Genes Help Some Corals Handle the Heat

A key to saving coral from climate change may be hidden in the DNA of different populations of the same species of coral.

Nature prepared one population for stress more than the other. A Standford University team of biologists analyzed the genes of two populations and identified 60 DNA sequences activated in the hardy variety, but not the other. The biologists found the activated sequences when the corals were stressed under conditions that cause bleaching, the heat-induced epidemic that reduces coral reefs around the world to pale skeletons.

Two groups of the species, Acropora hyacinthus, on Ofu Island, American Samoa lived in different environments. The group that resided in waters that changed dramatically in temperature, pH, and oxygen levels were able to cope with conditions that killed their cousins. These stress-resistant corals were able to withstand temperatures up to 34 degrees Celsius (93 F) and daily fluctuations of 6 degrees C (10.8 F).

The biologists suggested in their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that surviving such dramatic natural changes on a daily basis may give this group an advantage in dealing with climate change. Understanding what genes allow them to survive could help save other coral.

The 60 genes they identified in the hardy coral related to heat shock proteins, antioxidant enzymes, cell death regulation, tumor suppression, innate immune response, and cell adhesion. Along with hardy genes, the coral were also found to have a more heat tolerant form of the symbiotic algae, Symbiodinium that feed the coral with the products of photosynthesis in trade for inorganic nutrients that the coral provide.

From Discovery News

Jurassic Ecosystems Were Similar to Modern: Animals Flourish Among Lush Plants

CO2 levels in fossil soils from the Late Jurassic confirm that climate, vegetation and animal richness varied across the planet 150 million years ago, suggesting future human changes to global climate will heavily impact plant and animal life.

In modern ecosystems, it's widely known that animals flourish in regions where the climate and landscape produce lush vegetation.

A new study set out to discover whether that same relationship held true 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic when dinosaurs roamed Earth.

"The assumption has been that ancient ecosystems worked just like our modern ecosystems," said paleontologist and lead author Timothy S. Myers, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. "We wanted to see if this was, in fact, the case."

To test the theory, Myers analyzed fossil soils from the Late Jurassic by measuring the ratios of carbon isotopes. His analysis indicated that the Jurassic soils contained high levels of CO2 from vegetation.

From that, Myers was able to infer the presence of lush plant life in certain regions during the Jurassic. The soils came from locales where scientists previously have gathered animal fossils -- North America, Europe and Africa. Combining the data with the known fossil sampling allowed Myers to confirm that the modern relationship between animals and vegetation held true even millions of years ago.

"Our analysis represents the first time that anyone has tried to apply ecological modeling to this relationship in the fossil record," Myers said.

Relatively few places in the world are well-sampled for terrestrial fossils, so Myers' discovery of a new use for an already existing method represents a useful tool, he said. The new use allows scientists to tap the geochemical data of soils from anywhere in the world and from other geologic time periods to infer the relative abundance of plants and animals, particularly for areas where fossils are lacking.

"This not only provides a more complete picture of the ancient landscape and climate in which ancient animals lived," Myers said. "It also illustrates that climate and biota have been ecologically connected for many millions of years and that future human-caused changes to global climate will have profound impacts on plant and animal life around the world."

Myers and his co-researchers reported the findings in Paleobiology, "Estimating Soil pCO2 Using Paleosol Carbonates: Implications for the Relationship Between Primary Productivity and Faunal Richness in Ancient Terrestrial Ecosystems."

Co-authors were SMU sedimentary geochemist Neil J. Tabor and paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Octávio Mateus, New University of Lisbon, Portugal.

"Devising new and creative methods to understand how Earth and life have functioned together in the past is the foundation for predicting the future of life on our planet," said Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist and professor in SMU's Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. "It is the only approach that provides a long enough perspective of what is possible."

New method applied to old hypothesis confirms regional variability

Typically researchers count the number of animal species discovered in a region to determine how many different types of animals once lived there. Scientists call that a measure of faunal richness.

