Post-Dinos Mammal Was Fat and Slow

Many of the mammals that emerged right after the non-avian dinosaur extinction were hearty creatures, as exemplified by Ernanodon, a beast described in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The skeleton that is the focus of the study is nearly complete, revealing how this early mammal looked in the flesh and lived.

"Ernanodon was a badger-sized, rather chunky mammal with a short square skull, extremely reduced dentition and big claws on the forelimbs," lead author Peter Kondrashov told Discovery News.

"The structure of the forelimb indicates that this animal was doing a lot of digging, probably mostly in the search of food," added Kondrashov, who is an associate professor and chair of the Anatomy Department at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine.

He and colleague Alexandre Agadjanian analyzed the skeleton, which dates to the Late Paleocene (60 to 55 million years ago). This Ernanodon individual lived in Mongolia. Other, less complete, remains were previously found in China.

"Ernanodon is a unique find and represents one of the most complete skeletons ever collected from the Paleocene of the Naran Bulak locality," said Agadjanian, who works at the Borissiak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The animal's hind limbs were almost flat-footed, so the researchers don't think Ernanodon was much of a runner. It instead appears to have spent most of its days digging and eating, without much chomping.

"Based on the structure of the teeth -- very thin enamel layer, reduced tooth size -- it appears that the food was rather soft and did not require a lot of chewing," Kondrashov explained. "Similar dental structure is observed in mammals that feed on termites, ants and other social insects, so we think that it was specialized in feeding on social insects as well."

While Ernanodon is long gone and has no direct descendants, the scientists believe this animal was related to a group of extinct mammals known as palaeanodonts. They too had bulky bodies, tiny teeth, and big claws for digging.

These animals are, in turn, related to modern mammals called pangolins, or scaly anteaters, which live in Africa and Asia.

Based on the earlier evidence for Ernanodon, scientists thought the then enigmatic mammal was related to modern armadillos or sloths. While pangolins somewhat resemble these animals in appearance and behavior, they represent a different genus and species.

Read more at Discovery News

Sea Creature Unchanged for 500 Million Years

Humans tend to think that change means progress, always leading to something better, but tiny sea creatures known as rhabdopleurids prove that staying the course can sometimes be even more successful.

These animals reside on the ocean floor where they build their homes out of collagen on the shells of dead clams. It may not be an extravagant existence, but they've lived this way for 500 million years, according to a new study in the journal Lethaia.

What's even more interesting is that they've outlasted a more elaborate species that descended from a common ancestor.

"We think that change is always going to lead us to a better place, that evolution is always going to lead to something better," said lead author Charles Mitchell, a University of Buffalo geology professor. "But all this progress in making all these wonderful pelagic graptolites didn't lead them to take over the world. They didn’t survive, but these simple dudes, these bottom-dwelling creatures, did."

"Pelagic graptolites" were ancient zooplankton that went extinct around 350 million years ago. They evolved rapidly, splitting into many new species and evolving many new traits. Some of this happened because they were living closer to the ocean's surface, which tends to be more unstable.

In the meantime, the rhabdopleurids hardly changed, doing their clam and collagen thing over the eons. (They secrete the collagen themselves, so that's not coming from the shellfish.)

Here's what a colony of them looks like:

In this case, the conservative approach won out and the rhabdopleurids lived happily ever after until the present. You can still find them now, living in areas from Bermuda to the Bering Sea.

"High speciation rates generally go hand in hand with high extinction rates, and likewise low with low," Mitchell said. "Conservative lineages may weather the storms of climate change and other events, but do not become big parts of the ecosystem, whereas the major players are impressive but often brought low by mass extinction and other ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.'"

Read more at Discovery News

9/11 Monuments on Mars

Rocks are phenomenal time keepers. Their composition, shape, and age can make an otherwise barren environment reveal its secrets.

On Mars, rocks are front and center in the ongoing quest to uncover the planet's history and find evidence of past life. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to send men to Mars yet; men with their built-in geology kits: eyes, hammer-wielding hands, and clever brains.

