Fragments of World's Oldest Koran May Predate Muhammad

British scholars have suggested that fragments of the world's oldest known Koran, which were discovered last month, may predate the accepted founding date of Islam by the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

The Times of London reported that radiocarbon dating carried out by experts at the University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. The man known to Muslims as The Prophet is thought to have founded Islam sometime after 610 A.D., with the first Muslim community established at Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 622 A.D.

"This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven," Keith Small of Oxford's Bodleian Library told the Times.

The two sheets of Islam's holy book were discovered in a library at the University of Birmingham in England, where they had been mistakenly bound in a Koran dating to the seventh century. They were part of a collection of 3,000 Middle Eastern texts gathered in Iraq in the 1920s.

Muslims scholars have disputed the idea that the Birmingham Koran predates Muhammad, with Mustafa Shah of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies telling the Times: "If anything, the manuscript has consolidated traditional accounts of the Koran's origins."

The first known formal text of the Koran was not assembled until 653 A.D. on the orders of Uthman, the third caliph, or leader of the Muslim community after Muhammad's death. Before that, however, fragments of the work had circulated through oral tradition, though parts of the work had also been written down on stones, leaves, parchment and bones. The fragments of the Birmingham Koran were written on either sheepskin or goatskin.

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Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Podium Found in Jerusalem

A mysterious pyramid-shaped flight of stairs dating to the time of Jesus, has been unearthed in ancient Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.

Made from large ashlar — or finely cut — stones, the 2,000-year-old stepped structure leads to a podium.

The puzzling staircase was found alongside a stepped street that once led Jewish pilgrims from the rock cut Pool of Siloama on the southern slope of the City of David to the Second Temple which stood atop the Temple Mount.

Consisting of enormous stone slabs, the street was built sometime in the fourth decade of the 1st century A.D. and was one of the largest construction projects undertaken in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period.

The Second temple era, running from 538 B.C. to 70 A.D., refers to the lifetime of the temple built by King Herod the Great to replace the First Temple, razed by the Babylonians around 587 B.C.

In 70 A.D., the Second Temple also vanished as the Romans sacked the city and plundered Herod’s magnificent white and gold temple. Then they paraded the treasure, which also helped finance the building of the Colosseum, through the streets of Rome in triumph.

Archaeologists do not know yet what the pyramid-shaped staircase was used for. Rabbinic texts refer to stone platforms used for auctions or as “Stone of Claims” to find lost belongings, but nothing like that structure has been found in Jerusalem or elsewhere in ancient Israel.

“Given the lack of a clear archaeological parallel to the stepped-structure, the purpose of the staircase remains a mystery,” archaeologists Nahshon Szanton and Joe Uziel said in a statement.

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Yearlong Mock Mars Mission to Test Mental Toll of Isolation

On Friday (Aug. 28), six scientists left the comforts of civilization, set to be gone for an entire year. Their mission will simulate what it might be like for astronauts journeying to Mars.

In the confines of a 36-foot-wide (11 meters) and 20-foot-high (6 m) solar-powered dome in a remote location on the island of Hawaii, the six team members will have to live together for 365 days. They will have no face-to-face contact with humans outside of the dome. This is the fourth and longest such mission carried out by the Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) program, and its goal is to find out how people will respond to the isolation that might accompany a mission to Mars.

“We hope that this upcoming mission will build on our current understanding of the social and psychological factors involved in long-duration space exploration,” Kim Binsted, principal investigator for HI-SEAS, said in a statement from the University of Hawaii.

The HI-SEAS project, which is based at University of Hawaii at Manoa, has put crews into the isolated mock Mars colony in four previous missions: two 4-month missions in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and an eight-month mission that ended in June 2015. During those previous trips, the crewmembers were allowed to leave the dome in spacesuits, occasionally engaging in outdoor activities like golfing, but mostly to do research in the local environment, the way members of a real Mars crew would.