Myers took a different approach. Using a traditional method typically used to estimate carbon dioxide in the ancient atmosphere, Myers instead applied it to estimate the amount of CO2 in ancient soils.

Measurements were taken from nodules of calcite that form in soil as a result of wet and dry seasons. These nodules take on the isotopic signature of the CO2 gas around them, which is a mixture derived from two sources: the atmosphere, which leaves a more positive isotopic signature, and plants decaying in the soil, which leave a more negative isotopic signature.

A higher volume of CO2 from plants indicates a lusher, wetter environment.

"There's a lot more litter fall in an environment with a lot of plants, and that produces a lot of organic material in the soil, creating CO2. So we see more soil-produced CO2, displacing the atmospheric CO2. These are established relationships," Myers said.

"Our method can be used to infer relative levels of richness for areas where soils have been preserved, but where fossils are lacking because conditions were unsuitable for their preservation," he said.

The research demonstrates creative use of existing geological data, said co-author Tabor, an expert in ancient soil in SMU's Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

"Vertebrate paleontologists have been accumulating information about vertebrate fossils in the Jurassic for well over 100 years. In addition, geochemists have been systematically sampling the composition of ancient soils for several decades," Tabor said. "In these respects, the data that are the foundation of this study are not extraordinary. What is remarkable, though, is combining the paleontology and geochemistry data to answer large-scale questions that extend beyond the data points -- specifically, to answer questions about ancient ecosystems."

Data from Morrison Formation, Central Africa and Portugal

Myers tested Upper Jurassic soil nodules collected from the Morrison Formation in the western United States. The formation extends from Montana to New Mexico and has been the source of many dinosaur fossil discoveries.

He also analyzed Upper Jurassic soil nodules from Portugal, another location well-sampled for dinosaur fossils. The region's paleoclimate was broadly similar to that of the Morrison Formation.

In addition, Myers tested a small Upper Jurassic core sample from Central Africa, where there's no evidence of any major terrestrial life. Unique minerals in the rocks indicate that the region had an arid environment during the Late Jurassic.

Based on their hypothesis, the researchers expected to see regional variations in plant productivity -- the amount of new growth produced in an area over time, which is an indirect measure of the amount of plant life in an environment. Forests, savannas and deserts all have different amounts of plant productivity, although those specific ecosystems can't be identified on the basis of plant productivity alone.

The researchers expected to see higher plant productivity for Portugal than for the Morrison Formation, with the lowest productivity in Central Africa.

"Essentially that's what we found," Myers said. "We understand it's tenuous and not a trend, but few places in the world are well-sampled. However, it's still a useful tool for places where all we have are the soil nodules, without well-preserved fauna."

Soil nodules are fairly common, Myers said. They form as a result of seasonally dry conditions and may be preserved in all but the wettest environments. Since they harden into mineralized clods, they are easy to spot and sample as they weather out of ancient soil profiles.

Read more at Science Daily

Ancient Remedies Found in Shipwreck

An ancient doctor likely knew the composition of the medicines loaded aboard a doomed ship preparing to sail into the Mediterranean. But it would be another approximately 2,200 years until anyone else learned the ingredients of the six grey pills, which were lost beneath the waves along with the rest of the ship, known as the "Relitto del Pozzino."

A team of Italian archeologists, chemists and biologists deciphered the chemical clues to the composition of an ancient medicine packed in the cargo of a ship sunk in 18 meters (59 feet) of water off the coast of Tuscany.

The six flat disks were held in a tin container which was probably once held in a larger wooden box that rotted away. Other medical implements of the time were found nearby.

Discovery News reported on an earlier study that discovered the medicine contained a mixture of mineral and plant materials, but not exactly which chemicals.

The most abundant ingredients were zinc compounds. Zinc compounds, called "calmina," were popular in ancient medicine just as they are today in the form of calamine lotion, or zinc oxide.

The tablets also contained pollen from a variety of insect-pollinated plants, which suggested a bee product was included in the medine. Bees also contributed the wax used in making the pills.