Instead, we send geology-capable surrogates in the form of rovers like Spirit and Opportunity. And in the case of these two rovers, their geologic instruments are also a tribute to the victims of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Smashing a rock with a rover's arm is a little dicey and potentially very problematic. So the MER team behind Spirit and Opportunity (both of which landed on Mars in 2004) came up with an easier and safer way to see inside a rock: scrape away its weathered surface. Then individual instruments -- spectrometers to determine composition, magnets to collect magnetic dust particles, and a microscopic imager for high resolution photos -- could do the science. The tool for this first step, scraping into the rocks, was the rock abrasion tool or RAT.

The small tube-shaped RAT, about the size of a soda can, was designed to grind and brush away dirt from a rock’s surface. The result was a small circular depression revealing the rock’s interior. Because the tool’s small parts were prone to clogging with dust and rock shavings, each instrument also included a wire brush to keep the “teeth” clean and maintain its cutting power. This quick fix also had the benefit of avoiding cross contaminating between different rocks.

The RATs were designed and built by Honeybee Robotics, a New York City company created and led Steve Gorevan. Founded in 1983, Honeybee got its first NASA contract in 1986. Since then, the company has worked on over 100 NASA projects with nearly all the the agency’s centers -- fitting since Gorevan pursued engineering because of a childhood desire to work for NASA.

But Gorevean isn’t just clever about engineering, he’s also clever about his health and fitness. In 2001, though he lived just blocks away from Honeybee’s Manhattan offices, he biked to work along a circuitous route that took him through the plaza at the World Trade Center.

On the morning of Sept. 11, he heard jet engines on his ride. Not the sound of a regular approach to LaGuardia or JFK Airports, either, but the out-of place sound of engines accelerating and flying too low to the ground. Then he heard a crash. He stopped and got off his bike. Standing in the street with a dozen or so others, he stared at the flames spewing out of the North tower. After a minute, he hopped back on his bike and pedaled the mile north to Honeybee.

Honeybee employees watched the morning’s events unfold from their building’s rooftop. They saw the towers fall and watched as masses migrated away from the site, ghostlike from a layer of soot. But work at Honeybee couldn’t stop; employees couldn't put their work on hold to help the city recover. They had to go to Mars.

Steve Kondos, the JPL engineer in charge of the Honeybee RAT contract, came up with the way for the New York company to honor the victims: include material from the wreckage of the World Trade Center on the rovers. A lasting tribute on Spirit and Opportunity from the whole MER team.

Rather than having a Honeybee employee walk over to a fire station and ask for a piece of metal, the idea went through formal channels all the way to mayor Rudy Giuliani who approved the idea. Less than three months later, a representative from the mayor’s office arrived at Honeybee’s building with a box. It contained debris from both towers: a steel bracket, two large bolts, and a twisted plate of aluminum. The acrid smell that had permeated the city after the attacks was also preserved in that small box.

Read more at Discovery News

Aftermath of World Trade Center Attack

These two images show New York City in the aftermath of the World Trade center attack in 2001.

Above, is a true-color image taken from the Landsat 7 satellite using the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) on Sept. 12, 2001, at roughly 11:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

Image courtesy USGS Landsat 7 team, at the EROS Data Center. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

Below is the perspective seen from the International Space Station on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

"It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are," said ISS Commander Frank Culbertson of Expedition 3.

From Discovery News

Evolution Beats Creationism in South Korea Textbook Battle

There’s been a victory for sense and science in South Korea, as the government there has rejected calls to drop references to the evolution of birds from the national school curriculum.

As previously reported on Wired.co.uk, pressure group Society for Textbook Revise had managed to persuade textbook publishers to drop sections from their books that discussed the evolution of horses and the Jurassic-era early avian-like dinosaur Archaeopteryx.

Now, however, a special panel convened by the South Korean government has recommended that the publishers ignore the creationists’ arguments — which should mean that textbooks reintroduce the old segments before the start of the next school year.

The argument of the Society for Textbook Revise — an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research — rested on there being debate among evolutionary scientists over whether Archaeopteryx could fly, or glide, or merely had feathers for decoration. This disagreement was extrapolated to cast doubt on the whole evolutionary history of birds.

