Modeling floods that formed canyons on Earth, Mars

Larsen and Lamb apply their new model to the “channeled scablands” in eastern Washington State, an area that, like some on Mars, has very deep canyons cut into fractured basalt bedrock.

Geomorphologists who study Earth's surface features and the processes that formed them have long been interested in how floods, in particular catastrophic outbursts that occur when a glacial lake ice dam bursts, for example, can change a planet's surface, not only on Earth but on Mars.

Now geoscience researchers Isaac Larsen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Michael Lamb at the California Institute of Technology have proposed and tested a new model of canyon-forming floods which suggests that deep canyons can be formed in bedrock by significantly less water than previously thought. They point out that "reconstructing the magnitude of the canyon-forming floods is essential for understanding how floods modify planetary surfaces, the hydrology of early Mars, and abrupt climate change."

Larsen and Lamb apply their new model to the "channeled scablands" in eastern Washington State, an area that, like some on Mars, has very deep canyons cut into fractured basalt bedrock. The researchers say their results suggest "there may be a rich imprint of both the history and discharge of flooding in the morphology of canyons" such as terraces, valley shapes and slope profiles on Earth and on Mars "that warrant further investigation." Details appear in the current issue of Nature.

The researchers say channels in the scablands today, which are up to 650 feet (200 meters) deep and 3 miles (5 km) wide, were likely formed by flood discharges five- to tenfold smaller than brimful estimates, that is by "significantly lower megaflood discharges than previously thought. The channeled scablands are a classic landscape in the history of geomorphology and we're bringing new views of how it was formed."

Until the 1920s, scientists did not understand what could have formed the tortured landscape of eastern Washington studied for decades by J Harlen Bretz, a giant figure in geosciences, Larsen recalls. Bretz was the first to suggest that they were formed by catastrophic flooding of unknown origin. His views were dismissed for years, but Bretz was later vindicated when glacial Lake Missoula was identified as the floodwater source.

As most scientists came to accept the catastrophic flood explanation for the canyons and then tried to estimate floodwater discharges, they assumed that floods filled canyons to the brim, a huge amount of water. But an alternate hypothesis proposed and now tested by Lamb and and Larsen posits that as floodwater cuts into bedrock, the canyon deepens, meaning less water is required to shape it.

In areas underlain by fractured bedrock, Larsen says, "our general concept is that the channel floor was being cut and lowered as the floods were happening, and you need to account for that when reconstructing the scenario of flood magnitude. This applies to the scablands, to Mars and other areas where there have been catastrophic outburst floods."

He and Lamb combine numerical flood models with estimates of the force required to erode basalt bedrock to show that for Moses Coulee, a canyon carved by catastrophic Lake Missoula floods in eastern Washington when an ice dam repeatedly broke and reformed around 15,000 years ago, their "threshold shear stress model" explains the shape and depth of currently observed channels better than the brimful model.

"We numerically routed floods through the canyon in different states, from current configuration and at four different past scenarios," Larsen notes. "We predicted the discharge from two models and tested which one is most reasonable, based on the depositional evidence from the current bars seen today in the canyons. The size of floods our model predicts from the basalt erosion better match locations of depositional flood bars in the canyon than the brimful model predicts."

Read more at Science Daily

Biodiversity loss in forests will be pricey

Forest

A new global assessment of forests -- perhaps the largest terrestrial repositories of biodiversity -- suggests that, on average, a 10% loss in biodiversity leads to a 2 to 3% loss in the productivity, including biomass, that forests can offer. Based on these results, the authors estimate the value of biodiversity in maintaining commercial productivity to be 166 to 490 billion (USD), which would be considerably greater than the total cost of effective global conservation. The results could be used to better inform forest management and restoration.

The biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) has gained the interest of scientists and policy-makers over recent years, but most BPR assessments of forests have been regional to date. To gain more insights into BPR on a global scale, Jingjing Liang et al compiled data from 777,126 sample plots across 44 countries and 13 ecoregions. In total, more than 30 million trees across 8,737 species were tallied and measured.

Their assessment reveals that, in general, on a global scale, a 10% decrease in tree species richness would cause a 2 to 3% decline in productivity, which is the rate of biomass production in an ecosystem.

A 99% decrease in tree species richness, by contrast, results in productivity declines of 62 to 78%. While productivity trends consistently decrease with increased biodiversity loss across nearly all regions of the world, the areas that would experience the greatest productivity decline in absolute terms include the Amazon, West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, Southeastern Africa, Southern China, Myanmar, Nepal, and the Malay Archipelago.

From Science Daily

Astronomers predict possible birthplace of Rosetta-probed comet 67P

Using statistical analysis and scientific computing, astronomers at Western University have charted a path that most likely pinpoints the very origins of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is vital information in discovering what kind of material it is made from and just how long it has been present in our solar system.

When the Rosetta spacecraft successfully touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on September 30, 2016, the news was shared globally via Twitter in dozens of languages. Citizens the world over were engaged by the astronomical achievement, and now the European Space Agency and NASA are eager to learn as much as possible about the critically important celestial body of ice.

Using statistical analysis and scientific computing, astronomers at Western University have charted a path that most likely pinpoints the very origins of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is vital information in discovering what kind of material it is made from and just how long it has been present in our solar system.

Mattia Galiazzo, a postdoctoral fellow in Western's Department of Physics & Astronomy, presented his findings at the joint 48th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and 11th annual European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California. Galiazzo collaborated on the findings with solar system expert Paul Wiegert from Western's Centre for Planetary Science & Space Exploration.

