Lava Rocks: Cradle for Life on Earth?

Early life may have formed between a rock and a wet place.

Floating rafts of lava rock had the right conditions to nurture life as it emerged from the primordial ooze of chemicals in the Earth's early oceans. Researchers from the University of Oxford in England suggest lava rock, or pumice, had four special qualities that may have made it the cradle of life.

1. Only the cruelest of mothers would put her baby in a lava rock cradle. But for Mother Nature, the sharp nooks and crannies of lava rock that torture bare feet also made the rock a great shelter for the chemical reactions that led to life. The many crevices provide a large surface area compared to the volume of the rock.

2. Pumice “is the only known rock type that floats as rafts at the air-water interface and then becomes beached in the tidal zone for long periods of time,” wrote the researchers in the journal Astrobiology.

Wading near the beaches of the early Earth would create a mix of water, solids and air from which the building blocks of life could be drawn. Plus, like a modern day beach-goer, the chemical soup would be soaking up the sun, giving it a dose of UV radiation, which could have caused chemical reaction leading to more complex organic chemicals and eventually life.

3. As they floated on the surface of the sea and bumped into the shore, the lava rock was exposed to a wide variety of conditions, including lightning strikes and dehydration. The changing conditions could have fostered chemical reactions leading to life.

4. “Finally, from rafting to burial, it (pumice) has a remarkable ability to adsorb metals, organics, and phosphates as well as to host organic catalysts such as zeolites and titanium oxides,” wrote the researchers.

Metals, organics, and phosphates are the construction materials for building life. The organic catalysts are the tools and workers that get the job done faster than it would happen randomly.

Read more at Discovery News

Recent Human Evolution Detected in Quebec Town History

Though ongoing human evolution is difficult to see, researchers believe they’ve found signs of rapid genetic changes among the recent residents of a small Canadian town.

Between 1800 and 1940, mothers in Ile aux Coudres, Quebec gave birth at steadily younger ages, with the average age of first maternity dropping from 26 to 22. Increased fertility, and thus larger families, could have been especially useful in the rural settlement’s early history.

According to University of Quebec geneticist Emmanuel Milot and colleagues, other possible explanations, such as changing cultural or environmental influences, don’t fit. The changes appear to reflect biological evolution.

“It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection,” wrote Milot’s team in their Oct. 3 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. “Our study supports the idea that humans are still evolving. It also demonstrates that microevolution is detectable over just a few generations.”

ow humans evolve in modern societies is an enduringly fascinating question. It’s easy to assume that, in an age of developed-world plenty, biological evolutionary pressures have ceased, and biological evolution is supposedly too slow to detect in time scales of a few generations.

In fact, genetic signals of recent human evolution have been found, and there’s even reason to think it’s speeding up. But such genetic signatures, unconnected for now to identifiable traits, are far less glamorous and tangible than fertility.

Milot’s team based their study on detailed birth, marriage and death records kept by the Catholic church in Ile aux Coudres, a small and historically isolated French-Canadian island town in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It wasn’t just the fact that average first birth age — a proxy for fertility — dropped from 26 to 22 in 140 years that suggested genetic changes. After all, culture or environment might have been wholly responsible, as nutrition and healthcare are for recent, rapid changes in human height. Rather, it was how ages dropped that caught their eye.

The patterns fit with models of gene-influenced natural selection. Moreover, thanks to the detailed record-keeping, it was possible to look at other possible explanations. Were better nutrition responsible, for example, improved rates of infant and juvenile mortality should have followed; they didn’t. Neither did the late-19th century transition from farming to more diversified professions.

“I am inclined to have faith in the analyses since they are established within the quantitative genetic community,” said University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has studied changing rates of human evolution. “Evolution, gene frequency change, can work in a hurry and is working all the time in our species.”

According to Harpending, the findings are part of a trend away from assuming that changes in populations are always environmental. “Here and elsewhere we are discovering that changes are due to genetic changes, not changes in the environment,” he said.

Read more at Wired Science

9/11 Terrorists Debunk 9/11 Conspiracies

In a surprising twist, terrorist group al-Qaeda recently issued a statement ridiculing 9/11 conspiracy theories claiming U.S. involvement in the attacks.