In response, South Korea’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology set up a panel experts to assess the campaign’s claims. They disagreed that their Archaeopteryx objection was a valid argument, and said it should remain in the textbooks. The campaign group also claimed that a section on the evolution of the horse was too simplistic, which the panel agreed with — but they have merely recommended replacing it with a more thorough explanation, or a new section on the evolution of another animal like the whale.

Read more at Wired Science

How Swine Flu Can Become Pandemic

A new influenza virus that can spread from pigs to people has put some public health officials and state-fair goers on edge this season, even though the virus so far has not posed a major threat.

The fear is that a random mutation could turn the virus into an infecting machine, leading to another swine flu pandemic, like the 2009 H1N1 outbreak that may have killed more than half a million people around the world in its first year of circulation.

A new study illustrates one way that the next flu pandemic might begin. Focusing on a variant of swine flu circulating in Korea, researchers discovered a gene mutation that makes the virus especially virulent.

It's not this particular virus that should cause concern at this point. Instead, the research represents an incremental step towards understanding what it is that turns a mild virus into a devastating one. By compiling a more complete library of such mutations, the hope is to better predict which animal viruses we should be most worried about and better prevent major outbreaks.

"This is not: Oh my gosh, we've got to run for the hills, this virus is coming," said Richard Webby, an influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, and one of the new study's authors. "We really want to be able to try to assign some sort of risk to viruses we find in animal populations, and to know which out of a huge diversity of viruses we in human health should be concerned about. It's very hard to do that at this stage."

Influenza viruses are constantly moving targets, said Daniel Perez, a virologist who works with influenza at the University of Maryland, College Park. Regularly and without warning, this group of viruses acquire new mutations that affect how they behave.

To better understand what makes some flu viruses more threatening than others, Webby and colleagues in both the United States and Korea looked at several viruses that are currently circulating only in Korean pigs but are closely related to strains found in North America. To see how those strains might affect people, the researchers used them to infect ferrets, which respond to flu viruses much like we do.

Most of the viruses caused only mild infections. But one virus, called Sw/1204, killed the animals within 10 days. And it spread from ferret to ferret through droplets that entered the air as the animals breathed.

Genetic analysis isolated two mutations that made the Sw/1204 virus more infectious than others. One mutation, called HA-225, had already been well studied, Webby said. It is known to affect the part of the virus that sticks to host cells, allowing infection to occur.

The other mutation, called NA-315, hadn't been implicated in influenza infections before. This mutation seems to influence the virus' ability to leave the host cell after it has replicated and go on to infect other cells.

It wouldn't be surprising if the same mutation appeared in other parts of the world, Perez said, because the Korean viruses used in the study are very similar to viruses circulating elsewhere.

Read more at Discovery News

Are Animal-Borne Diseases on the Rise?

A string of recent reports of people falling ill and dying of diseases that spread to people from animals might have you wondering: Are animal-borne diseases on the rise?

This summer, three people died and eight were infected with hantavirus -- a disease carried by rodents -- after visiting Yosemite National Park; a Colorado girl reportedly contracted the plague from flea bites she received while camping; researchers reported the cases of two Missouri men infected with a never-before-seen virus carried by ticks; and nearly 2,000 people across the United States fell ill with West Nile virus, which is carried by mosquitoes.

Experts say the number of new diseases crossing from animals to people has indeed increased in recent years, from fewer than 20 in the 1940s to about 50 in the 1980s, according to a 2008 study published in the journal Nature. Between 1990 and 2000, more than half of newly identified infectious diseases originated in wildlife, the study says.

It's possible the increase is partly due to better detection of diseases, as well as new technologies that allow researchers to better study viruses, said Tony Goldberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Veterinary Medicine.

But there is also evidence the rise represents a true increase in the number of diseases that spread to people from animals. "The general feeling is that something is changing," Goldberg said.

Global changes, including movement of people, deforestation and climate change, may all be contributing to the more rapid emergence of animal-borne diseases in people, Goldberg said.

