Surprisingly simple explanation for the alien comet 'Oumuamua's weird orbit

In 2017, a mysterious comet dubbed 'Oumuamua fired the imaginations of scientists and the public alike. It was the first known visitor from outside our solar system, it had no bright coma or dust tail, like most comets, and a peculiar shape -- something between a cigar and a pancake -- and its small size more befitted an asteroid than a comet.

But the fact that it was accelerating away from the sun in a way that astronomers could not explain perplexed scientists, leading some to suggest that it was an alien spaceship.

Now, a University of California, Berkeley, astrochemist and a Cornell University astronomer argue that the comet's mysterious deviations from a hyperbolic path around the sun can be explained by a simple physical mechanism likely common among many icy comets: outgassing of hydrogen as the comet warmed up in the sunlight.

What made 'Oumuamua different from every other well-studied comet in our solar system was its size: It was so small that its gravitational deflection around the sun was slightly altered by the tiny push created when hydrogen gas spurted out of the ice.

Most comets are essentially dirty snowballs that periodically approach the sun from the outer reaches of our solar system. When warmed by sunlight, a comet ejects water and other molecules, producing a bright halo or coma around it and often tails of gas and dust. The ejected gases act like the thrusters on a spacecraft to give the comet a tiny kick that alters its trajectory slightly from the elliptical orbits typical of other solar system objects, such as asteroids and planets.

When discovered, 'Oumuamua had no coma or tail and was too small and too far from the sun to capture enough energy to eject much water, which led astronomers to speculate wildly about its composition and what was pushing it outward. Was it a hydrogen iceberg outgassing H2? A large, fluffy snowflake pushed by light pressure from the sun? A light sail created by an alien civilization? A spaceship under its own power?

Jennifer Bergner, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of chemistry who studies the chemical reactions that occur on icy rocks in the cold vacuum of space, thought there might be a simpler explanation. She broached the subject with a colleague, Darryl Seligman, now an National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, and they decided to work together to test it.

"A comet traveling through the interstellar medium basically is getting cooked by cosmic radiation, forming hydrogen as a result. Our thought was: If this was happening, could you actually trap it in the body, so that when it entered the solar system and it was warmed up, it would outgas that hydrogen?" Bergner said. "Could that quantitatively produce the force that you need to explain the non-gravitational acceleration?"

Surprisingly, she found that experimental research published in the 1970s, '80s and '90s demonstrated that when ice is hit by high-energy particles akin to cosmic rays, molecular hydrogen (H2) is abundantly produced and trapped within the ice. In fact, cosmic rays can penetrate tens of meters into ice, converting a quarter or more of the water to hydrogen gas.

"For a comet several kilometers across, the outgassing would be from a really thin shell relative to the bulk of the object, so both compositionally and in terms of any acceleration, you wouldn't necessarily expect that to be a detectable effect," she said. "But because 'Oumuamua was so small, we think that it actually produced sufficient force to power this acceleration."

The comet, which was slightly reddish, is thought to have been roughly 115 by 111 by 19 meters in size. While the relative dimensions were fairly certain, however, astronomers couldn't be sure of the actual size because it was too small and distant for telescopes to resolve. The size had to be estimated from the comet's brightness and how the brightness changed as the comet tumbled. To date, all the comets observed in our solar system -- the short-period comets originating in the Kuiper belt and the long-period comets from the more distant Oort cloud have ranged from around 1 kilometer to hundreds of kilometers across.

"What's beautiful about Jenny's idea is that it's exactly what should happen to interstellar comets," Seligman said. "We had all these stupid ideas, like hydrogen icebergs and other crazy things, and it's just the most generic explanation."

Bergner and Seligman will publish their conclusions this week in the journal Nature. Both were postdoctoral fellows at the University of Chicago when they began collaborating on the paper.

Messenger from afar

Comets are icy rocks left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, so they can tell astronomers about the conditions that existed when our solar system formed. Interstellar comets can also give hints to the conditions around other stars surrounded by planet-forming disks.

"Comets preserve a snapshot of what the solar system looked like when it was in the stage of evolution that protoplanetary disks are now," Bergner said. "Studying them is a way to look back at what our solar system used to look like in the early formation stage."

Faraway planetary systems also seem to have comets, and many are likely to be ejected because of gravitational interactions with other objects in the system, which astronomers know happened over the history of our solar system. Some of these rogue comets should occasionally enter our solar system, providing an opportunity to learn about planet formation in other systems.

"The comets and asteroids in the solar system have arguably taught us more about planet formation than what we've learned from the actual planets in the solar system," Seligman said. "I think that the interstellar comets could arguably tell us more about extrasolar planets than the extrasolar planets we are trying to get measurements of today."

In the past, astronomers published numerous papers about what we can learn from the failure to observe any interstellar comets in our solar system.

Then, 'Oumuamua came along.

On Oct. 19, 2017, on the island of Maui, astronomers using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope, which is operated by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, first noticed what they thought was either a comet or an asteroid. Once they realized that its tilted orbit and high speed -- 87 kilometers per second -- implied that it came from outside our solar system, they gave it the name 1I/'Oumuamua (oh MOO-uh MOO-uh), which is Hawai'ian for "a messenger from afar arriving first." It was the first interstellar object aside from dust grains ever seen in our solar system. A second, 2I/Borisov, was discovered in 2019, though it looked and behaved more like a typical comet.

As more and more telescopes focused on 'Oumuamua, the astronomers were able to chart its orbit and determine that it had already looped around the sun and was headed out of the solar system.

Because 'Oumuamua's brightness changed periodically by a factor of 12 and varied asymmetrically, it was assumed to be highly elongated and tumbling end over end. Astronomers also noticed a slight acceleration away from the sun larger than seen for asteroids and more characteristic of comets. When comets approach the sun, the water and gases ejected from the surface create a glowing, gaseous coma and release dust in the process. Typically, dust left in the comet's wake becomes visible as one tail, while vapor and dust pushed by light pressure from solar rays produces a second tail pointing away from the sun, plus a little inertial push outward. Other compounds, such as entrapped organic materials and carbon monoxide, also can be released.

Why was it accelerating?

But astronomers could detect no coma, outgassed molecules or dust around 'Oumuamua. In addition, calculations showed that the solar energy hitting the comet would be insufficient to sublimate water or organic compounds from its surface to give it the observed non-gravitational kick. Only hypervolatile gases such as H2, N2 or carbon monoxide (CO) could provide enough acceleration to match observations, given the incoming solar energy.

