King Tut's Tomb: Secret Chamber Search Is On

The search for secret chambers in King Tutankhamun’s tomb will resume tomorrow and will last until Saturday, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquity announced.

The three-day investigation is expected to add new clues to help reveal what Minister of Antiquity Mamdouh al-Damaty called “the discovery of the century.”

“The search will involve the use of radar and infrared thermography,” Damaty told Egypt’s news site Ahram Online.

The new non-invasive probe follows a claim by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, that high-resolution images of the tomb’s walls show “distinct linear traces” pointing to the presence of two still unexplored chambers behind the western and northern walls of the tomb.

According to Reeves, one chamber contains the remains, and possibly the intact grave goods, of queen Nefertiti, wife of the “heretic” monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father.

Reeves speculated that the tomb of King Tut was not ready when he died unexpectedly at 19 in 1323 B.C., after having ruled a short reign of nine to 10 years. Consequently, he was buried in a rush in what was originally the tomb of Nefertiti, who had died 10 years earlier.

Reeves and Damaty conducted a preliminary visual inspection of the tomb in September. The investigation was followed earlier this month by further tests, carried out by a team from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation.

The researchers used infrared thermography to detect the temperature of the walls in the tomb.

According to Damaty, the analysis showed “differences in the temperatures registered on different parts of the northern wall” of the tomb.

Read more at Discovery News

How Terrorism Can Harm Your Brain

When ISIS terrorists attacked Paris on Nov. 13, they took 130 lives and wounded hundreds more. But their bloody acts may have injured far more people -- both survivors and the countless numbers who experienced the event vicariously through horrific media images -- in an insidious way, by causing potentially harmful changes in their brains.

Indeed, terrorism's effect on the brain is so powerful that those who survive attacks have significantly higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than those who make it through accidents or natural disasters. But terrorism also is linked to long-term problems such as anxiety and alcohol abuse in people who only have secondhand exposure to the event by watching it on television.

Recent research shows fear of future terrorist attacks can alter brain chemistry in a way that increases your risk of dying eventually from a heart attack or other ailments that might seem unrelated to the violence.

The latter study, published in 2014 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at more than 17,000 Israelis, who live in a country where terrorist attacks are a frequent occurrence.

The subjects who had the most fear of terrorism tended to have resting heart rates that were 10 to 20 beats per minute faster than the norm, an indicator of increased risk for heart attacks and strokes. The elevated heart rate was linked to a change in brain chemistry. Blood tests revealed a decline in the function of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in responses to stress and which acts as a brake to the inflammatory response.

"Our brain reacts to acute stress situations by a rapid burst of acetylcholine release," explained study co-author Hermona Soreq, a professor of molecular neuroscience at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at Hebrew University in Jersusalem.

"The brain sends the acetylcholine to body tissues through the vagus nerve; Since acetylcholine blocks inflammation responses, too much of it weakens the immune system. We found lower prospects to survive in patients after heart attack whose blood tests show weakened capacity to destroy acetylcholine."

Soreq said that terrorism-induced anxiety also causes the production of small molecules called microRNAs, which block the function of numerous other genes, and can alter regulation of the nervous system.

Terrorism triggers mechanisms hard-wired into the nervous system by evolution, which enabled our ancient ancestors to escape from animal predators and rival human clans. The human brain and vision system is fine-tuned to spot things that we should be afraid of, and then react to them in a flash -- even without consciously realizing it.

In a 2012 study, for example, researchers from the University of Edinburgh and New York University trained subjects to fear certain pictures by giving them mild shocks. Some subjects were allowed to look directly at the images, while others only got to glimpse them in one eye while researchers flashed a colorful image in the other eye to interfere with conscious perception.

Even with that hindrance, the subjects who got the one-eyed glimpse actually developed a fear response more quickly.

When a person spots danger -- say, a gunman who bursts into a theater -- the alarm is sounded in the amygdala, a sort of biological alarm system that triggers the body's response. It directs glands to release an array of chemicals such as adrenalin and cortisol, which shift the heart, lungs and muscles into high gear. The senses shift into narrowly focused hyper-awareness of information that might aid in survival.

A study published in Psychological Science in 2009, for example, found that fear made subjects see coarser lines, which help the brain to evaluate movement and distance, more clearly, while they couldn't make out fine lines as well as usual.