For instance, the ticks that carry Lyme disease prefer the type of habitats that arise when forests are fragmented, as occurs with deforestation, Goldberg said. Deforestation is sometimes done for the development of new housing complexes close to the wilderness, bringing people into contact with these ticks, he said.

Global travel also allows diseases to spread quickly around the world. It's thought that West Nile virus, which arrived in New York City in 1999, came here from Europe or the Middle East, Goldberg said. The virus was first seen in Africa in the 1930s.

It's likely the next big infectious disease that will pose a threat to humans will come from animals, Goldberg said.

"That’s what almost everybody will put their money on," he said.

About three-quarters of all known human infectious diseases cross directly from animals to humans (like West Nile virus), or came from animals in the recent past (such as HIV), Goldberg said.

Avoiding risky interactions between animals and people, and educating people about ways to avoid exposure to animal-borne diseases, may help reduce the risk of new infectious diseases, Goldberg said.

Read more at Discovery News

Our Dangerous Galactic Passage

We're only a little more than three months away from the imaginary 2012 End of Times (based on silly misinterpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar). The 2012 doom and gloom folks have glommed onto all kinds of nonsensical predictions where the Milky Way galaxy disrupts us: the passage of the solar system across the galactic plane, or a supposed "grand alignment" with the galactic center will trigger a mysterious and nondescript celestial 'force.'

In reality, our Milky Way really does pose numerous hazards to Earth during the sun's orbital journey around the galactic center. But no future space disaster can be circled on a calendar on Dec. 21 or any other date.

The sun has completed 20 orbits of the galactic hub since Earth formed. Each orbit is called a galactic year -- a vast stretch of time (220 million Earth years) that the Mayans could have never imagined. Whatever cosmic catastrophes might have happened along the way, it has not prevented complex life from arising and evolving on Earth over roughly the past three galactic years. There have been attempts at statistically linking mysterious mass extinctions to cosmic disasters, but we simply don't have enough data, says Colin Norman the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

The reality is that the potential of navigational hazards along our galactic journey lie far into the future over many millions or billions of years. Our distant descendants could come up with strategies to guard against some of these mishaps. However, the biggest threat is from extremely rare energetic events in the galaxy, says Norman.

Killer catastrophes were much more frequent in the Milky Way's formative period, billions of years before Earth was born. Stars were being made at such a voracious rate -- and then quickly exploding -- that the galaxy would have been made uninhabitable by the radiation saturation, says Norman.

This is sobering because we suspect there could be ancient Methuselah planets in the galaxy that might have formed 12 billion years ago (as opposed to Earth’s 4.5 billion year birthday). But they would have been sterilized of life by radiation from multiple supernova and hot stellar winds from giant stars.

Over time there have been 1 billion supernovae in our galaxy. They accelerate cosmic rays that irradiate any nearby star systems. Even more devastating are so-called Quimby events. These are an unusual class of extraordinarily powerful supernova that defy conventional explanations for their power generation. It's hypothesized that these super-blasts only happen in very rare stars that are over 100 times the mass of our sun. There could have been 10 million of these popping off in our galaxy to date.

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) ratchet up the killer potential. It's estimated there have been 100,000 gamma-ray bursts over our galaxy's lifetime. These are produced by the biggest bangs since the Big Bang: hypernovae. These titanic stellar detonations unleash 1,000 times the energy of a supernova. It is concentrated in a narrow Death Star-like beam. The GRB beam evaporates anything that is nearby and along its path. The radiation would catastrophically damage DNA even over interstellar distances.

When the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide in about another 10 galactic years there will be supersonic collisions between gas clouds that generate shockwaves. There will also be gravitational tidal torques on the stellar distribution.

Planetary systems will survive the fireworks, but the clouds of cometary embryos surrounding these systems (known as the Oort cloud for our solar system) could be disrupted. The planets could then be subjected to devastating comet showers. However, advanced civilizations would have the technological prowess to set up a planetary protection system to deflect space invaders, like the classic Atari arcade game Asteroids.

The frequency of supernova blasts will go up as a firestorm of new star birth sweeps across the merging galaxies. But advanced civilizations might set up radiation storm cellars by burrowing underground, or even hollowing out asteroids.

