Alleged Dead Sea Scrolls Looters Indicted

A gang of robbers accused of trying to steal the Dead Sea Scrolls from a cave in the Judean Desert was indicted Sunday (Dec. 7) in Israel.

The group was caught red-handed looting historical artifacts, and the robbers were apprehended in what Israeli officials called a "dramatic capture" that played out along the high cliffs of a region of the Judean Desert known as the Leopard's Ascent.

"For many years now, gangs of antiquities robbers have been operating along the Judean Desert cliffs," Amir Ganor, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority's unit for the prevention of antiquities robbery, said in a statement.

"The robbers attempt to locate and find the Dead Sea Scrolls, pieces of ancient texts and unique artifacts that were left in the caves." The artifacts are then sold for large sums of money in Israel and around the world, he added.

Members of the Israeli police force's search-and-rescue team were recently undergoing routine training on the cliffs when they noticed movement in a nearby cave. The team reported the incident to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which placed the cave under surveillance.

Not long after, the suspected robbers were observed again, equipped with metal detectors and other excavation equipment. Upon leaving the cave, the looters were immediately apprehended by Israeli officials, who confiscated several ancient artifacts, including a 2,000-year-old lice comb from the Roman period.

The gang of looters indicted yesterday is one of the main criminal groups operating out of the Judean Desert, according to Israeli officials. In addition to the rock-climbing gear used to reach the looted cave, the alleged criminals were found in possession of excavation tools — so-called break-in equipment, metal detectors, lighting equipment and enough food and water to last several days.

Using this gear, the looters caused excessive damage in a cave known in archaeological circles as the"Cave of the Skulls," destroying historical evidence that dates as far back as the Chalcolithic period, about 5,000 years ago, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

"What makes the Judean Desert so unique is its dry climate that enable the preservation of rare leather, bone and wooden objects, including the Judean Desert Scrolls, pieces of parchment and papyruson which various texts were written, among them the Holy Scriptures, books of the Bible, legal contracts and historical stories," Ganor said.

The Judean Desert Scrolls, more commonly known as the Dead Sea scrolls, is a collection of texts discovered in the 1940s in a series of caves located in the northwest of the Judean Desert. Included in the texts were copies of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy. Archaeologists have also found other ancient scrolls in the region, some of which date back 2,000 years.

Read more at Discovery News

NOAA: Climate Change Did Not Cause Calif. Drought

Climate change is usually discussed in extremes: Epic heat in Australia. A deadly heat wave in Europe. Hurricane Sandy grinding New York to a halt.

The extreme California drought? Maybe not so much.

A new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study released Monday shows that the three-year California drought may have been caused by natural variability and not necessarily human-caused climate change.

The study follows a series of studies released in September that were inconclusive about the role of climate change in the California drought, and another published last week showing that the drought is the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years.

The devastating 3-year drought, which began in 2011 and is ongoing despite recent rains, was caused by a high pressure system that was sitting over the West Coast and part of the North Pacific Ocean, driving moisture away from California, report co-author Richard Seager, a professor of oceanography at the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., said.

The persistence of the high pressure ridge was also present in previous long-term droughts in California, some of which were longer than the current drought. The ridge was initially caused by cool sea surface temperatures in the Pacific brought about by a La Niña in 2011, but it persisted even after cool ocean surface temperatures began to warm, the study says.

“Two-thirds of the precipitation deficit in California were due to factors we wouldn’t judge to have long predictability at all,” report co-author Martin Hoerling, a NOAA research meteorologist in Boulder, Colo., said. “They resulted from the randomness of the atmosphere.”

Despite the extreme drought, winter precipitation in California has followed no particular trend since 1895 and is expected to increase because a low pressure system is expected to park itself over the North Pacific each winter, driving moisture into the state, Hoerling said.

Even though the drought may not have been caused by climate change, the drought’s effects may be worse because of hotter temperatures on land that may be caused by global warming, the study says.

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, called the study useful, but said it comes up short in many ways.