Other ingredients included iron oxide, starch, pine resin, and a mixture of plant and animal lipids, the building blocks of fats.

The researchers deduced that these tablets may have been an eye medicine, since their shape and ingredients are consistent with ancient descriptions of ocular unguents.

Read more at Discovery News

Black Hole Unleashes Supermassive Belch

While innocently surveying the Cosmos, astronomers serendipitously stumbled across a particularly uncouth galaxy. NGC 660 unleashed an epic belch, an event that we could see 44 million light-years distant.

This event emanated from the galaxy's core, around the likely location of a supermassive black hole.

To determine that the event was in fact triggered by NGC 660's central supermassive black hole and not a supernova, astronomers used the High Sensitivity Array (HSA) -- a global network of radio telescopes including the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the Arecibo Telescope, the National Science Foundation's 100-meter Green Bank Telescope, and the 100-meter Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany. They found five bright spots of radio emissions near the galaxy's core and not an expanding ring of material that would be synonymous with an exploding star.

"The discovery was entirely serendipitous. Our observations were spread over a few years, and when we looked at them, we found that one galaxy had changed over that time from being placid and quiescent to undergone a hugely energetic outburst at the end," Robert Minchin, of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, said in a statement.

"High-resolution imaging is the key to understanding what's going on," added Emmanuel Momjian, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "We needed to know if the outburst came from a supernova in this galaxy or from the galaxy's core. We could only do that by harnessing the high-resolution imaging power we get by joining widely-separated radio telescopes together."

The HSA employs the help of many radio antennae across the globe, all working in concert -- as an interferometer -- to gain incredibly high-resolution imagery deep inside the core of the galaxy. For example, in the above image, the radio insert represents just a single pixel of the optical image of NGC 660.

So why did the supermassive black hole in the galaxy's core belch? As we've learned from observations of the black hole behemoth in the center of the Milky Way, black holes consume anything that strays too close. Any dust, gas, planets, aliens or stars that fall into the black hole's gravitational well will be ripped apart and pulled into a violent accretion disk surrounding the black hole's event horizon.

Through processes that aren't fully understood, some of this matter is accelerated and ejected from the black hole's poles at relativistic speeds, generating superheated streams of gas. In the case of NGC 660, its black hole is likely feeding, erupting huge streams of radio-emitting gas, but the pattern of ejected gas isn't a simple case of two hot spots blasting from two poles; there appears to be five hot spots.

Read more at Discovery News

'Super Predator' Terrorized Jurassic Europe

Paleontologists have identified one of the world's oldest known "super predators," meaning carnivores that can feed on prey that's as large, or larger, than themselves.

The toothy beast, described in the latest issue of the Journal of Systematic Paleontology, was a marine crocodile that looked part shark and part sinister dolphin. Its scientific name is Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos, or "Tyrant Swimmer."

"Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos is the oldest known metriorhynchid macrophage -- an animal that was adapted to feeding on large-bodied prey," lead author Mark Young of the University of Edinburgh's School of Biological Sciences told Discovery News.

He explained that the term "metriorhynchid" refers to a group of marine crocodiles that were superficially similar to living dolphins.

"They lacked bony armor, had flipper-like forelimbs and had a tail fluke," he said.

This animal evolved from related species "that were opportunistic predators of small, fast moving prey." These marine hunters had narrow snouts and multiple teeth, but the teeth weren't serrated like those of Tyrant Swimmer, which also could open its mouth very wide.

Young and his colleagues studied the remains of Tyrant Swimmer, found in the Oxford Clay Formation. This is a Jurassic marine sedimentary rock formation underlying much of southeast England. The remains have been in storage for some time at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.

The super predator made the rounds outside of what is now the U.K. too.

"Tyrannoneustes is known from shallow marine deposits across Europe (England, France and Poland)," Young, who also works at the University of Southhampton's National Oceanography Centre, explained. "During the Middle Callovian 165 million years ago, much of Europe was covered by a shallow sea, creating a chain of large to small islands. Tyrannoneustes lived in this shallow sea, along with numerous other marine reptiles."