MD2: settled into quarters. #domelife #hiseas #montana pic.twitter.com/MUWJJTTl9a — Carmel Johnston (@_CarmelJohnston) August 31, 2015

The team has a yearlong supply of food and water. The cuisine, which the team must be able to store for months at a time, is similar to what astronauts eat. Team member Sheyna Gifford tweeted on Saturday (Aug. 29) a picture of a quesadilla, with some peas and corn. She wrote, “First dinner in simulated space: The cheese & turkey quesadilla & all the veggies were all dehydrated 30 min. ago.”

The HI-SEAS habitat features a downstairs area with a lab, a kitchen, a common workspace, an exercise area, a dining room and a bathroom. Upstairs are six small bedrooms and a bathroom.

The current mission will “focus on crewmember cohesion and performance,” the statement said. “HI-SEAS researchers are working to develop effective team composition and support strategies to allow crews to successfully travel to Mars and back, an estimated three-year journey.”

Researchers will monitor the six crewmembers throughout the mission via cameras, body-movement trackers and other methods. Back in the real world, the researchers will gather data on “a wide range of cognitive, social and emotional factors that may impact team performance,” according to the statement.

Read more at Discovery News

Human Eye's Blind Spot Can Shrink with Training

The blind spot of the human eye can be shrunk with certain eye-training exercises, thus improving a person’s vision slightly, a small new study suggests.

In the study of 10 people, researchers found that the blind spot — the tiny region of a person’s visual field that matches up with the area in the eye that has no receptors for light, and hence cannot detect any image — can shrink 10 percent, with special training.

That amount of change “is quite an improvement, but people wouldn’t notice, as we are typically unaware of our blind spots,” said study author Paul Miller, of the University of Queensland in Australia. Normally, the brain pulls in visual information from the regions surrounding the blind spot, compensating for it, so people don’t usually perceive it.

“The real significance is that our data shows that regions of blindness can be shrunk by training, and this may benefit people who suffer from pathological blindness,” Miller told Live Science.

The blind spot of the eye exists because there are no light receptors in a small region of the retina. In this spot, the optic nerve, which extends toward the eye from deep within the brain, reaches the back of the eye, at the retina’s surface. The nerve prevents the light receptors that line the rest of the retina from being in that spot.

In the study, the researchers trained 10 people for 20 days on what researchers call a “direction-discrimination” task. During the task, the investigators used an image of a ring, centered in the blind spot of one of the person’s eyes. Waves of dark and light bands moved through the ring, and the participants were asked what direction the waves were moving. In another task, they were asked what color the ring was.

But the size of the ring was manipulated — sometimes, it was made small enough that it fell completely within a person’s blind spot, while other times, it was larger, falling within the person’s field of vision. When the training began, the exercises were designed so that the people in the study were able to correctly judge the direction of the wave’s movement only about 70 percent of the time.

Eventually, the people’s eyes were better able to detect the image in their blind spot. At the end of the study, the participants’ ability to correctly judge both the direction of the waves and the color of the ring improved.

It does not seem that the improvement was simply due to practicing the task, because the results of doing the training with one eye did not result in any shrinking of the blind spot in the other eye, the researchers said.

Instead, the results suggest that the training increased the sensitivity of certain receptors that overlap or are adjacent to the blind spot, they said. The eye therefore becomes more sensitive to the weak signals that come from near or within the site of blindness.

Read more at Discovery News

Nazi 'Gold Train' Existence in Poland in Doubt Again

A regional governor in Poland said Monday he had serious doubts about the alleged discovery of a Nazi gold train days after a deputy culture minister revealed he was “more than 99 percent sure” one had been found.

“There is no more proof for this alleged discovery than for other claims made over the years,” Tomasz Smolarz, governor of the southwestern region of Lower Silesia, told reporters.

Two anonymous fortune hunters claim they have pinpointed the Nazi-era loot.