"We had never seen a comet in the solar system that didn't have a dust coma. So, the non-gravitational acceleration really was weird," Seligman said.

This led to much speculation about what volatile molecules could be in the comet to cause the acceleration. Seligman himself published a paper arguing that if the comet was composed of solid hydrogen -- a hydrogen iceberg -- it would outgas enough hydrogen in the heat of the sun to explain the strange acceleration. Under the right conditions, a comet composed of solid nitrogen or solid carbon monoxide would also outgas with enough force to affect the comet's orbit.

But astronomers had to stretch to explain what conditions could lead to the formation of solid bodies of hydrogen or nitrogen, which have never been observed before. And how could a solid H2 body survive for perhaps 100 million years in interstellar space?

Bergner thought that outgassing of hydrogen entrapped in ice might be sufficient to accelerate 'Oumuamua. As both an experimentalist and a theoretician, she studies the interaction of very cold ice -- chilled to 5 or 10 degrees Kelvin, the temperature of the interstellar medium (ISM) -- with the kinds of energetic particles and radiation found in the ISM.

In searching through past publications, she found many experiments demonstrating that high-energy electrons, protons and heavier atoms could convert water ice into molecular hydrogen, and that the fluffy, snowball structure of a comet could entrap the gas in bubbles within the ice. Experiments showed that when warmed, as by the heat of the sun, the ice anneals -- changes from an amorphous to a crystal structure -- and forces the bubbles out, releasing the hydrogen gas. Ice at the surface of a comet, Bergner and Seligman calculated, could emit enough gas, either in a collimated beam or fan-shaped spray, to affect the orbit of a small comet like 'Oumuamua.

"The main takeaway is that 'Oumuamua is consistent with being a standard interstellar comet that just experienced heavy processing," Bergner said. "The models we ran are consistent with what we see in the solar system from comets and asteroids. So, you could essentially start with something that looks like a comet and have this scenario work."

The idea also explains the lack of a dust coma.

"Even if there was dust in the ice matrix, you're not sublimating the ice, you're just rearranging the ice and then letting H2 get released. So, the dust isn't even going to come out," Seligman said.

'Dark' comets

Seligman said that their conclusion about the source of 'Oumuamua's acceleration should close the book on the comet. Since 2017, he, Bergner and their colleagues have identified six other small comets with no observable coma, but with small non-gravitational accelerations, suggesting that such "dark" comets are common. While H2 is not likely responsible for the accelerations of dark comets, Bergner noted, together with 'Oumuamua they reveal that there is much to be learned about the nature of small bodies in the solar system.

One of these dark comets, 1998 KY26, is the next target for Japan's Hayabusa2 mission, which recently collected samples from the asteroid Ryugu. The 1998 KY26 was thought to be an asteroid until it was identified as a dark comet in December.

"Jenny's definitely right about the entrapped hydrogen. Nobody had thought of that before," he said. "Between discovering other dark comets in the solar system and Jenny's awesome idea, I think it's got to be correct. Water is the most abundant component of comets in the solar system and likely in extrasolar systems, as well. And if you put a water rich comet in the Oort cloud or eject it into the interstellar medium, you should get amorphous ice with pockets of H2."

Because H2 should form in any ice-rich body exposed to energetic radiation, the researchers suspect that the same mechanism would be at work in sun-approaching comets from the Oort cloud at the outer reaches of the solar system, where comets are irradiated by cosmic rays, much like an interstellar comet would be. Future observations of hydrogen outgassing from long-period comets could be used to test the scenario of H2 formation and entrapment.

Read more at Science Daily

Sandy claws: Like holiday enthusiasts, majoid crabs decorate their shells

Majoid crabs, known as decorator crabs, are well-known for adorning their surface with objects such as sponges and algae.

'Tis the holiday season and it seems homes are festively trimmed at every turn. Ornaments of all shapes and sizes embellish everything from trees to windows and yards.

While tinsel originated in 17th century German decorating and modern day Christmas lights can be traced to the Victorian era, the idea of decorating is not an exclusively human trait.

Majoid crabs -- known as decorator crabs -- are well-known among marine scientists for adorning their surface with items secured from their surroundings. About 75 percent of majoid crab species are notorious for decorating with sponges, algae and other marine debris.

Scientists are uncertain what physical and environmental factors drive this decorating behavior, though it appears to be used as a means to hide from, or deter, predators.

University of Delaware marine scientist Danielle Dixson and a team of researchers that included undergraduate students studied the majoid species Camposcia retusa to identify the factors that determine patterns of, and investment in, decorating.

"The decorator crab is a perfect study example because the IndoPacific species has velcro-like substances on its shell and hooks on its appendages that enable it to secure items on its exterior," Dixson said.

The researchers ran a series of experiments with decorator crabs that were placed in individual containers and provided with craft pom-poms that had been soaked in water so they would sink to the bottom.

Half of the crabs were given a shelter for habitat to see whether having somewhere to hide affected how much or how fast the crab decorated.

Over a 24-hour period, the team photographed the crabs every hour for the first 12 hours, and at hour 24, and analyzed the images to determine where the crabs decorated, whether they rearranged things and what parts they decorated first.

Arms and legs first

In the study, all of the crabs were fully decorated within 24 hours. Most of the crabs were decorated within six hours of having access to the pom-poms. According to Dixson, this shows that decorating is an important predator adaptation because the crabs do it very quickly.

While other species of decorator crabs adorn their body first, the UD research team's study showed that Camposcia retusa decorated their appendages (arms/legs) first when a habitat was present.

This was different than other crabs that typically protect their vital organs first, but according to Dixson, still made sense because when they hide, a little bit of Camposcia retusa's arms remained outside their enclosure.

"This tells us they decorate the parts that stick out," Dixson says.

A perfect project for undergraduates

According to Dixson, this is a perfect project for undergraduates because the approach is straightforward and the students can have results in just a couple days, making it easy to add layers to the project as they go along.

It's also good way for undergrads to develop the skills to design an experiment and to refine their design based on the data collected.

For example, when no habitat was present the crabs decorated everywhere.

"The students were able to say, 'now that we know habitat matters, let's take the habitat away and see how quickly they decorate,' " Dixson said.