These reptiles included pliosaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Giant pliosaurs were even larger than the Tyrant Swimmer, so they might have feasted on the formidable species. As its name suggests, however, Tyrant Swimmer would have been swift in the water, so it likely could have out-swam possible predators and used the swimming prowess to capture its own prey.

As of now, no stomach contents for the Tyrant Swimmer have been located, so what it precisely ate remains a mystery.

The Middle Jurassic gave rise to other huge predators in both the sea and on land. One of the most bloodthirsty dinosaurs of the time was Allosaurus, known for its massive toothy skull on a short neck. Some dinosaurs of this genus could grow up to 28 feet long.

As for ecosystems today, the presence of such big hunters usually indicates a healthy food chain, with many animals down the line for predators to prey upon. When keystone species begin to decline, usually the entire ecosystem is in trouble.

Read more at Discovery News

Odd, Ancient Bird Had Sharp Teeth

The fossil skeleton of a bird with strange teeth that lived 125 million years ago has been discovered in China. The bird had bizarre ridges on its teeth that may have enabled it to crack open hard-shelled insects and snails, the researchers said.

The unusual fossil, described in the January issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, was so well preserved that some of its stomach contents were still present. The new find sheds light on the range of foods Earth's earliest birds ate during the dinosaur era.

"The teeth are weird and there are some stomach contents, which is unusual," said paleontologist Gareth Dyke, of the University of South Hampton in the U.K., who was not involved in the study. "It's more evidence for the uniqueness and range of ecological specialization that are seen in these particular Mesozoic birds."

Teeming with life

The new species' specimen was unearthed in the Liaoning province in China, where many fossils from the Cretaceous Period (the period from 145 million to 65 million years ago that was the end of the Mesozoic Era) have been found over the last 15 years, said study author Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. The primeval forest was teeming with ancient life, from pterodactyls and dinosaurs such as the microraptor to primitive lizards and various trees. The skies were also filled with birds, he said.

"This was clearly a hotspot of ancient bird biodiversity," Chiappe told LiveScience.

Toothy bird

The newly discovered bird, a robin-size creature called Sulcavis geeorum, lived between 121 million and 125 million years ago. Sulcavis geeorum belonged to a class of extinct toothed birds called Enantiornithines, which were the most numerous birds during the age of dinosaurs. The diminutive creature looked somewhat similar to modern-day songbirds, with a key difference: the bird had some very strange teeth.

The teeth of this tiny flier had sharp, pointy crowns. In addition, the fossil found by Chiappe's team had preserved tooth enamel that formed serrated ridges. Those serrated ridges probably enabled the birds to crack open the hard exoskeletons of insects, crabs or snails, Chiappe said.

The strange teeth may shed light on a prehistoric mystery of sorts: No one knows exactly why early birds had teeth. It's also unclear why they have lost their teeth at least four times since they first emerged in the fossil record. In fact, modern-day birds still have genes for teeth, but the genes are turned off, Chiappe said.

Read more at Discovery News

Earth-Sized Alien Worlds Orbit One in Six Stars

Four years ago, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in an attempt to learn just how common Earth-sized worlds are in the Milky Way galaxy.

On Monday, scientists unveiled part of the answer: About 17 percent -- one in six -- of Kepler's target stars have Earth-sized worlds orbiting closer to their parent stars than where Mercury orbits the sun.

With about 100 billions stars in the Milky Way galaxy, that means there's approximately 17 billion Earth-sized worlds, conclude astronomers who presented the research at the American Astronomical Society conference in Long Beach, Calif.

More work is needed to determine how many extrasolar 'Earths' orbit farther away from their parent stars in so-called "habitable zones" where temperatures are suitable for water to exist in a liquid state on the planet's surface. Water is necessary for life as we know it.

