'Bubble-Pop' Bird May Be Rarest in U.S.

The Gunnison sage-grouse, a bird with an unusual “bubble pop” mating call and display, could be America’s rarest bird, according to avian experts.

The bird was only discovered 13 years ago, and yet it’s already nearly a goner. Today, fewer than 5,000 of these birds remain in the wild, and they are rapidly dwindling.

“In my view, the Gunnison sage-grouse is the most biologically endangered bird species in all of continental North America,” Cornell Lab of Ornithology director John Fitzpatrick said in a statement sent to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The chicken-sized bird has an amazingly unusual mating ritual. To court females, the males strut about while wagging their spiky tails and making a popping-like noise as they inflate yellow air sacs from their white chests.

Fitzpatrick and others are paying attention to this bird now, as it’s a candidate for listing as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The Gunnison sage-grouse only lives in eastern Utah and Colorado.

“The Gunnison sage-grouse is now in imminent danger of a series of local population collapses, which — when they occur — will result in extinction of the species,” Fitzpatrick explained.

Efforts by public agencies and private landowners to help stabilize the bird’s populations through private land easements, conservation plans and community education have not halted its decline, says Fitzpatrick.

Despite the bird’s precarious status, getting a species endangered classification can be a long, laborious process.

For example the Dakota skipper butterfly, on the candidate’s list since 1975, is now extinct in Indiana and Iowa. The Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake has been a candidate since 1982. And the Kittlitz’s murrelet, a small bird, has been on the candidate’s list for nearly 20 years.

Read more at Discovery News

Cause of Odd Arctic Ozone 'Hole' Found

Cold temperatures, chlorine and a stagnant atmosphere caused a thinning in the ozone layer over the Arctic in 2011, a new NASA study finds.

This ozone loss is not the more famous ozone hole, found seasonally over Antarctica, which has been shrinking since the phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, that interact with ozone molecules in the atmosphere. These ozone molecules are made of three oxygen atoms bound together. Their high concentration in the stratosphere about 12 miles to 19 miles (20 to 30 kilometers) above the Earth's surface blocks harmful ultraviolet light from the sun.

Arctic ozone depletion is typically not as severe as that in the Antarctic. Over the South Pole, the sun barely or never sets around Christmas, creating a confluence of sunlight and cold in the atmosphere. Under these conditions, chlorine from CFCs eats away at ozone molecules.

Arctic ozone

Up north, however, the sun reappears in the sky in the spring as temperatures start to warm, so the conditions aren't as favorable for ozone depletion. But in 2011, the ozone concentration in the late winter Arctic was about 20 percent lower than average. [North vs. South Pole: 10 Wild Differences]

"You can safely say that 2011 was very atypical: In over 30 years of satellite records, we hadn't seen any time where it was this cold for this long," study researcher Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

Using atmospheric simulations, Strahan and her colleagues found that a mix of cold temperatures, chlorine and an unusually strong Arctic vortex caused the odd thinning. The Arctic vortex is a region of fast-blowing circular winds that get stronger each fall, creating an eddy of chilled air around the pole.

In 2011, the atmosphere was unusually quiet, allowing the Arctic vortex to remain strong well into the spring, after it usually breaks up. The reappearance of the sun in March while it was still especially cold created the conditions that led to the ozone thinning, the researchers report in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres.

"Arctic ozone levels were possibly the lowest ever recorded, but they were still significantly higher than the Antarctic's," Strahan said. "There was about half as much ozone loss as in the Antarctic," and the levels remained above the threshold for calling the ozone loss an actual "hole," Strahan added.

Future outlook

Strahan and her team calculate that two-thirds of the thinning was caused by a combination of chlorine pollution and extreme cold. The remaining third was caused by the oddly quiet atmosphere, which prevented ozone molecules from elsewhere from moving in to fill the gap.

The ozone layer over the Arctic returned to normal in April 2011. It's unlikely that such thinning will become a reoccurring problem, because the meteorological conditions were so odd, Strahan said. Not only that, but CFC levels in the atmosphere are still declining.

Read more at Discovery News

Closest Star System Found in a Century

A pair of newly discovered stars is the third-closest star system to the Sun, according to a paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916. The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the Sun.

