and Theia threw molten rock and metal into orbit that collided together to make the Moon.

The new theory relies instead on a synestia, a new type of planetary object proposed by Stewart and Simon Lock, graduate student at Harvard and visiting student at UC Davis, in 2017. A synestia forms when a collision between planet-sized objects results in a rapidly spinning mass of molten and vaporized rock with part of the body in orbit around itself. The whole object puffs out into a giant donut of vaporized rock.

Synestias likely don't last long -- perhaps only hundreds of years. They shrink rapidly as they radiate heat, causing rock vapor to condense into liquid, finally collapsing into a molten planet.

"Our model starts with a collision that forms a synestia," Lock said. "The Moon forms inside the vaporized Earth at temperatures of four to six thousand degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of tens of atmospheres."

An advantage of the new model, Lock said, is that there are multiple ways to form a suitable synestia -- it doesn't have to rely on a collision with the right sized object happening in exactly the right way.

Once the Earth-synestia formed, chunks of molten rock injected into orbit during the impact formed the seed for the Moon. Vaporized silicate rock condensed at the surface of the synestia and rained onto the proto-Moon, while the Earth-synestia itself gradually shrank. Eventually, the Moon would have emerged from the clouds of the synestia trailing its own atmosphere of rock vapor. The Moon inherited its composition from the Earth, but because it formed at high temperatures it lost the easily vaporized elements, explaining the Moon's distinct composition.

Read more at Science Daily

Stars around the Milky Way: Cosmic space invaders or victims of galactic eviction?

The Milky Way galaxy, perturbed by the tidal interaction with a dwarf galaxy, as predicted by N-body simulations. The locations of the observed stars above and below the disk, which are used to test the perturbation scenario, are indicated.

An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has made a surprising discovery about the birthplace of groups of stars located in the halo of our Milky Way galaxy.

These halo stars are grouped together in giant structures that orbit the center of our galaxy, above and below the flat disk of the Milky Way. Researchers thought they may have formed from debris left behind by smaller galaxies that invaded the Milky Way in the past.

But in a study published today in the journal Nature, astronomers now have compelling evidence showing that some of these halo structures actually originate from the Milky Way's disk itself, but were kicked out.

"This phenomenon is called galactic eviction," said co-author Judy Cohen, Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of Astronomy at Caltech. "These structures are pushed off the plane of the Milky Way when a massive dwarf galaxy passes through the galactic disk. This passage causes oscillations, or waves, that eject stars from the disk, either above or below it depending on the direction that the perturbing mass is moving."

"The oscillations can be compared to sound waves in a musical instrument," said lead author Maria Bergemann of MPIA. "We call this 'ringing' in the Milky Way galaxy 'galactoseismology,' which has been predicted theoretically decades ago. We now have the clearest evidence for these oscillations in our galaxy's disk obtained so far!"

For the first time, Bergemann's team presented detailed chemical abundance patterns of these halo stars using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii.

"The analysis of chemical abundances is a very powerful test, which allows, in a way similar to the DNA matching, to identify the parent population of the star. Different parent populations, such as the Milky Way disk or halo, dwarf satellite galaxies or globular clusters, are known to have radically different chemical compositions. So once we know what the stars are made of, we can immediately link them to their parent populations," said Bergemann.

The scientists investigated 14 stars located in two different halo structures -- the Triangulum-Andromeda (Tri-And) and the A13 stellar overdensities. These two structures lie on opposite sides of the Milky Way disk; about 14,000 light years above and below the Galactic plane.

The team obtained spectra of the halo stars using Keck Observatory's High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES).

"The high throughput and high spectral resolution of HIRES were crucial to the success of the observations of the stars in the outer part of the Milky Way," said Cohen. "Another key factor was the smooth operation of Keck Observatory; good pointing and smooth operation allows one to get spectra of more stars in only a few nights of observation. The spectra in this study were obtained in only one night of Keck time, which shows how valuable even a single night can be."

The team also obtained a spectrum of one additional star taken with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.

When comparing the chemical compositions of these stars with the ones found in other cosmic structures, the scientists were surprised to find that the chemical compositions are almost identical, both within and between these groups, and closely match the abundance patterns of the Milky Way outer disk stars.

This provides compelling evidence that the halo stars most likely originate from the Galactic thin disk (the younger part of Milky Way, strongly concentrated towards the Galactic plane) itself.

These findings are very exciting because they indicate the Milky Way's disk and its dynamics are significantly more complex than previously thought.

"We showed that it may be fairly common for groups of stars in the disk to be relocated to more distant realms within the Milky Way -- having been 'kicked out' by an invading satellite galaxy. Similar chemical patterns may also be found in other galaxies, indicating a potential galactic universality of this dynamic process," said co-author Allyson Sheffield of LaGuardia Community College/CUNY.

Read more at Science Daily

Life in world's driest desert seen as sign of potential life on Mars

The hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert.

For the first time, researchers have seen life rebounding in the world's driest desert, demonstrating that it could also be lurking in the soils of Mars.

Led by Washington State University planetary scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an international team studied the driest corner of South America's Atacama Desert, where decades pass without any rain.

Scientists have long wondered whether microbes in the soil of this hyperarid environment, the most similar place on Earth to the Martian surface, are permanent residents or merely dying vestiges of life, blown in by the weather.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schulze-Makuch and his collaborators reveal that even the hyper-arid Atacama Desert can provide a habitable environment for microorganisms.