Overall, scientists determined that 17 percent of Kepler's target stars have a planet 0.8 to -1.25 times the size of Earth in an orbit of 85 days or less. In comparison, Mercury orbits the sun in 88 days. Earth is positioned at a 365-day orbit.

About 25 percent of Kepler's stars have a super-Earth that is 1.25 to twice as big as Earth in orbits of 150 days or less. The same percentage of stars have a mini-Neptune that is twice to four times as big as Earth in orbits up to 250 days long, reports astronomer Francois Fressin, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Bigger planets are much more rare. Three percent have large Neptune-class planets four to six times as big as Earth and five percent have gas giants six to 22 times Earth's mass in orbits of 400 days or less.

Fressin and colleagues also determined that except for gas giants, planets form around all types of stars, including red dwarfs, the most common type of star in the galaxy.

"When you get into the subject of habitability, which is a very sticky subject, then it might matter that you're around a red dwarf instead of a sun-like star," California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson told Discovery News.

"It could be that the 20 or 30 factors that go into habitability that we know of on the Earth might not be met on other planets at all, he said. For example, it might be very rare to have a planet like Earth that is only partially covered with water, instead of completely submerged or with no water at all.

"That's something that we can't even begin to address right now," Johnson said.

The Kepler telescope works by looking for a slight dimming in light coming from 160,000 target stars that is due to a planet passing by, or transiting, relative to the telescope's point of view.

Planets closer to their parent stars are easier to find because they transit more frequently. In time, astronomers intend to determine how many Earth-sized worlds are in Earth-like orbits.

Read more at Discovery News

When Is the Next Doomsday (Not) Going to Happen?

Take a deep breath; Dec 21, 2012 is behind us. The Mayan calendar end-of-world debacle is over: zip, zilch, gone!

The silliness, anxiety, and paranoia leading up to the predicted end of times was so bad that on Dec. 21st -- the appointed doomsday -- a worried citizen left a message on my office phone that accused me of skipping town to escape Armageddon.

If history is any example, the next cosmic doomsday prediction is always right around the corner. The Mayan blowout was just the latest in many centuries of bad calls by prognosticators who have the audacity to think they can divine the End of Everything.

So, to be a little preemptive, let's look at just three cosmic events that might start another pop culture panic. Thankfully these aren't born out of mythology, psychics, and misinterpreted archeoastronomy. They are real events that will inevitably be embellished by the imaginations of modern day soothsayers.

The Comet of the Century

Last September, the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) near Kislovodsk, Russia, discovered comet C/2012 S1 (ISON). Though its closest approach to Earth is a year away, the celestial visitor is already billed as the "comet of the century." That's because it may be a first-time visitor to the solar system that will warm and then erupt with a lot of outgassing from pristine ices.

On Nov. 28, 2013 the comet will skim above the sun's surface at a distance slightly greater than the separation of the Earth and moon. Not doubt there will be pseudoscience predictions of the comet wreaking havoc by raising tides on the sun. The exact opposite will be the case. The sun's tidal pull could tear apart the comet into small pieces, as has been the case for previous sungrazer-class comets.

Comet ISON is due to pass within 37 million miles of Earth in January 2014. I'm expecting to see all types of outrageous claims that the object's feeble gravity will yank on Earth to trigger volcanoes and earthquakes.

Comet ISON has been compared with the Great Comet of 1680 (in above illustration) which, according to contemporary accounts, caused New Yorkers to be "overcome with terror at a sight in the heavens such as has seldom greeted human eyes." A day of fasting and humiliation was set-aside in order that "the wrath of God might be assuaged."

Likewise, soothsayers will quickly note that the comet will be at it brightest one month before Christmas 2013. "This comet, if it lives up to its billing, certainly could point to the glorious soon coming of the Lord Jesus Christ from heaven!" predicts one religious website.

The fact that the comet is anticipated to get as bright as the moon will only fuel religious and mystical speculation about its timing and significance as an omen. Chill out folks, it's just another 4 billion year-old primeval chunk of ice from the solar system's deep freeze, the Oort cloud.

