Boa Constrictor Mom Gives 'Virgin Birth'

A boa constrictor mother has given "virgin birth" to 22 female offspring, all of which have no father and are half-clones of their mother, according to new research.

The discovery adds boa constrictors to the list of animals that can give fatherless birth. The list so far includes other snakes, at least three species of sharks, the Komodo dragon and some other monitor lizards, certain termites, and more.

Researchers now even think some dinosaurs may have given virgin birth, since this phenomenon has now been reported in all lineages of jawed vertebrates, except mammals, and in a number of invertebrate species.

"Only with the development and application of molecular tools have we truly begun to understand how common this form of reproduction may be," lead author Warren Booth told Discovery News.

Booth, a research associate at North Carolina State University's Department of Entomology, and his team first suspected something was up when the mother boa constrictor gave birth, twice, to a total of 22 caramel-colored females. The males housed with the female did not carry the gene for this recessive color trait.

The scientists next extracted and analyzed DNA from skins shed by the mother, the males and the caramel-colored offspring. This DNA fingerprinting, functioning like a paternity test, determined that the offspring exhibited a sex chromosomal arrangement of WW, "something never before naturally observed," Booth said.
He explained that male snakes have the sex chromosomal arrangement ZZ, while females are ZW. Numerous prior studies concluded that the WW pairing was not viable.

"Our work essentially upends decades of scientific theory on reptile reproduction," said Booth.

He and his colleagues believe the births happened as a result of what's known as automatic parthenogenesis.
"Basically, like sexual reproduction, the offspring here received one set of the mother's chromosomes when they split during the egg production process," he explained. "However, instead of combining with a sperm that would contain the complementary second set of chromosomes from the father, the egg fuses with a copy of itself, stimulating embryonic development."

The findings are published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters.

Read more at Discovery News

New Hologram Tech Sets 3D in Motion

A palm-sized Princess Leia pleading for help is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

Arizona researchers have created the first 3-D hologram movie that plays almost in real time, they report in the Nov. 4 Nature. It's the fastest known demonstration of telepresence, where a 3-D hologram depicts a scene from another location.

The key to the invention is a new type of plastic that can refresh the hologram once every two seconds. While that's too slow to watch the World Series in 3-D, the researchers estimated holographic TV could be coming in seven to 10 years.

"It is very very close to reality," says physicist Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Something that was science fiction is something we can do today."

Holograms are created when light bounces off a sheet of material with grooves in just the right places to project an image away from the surface, like on some credit cards. The image is even crisper when the illuminating light waves march in step, as they do in a laser.

Holographic video is already possible, albeit painfully slow -- the U.S. military records enemy territory in 3-D, but refreshing each frame of the video can take an entire day. The Arizona team created a quicker way to play holographic video in 2008, but with that method each frame still took four minutes to generate. Now, after two years of optimizing the plastic, they've cut the time to just two seconds.

Sixteen cameras snap pictures of an object that are piped into a desktop PC, which processes the data. Then the computer shoots the holographic pixels, or "hogels," electronically to another location. There, the hogels are transformed into an optical signal and transmitted by a laser onto a plastic screen, much like a projector shines light onto a white screen to play a movie.

When this light hits, the plastic screen undergoes chemical reactions that temporarily record the most recent set of images in the data stream.

A particular color of light illuminates the plastic and -- voila! Light scatters in just the right way to recreate the original image. Then, the new plastic can be erased, creating a clean slate for the next image.

Read more at Discovery News

Harry Potter blamed for India's disappearing owls

Mr Ramesh said the craze for Harry Potter in India had led to an increase in people buying owls from illegal bird traders.

"Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination even among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls," Mr Ramesh told the BBC.

A report by conservation group Traffic suggested tough measures should be put in place to protect owls from an upcoming Hindu festival – Diwali - because thousands of owls are sacrificed on Hindu "auspicious occasions".

The author of the report, Abrar Ahmed, decided to investigate the owl trade after being asked to get a white owl for a boy's Harry Potter-themed 10th birthday.

"This was probably one of the strangest demands made to me as an ornithologist," he wrote.

Mr Ahmed found that endangered owls are being caught, traded or sacrificed in black magic rituals, while others are killed for medicine.