The victims and the perpetrator of the terrorism are both saying that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda acted alone and without any knowledge or support from the American government. The statement came in response to a speech that the Iranian President gave at the U.N. General Assembly in which he repeated his claim that the U.S. masterminded the terrorism. As ABC News reported last week,

    The terror group al-Qaeda has found itself curiously in agreement with the "Great Satan"--which it calls the U.S. -- in issuing a stern message to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: stop spreading 9/11 conspiracy theories. In the latest issue of the al Qaeda English-language magazine Inspire, an author appears to take offense to the "ridiculous" theory repeatedly spread by Ahmadinejad that the 9/11 terror attacks were actually carried out by the U.S. government in order to provide a pretext to invade the Middle East. "The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al Qaeda was behind 9/11 but rather, the U.S. government," an article reads. "So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?"

If anyone in the world would have hard evidence of American collusion in carrying out the September 11, 2001, attacks (and strong motivation for making it public), it would be al-Qaeda. If the conspiracy claims are true, al-Qaeda would have no reason to deny that America helped organize and carry out the attacks. It would call into question the American government’s credibility in a way that various ad hoc conspiracy theorists could never hope to, and forever tarnish America’s political and moral legitimacy.

Of course terrorism has fueled many conspiracy theories. Earlier this year, conspiracies circulated that Osama bin Laden had not actually been killed by American commandos. I wrote a column about it, pointing out that the best proof that bin Laden is dead is that he hasn’t been seen since his death was announced by President Obama. If bin Laden is alive, what better way to embarrass and discredit the United States than to make a smiling public appearance? In fact, not only has bin Laden not emerged from hiding since his (alleged) killing in May, but al-Qaeda itself publicly acknowledged that bin Laden was killed.

The fact that al-Qaeda has denied that America had any role in the attacks strikes a heavy blow to the already shaky credibility of the “Truther” movement and other 9/11 conspiracy theorists. They must not only explain the stark lack of evidence implicating the American government in the attacks, but also explain why America’s longtime sworn enemy would deny U.S. involvement if it were true.

Read more at Discovery News

Astrophysicists Share Nobel -- and a Mystery

A trio of relatively young astronomers won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Physics today, not for solving a problem, but for making an observation: our universe is expanding faster now than it did in the past.

Whoever figures out why this is happening likely will get a Nobel of his or her own -- plus the one just awarded to 41-year-old astronomer Adam Riess, with Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

"It's a very juicy problem," Riess told reporters on a conference call. "It's hard and you'll win a Nobel Prize if you figure it out. In fact, I’ll give you mine."

The leading theory for the universe's accelerating girth is an anti-gravity force called dark energy, but that's pure speculation at this point. New observatories providing deep and wide views of the universe will help, but what is really needed to resolve the puzzle is a new conceptual framework.

"At best we will get some clues about the nature of dark energy (from observations) but we won’t really resolve it until some brilliant person, the next Einstein-like person, is able to get the idea of what's going on and we can test that idea," Riess told Discovery News.

Riess shares the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with University of California-Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, who headed a rival team looking at the same phenomena, and with American-Australian Brian Schmidt, 44, a professor of astronomy at the Australian National University, who worked with both teams.

"It’s going to be a huge job for us to get to the bottom of what's going on here," Perlmutter, who turned 52 last week, tells Discovery News.

Evidence, which is still being collected, comes from measuring the brightness of exploding stars called supernova, which emit roughly the same amount of light wherever and whenever they're found. If you know you're looking at 100-watt light bulb, for example, you can tell how far away it is based on how much of the light you can see. From the observations of supernovae, scientists were able to determine that the universe is expanding at a faster rate now than it did in its younger days.

Perlmutter's team began by observing the rate of expansion of the distant universe and comparing it with today's acceleration. Riess' team worked from present day, back to the past. During presentations of research papers at science conferences, they came to realize that they were both making the same bizarre findings, so while there was competition, there also was comfort that the weirdness was not an error in instrument, technique or judgment.

Read more at Discovery News

Doomsdays That Never Happened

Last week, the mischievous eggheads of Improbable Research -- which publishes the mock journal Annals of Improbable Research, among other activities -- gathered at Harvard University's Sanders Theater to award the annual Ig Nobel Prizes in honor of scientific achievement that first makes you laugh, and then makes you think.