“I would contend that all droughts are largely natural in the sense that they arise from internal variability in the atmosphere-ocean system,” he said. “But this study completely fails to consider what climate change is doing to water in California. It completely misses any discussion of evapotranspiration and the increased drying associated with global warming.”

The extra heat in the atmosphere from global warming enhances drying on the surface and increases the risk of heat waves, worsening the effects of a drought, Trenberth said.

But the study is useful because it shows that most of what caused the drought and allowed it to persist was predictable, he said.

Trenberth said it’s puzzling that the study ignores that 2013 was California’s driest year on record, and the study is contradicted by the research published last weekconcluding that the drought isunprecedented in 1,200 years.

The lead author of that study, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher Kevin Anchukaitis, said that he believes the conclusions of his study and the NOAA study are actually complementary because both studies use different techniques and different information sources.

Read more at Discovery News

Lake in Mars' Gale Crater Adds Twist to Climate Story

The discovery that Mars' Gale Crater was once Gale Lake adds a powerful piece of evidence for an ancient wet and warm climate that lasted much longer than previous predictions. Now, if only the computer models would agree.

To account for a lake that lasted for millions or even tens of millions of years means the Martian atmosphere would have had to be not only far thicker than the puny envelope of gases that surrounds it today, but also loaded with water, said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

The Curiosity science team announced Monday that the 96-mile-wide crater where the rover landed in August 2012 was once a lake.

"The landscapes of Mount Sharp indicate that rivers, lakes and groundwater were present over millions of years, something that would be impossible on Mars today," Vasavada said.

Today, water on Mars is frozen around the planet's poles. Even if the atmosphere were thicker (generating pressure that would permit water to exist as a liquid, rather than just as solid or gas) water would still preferentially gather in the polar regions, leaving the atmosphere dry. Gale Lake would have evaporated quickly.

"To get a long-lived lake in Gale Crater there must have been so much water in the climate system that the frozen latitudes were essentially filled up, that water was forced to warmer latitudes where it would exist as liquid," Vasavada said.

To humidify the atmosphere, Mars would need a vigorous hydrological cycle fed by either warmer ice at lower latitudes or a large expanse of liquid water, like an ocean.

"A humid atmosphere would slow the evaporation of Gale Lake and also resupply water to precipitation," Vasavada said.

Since the 19070s-era Viking days, scientists have been looking for remnants of a Martian ocean. They've found tantalizing hints, such as a network of valleys and channels cut into the highlands that lead downward toward a large basin. However, concrete evidence, like a shoreline, may have been obliterated by erosion.

"There is no smoking gun for an ocean in the northern hemisphere," Vasavada said.

Even accounting for greenhouse gases, computer models currently fall short in explaining how Mars could have stayed warm enough to sustain a lake like Gale for millions of years.

"Constructing a model of Mars ancient climate that was thick, warm and humid for millions of years has proven pretty challenging," Vasavada said.

Read more at Discovery News

Viking Women Colonized New Lands, Too

Vikings may have been family men who traveled with their wives to new lands, according to a new study of ancient Viking DNA.

Maternal DNA from ancient Norsemen closely matches that of modern-day people in the North Atlantic isles, particularly from the Orkney and Shetland Islands.

The findings suggest that both Viking men and women sailed on the ships to colonize new lands. The new study also challenges the popular conception of Vikings as glorified hoodlums with impressive seafaring skills.

"It overthrows this 19th century idea that the Vikings were just raiders and pillagers," said study co-author Erika Hagelberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. "They established settlements and grew crops, and trade was very, very important."

Vikings hold a special place in folklore as manly warriors who terrorized the coasts of France, England and Germany for three centuries. But the Vikings were much more than pirates and pillagers. They established far-flung trade routes, reached the shores of present-day America, settled in new lands and even founded the modern city of Dublin, which was called Dyfflin by the Vikings.

Some earlier genetic studies have suggested that Viking males traveled alone and then brought local women along when they settled in a new location. For instance, a 2001 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggested that Norse men brought Gaelic women over when they colonized Iceland.

Modern roots

To learn more about Norse colonization patterns, Hagelberg and her colleagues extracted teeth and shaved off small wedges of long bones from 45 Norse skeletons that were dated to between A.D. 796 and A.D. 1066. The skeletons were first unearthed in various locations around Norway and are now housed in the Schreiner Collection at the University of Oslo.