After a threat is over, in many cases, a survivor's brain gradually can shift back into normal operating mode. But not always. Studies have shown that between 28 and 33 percent of survivors of mass shootings and 34 percent of bombing survivors develop post-traumatic stress disorder -- far higher rates than people involved in terrifying accidents or natural disasters.

Survivors continue to relive the trauma and often suffer from symptoms such as irritability, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilant watchfulness, and an exaggerated startle response, and sometimes feelings of numbness.

Recent research by German scientists suggests that cortisol, one of the chemicals that the body releases in an effort to survive a terror attack, not only helps burn the event more vividly into a person's memory, but also helps to keep it vivid even after it is retrieved repeatedly.

But it's not only immediate survivors whose brains may be affected by terrorism. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001 found that after the 9-11 attacks, 44 percent of U.S. adults and 35 percent experienced one or more substantial symptoms of stress, such as difficulty concentrating, repeated memories or dreams of the event, irritation and angry outbursts. The level of stress that people experienced was linked to the extent that they had watched TV coverage of the attacks.

Those effects sometimes last for years. Another study, published in 2008 in Journal of the American Public Health Association, looked at the effect of 9-11 on the mental health of office workers in Chicago, far away from the actual site of the attacks in New York and Washington.

Read more at Discovery News

Einstein's General Relativity Still Put to Test

A century after Albert Einstein unveiled a new concept to explain gravity, his so-called general relativity theory remains fertile ground for scientific observations and experiments.

Einstein’s revolutionary idea stemmed from his special theory of relativity, published a decade earlier, which wed space and time into a single continuum known as spacetime. Observers at different locations, for example, would see the same star exploding at different times, depending on how far away they were from the event. What is constant is the speed of light.

Special relativity did not take into account gravitational effects. Einstein toiled another 10 years to understand the physics and work through the math before unveiling his radically new idea in a four-part lecture at the Prussian Academy of Sciences that culminated on Nov. 25, 1915. Einstein published “The Field Equations of Gravitation” paper a week later.

“Before Albert Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity, we sort of pictured gravity as this magical force that connected different masses with one another,” said NASA astrophysicist Ira Thorpe, with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Under Issac Newton’s theory of gravity, which had dominated physics for more than 200 years, if a mass in one part of the universe moved, all the other masses in the rest of the universe would instantly know and be affected by the motion.

That concept, however, ran counter to an implication of Einstein’s special relativity theory, which established a universal speed limit -- the idea that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

Say one day the sun disappeared. Under Newtonian physics, the effect would be felt immediately on Earth. Under Einstein’s theory, it would take roughly eight minutes – the time it takes both light waves and gravitational waves, which also travel at the speed of light -- to cover the 93 million miles between Earth and the now-vanished sun.

Rather than masses exerting gravitational forces on one another, Einstein realized that it was spacetime itself that was bending, similar to what happens when a bowling ball rolls across a trampoline.

One of the newest frontiers opened by general relativity is the search for gravitational waves, a rippling of spacetime caused by massive objects in motion.

“They’re waves, much like water waves or light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation, except here what’s ‘waving’ is space and time itself,” Thorpe said during a webcast panel discussion hosted by DeepAstronomy.com.

Just like a bowling ball warps a trampoline more than a baseball, massive objects, such as black holes, bend spacetime more than relatively puny objects, like the sun.

“There’s a whole spectrum of gravitational waves, just like there’s a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves. So, just like you have radio and infrared and visible and ultraviolet and X-ray and all the way up through gamma ray, you have the same type of thing with gravitational waves,” Thorpe said.

Though astronomers have not detected any gravitational waves yet, they know what frequencies and wavelengths different sources generate, thanks to computer modeling.

The longest gravitational waves were produced in the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years. “They get stretched out to the size of the universe as the universe expands. They kind of expand along with the universe,” Thorpe said.

Some scientists are studying the remnant cosmic microwave background radiation for telltale fingerprints of gravitational waves. Others have been hunting for gravitation waves set off by massive, fast-moving objects, such as binary black holes.

Unlike most electromagnetic telescopes, which have to be pointed, gravitational wave detectors are more like microphones that you just stick out and see what’s there, Thorpe said.

“You get sources from all directions and then you do data analysis to disentangle them,” he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Animal That Survives in Space Has Weird DNA

The only animal known to survive the extreme environment of outer space without the help of special equipment turns out to have the most foreign DNA of any species.

