Black Hole Holds Universe’s Biggest Water Supply

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever found in the universe. It’s 12 billion light years away, and holds at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans combined.

It manifests itself as a colossal mass of water vapor, hidden in the distant APM 08279+5255 quasar. Quasars are bright and violent galactic nuclei fueled by a supermassive black hole at their center.

This quasar holds a black hole that’s 20 billion times more massive than the sun, and after gobbling down dust and gas it belches out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. The water vapor is spread around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light years.

“The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” says Matt Bradford from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” adds Bradford in the release. As the light from this watery quasar took 12 billion years to reach Earth, the observations come from a time when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.

The water reservoir was discovered by astronomers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, and using the Z-Spec instrument at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA) in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

Both instruments observe in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which lie between infrared and microwave wavelengths. Over the last two to three decades, this technique has allowed astronomers to find trace gases, including water vapor, in the earliest universe.

Astronomers are now building a new telescope that specializes in these wavelengths. The proposed 25-meter telescope is called CCAT (Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope) and would be plopped on the Cerro Chajnantor lava dome, more than 5,600 meters above sea level.

Read more at Wired Science

How We Learned to Chew

Are you reading this over a snack or your lunch? Go ahead, take a bite and notice how you use your tongue.

Expertly, you nudge your food into the right place so your teeth come down right on top of the hunk of food, and with each chew, you reposition the bolus just a little to get all the right parts chewed up.

In a new study, researchers took a look at how different animals use their tongues and jaws together. Their findings suggest that ancient animals' move to land may have led to wider ranging tongue motion, and, not surprisingly, that animals' dietary habits have dictated how tongue use has evolved.

"Chewing really is an ancestral trait," said Nicolai Konow of Brown University, in Providence, RI, who led the new study published in Integrative and Comparative Biology. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that chewing originated before the ancestors of modern land vertebrates left the sea.

But then its purposes diverged, Konow explained. "For fish, they use the tongue as an active processing unit and they use the tongue to pull the food further into the mouth and hold prey when they open the jaw." They move the tongue upward and pull it back in the nose-to-tail direction, in a relatively simple, two-dimensional motion.

"A fish is swimming around in a viscous medium," he said. "It has no appendages. Whenever the fish has caught some food, every time it opens its mouth to chew, there's a risk of the fish losing the food." This means the tongue is primarily working to keep and get the food backward and into the gullet, according to Konow.

"When you move up to land, all of a sudden we're subject to gravity, but we also evolved appendages," he said.

This created new roles for the tongue. Unlike fish, mammals can move their jaws and tongues side-to-side as well as up and down. Teeth come together precisely to mash up food, but that means the food needs to be in exactly the right place, and it is the tongue that makes that happen.

The new study found these differences among fish and mammals by implanting electrodes in the jaws and tongue muscles of a number of animals and tracking the patterns of their movement. Konow highlighted the importance of looking at the combination of jaw and tongue for getting a complete picture.

Not only did Kolow's team find differences in how fish and mammals use their tongues, but also within the collection of mammals the researchers studied, including omnivores like pigs and ungulates like llamas and goats.

Ungulates obtain their sustenance from a poor quality source, he noted. "It's very hard to extract nutrients from grass," he said. "This means that the energetics of chewing are really important, so efficiency is key. The tongue has to reposition the food precisely between the teeth."

This may explain the team's observations that ungulates' chewing was not as rhythmic as they had expected, but also more coordinated than the pigs'.

"The tongue in the herbivores has to be moved in a very labile manner to catch and reposition and intercept parts of that chunk of grass and constantly do fine tuning in terms of putting the food in the right spot," Konow said. "It doesn't matter so much for the pig. It doesn't need the tongue to be so intrinsically engaged in feeding."

Now the researchers want to understand how other animals fit into the picture.

Read more at Discovery News

Scientists Discover Why Bones Grow on Muscle

Researchers think they've found out why some people's muscles mistakenly grow bones.

The condition, called heterotopic ossification, occurs when an area of the body is signaled to grow bone rather than other tissues. In short, the condition gives rise to bones growing in places they're not usually found -- in muscles. People may experience the phenomenon after recovering from injury or may have it from birth.

Though there's no way to prevent or know when a person will develop heterotopic ossification, scientists now have a starting point to develop drugs that could help treat the problem.

Approximately 1 person out of every 2 million people worldwide is born with a permanent type of the condition called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), which causes muscles to consistently produce bone, especially when a person is injured or sick. In more serious cases, the disease can hinder a person's mobility and even shorten his or her life.

In a study in the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine found high levels of a neuropeptide called "Substance P," or SP, in both FOP patients and individuals who developed heterotopic ossification. From previous studies, it's known that SP causes inflammation and is used by the brain's neurons to help send white blood cells to injured areas of the body.

More at Discovery News

Mysterious Statue Once Featured at Machu Picchu

A mysterious stone statue, possibly the portrait of the great Inca emperor Pachacuti, once stood in Machu Picchu, according to archival research.

Likely placed against a round stone wall on one of Machu Picchu's terraces, the statue had already disappeared by the time American explorer Hiram Bingham climbed the steep jungle slope to be faced with an archaeological wonder exactly a century ago on July 24, 1911.