“It’s impossible to claim that such a find actually exists at the location indicated based on the documents that have been submitted,” Smolarz said, adding that he had set up a special unit including historians and geologists to scrutinise the alleged discovery.

Global media have for days been abuzz with talk of trains full of jewels and gold stolen by the Nazis after the two men — a German and a Pole — claimed to have found an armoured train car buried near the city of Walbrzych.

On Friday, Polish Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski said he had seen a convincing ground-penetrating radar image of the alleged Nazi train.

“I’m more than 99 percent sure such a train exists, but the nature of its contents is unverifiable at the moment,” Zuchowski told reporters, adding that he could make out platforms and cannons on the photo.

Smolarz said Monday he had not seen any such image.

“The fact that this train is armoured suggests there could be valuable objects inside” including artworks, archival documents or treasures, Zuchowski added.

The World Jewish Congress has asked that any valuables found that once belonging to victims of the Holocaust should be returned to their owners or heirs.

Zuchowski said someone who had been involved in hiding the train, which is over 100 metres (330 feet) in length, had disclosed its location before dying.

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330-Pound Beavers: What Earth Would Be Like Without Us

If humans never existed, lions, saber–tooth tigers, 330–pound beavers and house-sized armadillos would be walking around Texas right now. A new study from researchers at Aarhus University demonstrates what the world would look like for mammals if the most destructive super predator of them all — Homo sapiens — had never been around.

The study was born out of the team’s previous research, which found that a lot of mammal species that went extinct during the last Ice Age was mostly due to the spread of humans rather than climate change.

“Last year we published another study, which along other studies, clearly suggested that humans were a massive driver in the large extinction which occurred near the end of the last ice age,” lead study author and postdoctoral fellow in bioscience Soren Faurby told Foxnews.com.

“During this work we started talking about just how big the effects of humans was and how the world would have been different if humans had not influenced the distribution of any species within the last 130,000 years and I started estimating this by generating attempts of so–called present-natural distributions of all mammalian species, meaning where they potentially could have been today.”

According to the study, rhinos and elephants would thrive alongside bears and Eurasian elk in Europe, while American lions and camels (among other things) would be prowling around North America.

“Texas and Mexico would likely naturally have some of the highest diversity,” Faurby suggested. “Among the extinct North American species [that would be alive today] are short–faced bears, American lions, saber–tooth cats, Dire wolfs, giant ground sloths, mastodons, mammoths, camels, giant beavers (330 pounds or so), tapirs, and glyptodonts (house sizes armadillo relatives).”

Along with mapping out the current patterns of mammal diversity, the researchers had to use historic sources to determine how some species were distributed — for instance, what the Europeans saw when they first came to North America. However, for species that went extinct when the last Ice Age ended this wasn’t possible due to both the limited data available and the climate today being so different that the species wouldn’t be in the same location geographically.

“For these species we instead estimated the potential range based on the current ranges of the species used to co-occur with,” Faurby told Foxnews.com. “The extinct elephant (Straight tusked elephant, Elephas antiquus) and extinct rhinos (two species of Stephanorhinus) used to co–occur with species currently widely distributed in Northern Europe and it is therefore likely that this elephant and rhino would be found in the same overall places without human involvement.”

Today, sub–Saharan Africa has the greatest diversity of big mammal species and is in many ways the last refuge for them, with the Serengeti being one of the last places on Earth to see such a large diversity.

Read more at Discovery News

Earth Has More Than 1,500 Yet-Undiscovered Minerals

If you thought your rock and mineral collection was reasonably complete, guess again.

A team of researchers, led by the Carnegie Institute for Science’s Robert M. Hazen, used a sophisticated statistical modeling system to calculate that the Earth has a lot of undiscovered minerals — 1,563, to be precise — to add to the nearly 5,000 that already are known. Moreover, the scientists predict that Earth’s mineral diversity is unique, and is not duplicated anywhere else in the universe — even on Earth-like rocky exoplanets.