It's kind of a dubious honor to receive an Ig Nobel: some scientists are tickled by the prospect, like physicist Andre Geim, who won in 2000 for his research on levitating frogs. Others? Not so much. But a few recipients always show up for the ceremony to accept their prizes, regardless. Such was not the case for the winners of this year's Ig Nobel Mathematics Prize, awarded to:

    Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Making predictions about the end of the world as we know it is pretty much a stock in trade for crackpots; expect to hear a rising chorus of panicked doomsday prophets next year as we move inevitably towards Dec. 21, 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar -- plus a nifty planetary alignment (the Earth, the sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy) that, as Neil de Grasse Tyson is more than happy to tell you, occurs every year:




Unusual planetary alignments are a common culprit when it comes to doomsday prophecies (along with comets or asteroids). The technical term is syzgy, and it narrowly refers to a three-body system -- usually the sun, the earth, and either the moon or another planet in the solar system that is either in conjunction or opposition to the other bodies.

But in the broader sense, it's applied to any unusual conjunction of planets. The term might be familiar to fans of The X-Files; it was the title of an early episode in the series, where a key plot rested on an unusual planetary alighment.

So these kinds of predictions are common; they're also usually wrong, and this year's motley collection of Ig Nobel doomsday prophets is no exception. I suppose they can take comfort in the fact that they're in very good company. Here's just a sampling of famous failed Doomsday predictions from eras past, most of which sought to place the blame squarely on the cosmos.

2800 B.C. One of the earliest known Doomsday Predictions was inscribed on an acient Assyrian clay tablet. Loosely translated, it read, "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common."

February 1, 1524. London astrologers were convinced that odd planetary activity would give rise to a second Great Flood, causing 20,000 residents to panic and flee to higher ground.

1881. A 16th-century British prophetess named Mother Shipton supposedly wrote that the world would end in 1881, although the publisher of said prophecy, one Charles Hindley, later admitted he made the whole thing up to sell more books.  That didn't stop Scottish astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth from finding "clues" in the Great Pyramids of Giza indicating the world would indeed end in 1881.

May 18, 1910. This date marked the return of Halley's Comet, along with the usual doomsday fears -- in this case, the suspicion that the human race would be wiped out by noxious gases in the comet's tail.  When Halley's comet swung by Earth on April 29, 1987, doomsday prophet Leland Jensen predicted a collision between it and the Earth that would lead to mass extinction. He, too, was wrong. Coincidental side note: author Mark Twain -- born in 1835, another Halley's Comet year -- correctly "predicted" he would die when the comet returned in 1910. Sometimes the universe just likes to mess with you.

Read more at Discovery News

Powerful Chile Telescope Opens its Eyes

A much anticipated telescope has finally opened its eyes. And, oh, the wonders it can see...

The very first images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submilimeter Array, or ALMA, have been released to the public today. With just this first image, the potential of the new instrument to peer into the darkest and most exciting recesses of the universe can be seen. And the telescope hasn't even begun.

In the picture above, we can see a multi-wavelength composite of the galaxies NGC4038 and NGC4039, better known as the Antennae. The white and pink are from Hubble Telescope data, the blue from the radio emission seen by the Very Large Array, and the yellow and orange the new contributions from ALMA. The Antennae are a pair of spiral galaxies in the process of smashing together.

When galaxies collide, no stars collide due to their immense distances from each other, but gas can collide, igniting one of the grandest fireworks displays in the cosmos.

New stars are born, burn brightly, and die in fantastic supernovae in the span of just tens of millions of years. The complex process of star formation itself, however, is still a great puzzle for astronomers to piece together.

This is one area where ALMA will shine. Millimeter and submillimeter wave radiation can penetrate the thick, obscuring dust that surrounds the forming stars in the earliest stages. In the image below, the yellow and orange represents the emission seen by ALMA, tracing star formation even where the visible light image shows only a dark region.

Though an impressive amount of science has been done with previous mm/sub-mm telescopes, they lacked the sensitivity and ability to see fine details. They laid the groundwork whereas ALMA will be the first major workhorse telescope in these bands.