Asteroid Apophis

NASA keeps cataloging more Earth-threatening asteroids every year. But the asteroid Apophis, named after the Egyptian spirit of evil and destruction, is legendary because it will be a record-breaker.

On April, Friday the 13th of 2029 Apophis will skim below the orbits of communication satellites and briefly be a naked-eye object scooting over the mid-Atlantic ocean.

Earth's gravity will deflect the comet's trajectory. The worst-case scenario is that the chances of it striking Earth on its return on April 13, 2036 will increase to 1 in 5,500.

Apophis is the length of over three football fields. It packs enough kinetic energy to wipe out 10 million people with the power of 100,000 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. Even in this worst case scenario a direct hit would not obliterate all life on the planet. But it certainly would not be a good day for the human race.

People will get very squeamish over the possibility of Apophisgeddon despite the best low-probability collision estimate from astronomers. Parallels no doubt will be drawn to Biblical prophecy. This is especially true because the potentially destructive path of the asteroid crosses Middle East. South America and the west coast of Africa are also along the ground track.

Congress might even debate if steps should be taken to deflect the asteroid. But given that so many legislators are tone-deaf to global warming, I wouldn’t expect any preemptive actions to be funded.

Planetary Grand Alignment

Like clockwork so-called planetary grand alignments have taken place in 1962, 1982, and 2000. This does not mean that the planets line up like pearls on a string. But they sort of gang up on one side of the sun within an angle of roughly 10 to 30 degrees -- so the definition is a but mushy.

The uneventful year 1128 A.D. saw one of the tightest planetary alignments. The doomsday best seller The Jupiter Effect in 1982 spelled out an improbable chain of events that would be triggered by the planets' tug-of-war with the sun: tides raised on the sun's surface would increase sunspot activity, build up the solar wind, that would effect Earth's weather, and subsequently, Earth's spin rate, which would then trigger earthquakes.

No geological disasters happened in 1982 short of a 6.0 magnitude earthquake that killed 1,500 people in Dhamar, northern Yemen. In fact the celestial alignment allowed for NASA to pull off the Voyager 2 "grand tour" of the four outer gas giant planets from 1979 to 1989.

Jupiter contains more mass than all the other planets combined, and yet it is still less than 1 percent of the sun's mass. Therefore Jupiter's influence on the sun is inconsequential.

Alien astronomers could measure Jupiter's gravitational tug as an insignificant 270 mile-per-hour cyclic change in the sun's radial velocity over the planet's 12-year orbital period. Only if Jupiter was moved so close to the sun that its orbital period was measured in days, would some serious tidal effects be seen. This is observed with so-called "hot Jupiters," the exoplanet WASP-18 being the most extreme case.

Read more at Discovery News

Famed Roman Shipwreck Could Be Two

A dive to the undersea cliff where a famous Roman shipwreck rests has turned up either evidence that the wreck is enormous — or a suggestion that, not one, but two sunken ships are resting off the Greek island of Antikythera.

"Either way, it's an exciting result," said study researcher Brendan Foley, an archaeologist at Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution who presented the findings Jan. 4 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.

The Antikythera wreck is famed for the massive number of artifacts pulled from the site over the past century. First discovered in the early 1900s by local sponge divers, the wreck is most famous for the Antikythera mechanism, a complex bronze gear device used to calculate astronomical positions (and perhaps the timing of the Olympic games). Numerous bronze and marble statues, jars and figurines have also been pulled from the wreck. The ship went down in the first century B.C.

Remote wreck

The wreck is perched on a steep undersea cliff in water too deep for standard scuba gear. The undersea landscape also makes deploying remotely operated submersibles impossible, Foley said. In 1976, Jacques Costeau led a diving expedition to the site. Since then, it has been unexplored, thanks in part to its remote location in the strait between Crete and Peloponnese.

"This place is absolutely unspoiled," Foley said.