But just like in the holiday classic National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, more decoration is not necessarily better. For the decorator crab, more decoration means the animal requires more energy to move around, and the slower they will be to escape predators.

Visual vs. chemical camouflage

Through ongoing research, Dixson and her students are investigating whether the crabs can actually see and choose items based on color -- meaning they are visually hiding themselves -- or whether their decorating habits are motivated by smell, known as chemical camouflage.

Sea sponges, for example, emit a scent that the crab may be using to chemically mask or camouflage itself from predators like eels, which have terrible eyesight but are known to hunt through smell.

Read more at Science Daily

Physicians Report Rare Case of a Patient Sweating Blood

Bleeding discharge from the forehead (A) and lower face (B) of a 21-year-old woman.

A bizarre medical mystery has been making the rounds this week on news sites and social media concerning an Italian woman who literally sweats blood. The story behind the story is even more intriguing.

According to a report published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a 21-year-old woman in Florence walked into a medical ward bleeding from her face and hands. The blood appeared to be real — and appeared to be hers — but doctors could find no wounds or lesions.

The woman disclosed that she had been regularly sweating blood for years. The bleeding incidents happened spontaneously, both when awake and sleeping, and could last up to five minutes. She never reported the condition, which had taken a toll on her mental health, leading to isolation and depression.

“Our patient had become socially isolated owing to embarrassment over the bleeding and she reported symptoms consistent with major depressive disorder and panic disorder,” wrote doctors Roberto Maglie and Marzia Caproni.

After examining her skin and taking samples of the fluid, the doctors confirmed that the woman was indeed sweating blood through the pores of her skin. The medical team found no evidence of psychosis or factitious disorder — the clinical euphemism for “faking it.”

Histologic analysis from a bleeding area showed normal skin without any relevant histopathologic changes

The doctors from the University of Florence published details on the perplexing case this week, revealing more layers to the mystery.

In a commentary published with the initial case report, medical historian Jacalyn Duffin of Queen's University in Canada suggests that incidents of spontaneous blood sweat actually span the globe and go back thousands of years.

There's even a name for the condition – hematohidrosis – but it's so exceedingly rare that researchers have essentially ignored the phenomenon. No one had previously connected the dots in the medical literature.

Duffin found more than two-dozen cases of the condition from around the world in the past 15 years. In these modern cases, doctors had used modern methods of diagnosis to confirm that the blood was indeed seeping through the skin.

Duffin discovered reports of spontaneous bleeding going all the way back to the writings of Aristotle. She rooted out more than 40 references from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century. While some of these writings are simple descriptions, others are the equivalent of case reports from physicians of each era.

“When I saw the Italian case, I was really skeptical, quite honestly,” Duffin told Seeker. “There are so many similarities in the clinical presentation that I basically talked myself out of skepticism and I now believe that it's possible and plausiable that it happens.”

Duffin, initially recruited to peer-review the Italian report, said she quickly became fascinated by the topic.

“I got a double whammy on that one, because I'm both a hematologist and a medical historian,” she said.

Duffin believes incidents of hematohidrosis may be underreported. Doctors are hesitant to document or publish when they comes across a condition that isn't in the medical literature. The assumption is often that the patient is faking it, or is somehow deluded.

“That raises the question, are doctors ignoring it?” Duffin said.

Read more at Seeker

'Perfect' Star Is Roundest Object Ever Found

When we think of a star, or when we see photos or diagrams of our sun, we see a spherical ball of superheated gas. But no star is perfectly spherical, they're actually oblate — a kind of oval shape. Why is this? Well, as a star spins, as all stars do, the centrifugal force causes the star to flatten and its equator to spread out, squishing the poles very slightly. In the case of our sun, which rotates once every 27 days, the effect is small, but it has been measured. The sun is 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) wider at its equator than it is at its poles.

However, though all stars spin, astronomers have made a surprise discovery and realized that there's a star out there that's not only almost perfectly spherical, but it could be the most perfectly spherical object ever found in nature.

Kepler 11145123 is located around 5,000 light-years from Earth and, using four years of data from NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope, a team of astronomers led by Laurent Gizon, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen, were able to precisely measure the star's oscillations in brightness. And these oscillations revealed Kepler 11145123's secret.

All stars oscillate, much like a sphere of Jello would wobble when placed on a speaker playing Metallica. By measuring the Jello wobbles, we would be able to calculate the frequency of the sound waves passing through the substance and then, from these measurements, we'd be able to understand how dense the Jello is and even gauge its precise shape. Although stars don't wobble nearly as dramatically as this Jello example, waves ripple through our sun and these waves can be measured to help us understand what our star is physically made of. This field of study is called helioseismology; when studying other stars, it's called astroseismology.

So, by measuring the modes of oscillation (revealed by slight changes in brightness), Gizon's team was able to "see" that Kepler 11145123 supports purely sinusoidal modes of oscillation. By comparing the frequencies that are sensitive to the star's high latitudes and those that are sensitive to the low latitudes, they were able to precisely measure the "oblateness" of the star. And what they found was a surprise. The star is only 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) wider at its equator than the distance between its poles.

"This makes Kepler 11145123 the roundest natural object ever measured, even more round than the sun" said Gizon in a statement. Though the star is rotating three times slower than our sun, Kepler 11145123 is a lot more spherical than thought possible.

Read more at Discovery News

Jumping Spiders Hear You from Across the Room

At this moment you are probably in a room with a spider that can hear everything from your phone ringing to your conversations, according to new research on spiders that don't even have proper ears.

This discovery, detailed in Current Biology, was triggered by a completely unplanned event: a researcher's chair squeaked.

Paul Shamble was in a lab at Cornell University with colleague Gil Menda and others making neural recordings from the brains of jumping spiders. Shamble, who has since moved to Harvard, and the others were exploring how jumping spiders process visual information. While setting up an experiment, Menda's chair squeaked across the floor.

It was then that a speaker, set up to record the sounds of spider brain neurons firing, started to blast out multiple "pops." Whenever the chair squeaked, the popping followed.

"That was a really exciting moment for all of us in the lab," Shamble said.

Jumping spider.

He added that when he and his team did behavioral experiments later, "the response was really clear -- the jumping spiders would be wandering along and just stop instantly when the sound came on."

In short, if you have a squeaky chair in your room, you're probably driving the resident jumping spiders nuts. And the sounds aren't limited to squeaks, either.