The researchers found that specialized bacteria are able to live in the soil, going dormant for decades, without water and then reactivating and reproducing when it rains.

"It has always fascinated me to go to the places where people don't think anything could possibly survive and discover that life has somehow found a way to make it work," Schulze-Makuch said. "Jurassic Park references aside, our research tell us that if life can persist in Earth's driest environment there is a good chance it could be hanging in there on Mars in a similar fashion."

The dry limit of life

When Schulze-Makuch and his collaborators went to the Atacama for the first time in 2015 to study how organisms survive in the soil of Earth's driest environment, the craziest of things happened.

It rained.

After the extremely rare shower, the researchers detected an explosion of biological activity in the Atacama soil.

They used sterilized spoons and other delicate instrumentation to scoop soil samples from various depths and then performed genomic analyses to identify the different microbial communities that were reproducing in the samples. The researchers found several indigenous species of microbial life that had adapted to live in the harsh environment.

The researchers returned to the Atacama in 2016 and 2017 to follow up on their initial sampling and found that the same microbial communities in the soil were gradually reverting to a dormant state as the moisture went away.

"In the past researchers have found dying organisms near the surface and remnants of DNA but this is really the first time that anyone has been able to identify a persistent form of life living in the soil of the Atacama Desert," Schulze-Makuch said. "We believe these microbial communities can lay dormant for hundreds or even thousands of years in conditions very similar to what you would find on a planet like Mars and then come back to life when it rains."

Implications for life on Mars

While life in the driest regions of Earth is tough, the Martian surface is an even harsher environment.

It is akin to a drier and much colder version of the Atacama Desert. However it wasn't always this way.

Billions of years ago, Mars had small oceans and lakes where early lifeforms may have thrived. As the planet dried up and grew colder, these organisms could have evolved many of the adaptations lifeforms in the Atacama soil use to survive on Earth, Schulze-Makuch said.

"We know there is water frozen in the Martian soil and recent research strongly suggests nightly snowfalls and other increased moisture events near the surface," he said. "If life ever evolved on Mars, our research suggests it could have found a subsurface niche beneath today's severely hyper-arid surface."

Next Steps

On March 15, Schulze-Makuch is returning to the Atacama for two weeks to investigate how the Atacama's native inhabitants have adapted to survive. He said his research team also would like to look for lifeforms in the Don Juan Pond in Antarctica, a very shallow lake that is so salty it remains liquid even at temperatures as low as -58 degrees Fahrenheit.

Read more at Science Daily

Complex Ecosystems Better Resist Extinction ‘Cascades’

Amazon deforestation

Like a game of biological Jenga, the disappearance of a species could bring down an entire ecosystem, wiping out other animals around them.

But the more species a community holds, the less likely it is to suffer from a “cascade” of secondary extinctions when one species dies out, British researchers report. Their study could help other scientists understand the ongoing wave of extinctions rippling through the Earth’s environment.

“Each species has a certain function,” Dirk Sanders, a community ecologist at the University of Exeter, told Seeker. If you remove a species, like the game in which players remove wooden blocks from a tower, “you lose that function. That means we get knock-on effects throughout the whole system, and they’re not necessarily obvious.”

Sanders and his colleagues tested their theory by setting up their own communities at a research station in southwest England. They populated those 40 micro-environments with differing mixes of bean and barley plants; three species of plant-eating aphids; three or four species of parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in the aphids; and eight species of hyperparasitic wasps, which live off the parasitic wasps. Some communities were more complex than others.

Then they started pulling a block out of that ecological Jenga tower by targeting one of the parasitic wasp species. Over the 14-week study, the researchers started plucking out the host aphid “mummies” that the parasites’ larvae turned into cocoons, cutting the population of those wasps by roughly half.

As might be expected, the population of the aphid species the wasps had used as hosts grew — but other aphid species that weren’t directly disturbed found themselves facing more competition, so their numbers plunged. So did the number of parasitic wasps that laid eggs in those species.

“For the target species, it was not necessarily a problem,” Sanders said. “But the effects for the whole system were actually quite dramatic.”

Meanwhile, in more complex communities that included other species of parasitic wasps, the aphid numbers stayed relatively stable, with fewer extinctions.

“The first ones to go extinct are not directly linked,” Sanders said. “It all happens through the herbivore level, where these aphids interact and they compete for the resource.”

The findings were published February 20 in the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sanders, the study’s lead author, said earlier studies were limited to computer models that simulated the expected effects of a species disappearing.

The study comes as the world is experiencing what some scientists are calling a sixth mass extinction period. Despite recent efforts at conservation, species are disappearing 1,000 times faster than they have in the past centuries. Most of that is the result of human activity — destruction of habitat, hunting and fishing, pollution, and climate change.

Kristy Bly, a senior wildlife biologist with the World Wildlife Fund, told Seeker the study adds “concrete evidence” to what many researchers have long suspected, but have found difficult to measure.

“In my experience on the prairie, we see this almost daily with the loss of the prairie dog, which is a keystone species of the grassland ecosystem on the northern Great Plains,” said Bly, who’s based in Montana. For example, up to 150 different species depend in some way on the black-tailed prairie dog, including the black-footed ferret — a prairie dog predator listed as an endangered species. But the prairie dogs have lost 95 percent of their original habitat, and the animals that remain have been ravaged by outbreaks of a form of bubonic plague.

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