Water bears, also known as tardigrades, have genomes that are nearly one-sixth foreign, meaning that the DNA comes from creatures other than the animal itself, new research finds.

The discovery, published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to the evidence that tiny water bears are incredibly unique and seemingly indestructible animals. In 2007, some were even rocketed into space on the outside of a satellite.

When the satellite returned, many of the water bears were still alive. What’s more, some of the females had laid eggs in space, with the young hatching healthily, as though nothing had happened.

“We had no idea that an animal genome could be composed of so much foreign DNA,” co-author Bob Goldstein of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said in a press release. “We knew many animals acquire foreign genes, but we had no idea that it happens to this degree.”

Water bears are segmented, eight-legged micro-animals that measure just a miniscule fraction of an inch long. Goldstein, lead author Thomas Boothby and their team determined that water bears acquire 6,000 foreign genes primarily from bacteria, but also from plants, fungi and various single-celled microorganisms.

This means that 17.5 percent of the water bear’s genome comes from these other sources.

The DNA is acquired via a process called horizontal gene transfer. Instead of just inheriting DNA, it is swapped between species.

Boothby said, “Animals that can survive extreme stresses may be particularly prone to acquiring foreign genes — and bacterial genes might be better able to withstand stresses than animal ones.”

Water bears have astounded scientists for years with their heartiness. For example, you can stick them in a freezer for a year. Within 20 minutes, the animal thaws out and starts to scurry around as normal.

The researchers suspect that when water bears are under conditions of extreme stress, such as desiccation, their DNA will break into small pieces. When the cell rehydrates, the cell’s membrane and nucleus (where the DNA resides) become temporarily “leaky,” such that DNA and other large molecules can pass through easily.

During this process, the water bears not only repair their own damaged DNA, but also stitch in the foreign DNA, creating a mosaic of genes that come from different species.

The prior record holder for most foreign DNA was another microscopic animal called the rotifer. It is now known that rotifers just have about half as much foreign DNA as water bears, though.

Read more at Discovery News

Captivating Blue Dragon Sea Slug Washes Up in Australia

It takes a lot of courage to go up against the venomous Portuguese man o' war -- a creature that sends even humans bolting out the water -- but the blue dragon is up for the challenge.

As it munches on the highly venomous siphonophore, the blue dragon intentionally eats the man o' war's toxic stingers, storing them within its own body. Now armed and dangerous with its victim's weapon, the blue dragon can impart a nasty sting on any would-be predators.

Also known as Glaucus atlanticus, the small sea slug is found floating along the surface many of the world's oceans, yet rarely seen by humans -- unless it washes ashore, as one did on Australia's Gold Coast earlier this week:

Griffith University marine invertebrates expert Kylie Pitt told the Gold Coast Bulletin that the "really weird" creatures "float upside down and move around using the water's surface tension."

"I have handled them before and wasn't stung, but I would not recommend anyone pick them up because they can have a painful sting," he added.

From Discovery News

Medieval Parchment Mystery Solved

Using a simple PVC eraser, an international team of researchers has solved the long-standing mystery surrounding the origin of the tissue-thin parchment used to produce the first pocket Bibles in the Middle Ages.

The secret of the ultra-thin material derives from a highly specialized craft technique rather than the supply of particular animal skins, said the researchers.

More than 20,000 copies of pocket Bibles were produced by scribes in the 13th century, mainly in France but also in England, Italy and Spain.

The books were written on an ultra-fine, almost translucent parchment known as “uterine vellum.” It was believed to have come from the thin skins of unborn calves or sheep.

But most paleographers have discounted the theory, viewing the Medieval uterine vellum simply as a myth.

“Its production on the scale implied by extant manuscripts would have entailed an untenably high number of aborted fetuses,” researchers led by Sarah Fiddyment and Matthew Collins of the BioArCh research facility in the Department of Archaeology at York, wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Older research suggested smaller, more thin-skinned mammals such as rabbit, squirrel or even rats as the source of the unique writing material.

To identify the animal origin of parchment, the researchers used a novel, non- invasive technique – a triboelectric extraction of skin collagen.

A variant on ZooMS (ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) peptide mass fingerprinting, the simple method extracts protein from the parchment surface simply by rubbing a PVC eraser on the membrane surface.