"Jumping spider hearing is almost certainly sensitive enough to hear you talking," Shamble said, but added that such spiders are "really only sensitive to low frequency tones, so lots of human speech is too high for them to hear."

It's likely, he says, that spiders tune into lower frequency sounds as a sort of warning system. In the same way a shout might catch your attention and make you stop what you're doing, a low noise puts the spiders on alert.

Female Phidippus audax.

Spiders hear noises using sensory hairs, but it was thought that these hairs could only pick up very close sounds. This finding shows that jumping spiders actually have an acute sense of hearing.

"Their sensory hairs are basically everywhere, but especially on their legs and their head -- and there are lots of them, not just one or two," Shamble said. "That said, these are the only things they have for hearing sound; spiders don't seem to have proper ears at all."

As for why jumping spiders evolved such great hearing, the researchers suspect that they use the sense to listen for predators, such as parasitoid wasps. The ability could have a role in attracting and impressing mates. The spiders may also be listening for prey.

Since, as their name suggests, the spiders like to jump, they are known to pounce on people. Some are even black and red in color, causing some to think they are being attacked by a black widow, but Shamble said that these spiders hardly consider us to be prey.

Read more at Discovery News

This Flower Stinks Like a Stressed-Out Bee

Flowers of the popular ornamental parachute plant Giant Ceropegia can make you grimace if you take a whiff, and now new research reveals what the smell mimics: stressed out honeybees being attacked by a spider or other predator.

This smell of stress would seem to be a turnoff, but the odor attracts honeybee-craving flies to the sci-fi-looking plant Ceropegia sandersonii, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology.

As if the plant is not creepy enough, it also has "trap flowers" that keep the duped flies in their clutches until the plant gets what it wants: pollination.

"We show that trap flowers of this plant mimic alarm substances of western honeybees to lure food-stealing freeloader flies as pollinators," co-author Stefan Dötterl of the University of Salzburg said in a press release. "Flies are attracted to the flowers, expecting a meal, but instead of finding an attacked honeybee they are temporarily trapped in the non-rewarding flowers and misused as pollinators."

A honeybee eaten by a spider with food-stealing flies. A drop of venom is visible at the tip of the stinger.

Dötterl and colleagues Annemarie Heiduk and Ulrich Meve from the University of Bayreuth got the idea to investigate the flower's stinky scent after realizing that the plant was pollinated by flies from the genus Desmometopa. These flies typically feed on the drippings of honeybees that are in the clutches of a predator.

While observing a honeybee caught by a spider, they noticed that the bee extruded its sting and released a drop of venom. The bees' venom is known to contain volatile alarm pheromones, which serve to call and attract nest mates for help. The researchers began to wonder if the plant could be taking advantage of this line of communication among honeybees.

Sure enough, chemical analysis found that the flower's scent is comparable to volatiles released from honeybees when they are being attacked. The scientists also found that some of the shared compounds elicit a response in the antennae of the freeloader flies, showing the scent lures these insects.

Read more at Discovery News

Strange New Objects Found During Hunt for 'Planet 9'

Astronomers have captured some interesting prey as they scan the distant solar systems for signs of a potential ninth major planet beyond Neptune.

Among the discoveries: the first Oort Cloud object that orbits entirely past Neptune. At the most distant part of its orbit, the newly found object, known as 2014 FE72, is 3,000 times farther away from the sun than Earth.

At that distance, FE72 is "likely being influenced by forces of gravity from beyond our solar system, such as other stars and the galactic tide," the Carnegie Institute for Science wrote in a press release.

Also submitted to the Minor Planet Center for official designations are the newly discovered extremely distant objects 2014 SR349 and 2013 FT28. Both so-called "trans-Neptunian objects" show signs their orbits may be under the gravitational influence of one or more large, undiscovered planets in the distant reaches of the solar system.

"The smaller objects can lead us to the much bigger planet we think exists out there," astronomer Scott Sheppard, with the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington DC, said in a statement.

"The more we discover, the better we will be able to understand what is going on in the outer solar system," he added.

In 2014 Sheppard and colleague Chadwick Trujillo, with Northern Arizona University, discovered several extreme trans-Neptunian objects with similar orbital angles, raising the prospect that the bodies are being gravitationally influenced by an undiscovered, ninth planet more than 200 times farther away from the sun than Earth.

Calculations show the mystery planet would be at least several times bigger than Earth, and possibly as big as Neptune, which is about 17 times more massive than Earth.

So far, Sheppard and colleagues have scoured about 10 percent of the sky looking for objects beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt using the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes in Chile, NOAO's 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile and the 8-meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii, among others.

Read more at Discovery News

Piranhas With Human-Like Teeth Found in Michigan Lakes

Smile! Pacus use their disturbingly human-like teeth for cracking open seeds and nuts.

A South American fish with uncannily human-like chompers has been unexpectedly showing up on Michigan anglers' hooks.

The fish are red-bellied pacus (Piaractus brachypomus) and are piranha relatives, though their diet is mostly vegetarian. Pacus are popular with aquarium owners for their unusual square teeth that look remarkably human —rather disturbingly so, in fact. But recently, pacus have been sighted in places where they shouldn't be: Lake St. Clair and Port Huron in southeastern Michigan, where three pacus were caught during the month of July.

The pacus were almost certainly introduced into the lakes by former owners who kept them as pets, according to a statement released Aug. 9 by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

Pacus are native to the Amazon and Orinoco river basins and flood plains. Their flattened bodies resemble those of their sharp-toothed piranha cousins, but their own distinctive teeth are used for crushing seeds and nuts. Pacus can grow to be about 35 inches (89 centimeters) in length, and pet owners may be dismayed to find that their exotic pet can outgrow its tank, which can prompt them to release the fish in the wild, according to the DNR.

Warm temperatures are vital to the pacus' survival, so they are unlikely to become established as an invasive species in Michigan's seasonally cold waters. However, releasing pets in the wild is not only harmful to the animals and likely to result in their death, but could have severe implications for native wildlife and ecosystems, DNR officials said in the statement.

Pacus have been found in Michigan waters before, but this is the first time that people have caught three of them in one week, according to Nick Popoff, a biologist with the Fisheries Division at the DNR. Popoff told Live Science that it's possible the three fish came from a single tank that was dumped in a public access site.