"The sacrifice of owls on auspicious occasions appears to be a regular practice and [there could be] a possible increase in trade and sacrifices around Diwali," the Imperilled Custodians of the Night report says.

Read more at The Telegraph

Great Sphinx's Walls Rise Again

Large sections of mudbrick walls have emerged from the sands of the Giza plateau on which the Sphinx and the three great pyramids stand, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities announced on Tuesday.

Discovered by a team of Egyptian archaeologists during routine excavation work near the valley temple of the Fourth Dynasty King Khafre, the structures are part of a wall that once protected the Sphinx from the desert winds.

According to ancient Egyptian texts, the wall was built following a dream which King Thuthmose IV (1400-1390 B.C.) had after a long hunting trip in Wadi El-Ghezlan (Deer Valley), an area next to the Sphinx.

In the dream, the mythical beast with the head of a man and the body of a lion complained that it was being choked by the desert sand. As a result, the king removed the sand that had partially buried the great limestone figure and built an enclosure wall to preserve it.

Stretching for 132 meters (433 feet) in total, the wall is part of a larger structure previously found to the north of the Sphinx.

It consists of two sections. The first part, which is 75 centimeters (29.52 inches) tall and 86 meters (282.2 feet) long, runs from North to South along the eastern side of Khafre’s valley temple and the Sphinx. The second part, which is 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) tall and 46 meters (150.9 feet) long, stretches from East to West along the perimeter of the valley temple area.

Read more at Discovery News

Earliest Predator Wasn't So Fierce

The great, car-sized predatory "shrimp" that was master of Earth's seas a half billion years ago may have been unable to eat anything harder than baby food.

Several lines of evidence along with a new 3-D model of the way the mouth parts of Anomalocaris worked show that the infamous carnivore could not crack the hard shells of trilobites and other protected critters of the Cambrian seas.

"The mouth parts appear soft and bendable in (fossil) specimens," said paleontologist James "Whitey" Hagadorn of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. "That struck me as kind of funny."

Soft mouth parts don't jive with the now standard interpretation of Anomalocaris being a predator that wolfed down trilobites and anything else it could catch. That got Hagadorn wondering: "Is it possible that Anomalocaris didn't eat trilobites?" he asked.

To find out, Hagadorn started looking at all the available fossilized feces from the Cambrian time when Anomalocaris lived. None containing mangled bits of the hard, indigestible exoskeletons of trilobites could be found that could be traced to Anomalocaris.

What's more, there is no evidence of trilobite parts in the gullets of any known Anomalocaris fossil.
For that matter, no gut contents have ever been found for any of the dozen or so known species of Anomalocaris, he said. That's especially strange considering that hundreds of other fossil animals found nearby have guts filled with all sorts of interesting stuff.

To get a better idea just what Anomalocaris might be capable of eating, Hagadorn and his colleagues devised a 3-D, finite element analysis model of the Anomalocaris's whorl of mouth parts. The model let them virtually operate the mouth to see what it could do and how much force it could generate.

The answer is that Anomalocaris couldn't close its mouth and could not create forces strong enough to break a modern lobster or shrimp shell -- the analogues they used for trilobite shells.

Read more at Discovery News

Hotspot for Life Found on Ancient Mars Volcano

If life ever existed on Mars, then newly discovered mineral deposits on the flanks of a long-dead volcano would be a good place to dig for its remains.

Spotted by a high-powered orbital imager, they’re not the first deposits found on Mars of silica, a mineral used by some simple forms of life, including single-celled algae that evolved early in Earth’s volcanic past.

But the new deposits are the first from a locale with a definite volcanic pedigree, formerly rich in heat and water as well as minerals — a locale formerly suited, by any Earthly definition, for life.

Stand on the slopes of Nili Patera 3.7 billion years ago, and “you would see steam rising up out of the volcano. In the spots we see the deposits, that’s where the highest concentration of steam would be,” said geoscientist Jack Mustard of Brown University. “It’d be like standing on Hawaii, looking across a volcano, seeing the fumaroles where vapors are given off, or standing in Iceland where the hills are steaming.”