Led by Aggeliki Simossi, the director of the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, Foley and colleagues from Greece and Woods Hole watched footage and pored over logs from the 1976 dive. With so many artifacts already taken from the site, they knew there would be little evidence of the shipwreck exposed on the ocean floor. They'd have to match the underwater geology to find the wreck.

In October, diving with technical scuba gear and diver propulsion vehicles that look like underwater fans, the team found the sweet spot, marked by a scattering of amphora, or large curved jars.

Intact artifacts from the wreck were spread over a huge area, about 197 feet (60 meters) long at depths ranging from 114 feet to 197 feet (35 to 60 m), Foley said. That's large for an ancient shipwreck, Foley said, suggesting either a huge ship or perhaps more than one wreck. The findings are preliminary, Foley said, but the team may have ultimately been excavating 984 feet (300 m) away from the site explored by Cousteau. If that's the case, he said, they may have found a separate wreck — likely part of the same fleet as the original wreck that went down in the same storm.

More secrets

One reason for the researchers' uncertainty is the fact that they used Costeau's Antikythera expedition videos to gauge where to anchor their boat. Since some of the shots in the video were almost certainly staged, the researchers can't be sure they weren't diving at a site hundreds of yards away from the site explored in 1976.

Either way, the wreck site has many more artifacts to offer, the researchers found. They pulled one jar to the surface, which will undergo DNA testing to determine its contents. They also recovered two components of a lead anchor, which itself was resting on top of other artifacts, suggesting it was on deck when the ship went down.

"What else could be down there?" Foley said. "Are there more pieces of the known Antikythera mechanism? Is there another mechanism down there?"

The researchers plan to return to the area next year and will use metal detectors to check the site almost 1,000 feet away where Costeau's team may have really been, he said. There are no artifacts visible on the ocean floor other than the spot that Foley and his colleagues explored, but metal detectors should pick up on any remnants under the sand at the other site if there are in fact two wrecks.

Read more at Discovery News

Secret to Fish's Waterfall-Climbing Ability Found

A waterfall-climbing fish in Hawaii uses the same muscles to both rise and feed, researchers have discovered.

Scientists looked at the Nopoli rock-climbing goby (Sicyopterus stimpsoni), also known in Hawaiian as o'opu nopili. This plant-eating fish is found throughout Hawaii, and was once greatly relished as food, apparently being a favorite snack among priests.

Many gobies can inch their way up waterfalls with the aid of a sucker on their bellies formed from fused pelvic fins. The Nopoli rock-climbing goby, on the other hand, can climb waterfalls as tall as 330 feet (100 meters) with the aid of a second mouth sucker, which develops after their mouthparts move from a forward-facing position to under the body during a two-day-long metamorphosis into adulthood.

"For a human to go the equivalent distance based on body size, it'd be like doing a marathon, some 26 miles (42 kilometers) long, except climbing up a vertical cliff-face against rushing water," researcher Richard Blob, an evolutionary biomechanist at Clemson University in South Carolina, told LiveScience. Indeed, an old Hawaiian saying is that as the Nopili clings, so will luck.

The goby, which can grow up to 7 inches (18 centimeters) long as an adult, feeds by cyclically sticking the tip of its upper jaw against rock to scrape food off surfaces. This behavior is quite distinct from other Hawaiian gobies, which feed by sucking in food from the water. Given the apparent similarity of the climbing and feeding behaviors of the S. stimpsoni species, researchers thought one might have developed from the other.

"The fish gave us an opportunity to see how unusual behaviors evolved," Blob said.



To see if these behaviors really were as similar as they looked, the scientists captured Nopoli rock-climbing gobies from a stream on the island of Hawaii by net while snorkeling and kept them in aquaria. They next filmed the gobies' jaw-muscle movements as the fish climbed and ate, either scraping food off glass microscope slides or climbing up angled plastic boards. They found that overall movements were indeed similar during both activities.

It remains uncertain whether feeding movements were adapted for climbing, or vice versa.

Read more at Discovery News