The team looked at DNA carried in the mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of the cell. Because mitochondria are housed in the cytoplasm of a woman's egg, they are passed on from a woman to her children and can therefore reveal maternal lineage. The team compared that material with mitochondrial DNA from 5,191 people from across Europe, as well as with previously analyzed samples from 68 ancient Icelanders.

The ancient Norse and Icelandic genetic material closely matched the maternal DNA in modern North Atlantic people, such as Swedes, Scots and the English. But the ancient Norse seemed most closely related to people from Orkney and Shetland Islands, Scottish isles that are quite close to Scandinavia.

Mixed group

"It looks like women were a more significant part of the colonization process compared to what was believed earlier," said Jan Bill, an archaeologist and the curator of the Viking burial ship collection at the Museum of Cultural History, a part of the University of Oslo.

That lines up with historical documents, which suggest that Norse men, women and children — but also Scottish, British and Irish families — colonized far-flung islands such as Iceland, Bill told Live Science. Bill was not involved with the new study.

"This picture that we have of Viking raiding — a band of long ships plundering — there obviously would not be families on that kind of ship," Bill said. "But when these raiding activities started to become a more permanent thing, then at some point you may actually see families are traveling along and staying in the camps."

Read more at Discovery News

Continent-Sized Scan Reveals US Underbelly

A continent-sized scan of North America is giving researchers the sharpest view yet of mysterious geological structures underneath the United States.

The impressive view comes from an ambitious experiment called EarthScope, which has scanned the country from California to Maine using hundreds of portable seismometers. (The next stop is Alaska.) Launched in 2004, the massive effort has already revealed new details about the geology of the western and central United States, such as the shape of Yellowstone's magma plume. Now, the first clear images of the entire continent are beginning to emerge, according to a study published Oct. 15 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"This was the dream to start with," said Brandon Schmandt, lead study author and a seismologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The EarthScope process resembles snapping a CT scan of the Earth, with a field crew moving sensitive earthquake detectors across the surface and researchers constructing an image of the rocks below.

In the new study, Schmandt and his co-author, Fan-Chi Lin of the University of Utah, built a detailed, 3-D map of the Earth's upper mantle, which is the rocky layer between the crust and core. The results could help researchers solve some long-standing geologic puzzles. The mantle is not only a time capsule, preserving the history of crashing tectonic plates, but also a force that influences what happens at the surface.

Deep discoveries

Clues to geologic mysteries may lie hidden in the mantle, the study reports. One mystery is why there are a handful of 48-million-year-old volcanoes in Virginia, when no other volcanic features have formed on the East Coast since about 200 million years ago.

The East Coast has been a passive margin, with no colliding tectonic plates, for 200 million years, so the Virginia volcanoes are unusual features, Schmandt said. But it turns out that the mantle beneath the East Coast isn't as cold and dense as one might expect after so many millennia free from jostling.

The researchers found alternating zones within the mantle where earthquake waves shift gears, from fast-moving and slow-moving speeds and back. This differs from the more uniform mantle under the old and tectonically stable central United States. (Earthquake waves speed up and slow down when they hit rocks with different temperature, density or composition.)

The new model revealed that two of sites where seismic waves suddenly slow down match up with geological features on the Earth's surface. One is in the central Appalachians, centered directly below the Virginia volcanoes. The second, located in the northern Appalachians, lines up with a feature called the Great Meteor hotspot track in Canada, Schmandt said. The track is a chain of progressively younger volcanoes that starts in Canada and stretches out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Further work on the anomalies could help explain why Virginia's rare volcanoes appeared. For instance, Schmandt said he was impressed that 50 million years later, the mantle beneath the volcanoes is still altered by whatever process triggered the eruptions. "It's a little bit surprising to see these strong changes in a place that's been a passive margin for such a long time," Schmandt told Live Science.