"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light years -- so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," Luhman said. "It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because it is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs." Since it is the third-closest star system, in the distant future it might be one of the first destinations for manned expeditions outside our solar system, Luhman said.

The star system is named "WISE J104915.57-531906" because it was discovered in a map of the entire sky obtained by the NASA-funded Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite. It is only slightly farther away than the second-closest star, Barnard's star, which was discovered 6.0 light years from the Sun in 1916. The closest star system consists of Alpha Centauri, found to be a neighbor of the Sun in 1839 at 4.4 light years, and the fainter Proxima Centauri, discovered in 1917 at 4.2 light years.

Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator for the WISE satellite, said "One major goal when proposing WISE was to find the closest stars to the Sun. WISE 1049-5319 is by far the closest star found to date using the WISE data, and the close-up views of this binary system we can get with big telescopes like Gemini and the future James Webb Space Telescope will tell us a lot about the low mass stars known as brown dwarfs." Wright is the David Saxon Presidential Chair in Physics and a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA.

Astronomers have long speculated about the possible presence of a distant, dim object orbiting the Sun, which is sometimes called Nemesis. However, Luhman has concluded, "we can rule out that the new brown dwarf system is such an object because it is moving across the sky much too fast to be in orbit around the Sun."

To discover the new star system, Luhman studied the images of the sky that the WISE satellite had obtained during a 13-month period ending in 2011. During its mission, WISE observed each point in the sky 2 to 3 times. "In these time-lapse images, I was able to tell that this system was moving very quickly across the sky -- which was a big clue that it was probably very close to our solar system," Luhman said.

After noticing its rapid motion in the WISE images, Luhman went hunting for detections of the suspected nearby star in older sky surveys. He found that it indeed was detected in images spanning from 1978 to 1999 from the Digitized Sky Survey, the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, and the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky. "Based on how this star system was moving in the images from the WISE survey, I was able to extrapolate back in time to predict where it should have been located in the older surveys and, sure enough, it was there," Luhman said.

By combining the detections of the star system from the various surveys, Luhman was able to measure its distance via parallax, which is the apparent shift of a star in the sky due to Earth's orbit around the Sun. He then used the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile to obtain a spectrum of it, which demonstrated that it had a very cool temperature, and hence was a brown dwarf. "As an unexpected bonus, the sharp images from Gemini also revealed that the object actually was not just one but a pair of brown dwarfs orbiting each other," Luhman said.

Read more at Science Daily

Mummy Scans Reveal Clogged Arteries

Scans of mummies from as long ago as 2,000 BC have revealed that ancient people also had clogged arteries, a condition blamed on modern vices like smoking, overeating and inactivity, a study said Monday.

The finding, published in the Lancet medical journal, casts doubt on our understanding of the condition known as atherosclerosis that causes heart attacks and strokes.

"The presence of atherosclerosis in premodern human beings suggests that the disease is an inherent component of human aging and not associated with any specific diet or lifestyle," states the study conclusion.

"A common assumption is that the rise in levels of atherosclerosis is predominantly lifestyle-related, and that if modern humans could emulate pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural lifestyles, that atherosclerosis... would be avoided," cardiologist Randall Thompson, one of the authors of the international study, said in a statement issued by Lancet.

"Our findings seem to cast doubt on that assumption, and at the very least, we think they suggest that our understanding of the causes of atherosclerosis is incomplete, and that it might be somehow inherent to the process of human aging."

This did not mean that lifestyle factors should be discounted, senior author Gregory Thomas, medical director of the Memorial Care Heart and Vascular Institute at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in California, said.

They have been shown in study after study to contribute to the development of atherosclerosis, though the degree remains unclear.

"Our study demonstrates... that we are all at risk of atherosclerosis," said Thomas.

"We should do the very best we can to avoid these risk factors. We can not expect, however, that avoiding them will prevent atherosclerosis."

Atherosclerosis is a hardening and narrowing of the arteries that transport oxygen-rich blood from the heart, through a buildup of fatty material or cholesterol.