“By passing the eraser gently across the surface, you generate an electrostatic charge — in the same way you can rub a silk cloth on amber or a balloon on your hair,” Matthew Collins told Discovery News. “The eraser exfoliates into charged sheets, and the protein and dirt are lifted off onto the resulting crumbs,” he added.

Using this method, Collins and colleagues analyzed 72 pocket Bibles originating in France, England, and Italy and 293 additional parchment samples from the 13th century.

The thickness in the parchment samples ranged from 0.03 to 0.28 mm.

“We found no evidence of unexpected species, such as rabbit or squirrel. However, we did identify the use of more than one mammal species in a single manuscript, consistent with the local availability of hides,” the researchers wrote.

According to Collins and colleagues, parchment makers simply had the skills to make the finest parchments from calf, goat and sheep skins.

“It is more a question of using the right parchment-making technology than using uterine skin,” said co-author and parchment conservator Jiří Vnouček.

Based on the new findings, Vnouček has recreated parchment similar to uterine vellum from old skins.

Read more at Discovery News

Lost Ancient Greek Island May Have Been Found

An international team of archaeologists believe they had discovered an island in the Aegean Sea that was once the ancient city of Kane, site of an epic sea battle between the Athenians and the Spartans in 406 B.C.

The Arginusae islands, now called the Garip islands, lie only a few hundred yards off the coast of Turkey, National Geographic reported Friday. Ancient historical sources refer to three Arginusae islands but the exact location of the third has long been unclear, disappearing from maps as far back as the 16th century.

Researchers determined what is now a peninsula was once an island after drilling into the ground and examining rock samples, the magazine reported.

The Athenians crushed the Spartans in the battle of Arginusae, but the victory was short-lived.

A storm stranded Athenians whose ships had been destroyed, according to the magazine. When the victorious admirals returned home, the citizens of Athens voted to execute them for failing to rescue those left behind.

The archaeological team drilled down into the filled-up gap that once separated Kane from the Turkish coast to discover that it was made up of loose soil and rock, ScienceAlert reported.

“It had been a matter of discussion if the islands here were the Arginus Islands or not until our research began,” one of the team, archaeologist Felix Pirson from the German Archaeology Institute, told the Dogan News Agency, according to the website.

“But then we revealed that the ancient Kane was located on an island in the past,” he said. “The strait between this island and the land was filled with alluviums and created this peninsula. We will get more evident information after examining the geological samples.”

From Discovery News

Mars Will Become a Ringed Planet When Phobos Dies

Mars’ doomed moon Phobos may leave its parent planet a parting gift. A new study shows the moon is likely to break apart before it hits the atmosphere, creating a debris ring that will encircle Mars for millions of years.

The research, published in this week’s Nature Geoscience, follows a report earlier this month that not only is Phobos losing altitude due to Mars’ gravity, it also already is showing signs of structurally stress from tidal forces.

Phobos survived a giant impact early in its history, but damage from the crash left the moon weak, say Benjamin Black and Tushar Mittal, planetary scientists with University of California at Berkeley.

Their study shows that in 20 million to 40 million years, Phobos will break apart, leaving a cloud of debris that will relatively quickly assembly into a ring around Mars.

Initially, the ring will be as dense as Saturn’s rings today, and it will last for up to 100 million years, the study shows.

For Earthlings, Phobos’ demise presents a unique opportunity to study what may be the solar system’s last inwardly migrating moon.

“Inwardly migrating satellites — some of which may break up tidally, some of which may collide with their primaries — are likely to be an under-appreciated and important component of planetary evolution,” the authors note.

“Phobos offers the last possible glimpse of the signatures and processes that applied to inwardly migrating moons and the interplay with ring formation early in our solar system’s history.”

From Discovery News

Syphilis widespread in Central Europe even before Columbus' voyage to America

In 1495, a "new" disease spread throughout Europe: syphilis. Christopher Columbus was said to have brought this sexually transmitted disease back from his voyage to America. At least, that has been the accepted theory up until now. Using morphological and structural evidence, researchers from the Department of Forensic Medicine and the Center for Anatomy and Cell Biology (bone laboratory) at MedUni Vienna have now identified several cases of congenital syphilis dating back to as early as 1320 AD in skeletons from excavations at the cathedral square of St. Pölten, Austria "The discovery clearly refutes the previous theory," say study leaders Karl Großschmidt and Fabian Kanz of MedUni Vienna.