To the south, a puzzling bite in the Appalachian Mountains called the Mississippi Embayment stands out sharply in the new model. The corner-shaped region of the embayment pokes northwest from the Mississippi River delta. Geologists have long argued over what created the embayment, which is concealed under miles of Mississippi River mud.

The new data suggests a piece of North America was ripped out long ago, then later replaced by another drifting chunk, perhaps a piece of an island chain similar to Japan. "It really looks like a different type of lithosphere in there," Schmandt said. Fragments of islands and other continents that smashed onto North America can appear as hotter mantle regions beyond the outline of the original continent.

Old history

Some of the clearest shapes in the new mantle map are ancient relics. Earlier studies have shown North America sits above a graveyard for discarded pieces of old ocean floor. The pieces of oceanic crust (or slabs) were consumed at a subduction zone offshore the West Coast. A subduction zone is where one plate sinks underneath another. "It's fascinating to see slabs that subducted 10 to 100 million years ago," Schmandt said. "It tells us what the driving forces were like in the past."

But beneath North America, the slabs of crust aren't sinking in the way scientists thought they would. Schmandt and Lin discovered fragments of old oceanic crust at about 310 miles (500 kilometers) depth under the central and eastern United States, whereas younger pieces of oceanic crust have dropped nearly twice that depth beneath the western United States. The researchers suggest a large piece of oceanic crust that subducted more than 40 million years ago broke into several large fragments, at least two of which foundered.

Read more at Discovery News

How Placebos Can Help You Run Faster

Just believing that you're blood doping is enough to help you run faster, recent research found.

When the runners found out that they'd been given nothing more powerful than an injection of salt water, many were red-faced and a little embarrassed, lead author Ramzy Ross said. While the subjects may have felt duped, however, it's actually another testament to the power of expectation on our health, placebo experts said. Other work has shown that placebos can soothe a baby's cough, relieve migraine pain, and even mend torn knee cartilage as well as surgery.

One of the key issues in placebo research is parsing out what makes them work, said John Kelley, deputy director of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of psychology at Endicott College.

The two most common components, he said, are conscious expectations and classical conditioning. Think of the first as what you could verbalize: In the case of the runners, for example, most would say that taking erythropoietin (EPO) would improve their aerobic capacity and delay fatigue. As for classical conditioning, just as Pavlov's dogs started salivating when the physiologist entered the room in anticipation of being fed, people experience physical responses to certain associations.

In fact, even when researchers tell subjects they're taking a placebo, so-called open label studies still show a positive placebo effect.

Researchers attribute it to the conditioning response, Kelley said. It works best in people who have been treated previously for a condition. People with migraine headaches who experienced pain relief by taking a certain drug in the past also felt better when taking a pill that looked similar -- even when they knew it was not the actual drug.

By that rationale, athletes who have previously blood doped for real might fare even better on sham EPO, Kelley said. Previous research on cyclists showed that the benefits of taking morphine during workouts were maximized when the cyclists were preconditioned to using it first. Ramzy's team also delivered the placebo to the runners via injections instead of pills, knowing that most people have a stronger reaction to more invasive procedures.

Read more at Discovery News

Mysterious Mars Lava Formation Looks Like a Cookie

The Martian landscape is peppered in features that look very alien and often cannot be easily explained.

Take this latest example, as imaged by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which looks like a freshly baked cookie.

This strange circular landform was spotted in the Athabasca region of the Red Planet, where some of the youngest lava flows are known to reside. The feature is around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) wide and appears to contain some rather lumpy landscaping, whereas the region surrounding it is almost perfectly smooth.

Planetary scientists aren’t sure what caused the ‘cookie,’ but suspect it was ‘baked’ out of the surface material when Mars was volcanically active millions of years ago.

According to a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) news release, the ancient lava flow may have seeped underground, pushing this mound up from below. The lumpiness of the mound may be due to ice being melted out of the surface layers, causing some collapse of material.

There are many strange features like these in Athabasca and, like this peculiar circle, an explanation isn’t easy to come by.

From Discovery News

Curiosity's Mars Crater was Once a Vast Lake

The mountain that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is exploring appears to have been the site of a large lake, one that likely filled and drained over tens of millions of years, scientists said Monday.