The World Health Organization considers smoking, physical inactivity, a high-salt, high-fat diet and high alcohol use as risk factors.

For this study, the researchers performed full-body computed tomography (CT) scans on 137 mummies from four geographic regions in modern-day Egypt, Peru, southwest America and Alaska.

The mummies were of people who had lived over a 4,000-year period stretching from ancient Egypt in about 2,000 BC to the Unangan hunter-gatherers who lived in the Aleutian Islands of modern-day Alaska as recently as 1930.

The team diagnosed "probable or definite" atherosclerosis in more than a third of the mummies on the basis of calcification of the arteries shown up by the scans.

A similar diagnostic method is used today.

The calcification was found in the same locations as in modern humans, and the appearance was the same.

"Our findings greatly increase the number of ancient people known to have atherosclerosis and show for the first time that the disease was common in several ancient cultures with varying lifestyles, diets and genetics, across a wide geographical distance and over a very long span of human history," the scientists wrote.

"These findings suggest that our understanding of the causative factors of atherosclerosis is incomplete."

The mummies of older people were more likely to show signs of the disease, just as in humans today.

Other research cited in the study has found atherosclerosis to be common in people living today, even ubiquitous in men by age 60 and women by 70.

"We simply don't know enough about the diet and lifestyle of the people studied to say whether behavior or genetics lies at the root" of the disease, the British Heart Foundation said in a comment on the study.

And Grethe Tell, an expert with the European Society of Cardiology, said the findings "do not refute" that an unhealthy lifestyle increased the risk of heart attack and stroke.

"Not everybody who has atherosclerosis (whatever the cause may be) gets clinical disease," she explained.

"Lifestyle factors increase the risk of heart attacks and may therefore be a triggering factor in the chain between atherosclerosis and heart attack."

According to the study, the ancient populations' diets had been varied -- including everything from shellfish and fish, game, domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs and ducks to a wide variety of berries, farmed maize, beans and potato -- even beer and wine in the case of the Egyptians.

Read more at Discovery News

First Evidence of Viking-Like 'Sunstone' Found

Ancient lore has suggested that the Vikings used special crystals to find their way under less-than-sunny skies. Though none of these so-called "sunstones" have ever been found at Viking archaeological sites, a crystal uncovered in a British shipwreck could help prove they did indeed exist.

The crystal was found amongst the wreckage of the Alderney, an Elizabethan warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592. The stone was discovered less than 3 feet (1 meter) from a pair of navigation dividers, suggesting it may have been kept with the ship's other navigational tools, according to the research team headed by scientists at the University of Rennes in France.

A chemical analysis confirmed that the stone was Icelandic Spar, or calcite crystal, believed to be the Vikings' mineral of choice for their fabled sunstones, mentioned in the 13th-century Viking saga of Saint Olaf.

Today, the Alderney crystal would be useless for navigation, because it has been abraded by sand and clouded by magnesium salts. But in better days, such a stone would have bent light in a helpful way for seafarers.

Because of the rhombohedral shape of calcite crystals, "they refract or polarize light in such a way to create a double image," Mike Harrison, coordinator of the Alderney Maritime Trust, told LiveScience. This means that if you were to look at someone's face through a clear chunk of Icelandic spar, you would see two faces. But if the crystal is held in just the right position, the double image becomes a single image and you know the crystal is pointing east-west, Harrison said.

These refractive powers remain even in low light when it's foggy or cloudy or when twilight has come. In a previous study, the researchers proved they could use Icelandic spar to orient themselves within a few degrees of the sun, even after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

European seafarers had not fully figured out magnetic compasses for navigation until the end of 16th century. The researchers say the crystal might have been used on board the Elizabethan ship to help correct for errors with a magnetic compass.

"In particular, at twilight when the sun is no longer observable being below the horizon, and the stars still not observable, this optical device could provide the mariners with an absolute reference in such situation," the researchers wrote online this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

No such crystals have been found yet at Viking sites. The team notes that archaeologists are unlikely to find complete crystals as part of a group of grave goods, since the Vikings often cremated their dead.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Humans Get Lost

In 1996, a ranger flying a helicopter over Death Valley, Calif., spotted a minivan in a wash near Anvil Canyon. That was ominous for several reasons: There was no road leading up to the spot, and the area wasn't passable without a four-wheel vehicle.