Observing at these wavelengths is very challenging because of the amount of water in Earth's atmosphere. Water absorbs and distorts the mm/sub-mm light coming from space, so astronomers had to go to the high desert region of the Chilean Andes in order to build this telescope. When completed, it will have 66 individual antennas working as one complete telescope using one of my favorite techniques ever, interferometry.

Though it can take a lot of work to produce an image from a radio interferometer, especially one with so many challenges from the atmosphere, ALMA has been designed to calibrate for weather effects and eventually have a pipeline process for data so that astronomers new to radio astronomy can get science-quality data for their work with little tweaking.

I should note, also, that ALMA's power is not only in imaging but in spectroscopy. The light collected by ALMA can be spread out by frequency (or wavelength, depending on your tastes) where tons and TONS of emission lines can be seen from molecules in space. The identities of many of these molecules are unknown, so ALMA will be like a chemistry lab for the universe as well, with its own set of tools.

On a personal note, I've been hearing about ALMA since I was a wee undergrad just getting into this radio astronomy business. I heard it discussed while I was a summer student at MIT's Haystack Observatory in 2003, and a little more when I got my first internship at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the organization contributing the US share of the telescope's development.

I even visited the three test antennas out in New Mexico when they were decided on final designs. Now, I live and work in Charlottesville, home of the North American ALMA Science Center at NRAO headquarters. I've seen engineers designing and building special receivers for the telescopes at the NRAO Technology Center. We even have a joke amongst the grad students that no astronomer can give a talk in Charlottesville without mentioning ALMA somewhere in the talk!

So, yeah, though I've been watching from the sidelines, I am thrilled to see this come to fruition after the dedicated hard work of so many people for so long.

Read more at Discovery News

Beheaded Archbishop's Face Revealed

The face of a 14th-century former Archbishop of Canterbury has been revealed 630 years after he was beheaded by angry peasants.

Resembling a character out of a science fiction movie, the medieval cleric Simon of Sudbury now stares at visitors in St. Gregory's Church at Sudbury in Suffolk, where the 3-D model is on permanent display alongside the original skull.

"There was a gasp when people saw what he looked like as his sculpture was unveiled. He was compared to characters such as Spock and Shrek, and some were surprised by the size of him. Indeed, he is quite a big guy," forensic artist Adrienne Barker from the University of Dundee told Discovery News.

Simon of Sudbury, who was Chancellor of Salisbury and Bishop of London before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1375, crowned King Richard II at Westminster Abbey in 1377.

Named Lord Chancellor of England three years later, the mild and gentle archbishop soon became the target of the peasants' hatred.

Seen as responsible for introducing the third poll tax, Simon met a grisly end when insurgents stormed the Tower of London during the Peasants' Revolt, or the Great Rising of 1381. They dragged him from his chamber to Tower Hill, struck off his head and placed it on a spike on Tower Bridge.

It is believed that the gruesome trophy was spotted by a man from Sudbury, who grabbed it in the middle of the night and brought it back to his hometown in a barrel of brine.

While the archbishop's body was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, the head has been kept at St. Gregory's Church at Sudbury in Suffolk ever since.

To reconstruct the archbishop's face, Barker first carried out CT scans on his partly mummified skull.

The scans provided grim details about the execution.

"The CT images showed evidence of only one blow, which would have cut through the neck tissue at least halfway and would have severed the cervical spinal nerve 4, causing respiratory arrest," Barker said.

"This is not to say that there weren't more blows; however these would have occurred to tissues we no longer had access to," she added.

Barker, who created a website detailing how the reconstruction worked step by step, made use of known measurements of the thickness of soft tissue at key areas on human faces.

Once a cast of the skull was produced, she stuck in wooden pegs cut to the lengths of the desired tissue thickness on the corresponding points of the skull.

Read more at Discovery News

Beetles Die During Sex With Beer Bottles

Besotted beetles are dying while trying to get it on with discarded brown beer bottles, according to research conducted by Darryl Gwynne, a University of Toronto Mississauga professor.

It's a case of mistaken attraction, because the beer bottles happen to possess all of the features that drive male Australian jewel beetles wild. They're big and orangey brown in color, with a slightly dimpled surface near the bottom (designed to prevent the bottle from slipping out of one's grasp) that reflects light in much the same way as female wing covers.

As a result, the beer bottles are irresistible to the male insects, which will die trying to mate with them in the hot Australian sun.