Those findings are contained in an quartet of recently published articles in Canadian Mineralogist, Mathematical Geoscience, American Mineralogist, and Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Minerals are naturally occurring, inorganic substances that are crystalline — that is, have an ordered arrangement of atoms — and definite chemical compositions. They can be formed with the help of a variety of different types of geological activity, ranging from volcanoes and plate tectonics to water-rock interactions, as well as by biologically-based chemical reactions.

The latter are particularly important, according to Hazen, who has long theorized the Earth’s diversity of minerals is related primarily to the development of life on this planet. More than two thirds of known minerals can be linked directly or indirectly to biological activity, such as the carbonate minerals created by freshwater bacteria. The rise of bacterial photosynthesis 2.4 billion years ago, which dramatically increased the atmosphere’s oxygen concentration, also expanded the number of mineral species.

Hazen and his colleagues used statistical models of ecosystems and compared them to mineralogical databases in order to predict that thousands of mineral species that have been created during the Earth’s history. Some have been lost due to burial, erosion or subduction back into the Earth’s mantle, but by the team’s calculations, 1,563 of them still exist and are waiting to be discovered.

Another weird fact: Most of the earth’s mineral types are rare, and found at five or fewer locations on the planet.

From Discovery News

Ballet of Death for Stars in Cosmic Butterfly Photo

Two dying stars are in a dance of death in this spectacular image of the Twin Jet planetary nebula.

The butterfly shape is created by the stellar ballet of the two sun-like stars at the end of their lives.

The primary star of this binary system is now a red giant, between 1.0 and 1.4 times the mass of the sun. It’s blowing away its outer gaseous envelope to expose its stellar core and will eventually contract into a white dwarf.

The other star is already a white dwarf – a slowly cooling stellar corpse – between 0.6 and 1.0 times the mass of the sun.

The white dwarf is orbiting very close to the primary star and may even have been engulfed by the other’s expanding stellar atmosphere with the resulting interaction creating the nebula.

The pair orbit each other every 100 years, and astronomers think the gravity of one star is pulling ejected material from its binary companion and twisting it into two thin iridescent lobes which are stretching far out into space.

The lobes are still growing, and by measuring their rate of expansion, scientists have calculated that the nebula was created about 1200 years ago.

A planetary nebula is effectively a huge expanding shell of gas.

These growing shells are heated up, and the kaleidoscope of colors are caused by the different chemicals being ionized.

Within the lobes of Twin Jet planetary nebula PN M2-9 are two faint blue patches streaming horizontally outwards like veins, barely visible in the nebula’s rainbow colors.

These blue patches are actually violent twin jets moving at over a million kilometers per hour out from the rapidly rotating star system.

Over time, images of these jets show that they’re slowly changing their orientation, moving across the lobes, as they’re pulled by the wayward gravity of the binary system.

This rotation not only creates the lobes and jets, it also allows the white dwarf to strip gas from its larger companion, which then forms a large disc of material around the pair.

Read more at Discovery News

Chaos Tamed with New Math Definition

It’s that point when a smooth river turns into a tumultuous swirl of white water, the tornado that unpredictably changes course on a dime or the wild interactions of three planets under one another’s gravitational pull.

It’s chaos.

Although most people instinctively know chaos when they see it, there hasn’t been one, single, universally agreed-upon mathematical definition of the term. Now, scientists have tried to come up with a mathematical way to describe such chaotic systems.

The new definition, which was described in a paper published in July in the journal Chaos, could help identify seemingly smooth situations where the potential for chaos lurks, said study co-author Brian Hunt, a mathematician at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Chaos theory

Mathematician Henri Poincaré first encountered the wild state while trying to describe the behavior of three celestial bodies under one other’s gravitational influence. Their movements proved difficult to predict beyond a few steps, and he termed this kind of erratic motion “chaos.”

Unlike truly random behavior, however, those systems were still “deterministic,” meaning that if one knew all the past laws and forces acting on the systems, one could perfectly predict where they would be in the future. By contrast, at the subatomic scale, particles are fundamentally uncertain, meaning there’s no way to perfectly predict what a given teensy particle will do.