The discovery is based on data collected by Curiosity over the past 2.5 years, including findings of sediment beds of sandstones that are inclined toward Mount Sharp, a three-mile high mound rising from the center of a 96-mile wide impact crater.

“We can see a whole series of beds, of sandstones, with some pebble beds in there, that are actually inclined at a large scale toward the south,” Curiosity scientist Sanjeev Gupta, with Imperial College in London, told reporters on a conference call.

Scientists believe that means that not only did Mount Sharp not exist at the time, but that Curiosity’s Gale Crater landing site was once -- and possibly many times over -- a shallow lake.

Similar inclined beds are found on Earth at the mouths of river channels where they feed into lakes, Gupta said.

The research indicates that Mount Sharp formed from sediments deposited in the center of the lakebed over millions of years. The sediments would have been carried in rivers originating from the crater rim highlands -- which may have been capped in snow or ice -- and ending in the waters that filled the crater basin. Scientists suspect that winds later eroded the deposits, eventually creating the mountain.

"We are beginning to think that maybe Mount Sharp formed in a series of episodes involving sedimentation and erosion, stacked by different processes," said lead Curiosity scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Scientists suspect there were many cycles of wet and dry times at Gale Crater and that the cycle continued for millions or tens of millions of years, boosting chances that conditions were suitable for microbial life.

Read more at Discovery News

In world first, researchers convert sunlight to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency

UNSW Australia's solar researchers have converted over 40% of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest efficiency ever reported.

The record efficiency was achieved in outdoor tests in Sydney, before being independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at their outdoor test facility in the United States.

The work was funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and supported by the Australia-US Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV).

"This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity," UNSW Scientia Professor and Director of the Advanced Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Professor Martin Green said.

"We used commercial solar cells, but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry," added Dr Mark Keevers, the UNSW solar scientist who managed the project.

The 40% efficiency milestone is the latest in a long line of achievements by UNSW solar researchers spanning four decades. These include the first photovoltaic system to convert sunlight to electricity with over 20% efficiency in 1989, with the new result doubling this performance.

"The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia," Professor Green said.

Power towers are being developed by Australian company, RayGen Resources, which provided design and technical support for the high efficiency prototype. Another partner in the research was Spectrolab, a US-based company that provided some of the cells used in the project.

A key part of the prototype's design is the use of a custom optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight that is normally wasted by commercial solar cells on towers and convert it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could.

Such filters reflect particular wavelengths of light while transmitting others.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the achievement is another world first for Australian research and development and further demonstrates the value of investing in Australia's renewable energy ingenuity.

Read more at Science Daily

Pluto-Bound Probe Wakes From Electronic Slumber

NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft turned off its snooze alarm for the last time Saturday night to begin preparations for a long-awaited study of the dwarf planet and its Kuiper Belt neighbors.

Ground control teams at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a radio transmission around 9:30 pm. EST that the spacecraft woke up from electronic slumber, its 18th hibernation period since its 3-billion-mile voyage began in January 2006.

"This is really quite an epic journey," lead researcher Alan Stern told reporters at the American Astronomical Society meeting last month.

New Horizons spent a total of 1,873 days in hibernation, with periods ranging from 36-  to 202 days, said mission operations manager Alice Bowman.

The downtime left the spacecraft free to collect dust particles and run science experiments without having a costly flight control team or needing to use NASA’s deep space communications network.

New Horizons pre-programmed wake-up call now gives the team about six weeks to calibrate the spacecraft’s instruments, load software, prepare recorders and check other systems before the main science mission begins Jan. 15.

The spacecraft will make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14.

Pluto, which was still considered a planet when New Horizons blasted off, is now known as a dwarf planet, one of thousands located beyond Neptune’s orbit in the unexplored Kuiper Belt region of the solar system.

Scientists believe Kuiper Belt-type objects were the building blocks of planets. New Horizons will be the first spacecraft to survey Pluto.

"Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meager ...  despite the march of technology on the ground, even with the Hubble Space Telescope," Stern said. "New Horizons will write the textbook on the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt."

From Discovery News