Congenital syphilis, which is passed from a pregnant mother to her unborn child, was primarily identified by changes to the teeth of skeletons from the 14th century. "We found so-called Hutchinson's teeth with central notches and converging edges and mulberry molars, which are characteristic signs of syphilis," study authors Kanz and Großschmidt (Department of Cell and Developmental Biology) explained. Their findings have now been published in the Journal of Biological and Clinical Anthropology.

Thin sections of bones provide perfect examination results

The researchers at the Center for Anatomy and Cell Biology of the Medical University of Vienna prepared undecalcified bone thin sections from the bones and teeth of the skeletons for histological examination and analysis. These thin sections, which can only be produced in a few places throughout the world, where subsequently examined by a special light microscopy technique to morphologically determine the pathogen involved.

Up to now, a total of 9000 skeletons as old as the 9th century AD have been recovered from the excavations in the cathedral square in St. Pölten. The large number of unearthed individuals at one archaeological site is unique in Europe. The recovery was conducted in close collaboration with the Urban Archaeology Department of the state capital of Lower Austria. Additional studies of the living conditions and diseases evident from the skeletons were started.

This remarkable discovery of the earliest evidence of syphilis between 1320 and 1390 now awaits confirmation by molecular biological tests and proteomics (examination of the proteome using biochemical methods). The scientists hope to gain further insights from the proteomic analysis, in particular, because the DNA of syphilis decays very rapidly.

From Science Daily

'Resurrection Plants' Offer Hope as Climate Turns Hostile

As the race to adapt to climate change quickens, a South African scientist is leading global research into developing crops that mimic the extraordinary survival skills of “resurrection plants.”

Jill Farrant, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, hopes that unlocking the genetic codes of drought-tolerant plants could help farmers toiling in increasingly hot and dry conditions.

With more than 130 known varieties in the world, resurrection plants are a unique group of flora that can survive extreme water shortages for years.

During a drought, the plant acts like a seed, becoming so dry it appears dead.

But when the skies finally open and the rain pours down, the shriveled plant bursts “back to life”,  turning green and robust in just a few hours.

“I want to cater to the subsistence farmer, the person who wants to make enough food to live,” Farrant, 55, said. “Farmers are becoming more and more dispirited, and droughts are killing them.”

Perhaps the most well-known resurrection plant is Myrothamnus flabellifolius, which makes antioxidant chemicals to protect it during dry spells and is used in fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s cosmetics line.

- A life passion -

A farmer’s daughter, Farrant recalls stumbling across a resurrection plant as a nine-year-old and being amazed at its seemingly immortal properties.

“I wrote in my diary about a plant that had died and came back after the rain,” she said.

She returned to the subject professionally in 1994, and has since become the world’s leading expert in her field.

Environmentalists fear that more and more of Africa will be reduced to a dust bowl by global warming, with higher temperatures, reduced water supplies and population growth threatening to trigger worsening famines.

Climate change could reduce maize yields across southern Africa by as much as 30 percent by 2030, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Ahead of the United Nations conference in Paris at the end of November, countries are facing growing pressure to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution levels by weaning their carbon-hungry societies off fossil fuels.

But, scientists say it is just as important to adapt to the new reality.

“Soil, cropping systems, farming systems — they all must have the capacity to recover from a drastic change in climate,” said Rattan Lal, professor of soil science at Ohio State University.

“We should make agriculture part of the solution to our issues… the climate change problem is so huge everything should be on the table.”

If successful, Farrant will follow in the venerable footsteps of earlier scientists who have saved crops from devastation by exploiting plants with specific strengths.

In the 1970s, US maize was rescued from southern leaf blight disease by incorporating resistant genes found in other varieties of maize.

- Adapt to survive -

Farrant has recently focused her research on teff, a grass native to Ethiopia whose seed has been used as a stable food in the region for centuries.

She hopes to make it more resilient by activating genes she discovered by studying resurrection plants.

“My main aim all along is to make crops that can improve drought tolerance,” Farrant said. “If we get the money, I would say in 10 to 15 years we’ve got a product.”

Experts warn that drought-tolerant crops are not a one-stop solution to the world’s climate problems or even a safeguard against hunger.

Read more at Discovery News