"Pacus' temperature requirements are tropical, and Michigan is not a tropical state," Popoff said. "They're not going to be able to survive our winters, so we don't consider them invasive. We're concerned with this because it highlights the issue of pet owners releasing their pets into the wild."

Goldfish have also been released into Michigan lakes by their owners, but unlike the pacu, they survive year-round and are successfully breeding.

"We have reproducing populations of goldfish in Lake Erie and Lake St. Claire." Popoff explained. "They're an example of an aquarium disposal over time that has created a naturally reproducing population of non-native fish."

Read more at Discovery News

Floating 'Alien' Orb Spotted by Fisherman

A huge, floating orb — one that looks more like an alien object than anything typically found in the ocean — left a fisherman perplexed when he came across it in the waters off the coast of Australia. But despite its strange appearance, the bobbing monstrosity has an earthly explanation: Researchers said it's a bloated whale carcass.

Fisherman Mark Watkins spotted the ballooned carcass about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Bunbury, Australia. Watkins said he thought it could be another boat or a balloon, but as he got closer to the orb, a pungent odor revealed the object's true identity: whale.

The species of the whale was not officially identified, but the texture of its belly suggests it was most likely a humpback or southern right whale, reported Mother Nature Network.

And though whale carcasses may seem like an unusual sight, they are a challenging problem. Marine biologist Andrew David Thaler told National Geographic in 2014 that the bloat of a dead, beached whale comes from pent up gas released as the animal's internal organs and stomach contents decompose. (Thaler created the website Has the Whale Exploded Yet? to update people on the status of a 375,000-lb., or 170,000 kilograms, beached blue whale in Newfoundland, Canada.) When jostled or manipulated, a whale carcass can explode, spewing whale guts and emitting a punishing smell.

"Imagine a jar of bacon grease that you leave out in the sun for weeks. Now imagine that odor is so potent that it clings to everything you own. ... Decomposing whale is one of the worst smells in the world," Thaler told National Geographic.

Beached whales do pose a threat to coastal communities. In 2014, an unusually high number of Newfoundland blue whales died and washed ashore, including the specimen Thaler was monitoring, after being trapped in shifting ice patches. If ice shifts in such a way that whales can't surface, the animals are unable to breathe and they can suffocate, reported CTV News. One or two animals are typically trapped in this way each year, but the nine whales that washed up on the Newfoundland coast in the spring of 2014 made for a particularly dramatic year, according to CTV News.

Thaler said the best option in the event of a beaching is to bury the carcass on site and leave it to decompose.

But whale deaths in the ocean, like what Watkins observed, result in a much more natural process. Thaler said scavengers aren't usually able to puncture the whale's thick skin and blubber when the carcass is floating in the sea, and eventually the body will naturally deflate and sink, intact, to the seafloor.

Read more at Discovery News

'Game of Thrones' Spiked Ants Discovered

3-D scan of the newly discovered ant Pheidole drogon.

The dragons Viserion and Drogon from the "Game of Thrones" fantasy novels and TV series have come to life in miniature as two newly discovered muscular, spiny ants, which are described in a new study.

The new ants, Pheidole viserion and Pheidole drogon, not only feature dragon-like characteristics, but the soldier ants of these species also have massive heads relative to the size of the rest of their bodies. The formidable insects are documented in the journal PLOS ONE.

3-D scans of a Pheidole drogon minor (left) and a major worker (right).

Researchers Georg Fischer, Eli Sarnat and Evan Economo from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University found the ants in the tropical rainforests of Papua New Guinea. To study the ants, they used a cutting edge 3-D imaging technology called x-ray microtomography, which is like a hospital CT scan, but with a much higher resolution suitable for small organisms.

"This is one of the first studies in ant taxonomy to use micro-CT," Economo, head of OIST's Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit, said in a press release. "While this method is gaining popularity in different scientific fields, it is rare to use it in this way."

Pheidole viserion.

Fischer said, "If you are working in the bush in Africa and find an ant that you want to identify, it is really difficult to fly all the way to a museum in Europe or the U.S. to see collections of already known species. This way you can download the virtual ant, make measurements, and compare it to the specimen you are trying to identify."

That process, along with more traditional analysis, allowed the researchers to determine that the found ants represent new species. The ants now "live" in 3-D, allowing them to be dissected, archived and shared with other scientists around the world.

The spines on the ants help to protect the insects, but the scientists think the sharp appendages serve another surprising function, given the ants' enormous heads.

"Once you open up the rotational 3-D PDF and see these ants' extraordinary spines, or 'inordinate spinescence' as we phrase it in the study, you can't help but ask why on earth these structures evolved," Sarnat said. "The most obvious answer is defense, but the internal morphology revealed by this new micro-CT scanning technology suggests that the answer might also have something to do with muscle mechanics and powering the huge heads of the soldier ants."

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient 'Mad Libs' Papyri Contain Evil Spells

Ancient, magical spells of love, subjugation and sex: It may sound like a “Game of Thrones” episode, but these evildoings are also found on two recently deciphered papyri from Egypt dating to around 1,700 years ago.

One spell invokes the gods to “burn the heart” of a woman until she loves the spell caster, said Franco Maltomini of the University of Udine in Italy, who translated the two spells. Another spell, targeted at a male, uses a series of magical words to “subject” him, forcing him to do whatever the caster wants.

The two spells were not targeted at a specific person. Rather, they were written in such a way that the person who cast the spell would only need to insert the name of the person being targeted — sort of like an ancient “Mad Libs.”

Researchers date the two spells to the third century A.D., but the names of the ancient spell writers are unknown. The spells are written in Greek, a language widely used in Egypt at the time.

Archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt discovered the spells in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, more than 100 years ago, among a haul of hundreds of thousands of papyri. Over the past century, scientists have gradually studied and translated the papyri. Many of them are now owned by the Egypt Exploration Society and are housed and studied at the University of Oxford in England.

Maltomini is part of a larger group of editors and contributors from multiple institutions who analyzed and translated the most recent batch of these magical texts, which will be published in an upcoming volume of “The Oxyrhynchus Papyri,” a series a books devoted to publishing the papyri from Oxyrhynchus.