Bingham, who has been credited as one possible inspiration for the "Indiana Jones" character, saw "a remarkably large and well-preserved abandoned city " perched some 8,000 feet in the clouds "in a wonderfully picturesque position," he wrote in the March 26, 1914, issue of Nature.

Surrounded on three sides by the gorges of the Urubamba River (also called the Vilcanota River), and tucked between two massive mountain peaks -- the Huayna Picchu and the Machu Picchu -- the vine-covered ruins of "the lost city of the Incas" were never really lost at all.

"Machu Picchu was never lost to the locals and certainly not to the huaqueros [treasure hunters and tomb-robbers] who looted the site before Hiram Bingham was born," American explorer and researcher Paolo Greer told Discovery News.

"I really believe that Bingham was one of the best things that happened to Machu Picchu. He actually stopped the looters who had sacked the ruins for decades before he arrived," Greer said.

The stone statue was lost to such plundering, said Greer.

"According to old documents, it was last seen in Machu Picchu in the 1860s. Then, possibly around 1880, it fell victim of the local treasure hunters," he said.

Greer, who has spent much of the last two decades studying Inca ruins, made in 2008 the controversial claim that Machu Picchu was "discovered" 43 years before Bingham's arrival by an obscure German entrepreneur named Augusto Berns.

While tracking down Berns' activities through documents in the National Library of Peru, Greer found a specific reference to the mysterious statue.

"Indeed, it was Augusto Berns himself who saw the sculpture. In his private letters he wrote about a large effigy of an Inca, placed as a sign, and 'formerly used as a model for the silver molders.' He mentioned that it was knocked down by those searching underneath it for gold and silver idols," Greer said.

According to the researcher, the stone effigy likely represented Pachacuti (about 1391– 1473), regarded as the greatest of the Inca emperors. With a name meaning "Earthshaker" or "He Who Changes the World," the Genghis Khan of the Incas conquered a huge territory and is widely credited with building Machu Picchu.

The presence of a stone statue with his likeness would strengthen the hypothesis that Machu Picchu held Pachacuti's tomb.

"The stone sculpture might have simply been the mold for a lost gold effigy said to stand on top of the emperor's tomb," Greer said.

He believes that the emperor's mummy was placed in what Bingham called "The Royal Mausoleum," a cave below the Torreón or the Temple of the Sun in Machu Picchu, and later moved to an upper crypt.

"The room above the mausoleum features a rounded plinth on which a gold statue of the emperor once stood," Greer said.

The statue is described in the 1557 "Narrative of the Incas" by Juan de Betanzos, one of the most important sources on the Incan civilization.

According to Betanzos, Pachacuti ordered "a golden image made to resemble him be placed on top of his tomb." The gold statue was to be worshiped instead of his mummy.

Leading Peruvian historian Luis Guillermo Lumbreras agrees that Pachacuti was buried in Machu Picchu.

"The latest research tells us that Machu Picchu was a great monastery where they worshipped the [royal] mummies," Lumbreras told Peru's news agency Andina.

Unfortunately, the mummies of the Inca emperors are now lost. To stop the worshipping of the mummified remains, and to possibly steal the gold and treasures that were associated with the mummies,the Spanish seized the remains of 11 kings and several queens. Five royal mummies, including that of Pachacuti, who was "so well preseved that it seemed alive," were sent in 1560 to Lima and put on display in the Hospital of San Andrés.

Around 1638, they disappeared. Scholars have long maintained that the mummies still lie buried in the hospital's ground, yet all attempts to find them have proved unsuccessful.

Read more at Discovery News

Pioneers Get Close-Up View of Miracle Material Graphene

Physicists who won last year's Nobel Prize for isolating graphene, the world's thinnest material, said Sunday they had devised ways of studying the novel substance at the fundamental level of the electron.

In a study published in the journal Nature Physics, Russian-born physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov said they had detailed interactions between electrons on a sheet of graphene in a bid to understand why the material is so unique.

Graphene comprises just a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-shaped, hexagonal lattice.

The substance is chemically very simple but extremely strong, conducts electricity, dissipates heat and is transparent. There is a surge of interest in it to replace semiconductors in next-generation computers, touch screens and other electronic gadgets.

The Geim-Novoselov team built a test bed in which extremely high-quality sheets of graphene were suspended in a vacuum in order to get a clear view of how electrons interacted, free from the distortion of electron "scattering."

They found that the electrons moved at very high velocities -- previous research has monitored speeds 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) per second, some 30 times faster than in silicon -- and in a way that mimics photons, or particles of light.

Read more at Discovery News

Hotspot Found on Moon's Far Side

Scientists have found evidence of volcanoes on the far side of the moon.

The new discovery, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience is a rare example of volcanism on the lunar surface not associated with asteroid, meteor or comet impact events.

Until now the best known examples of volcanism were on the moon's near side in a region known as the Procellarum KREEP terrane.

A team of scientists, led by Bradley Jolliff from Washington University in St Louis, used images and other data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to assess the composition of an unusual region on the far side of the moon called the Compton-Belkovich thorium anomaly.