After investigating the vehicle, park rangers determined that four German tourists — a man, a woman, and their two sons, ages 4 and 11 — had last rented the minivan. But there was no trace of the family itself.

Their remains were not found for about 15 years, until Tom Mahood, a physicist-turned-adventurer, retraced their steps. As he recounts on his website, a series of reasonable mistakes, such as misreading the steepness of a canyon descent and being led astray by culturally confusing map landmarks, likely led to the decisions that ended in them separating, then dying in the scorching desert heat.

The story reveals how easy it is for people to become hopelessly lost in the wilderness. Humans get lost in part because we don't pay attention and have lost ancient ways of reading the environment to navigate. But humans' way-finding abilities are also less precise than the abilities of other animals.

While innate navigational ability differs, "just about everyone can get better," said Daniel Montello, a geographer and psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Ancient tools

Historically, not getting lost was a matter of life or death. One wrong turn could lead to a hyena's den or a nasty death from thirst. As a result, all indigenous cultures navigate in part by tracking the sun or the stars' positions in the sky relative to the fixed star Polaris, said Tristan Gooley, author of "The Natural Navigator" (The Experiment, 2012) and owner of naturalnavigator.com.

Those cues "are as good if not better than a compass in many situations," Gooley told LiveScience.

For instance, Polynesian seafarers track direction using ocean swells, the natural rise and fall of the water caused when a huge storm generates waves deep at sea. Because swells can linger for days, they can reliably be used to fine-tune direction, Gooley said. The Polynesians can track up to eight swells at a time, he said.

Both land and sea bear traces of long- and short-term directional cues. For instance, grass may wave in the direction of the winds on a given day, but a tree may lean toward the direction the winds blow over long periods of time, Gooley said.

Use it or lose it

Human mental-mapping stems in part from a brain region called the hippocampus, and studies suggest it can be strengthened with practice. For instance, one study found cab drivers in London have bigger and thicker hippocampi than the average person, said Colin Ellard, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada and author of the book "You Are Here" (Doubleday, 2009).

But the sense of direction may also wither with disuse. Small studies have found that using a GPS for just a few hours seems to impair people's navigational skills in the short term, Montello said. Many people get lost because they simply aren't paying attention, he added.

Animal sense

It's also true that the human sense of direction is simply less precise than that of many animals. For instance, migratory birds can use internal magnetic compasses or sonar maps to create incredibly detailed mental maps. And many animals' sense of direction is instinctual and is genetically hard-wired.

In addition, humans have faulty internal senses of direction. For instance, several studies have found that people walk in circles when blindfolded or disoriented (for instance, in an unfamiliar, heavily forested area), Ellard said. African desert ants, by contrast, can march in a straight line for miles. [Album: Stunning Photos of the World's Ants]

"They have this prodigious ability to keep track of where they are with respect to their initial starting point," Ellard told LiveScience. "They have a very accurate internal odometer."

But while animals' sense of direction is more precise, we have a much more flexible way-finding ability, Montello said. For instance, migrating animals travel thousands of miles but usually go to specific, pre-determined locations. But humans use landmarks, directional cues, a sense of how far they've traveled, as well as myriad other cues to go vastly more places, often with no prior knowledge.

Read more at Discovery News

Amplified Greenhouse Effect Shaping North Into South

An international team of 21 authors from 17 institutions in seven countries has just published a study in the journal Natural Climate Change showing that, as the cover of snow and ice in the northern latitudes has diminished in recent years, the temperature over the northern land mass has increased at different rates during the four seasons, causing a reduction in temperature and vegetation seasonality in this area. In other words, the temperature and vegetation at northern latitudes increasingly resembles those found several degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 30 years ago.

The NASA-funded study, based on newly improved ground and satellite data sets, examines critically the relationship between changes in temperature and vegetation productivity in northern latitudes.