Gwynne made these observations with colleague David Rentz. This week they were awarded with an Ig Nobel Prize at Harvard University.

The Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prizes, are awarded annually by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to first make people laugh and then make them think." The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology.

"I'm honored, I think," Gwynne, who is a professor of biology, was quoted as saying in a press release. "Really, we've been sitting here by the phone for the past 20 plus years waiting for the call. Why did it take them so long?"

Gwynne and Rentz were conducting field work in Western Australia when they noticed something unusual along the side of the road.

He explained, "We were walking along a dirt road with the usual scattering of beer cans and bottles when we saw about six bottles with beetles on top or crawling up the side. It was clear the beetles were trying to mate with the bottles."

The bottles –- stubbies as they are known in Australia, Canada and a few other countries –- resemble a "super female" jewel beetle. Male beetles are so captivated by the bottles that they will gird their loins and go through the expected motions, refusing to leave until they fry to death, are consumed by hungry ants, or are physically removed by the researchers.

The male beetles are very particular about the bottles. Beer cans or wine bottles do nothing for them. It's all about the shape, color, and texture, and doesn't have anything to do with booze. As the researchers wrote, "Not only do western Australians never dispose of a beer bottle with beer still in it, but many of the bottles had sand and detritus accumulated over many months."

Read more at Discovery News

Getting Intimate with a Black Hole Behemoth

Black holes have captured our imagination and fascination since they were first hinted to exist in the universe. People love to ask about black holes, how they work, how we know they are there.

My favorite black holes are the monsters that live in the centers of most galaxies where they have the potential to make themselves known through powerful processes that can be seen across the universe.

Active galactic nuclei, or AGNs, are the bright, sometimes chaotic, always powerful regions around a supermassive black hole that is eating up the surrounding material. How massive? Try millions, even billions of times the mass of our sun, which is something like 300,000 times the mass of our whole planet. So yeah, "behemoth" doesn't even begin to describe it.

So far, we know that when material gets pulled into a black hole, it is gone from the observable universe for good. So, how can we see so much activity in an AGN? Well, not all of the material makes it in, and the stuff that does sure can make its presence known beforehand.

Astronomers have been plugging away at describing the details of these regions for decades, figuring out all the complex balances of radiation pressure and gas pressure and turbulent velocities and rotational velocities and so much more. Yet, the complex puzzle has yet to be solved.

No wonder it's taken a team of 26 astronomers on four continents to get the latest, finest probe of the AGN of a galaxy called Markarian 509.

This "test case" went under extreme scrutiny by 5 different space telescopes in order to probe the finer effects of the supermassive black hole on its surroundings. The AGN was monitored in visible, x-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL satellites.

Astronomers go to such high frequencies when studying AGN because these show where some of the most energetic processes are happening. After monitoring in this way for six weeks, they acquired deep observations with two of the best imaging telescopes in space, the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory. To top it off, the satellite Swift monitored the galaxy at several wavelength through the whole campaign.

Read more at Discovery News

Dead Sea Not Quite Dead Yet

The Dead Sea is not really dead. Freshwater springs are still feeding the rapidly drying body of water.

A collaborative team of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and the Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology in Germany used highly skilled divers to observe the springs and undersea life. The scientists knew the springs and the organisms that grew around them were there, but they has never been able to observe them directly.

"While researchers have known for decades that the 'Dead' Sea was a misnomer, the rich variety of life as evidenced in the vicinity of the springs was unexpected," said Danny Ionescu of the Max Planck Institute in a press release.

"While there are no fish present, carpets of micro-organisms that cover large seafloor areas contain considerable richness of species," Ionescu said.

"The micro-organisms in the Dead Sea water mainly belong to the domain Archaea and they number around 1,000 to 10,000 per milliliter, much lower than regular sea water," said Ionescu. "Never before have microbial mats/ biofilms been found in the Dead Sea and not much is known about sediment micro-organisms in the Dead Sea."

The Dead Sea itself is dying. The salty sea has been shrinking by about three feet per year because its main source of fresh water, the Jordan River, is used to give drinking water to Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians. The famous Jordan River, site of Jesus' baptism, is siphoned off just below the Sea of Galilee.

Read more at Discovery News