A love spell

The deciphered love spell invokes several gnostic gods. (Gnosticism was an ancient religion that incorporated elements of Christianity.) It says that the spell caster should burn a series of offerings in the bathhouse (the names of the offerings didn’t survive degradation) and write a spell on the bathhouse’s walls, which Maltomini translated as follows:

“I adjure you, earth and waters, by the demon who dwells on you and (I adjure) the fortune of this bath so that, as you blaze and burn and flame, so burn her (the woman targeted)whom (the mother of the woman targeted) bore, until she comes to me…”

Then, the spell names several gods and magical words. It goes on to say, “Holy names, inflame in this way and burn the heart of her…” until she falls in love with the person casting the spell.

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

Mummified Fetus From Ancient Egypt Found

Curators at a British museum have discovered what they claim is the youngest mummy from ancient Egypt — a mummified fetus believed to be between 16 and 18 weeks old.

For more than 2,500 years, the tiny body has been resting in a small wooden coffin, the arms crossed over its chest. The coffin was excavated at Giza in 1907 by the British School of Archaeology and came into the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, U.K., the same year.

“It is a perfect miniature example of a wooden coffin of the ancient Egyptian Late Period, dating from 664-525 BC. The lid and box are both made from cedar wood,” the museum said in a statement.

“Although the coffin is deteriorated, it is clear that the wood was carefully carved on a painstakingly small scale and decorated,” it added.

Until now it was believed the coffin, which is a little more than 17 inches long, contained the mummified remains of internal organs that were routinely removed during the embalming of bodies. Indeed, only a wrapped package could be seen inside.

Such package was “carefully bound in bandages, over which molten black resin had been poured before the coffin was closed,” the museum said.

But when curators asked the Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology to CT scan the coffin for a forthcoming exhibition, they were presented with pictures of the remains of a tiny human body.

Although the skull and pelvis had collapsed, five digits on both hands and feet and the long bones of the legs and arms were all clearly visible.

“From the micro CT scan it is noticeable that the fetus has its arms crossed over its chest. This, coupled with the intricacy of the tiny coffin and its decoration, are clear indications of the importance and time given to this burial in Egyptian society,” the museum said.

Experts estimate the fetus, whose gender is unknown, died as the result of a miscarriage at no more than 18 weeks gestation.

“This discovery is the only academically verified specimen to exist at only sixteen to eighteen weeks of gestation,” the museum said.

Indeed, two mummified fetuses, placed in individual coffins, were found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, but they were more developed at about 25 weeks and 37 weeks into gestation. DNA analysis in 2010 revealed the fetuses can be Tutankhamun’s daughters.

Read more at Discovery News

70-Year-Old Woman Gives Birth to First Baby

An Indian woman who gave birth at the age of 70 said Tuesday she was not too old to become a first-time mother, adding that her life was now complete.

Daljinder Kaur gave birth last month to a boy following two years of IVF treatment at a fertility clinic in the northern state of Haryana with her 79-year-old husband.

Kaur said the couple, married for 46 years, had almost lost hope of ever having a child and had faced ridicule in a country where infertility is sometimes seen as a curse from God.

“God heard our prayers. My life feels complete now. I am looking after the baby all by myself, I feel so full of energy. My husband is also very caring and helps me as much as he can,” Kaur told AFP from the northern city of Amritsar.

“When we saw the (IVF) advert, we thought we should also give it a try as I badly wanted to have a baby of my own,” she said.

Kaur put her age at about 70, a common scenario in India where many people don’t have birth certificates, while the clinic said in a statement that she was 72.

The baby was conceived using the couple’s own egg and sperm and was now “healthy and hearty” after weighing just two kilograms (4.4 pounds) at birth on April 19, the National Fertility and Test Tube center said.

Kaur’s husband, Mohinder Singh Gill, who owns a farm outside Amritsar, said he was unfazed about their age, saying God would watch over their child whom they named Armaan.

“People say what will happen to the child once we die. But I have full faith in God. God is omnipotent and omnipresent, he will take care of everything,” he told AFP.

Anurag Bishnoi, who runs the fertility clinic, said he was initially skeptical about going ahead with in vitro fertilization (IVF), but tests showed Kaur was able to carry the unborn baby.

Read more at Discovery News

'Very Strange Animal' Was First Marine Plant Eater

An animal described as part Dr. Seuss, part dinosaur has been identified as being the first known plant-eating marine reptile.

The reptile, which lived 242 million years ago in southern China, arose after the planet's largest mass extinction, revealing that dire times can result in animals with seemingly improbable features.

The crocodile-sized plant eater, named Atopodentatus unicus, aka "Uniquely Strangely Toothed," is described in the journal Science Advances.

Senior author Nicholas Fraser of National Museums Scotland told Discovery News, "To me, it is very much in keeping with a Dr. Seuss creation!" said Senior author Nicholas Fraser of National Museums Scotland, adding that the Seuss tale, "The Things You Can Think" comes to mind.

Fraser and his team studied the fossils for the reptile, with a particular focus on what was previously thought to be a flamingo-like beak. The new analysis instead found that the "beak" was part of a hammerhead-shaped jaw apparatus that the reptile used to feed on plants on the ocean floor. Peg-like front teeth lined the jaw, which also had needle-shaped teeth. None of the teeth were suitable for eating meat.

Some sharks today have hammerheads, but their sharp teeth are definitely ready to sink into moving prey such as octopus and even other sharks.

Co-author Olivier Rieppel of Chicago's The Field Museum said that the marine reptile's peg teeth were used "to scrape plants off rocks on the seafloor, and then it opened its mouth and sucked in the bits of plant material. Then it used its needle-like teeth as a sieve, trapping the plants and letting the water back out, like how whales filter-feed with their baleen."

The teeth are reminiscent of those of certain dinosaurs, such as plant-eating Nigersaurus. The body of A. unicus seemed to be dinosaur-like as well, given the creature's long neck and rather chunky mid section.

While the lineage of A. unicus is a mystery for now, the researchers speculate that it was an "aberrant sauropterygian." These were aquatic reptiles that developed from terrestrial ancestors at around the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago. Sauropterygians include plesiosaurs that, like A. unicus, breathed air, had flippers and often long necks.

As for A. unicus looking somewhat like an underwater dinosaur, Fraser said, "Maybe all these large extinct animals seem so far-removed from anything we know today that we automatically try to group them together."