On the amplified greenhouse effect, Prof. Ranga Myneni, Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University and lead co-author says "A greenhouse effect initiated by increased atmospheric concentration of heat-trapping gasses -- such as water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane -- causes the Earth's surface and nearby air to warm. The warming reduces the extent of polar sea ice and snow cover on the large land mass that surrounds the Arctic ocean, thereby increasing the amount of solar energy absorbed by the no longer energy-reflecting surface. This sets in motion a cycle of positive reinforcement between warming and loss of sea ice and snow cover, thus amplifying the base greenhouse effect."

"The amplified warming in the circumpolar area roughly above the Canada-USA border is reducing temperature seasonality over time because the colder seasons are warming more rapidly than the summer," says Liang Xu, a Boston University doctoral student and lead co-author of the study.

"As a result of the enhanced warming over a longer ground-thaw season, the total amount of heat available for plant growth in these northern latitudes is increasing. This created during the past 30 years large patches of vigorously productive vegetation, totaling more than a third of the northern landscape -- over 9 million km2, which is roughly about the area of the USA -- resembling the vegetation that occurs further to the south," says Dr. Compton Tucker, Senior Scientist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

The authors measured seasonality changes using latitude as a yardstick. They first defined reference latitudinal profiles for the quantities being observed and then quantified changes in them over time as shifts along these profiles.

"Arctic plant growth during the early-1980s reference period equaled that of lands north of 64 degrees north. Today, just 30 years later, it equals that of lands above 57 degrees north -- a reduction in vegetation seasonality of about seven degrees south in latitude," says co-author Prof. Terry Chapin, Professor Emeritus, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "This manner of analyses suggested a decline in temperature and vegetation seasonality of about four to seven degrees of latitude during the past 30 years," says co-author Eugenie Euskirchen, Research Professor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

"The reduction of vegetation seasonality, resulting in increased greenness in the Arctic, is visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and tree incursions in several locations all over the circumpolar Arctic," says co-author Terry Callaghan, Professor, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the University of Sheffield, UK. He notes that the greening in the adjacent Boreal areas is much less conspicuous in North America than in Eurasia.

A key finding of this study is an accelerating greening rate in the Arctic and a decelerating rate in the boreal region, despite a nearly constant rate of temperature seasonality diminishment in these regions over the past 30 years. "This may portend a decoupling between growing season warmth and vegetation productivity in some parts of the North as the ramifications of amplified greenhouse effect -- including permafrost thawing, frequent forest fires, outbreak of pest infestations, and summertime droughts -- come in to play," says co-author Hans Tømmervik, Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Tromsø, Norway.

According to the authors, the future does indeed look troubling: Based on analysis of 17 state-of-the-art climate model simulations, diminishment of temperature seasonality in these regions could be more than 20 degrees in latitude by the end of this century relative to the 1951-1980 reference period. The projected temperature seasonality decline by these models for the 2001-2010 decade is actually less than the observed decline. "Since we don't know the actual trajectory of atmospheric concentration of various agents capable of forcing a change in climate, long-term projections should be interpreted cautiously," says co-author Bruce Anderson, Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University.

"These changes will affect local residents through changes in provisioning ecosystem services such as timber and traditional foods," says Research Professor Bruce Forbes, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland. They will also impact the global community through changes in regulatory ecosystem services relating to emissions of greenhouse gases. "The soils in the northern land mass potentially can release significant amounts of greenhouse gases which are currently locked up in the permanently frozen ground. Any large-scale deep-thawing of these soils has the potential to further amplify the greenhouse effect," says co-author Philippe Ciais, Associate Director, Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Science, Paris, France.

Read more at Science Daily

Bronze-Age Donkey Sacrifice Found in Israel

Archaeologists in southern Israel say they've uncovered a young donkey that was carefully laid to rest on its side more than 3,500 years ago, complete with a copper bridle bit in its mouth and saddle bags on its back.

Its accessories -- and the lack of butchery marks on its bones -- lead researchers to believe the venerated pack animal was sacrificed and buried as part of a Bronze Age ritual.