Mustard’s findings, co-authored with fellow Brown geoscientist J.R. Skok, were published October 31 in Nature Geoscience. His laboratory is among those that in recent years has processed an extraordinary flow of Red Planet data, returned by Mars-orbiting spacecraft and surface-exploring robots.

This data has moved researchers beyond looking for signs of water — the latest of which was reported just last week, by both the Spirit and Phoenix rovers — to evaluating potentially once-habitable environments in precise detail.

“It’s the most definitive hydrothermal system we’ve found on Mars. You can see the source of the heat, the driving of the fluids that left the deposits,” said Mustard. “In this deposit, you have the culprit right before you. In other deposits, they’re either sedimentary, or in the center of an impact crater. You have no idea how they happened.”

Red more at Wired

Fingers detect typos even when conscious brain doesn’t

“Expert typists are able to zoom across the keyboard without ever thinking about which fingers are pressing the keys. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals that this skill is managed by an autopilot, one that is able to catch errors that can fool our conscious brain.

The research was published in the Oct. 29 issue of Science.

“We all know we do some things on autopilot, from walking to doing familiar tasks like making coffee and, in this study, typing. What we don’t know as scientists is how people are able to control their autopilots,” Gordon Logan, Centennial Professor of Psychology and lead author of the new research, said. “The remarkable thing we found is that these processes are disassociated. The hands know when the hands make an error, even when the mind does not.”

To determine the relationship between the autopilot and the conscious brain, or pilot, and the role of each in detecting errors, Logan and co-author Matthew Crump designed a series of experiments to break the normal connection between what we see on the screen and what our fingers feel as they type.

In the first experiment, Logan and Crump had skilled typists type in words that appeared on the screen and then report whether or not they had made any errors. Using a computer program they created, the researchers either randomly inserted errors that the user had not made or corrected errors the user had made. They also timed the typists’ typing speed, looking for the slowdown that is known to occur when one hits the wrong key. They then asked the typists to evaluate their overall performance.

The researchers found the typists generally took the blame for the errors the program had inserted and took the credit for mistakes the computer had corrected. They were fooled by the program. However, their fingers, as managed by the autopilot, were not – the typists slowed down when they actually made an error, as expected, and did not slow down when a false error appeared on the screen.”

Read more at Lab Spaces

Christopher Hitchens vs. Tariq Ramadan: Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan Debate: Is Islam a Religion of Peace? Moderated by Laurie Goodstein.

Via Atheist Media

Moving illusions: Impossible objects made real

“The artist M. C. Escher was renowned for creating drawings of imaginary spaces that could not exist in three dimensions. Or could they?

Kokichi Sugihara at Meiji University in Kawasaki, Japan, has been using computer software to bring impossible drawings to life. The video above shows some of the objects he has made moving in ways that appear to defy geometry.

When the models are turned around, however, the trick is revealed: the objects are not what they seem. That’s because we constantly make assumptions about perspective and depth in order to move about in a 3D world, and these models take advantage of those assumptions.

Sugihara used computer software to analyse seemingly impossible drawings and come up with solid shapes that might look like the drawing from one perspective, but not from others.

It’s not the first time Sugihara has tricked New Scientist readers with his illusions. Earlier this year, the engineer won first prize in the 2010 Illusion of the Year contest in Naples, Florida.”

Read more at New Scientist

Charlie Chaplin time traveller spotted in old film

While watching the DVD extras for The Circus, an Irish filmmaker has spotted a woman who appears to be using a mobile phone, fifty years before their invention.

George Clarke, who is based in Belfast, uploaded the clip to YouTube where it has since received more than 1.5 million views.

The footage shows the exterior the cinema that is premiering The Circus; a woman walks past holding her left hand to the side of her face while moving her lips.

The original clip lasts a matter of seconds but has been looped and slowed down to such an extent that the online version lasts for several minutes.

Watch the clip here.

Clarke claims the footage has not been tampered with in any way and seems convinced this is evidence of time travel.

Others are not so sure and explanations range from the woman holding a block of ice to take away the pain of a dental appointment, to the clip itself being a fake – detractors point out that fade transitions had not been developed in the 1920s.

Read more at The Telegraph