He said that after the big extinction event, there was a major breakdown in the food chain. Over a period of 6–7 million years, a large range of different feeding strategies had become established among marine reptiles. Some of these animals became suction feeders, while others feasted only on mollusks or fish. Still other strategies emerged, including A. unicus taking advantage of seafloor plant life.

Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, told Discovery News that A. unicus "adds to the amazing explosion of marine reptiles during the massive recovery of life from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction."

Xiao-Chun Wu of the Canadian Museum of Nature said, "The research is important not only for revealing the oldest record of herbivory with a bizarre head within marine reptiles, but also for us to understand the recovery mechanism of marine vertebrates, especially reptiles after the global extinction at the Permian-Triassic Transition."

Wu believes that further examination of the reptile's teeth using a highly magnified electronic microscope might reveal wear surfaces that could provide additional clues concerning what the animal was eating. He wonders if, instead of scraping off plants, A. unicus was "grabbing muddy piles with organisms, including algae and plant matter, which were shoveled together" in the mouth.

Read more at Discovery News

Elks Belt Evil 'Lord of the Rings' Sound

Bull elks produce a shrieking call that many have likened to the cries of sinister characters known as Ringwraiths in the “Lord of the Rings,” and now new research shows how the animals produce this unusual sound.

The elks, also known as North American red deer or wapitis, manage to roar and whistle at the same time, resulting in the vocalization known as a bugle. The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Bugling bull elk:

“Lord of the Rings” Ringwraiths (also called the Nazgûl or Dark Riders):

An initial surprise upon hearing the elk’s bugle is how high-pitched the sound is for such a big beast.

“Larger animals tend to have deeper resonances and lower voices,” lead author David Reby from the University of Sussex explained in a press release.

The paradox has puzzled scientists for decades, so when Reby’s colleague Megan Wyman returned from a trip recording deer bellows in New Zealand, Reby knew that they might have a chance to finally solve the mystery.

While studying these and other recordings of the animals, another stroke of good luck happened — at least for the researchers.

A member of the research team, Yann Locatelli, learned that a male elk in the herd at France’s Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle had died. The natural death gave the scientists a chance to study the elk’s anatomy underlying calls.

All of the analysis allowed the team to determine that elks whistle while simultaneously roaring through their vocal chords. The call includes an unnatural sounding, high-pitched shriek that reaches frequencies up to 4000 Hz.

The high and low pitched sounds can shift independently. For example, sometimes the high-pitched wail rises and falls while the tone of the lower-pitched roar remains constant. The vocal folds vibrate and produce a call that matches the animal’s size, while the bull simultaneously produces a high-pitched, high-volume, wraith-like cry by whistling.

Physicist Joel Gilbert, also on the research team, calculated how the air released by the bull might vibrate in the animal’s oral cavity. He realized that the jet of air could hit the elk’s soft palate (known as the velum) in much the same way that air in a flute vibrates.

Like a wind instrument musician, the process requires the elk to make some skillful mouth and other facial movements, too.

Read more at Discovery News

Oldest Message in a Bottle Discovered

A 108-year-old postcard offering a shilling in exchange for its return to an English marine research institute is now officially the world’s oldest message in a bottle after being recovered in Germany.

The Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association (MBA), which received the card, said this week that the bottle had smashed the old record of 99 years and 43 days in the Guinness World Records.

It was discovered by retired German postal worker Marianne Winkler while on holiday on Germany’s North Frisian islands, 108 years and 138 days after it was thrown into the North Sea off the English coast by distinguished marine biologist George Parker Bidder on November 30, 1906.

Winkler followed the message inside reading “break the bottle”, and found a postcard inside asking to be returned to the MBA in Plymouth, on England’s south coast.

“The postcard asked the finder to fill out information about where the bottle was found, if it was trawled up, what the boat’s name was, and asked once the postcard was completed for it to be returned to a George Parker Bidder in Plymouth for a reward of one shilling,” said Guy Baker of the MBA.

When Winkler wrote a letter addressed to Bidder “our receptionist was somewhat confused”.

Bidder released a total of 1,020 bottles between 1904 and 1906.

He found that many bottles that sank to the bottom of the southern North Sea washed up in England, while floating bottles moved towards mainland Europe.

From this, he deduced for the first time that the North Sea’s deep sea current flowed from east to west.

The MBA is still an internationally renowned research institution, and Bidder served as its president between 1939-45 before his death in 1954, aged 91.

Honoring its promise, the MBA forwarded a thank you letter and an old shilling piece to the finder.

From Discovery News

Giant Rock Sphere Linked to Mysterious Civilization?

Bosnia’s “Indiana Jones” of archaeology claims to have found a massive, mysterious sphere embedded in the ground in a forest in Bosnia.

The controversial archaeologist, Semir Osmanagich, wrote in a blog that the sphere dates back more than 1,500 years and is “the most massive stone ball in Europe.” He estimates the sphere weighs some 30 tons or more.

Osmanagich said he discovered the sphere in the village of Podubravlje, near Zavidovici, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and his estimates show it has a radius of between 1.2 to 1.5 meters (about 3 feet, 11 inches to about 4 feet, 11 inches).

He says the sphere, in addition to his earlier claims that Bosnia is home to hidden ancient pyramids linked by underground tunnels, prove the existence of an advanced, lost civilization.

“It would be another proof that Southern Europe, Balkan and Bosnia, in particular, were home for advanced civilizations from distant past and we have no written records about them,” Osmanagich wrote in the blog post announcing the discovery for his non-profit group named The Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation.

Other archaeologists have dismissed Osmanagich’s previous claims about pyramid finds. Anthony Harding, President of the European Association of Archaeologists, described the claims as “complete fantasy.”

According to the International Business Times, some archaeologists have already dismissed Osmanagich’s sphere discovery saying that the rock was likely created naturally. Mandy Edwards of the University of Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences told the Daily Mail that the rock was likely formed by the "precipitation of natural mineral cement within the spaces between sediment grains."

Could Osmanagich's new discovery be manmade?

Stone balls have been discovered around the world and linked to ancient civilizations. There are ancient volcanic stone spheres in western Mexico, stone balls in the small island in Pacific – Isla del Cano, volcanic stone balls on Easter Island, and others in Tunisia, and the Canary Islands.

Among the most famous of these finds are the more than 300 granite balls uncovered in Costa Rica. Each weighs up to 14 tons and were linked to the now extinct Diquis culture. In June 2014, the Stone Spheres of the Diquis was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

Osmanagich stands by his theory that his recent find could represent the biggest, manmade stone ball of them all. He added that his team has located stone balls in several other locations in Bosnia.