They focused on an area containing numerous domes, some more than six kilometers high.

The domes featured steeply sloping sides which Jolliff and colleagues interpret as, "volcanic in origin and formed from viscous lava."

"We also observe circular depressions, which we suggest result from caldera collapse or volcanic vents," the researchers write.

The LRO data indicates the rocks are rich in thorium, silica and alkali-feldspar minerals, making them different from the black basalts that make up the lunar mare on the near side.

Sarah Maddison, an associate professor of Astrophysics at Swinburne University in Melbourne said such a localized region of volcanism on the lunar far side is unusual.

"Most of the volcanism we see on the moon is impact related and on the near side, although we don't know why," said Maddison.

"But if it's caused by radioactive decay, then why is it limited to the one hot spot and why did it happen so much later than everywhere else on the moon?"

Geology lecturer Ian Graham from the University of New South Wales said the discovery is highly significant.

"It's much higher in silicon and potassium than the basaltic volcanism seen elsewhere on the moon" said Graham.

More at Discovery News

Kid claims “fish accidentally slipped in to my penis” whilst cleaning aquarium

Above image is of a fish in someones bladder.

“Details of the case, which was documented in The Internet Journal of Urology, have revealed that the patient claimed that the fish “slipped” into his penis while he was maintaining his aquarium.

“While he was cleaning the fish tank in his house, he was holding a fish in his hand and went to the toilet for passing urine. When he was passing urine, the fish slipped from his hand and entered his urethra and then he developed all these symptoms.”

Full story at Geekologie

Woman accidentally paid for 12 years of no work

AOL NEWS: For the last 12 years, a Virginia woman hasn’t set foot in her office and has done zero work, yet she’s been collecting an annual salary that has totaled more than $300,000. Recently, the bookkeeping mistake was discovered and her payments were discontinued, but now she’s filing for wrongful termination and unemployment benefits.

It all started more than a dozen years ago, when Jill McGlone, who had been working as an office assistant for the Norfolk Community Services Board, was suspended for “revealing confidential medical information.” Apparently, authorities forgot to suspend her pay, however, and the checks, which totalled about $26,000 per year, kept going out.

Her situation was only uncovered recently, when a new supervisor, Maureen Womack, came in to take the reigns of Norfolk CSB. She went over the budget, discovered the human resource department’s mistake, and fired McGlone with alacrity.

Full story at AOL

Wiedemann-Franz Law: Physicists Break 150-Year-Old Empirical Laws of Physics

A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law. This historic discovery is described in a paper published July 20 in Nature Communications.

In 1853, two German physicists, Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, studied the thermal conductivity (a measure of a system's ability to transfer heat) of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals at the same temperature.

The origin of this empirical observation did not become clear however until the discovery of the electron and the advent of quantum physics in the early twentieth century. Electrons have a spin and a charge. When they move through a metal they cause an electrical current because of the moving charge. In addition, the moving electrons also carry heat through the metal but now it is via both the charge and the spin. So a moving electron must carry both heat and charge: that is why the ratio does not vary from metal to metal.

For the past 150-plus years, the Wiedemann-Franz law has proved to be remarkably robust, the ratio varying at most by around 50 per cent amongst the thousands of metallic systems studied.

In 1996, American physicists C. L. Kane and Matthew Fisher made a theoretical prediction that if you confine electrons to individual atomic chains, the Wiedemann-Franz law could be strongly violated. In this one-dimensional world, the electrons split into two distinct components or excitations, one carrying spin but not charge (the spinon), the other carrying charge but not spin (the holon). When the holon encounters an impurity in the chain of atoms it has no choice but for its motion to be reflected. The spinon, on the other hand, has the ability to tunnel through the impurity and then continue along the chain. This means that heat is conducted easily along the chain but charge is not. This gives rise to a violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law that grows with decreasing temperature.

The experimental group, led by Professor Nigel Hussey of the Correlated Electron Systems Group at the University of Bristol, tested this prediction on a purple bronze material comprising atomic chains along which the electrons prefer to travel.

Remarkably, the researchers found that the material conducted heat 100,000 times better than would have been expected if it had obeyed the Wiedemann-Franz law like other metals. Not only does this remarkable capability of this compound to conduct heat have potential from a technological perspective, such unprecedented violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law provides striking evidence for this unusual separation of the spin and charge of an electron in the one-dimensional world.

Read more at Science Daily

Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists

Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light -- demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, "obeys the traffic law of the universe."

"Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light," the university said on its website.

"Professor Du's study demonstrates that a single photon, the fundamental quanta of light, also obeys the traffic law of the universe just like classical EM (electromagnetic) waves."

The possibility of time travel was raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered superluminal -- or faster-than-light -- propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said.

It was later found to be a visual effect, but researchers thought it might still be possible for a single photon to exceed light speed.

Du, however, believed Einstein was right and determined to end the debate by measuring the ultimate speed of a single photon, which had not been done before.

"The study, which showed that single photons also obey the speed limit c, confirms Einstein's causality; that is, an effect cannot occur before its cause," the university said.

More at Discovery News