Donkeys were valuable beasts of burden in the ancient Near East. Donkey caravans helped open up vast trade networks across the Levant and Anatolia in the 18th and 17th centuries B.C., according to archives from Amorite settlements like Mari in modern-day Syria. Ancient Egyptian inscriptions from around the same time show that hundreds of pack donkeys were used in large-scale expeditions to mining sites in the eastern desert and southern Sinai, researchers say.

The animals have even been associated with royalty. In 2003, paleoscientists discovered the skeletons of 10 donkeys nestled in three mud graves dating back 5,000 years ago when Egypt was just forming a state. The donkey skeletons were lying on their sides in graves at a burial complex of one of the first pharaohs at Abydos, Egypt.

The donkey found in Israel seems to have been symbolically important, too, though this particular animal likely was never made to do hard labor before its death, said a team headed by archaeologist Guy Bar-Oz, of Israel's University of Haifa.

The grave was found in a temple courtyard, in the heart of the sacred precinct of Tel Haror, a Middle Bronze Age city near Gaza that was fortified by massive ramparts and a deep moat and dates back from around 1700 B.C. to 1550 B.C.

The donkey, estimated to be about 4 years old, was laid on its left side with its limbs neatly bent, the researchers say, and a copper bridle bit, a mouthpiece used to help steer animals, was found in its mouth. Some parts of the bit were extensively worn and it likely wasn't functional at the time of the burial. But an examination of the donkey's teeth suggests it was never meant to be practical.

"The absence of any sign of bit wear on the lower premolars indicates that the animal was not ridden or driven with a bit for prolonged periods of time," the researchers write in a paper published online this week in the journal PLOS ONE. "Moreover, the young donkey was still in the process of shedding its teeth and permanent teeth were just erupting. Based on its age, the Haror donkey would probably have been too young to be a trained draught animal."

Read more at Discovery News

Stonehenge Was Ancient Rave Spot

British researchers unveiled a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge, saying the ancient stone circle was originally a graveyard and venue for mass celebrations.

The findings would overturn the long-held belief that Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southwestern England was created as a Stone Age astronomical calendar or observatory.

A team led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London said Stonehenge, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is both older and had a different function than previously thought.

"In many ways our findings are rewriting the established story of Stonehenge," Parker Pearson said.

The archaeologists carried out a decade of research which included excavations, laboratory work and the analysis of 63 sets of ancient human remains.

They said the original Stonehenge appeared to have been a graveyard for elite families built around 3000 BC, 500 years earlier than the site that is famous today.

The remains of many cremated bodies were marked by the bluestones of Stonehenge, Pearson said.

Further analysis of cattle teeth from 80,000 animal bones excavated from the site also suggest that around 2500 BC, Stonehenge was the site of vast communal feasts.

These would have been attended by up to one tenth of the British population at one time in what Parker Pearson said resembled "Glastonbury festival and a motorway building scheme at the same time."

It seemed that ancient people traveled to celebrate the winter and summer solstices but also to build the monument, he said.

"Stonehenge was a monument that brought ancient Britain together," he said.

"What we?ve found is that people came with their animals to feast at Stonehenge from all corners of Britain -- as far afield as Scotland."

He said it appeared to be the "only time in prehistory that the people of Britain were unified."

UNESCO describes Stonehenge as the most architecturally sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world.

Read more at Discovery News

No New Life in Antarctic Lake, Russia Admits

Russian scientists on Saturday dismissed initial reports that they had found a wholly new type of bacteria in a mysterious subglacial lake in Antarctica.

Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had said Thursday that samples obtained from the underground Lake Vostok in May 2012 contained a bacteria bearing no resemblance to existing types.

But the head of the genetics laboratory at the same institute said on Saturday that the strange life forms were in fact nothing but contaminants.

"We found certain specimen, although not many. All of them were contaminants" that were brought there by the lab during research, Vladimir Korolyov told the Interfax news agency.

"That is why we cannot say that previously-unknown life was found," he said.

Lake Vostok is the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica and scientists have long wanted to study its ecosystem. The Russian team last year drilled almost four kilometers (2.34 miles) to reach the lake and take the samples.

Russia had been hoping to discover a new life form at the pristine site and the drilling was of major importance for the prestige to the country's science program.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was even given a sample of Lake Vostok water after the drilling was performed.

From Discovery News