“We found granite stone balls in the Teocak village in northeastern Bosnia, volcanic stone ball near town of Konjic in middle Bosnia and sandstone stone spheres in many locations in western and middle Bosnia,” Osmanagich wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

350-Year-Old Pendulum Clock Mystery Solved

The 350-year-old mystery of why pendulum clocks hanging from the same wall can influence each other and synchronize over time may hold even more secrets than previously thought, researchers say.

Solving this mystery could shed light on puzzling aspects of a variety of synchronized behaviors, such as how brain cells work together, the scientists added.

In 1665, the inventor of the pendulum clock, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, was lying in bed sick, watching two of his clocks, when he noticed something odd: No matter how the pendulums on these clocks started, they ended up swinging in exactly the opposite direction from each other within about a half-hour.

For centuries, the cause of this effect was unknown. Solving the puzzle could help shed light on the mysterious phenomenon of synchronization, scientists say.

“The synchronization phenomenon is one of the most pervasive drives in nature,” said study lead author Jonatan Peña Ramirez, a dynamicist at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Ensenada, Mexico. “For example, consider a couple dancing to the rhythm of music, or violinists in an orchestra playing in unison, or a school of fish gracefully swimming.”

In a separate study published last year in the journal Scientific Reports, scientists suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon involved sound pulses traveling from clock to clock — for instance, through the wall on which the machines hang. However, Peña and his colleagues now suggest that Huygens’ original explanation for this mystery could be the correct one.

The researchers experimented with two complex pendulum clocks known as monumental clocks.”To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Huygens’ experiment is reproduced using real monumental pendulum clocks,” Peña told Live Science. “Previous studies have used scaled-down versions of pendulum clocks, or commercial and generic clocks.”

The scientists placed both clocks on the same wooden table. As they expected, the motion of the clock pendulums synchronized over time.

However, unlike the clocks in Huygens’ experiment, the clocks did not swing in opposite directions. Rather, they unexpectedly moved in exactly the same direction. Moreover, while the clocks stayed in sync, they became slower and more inaccurate over time, the scientists said.

To explain these findings, the researchers developed a mathematical model of the clocks, taking into account the flexible nature of the wooden support that both machines rested on. The model suggested that the clocks could make the wooden board vibrate.

The researchers found that the support connecting the clocks (in this case, the wooden table) could serve as a kind of communication channel between the clocks, which they could use to exchange energy. The rigidity, thickness and mass of this support can influence the way in which the clocks synchronize and how inaccurate they become, the researchers said.

Long ago, Huygens suggested that the synchronous behavior of the clocks he observed might be caused by “the imperceptible vibrations of the beam on which they are hanging,” Peña said. Huygens “was so brilliant that he gave the correct explanation for his discovery without using a single equation.”

These findings suggest that much remains unknown about how coupled pendulum clocks behave, Peña said. “There still are hidden secrets to be revealed, and consequently, further studies of this system are necessary in order to unveil more details about the complex yet intriguing synchronization phenomenon,” Peña said.

A better understanding of synchronization could have technological and biological implications. For instance, consider two rotors mounted on an elastic support. “A familiar example of this kind of devices is a washing machine,” Peña said. Under certain conditions, the rotors may synchronize to rotate in the same direction, or in opposite directions, he said.

The synchronization of these rotors in opposite directions is highly desirable, because this will reduce or even eliminate the vibrations of the washing machine while its rotors are operating, Peña said. However, synchronization of these rotors in the same direction is not desired at all, because strong vibrations can result, with harmful and undesirable effects, he explained.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Would Someone Steal Shakespeare's Head?

“Good frend, for Iesus sake forebeare To digge the dust encloased heare. Bleste be ye man spares these stones, And curste be he moves my bones.”

This is William Shakespeare’s epitaph, dating back to 1616. Though the world’s best- known dramatist, Shakespeare was not being dramatic when he wrote these words. Instead, he was trying to prevent something unsavory that neither his fame nor fortune could deter: his corpse being dug up by grave robbers.

His curse may not have worked, at least not centuries ago: According to a documentary that aired over the weekend, “A radar scan of William Shakespeare’s tomb has discovered signs of tampering with his final resting place that lend credence to a story about his skull being stolen in the 18th century, researchers say.”

The archaeologists cleverly avoided Shakespeare’s curse, which specifically warns against “digging dust” and “moving bones” but says nothing about using ground-penetrating radar. The findings, though indirect, give new life to speculation—long dismissed as rumor—that his head may have been stolen in 1794.

But why would anyone want to steal Shakespeare’s head?

As “The New York Times” noted, one motivation for stealing his skull can be found in phrenology, a wildly popular—and widely believed—pseudoscientific field of “study” begun in the late 1700s in which a person’s skull was believed to reveal his or her personality and other characteristics.

A prominent bump on the forehead, for example, might be assumed to reflect a proficiency in language or dramatics. It’s not surprising that the skull of one of the most famous and important literary figures in history would be coveted and examined.

Skull-Duggery and Grave Robbing

Aside from phrenological curiosity about Shakespeare’s skull specifically, there were other reasons why the bard’s bones might have been disturbed. Throughout most of history, medical knowledge of anatomy was poor and indirect, partly because of fear and taboos against cutting open corpses.

The Renaissance brought an emphasis on practical, real-world knowledge about anatomy, which necessarily meant examining and cutting up the dead. In Europe, the rise of early medical centers created a strong demand for dead bodies; a few cadavers were made available by royal decree, usually the bodies of condemned criminals. In the 1700s, in fact, dissection was a punishment for serious crimes. Demand soon outstripped supply, however, and a black market for cadavers emerged.

Centuries ago it was not uncommon to wear dead strangers’ body parts; in the 1600s and 1700s teeth and hair from dead bodies was sometimes used to make dentures and wigs, respectively (if not respectfully).

By 1720, theft from graveyards was common in London, and grave robbers (or “resurrection men,” as they were known) were making a profit digging up bodies and selling them to anatomists and doctors. Some were so eager to cash in that they didn’t wait for people to die: Irish grave robbers Brendan Burke and William Hare, for example, committed 16 murders and sold the bodies to a well-known London anatomist in 1828.

Read more at Discovery News