But scientists didn’t really notice the chaos swirling in the universe until the 1960s, when computers had become powerful enough to crunch numbers and solve equations that couldn’t be worked out on paper, said Edward Ott, an applied physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Sometimes, such as in the case of a simple pendulum, computers could predict behavior far into the future just by knowing a few facts. But other systems were much weirder. For instance, computers needed a ridiculous amount of extra information just to predict what a weather system would do just a few days into the future, which is why a four-hour weather forecast is typically spot-on but a 10-day forecast is little more than a historical guess. Go far enough into the future, “and, eventually, you won’t know anything about what the weather is going to do,” Ott told Live Science.

Once researchers realized that chaos was so often at play, mathematicians like Edward Lorenz began to develop newer theories for how these chaotic systems work. Yet decades later, no one had come up with a single, simple mathematical definition of chaos that seemed to perfectly capture all of these helter-skelter situations, Ott said.

Single rule for chaos

So Hunt and Ott tried to tackle the problem. The team developed a definition of chaos that was deceptively simple, and roughly based on the quantity similar to entropy, or the inherent tendency of things in the universe to move from a more orderly to a more disorderly state. They found that, if this entropylike number, called expansion entropy, is positive, the system could become chaotic, whereas one with zero expansion entropy would not become chaotic.

Read more at Discovery News

Black Holes Slug it Out in Quasar Deathmatch

In a galaxy, 600 million light-years away, a black hole deathmatch is ripping up spacetime, exposing some fascinating dynamics at the heart of a powerful quasar.

The quasar, which lives in the core of the galaxy Markarian 231 (Mrk 231), is the closest quasar to Earth and after studying years of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have realized that this particular quasar is driven by 2 black holes trapped in an orbital spiral of death.

This discovery could be critical to the study of quasars, the super-bright emissions blasting from galaxies in the distant universe. But the fact we have a quasar that’s comparatively close to our galactic neighborhood, Mrk 231 is a great laboratory to gain an insight to these enigmatic objects.

When studying the ultraviolet emissions blasting from the quasar’s accretion disk — a disk of superheated gases surrounding the central region — a deeply fascinating discovery was made. The quasar appears to be hollowed out, resembling a ring doughnut, and using dynamical models the researchers quickly realized that there must be two supermassive black holes, one more massive than the other, carving out the center.

As they orbit one another inside the quasar’s core, the smaller black hole carves out a region at the inner edge, also creating its own, smaller accretion disk. Calculations show that the pair complete one orbit every 1.2 years. The larger black hole is approximately 150 million times the mass of our sun and its smaller partner is 4 million times the mass of our sun.

“We are extremely excited about this finding because it not only shows the existence of a close binary black hole in Mrk 231, but also paves a new way to systematically search binary black holes via the nature of their ultraviolet light emission,” said Youjun Lu, of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

As the two black holes whip around one another, energy is lost through the emission of gravitational waves. And this means that they are slowly spiraling into one another, set to collide and merge in a few hundred thousand years.

The fact there are 2 supermassive black holes occupying the quasar speaks to Mrk 231′s violent past.

Known as a “starburst” galaxy, it is a powerhouse of star formation, birthing stars 100 times the rate of our Milky Way. The tidal disruption of a smaller galaxy merging with Mrk 231 is also highlighted by long tails of young, blue stars. The galaxy is also asymmetrical in shape, showing that the billions of stars are still in the process of settling. It’s likely that the smaller black hole in the galactic core was the central black hole occupying the smaller, merging galaxy.

“The structure of our universe, such as those giant galaxies and clusters of galaxies, grows by merging smaller systems into larger ones, and binary black holes are natural consequences of these mergers of galaxies,” added co-investigator Xinyu Dai of the University of Oklahoma.

Read more at Discovery News