When the supermassive black holes in the cores of the Milky Way and Andromeda merge, they will send out a gravitational wave that will momentarily distort the shape of every object in the galaxy. But not to worry. Earth's diameter would briefly "squish" by merely one-millionth of an inch.

There will not be any residual dust and gas in space to feed the 10 million solar mass newly merged black hole. All the Milky Way's nebulosity will have all been blown away by the star formation firestorm. Therefore the elliptical galaxy formed from the Milky Way-Andromeda merger will not have a blazing active galactic nucleus powered by a well-fed black hole.

This is very good news. Otherwise the blast of radiation from an active black hole would increase the pressure of the tenuous interstellar medium by a factor of as much as one million. This would crush the heliosphere around the sun, a roughly 25 billion-mile diameter bubble of solar charged particles and plasma that protects our planet from low energy cosmic rays from interstellar space and solar wind particles.

Read more at Discovery News

New Approach to Cosmic Lithium in the Early Universe

Astrophysicists have explored a discrepancy between the amount of lithium predicted by the standard models of elemental production during the Big Bang and the amount of lithium observed in the gas of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy near to our own.

J. Christopher Howk, Nicolas Lehner and Grant Mathews of the Center for Astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame published a paper this week in the journal Nature titled "Observation of interstellar lithium in the low-metallicity Small Magellanic Cloud."

"The paper involves measuring the amount of lithium in the interstellar gas of a nearby galaxy, but it may have implications for fundamental physics, in that it could imply the presence of dark matter particles in the early universe that decay or annihilate one another," Howk says. "This may be a probe of physics in the early universe that gives us a handle on new physics we don't have another way to get a handle on right now."

The team, using observations from European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, measured the amount of lithium in the interstellar gas of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which has far fewer star-produced heavy elements than the Milky Way. In addition to the production of elements by fusion in the core of stars, scientists believe conditions immediately after the Big Bang led to the formation of some elements, including a small amount of lithium.

Stars in the Milky Way have about four times less lithium on the surface than expected by Big Bang predictions. Some scientists suggest that stellar activity might destroy lithium, or the element might sink from the surface through lighter hydrogen, but the remarkably consistent ratio from star to star is a challenge to those explanations. Observations of gas in the Small Magellanic Cloud revealed the amount of lithium that predictions say would have been produced at the Big Bang, but leave no room for subsequent production of the element.

One explanation could be a novel kind of physics operating at the Big Bang that left less lithium than the Standard Model predicts. To pursue this possibility, the team will conduct three nights of observations on the VLT in November. They will look for the lithium isotope 7Li in the Large Magellanic Cloud and 6Li in both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud. The standard model predicts that no 6Li was created at the Big Bang.

Read more at Science Daily

First Temple-Era Reservoir Found in Jerusalem

Archaeologists have found an ancient water reservoir in Jerusalem that may have been used by pilgrims coming to the Temple Mount, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.

The IAA said the cistern could have held 66,000 gallons (250 cubic meters) of water; it likely dates back to the era of the First Temple, which, according to the Hebrew Bible, was constructed by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C. and then destroyed 400 years later.

Israeli archaeologists believe the reservoir served the general public in the ancient city, but say its location hints at a role in the religious life of Jerusalem.

"Presumably the large water reservoir, which is situated near the Temple Mount, was used for the everyday activities of the Temple Mount itself and also by the pilgrims who went up to the Temple and required water for bathing and drinking," Tvika Tsuk, chief archaeologist of Israel's Nature and Parks Authority, said in a statement.

Excavation director Eli Shukron, with the IAA, said the reservoir also sheds new light on the extent of the public water system in Jerusalem hundreds of years ago. 

"It is now absolutely clear that the Jerusalem's water consumption during the First Temple period was not solely based on the output of the Gihon Spring, but that it also relied on public reservoirs," Shukron said in a statement. The Gihon Spring was the main source of water for the city.

The reservoir was exposed during excavations on a massive drainage channel dating to the Second Temple period, according to the IAA. When that channel was constructed, its builders had to remove or cut through existing rock-hewn structures along the route, such as this reservoir.

Read more at Discovery News