"These results come from computations of the comet's orbit from the present to the past, which is computationally difficult due to the chaosity of the orbit caused by close encounters with Jupiter," says Galiazzo. "Thus the details are obscure but we can establish a dynamical pathway from its current orbit back to the Kuiper belt."

Galiazzo and Wiegert think that 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is relatively new to the inner parts of our solar system, having only arrived about 10,000 years ago. Prior to this time, the comet would have been inactive in frozen storage far from the Sun.

Previous studies show that similar comets -- known as Jupiter Family comets -- historically stay in the inner parts of our solar system for 12,000 years, therefore recognizing comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as a member of the Jupiter Family makes sense.

The majority of the Jupiter Family comets are thought to come from the Kuiper belt -- a ring-shaped accumulation of comets, asteroids and other space bodies in the solar system beyond the known planets -- and Galiazzo and Wiegert believe, based on initial analysis of their investigation, that this is the case for 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as well.

Read more at Science Daily

New Human Cell Atlas Is Like Google Maps for the Body

Imagine having the level of detail in Google Maps but for the inner workings of the human body. A new international initiative is creating an atlas that will chart every single cell in the human body, encompassing all of the tissues within Homo sapiens, scientists announced last week at a meeting in London.

The revolutionary project, called the Human Cell Atlas, will help biologists and doctors understand, diagnose and treat diseases with the help of high-resolution images of healthy and atypical cells from every structure in the body.

"In sickness and in health, cells are the fundamental units of life, and only by knowing our cells will we be able to fully comprehend the mechanisms of human disease," Sten Linnarsson, a professor of molecular systems biology at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, who is participating in the initiative, said in a statement.

The initiative was formally announced at an international meeting convened by the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and Wellcome Trust on Oct. 13 and 14.

At the meeting, researchers decided what to include in the initiative's first phase. The scientists said the project is expected to be as ambitious in scope as the Human Genome Project, which was the first successful undertaking to sequence the human genome — all of the 3 billion "letters" in human DNA.

There are trillions of cells within the human body, but each person came from just two cells: an egg and sperm cell. Once the egg and sperm combine to make an embryo, these cells divide, grow and give rise to new types of cells that form tissues and organs, the project's scientists said.

However, there isn't much detailed knowledge about the body's countless cells. Earlier studies have described what certain cells look like under a microscope, and more recent analyses have found the average properties of cells by examining clumps of hundreds or thousands of them. But there isn't yet an entity that shows a magnified image of every cell and what molecules are produced in each cell, the researchers said.

For instance, the atlas will include messenger RNA that gives each cell its unique identity. Collecting this information would have been impossible a few years ago, but new advances in single-cell genomics now allow researchers to separate individual cells from different tissues and organs, and to measure the transcriptome (the body's messenger RNA molecules) and other important molecules, the researchers said.

"We are currently limited in our understanding of how cells differ across each organ, or even how many cell types there are in the body, said Sarah Teichmann, head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom. "The Human Cell Atlas initiative is the beginning of a new era of cellular understanding, as we will discover new cell types; find how cells change across time, during development and disease; and gain a better understanding of biology."

The new atlas will identify each cell's type, such as whether it is an immune cell or brain cell. The map will also show where these cells are located within the body's tissues. In addition, it will distinguish among cell states, for instance, what a naive immune cell looks like before it has encountered any pathogens and how a seasoned immune cell appears after it has been activated by a bacterium, the researchers said.

Moreover, the atlas will capture key characteristics of cells as they transition, for instance, the changes that occur as a stem cell becomes a specific type of cell, the scientists said. This will help researchers trace the lineage of each cell, such as how a predecessor stem cell in bone marrow turns into a functional red blood cell, the researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

Volcanoes in Ethiopia Shook Up Early Human Evolution

Dramatic and rapid changes from volcanic activity in Ethiopia appear to have set the stage for the emergence of Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago. The first known fossil evidence for our species was unearthed there, where explosive volcanic activity was dramatically changing the landscape and environment, according to new research published in the journal Nature Communications.

"Pyroclastic flows -- hot currents of gas, ash and rock -- would have inundated large tracts of the rift floor while ash and pumice fallout from larger plumes are likely to have covered regions to at least 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the vent," lead author William Hutchison of the University of Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences told Seeker.

While all of this was going on, the earliest-known members of our species were not very far away. The fossils from the Omo Kibish rock formation of southern Ethiopia date to 195,000 years ago. These early humans likely viewed the eruptions from a safe enough distance -- but their presence in the region as the volcanic activity took place seems to be too coincidental to ignore.

Hutchison said that the volcano eruptions occurred along the East African Rift System, which is a still-active continental rift where Africa is slowly being pulled apart. One segment runs through Ethiopia, where a population of around 10 million people live alongside it.

As the continent gradually pulls apart, Earth's crust along the rift is extended and thinned, allowing molten rock (magma) to rise.

Hutchison and his team reconstructed the eruptive history of a 124-mile-long segment of the rift in Ethiopia by studying the Aluto and Corbetti volcanoes there. The researchers used two techniques, argon isotopes and radiocarbon analysis, to determine the dates of erupted rocks. They also analyzed the sizes of eruptions along the rift over time.

"We suggest that an increased flux of melt from the mantle into the crust generated the large magma chambers that over-pressured and erupted 320,000–170,000 years ago," Hutchison said. "These events are called flare-ups and have been identified before in other rift zones such as the Taupo Volcanic Zone in New Zealand."

The caldera walls of Corbetti volcano, Ethiopia. The caldera was created 200,000 years ago during a colossal volcanic eruption.

Ancestors of our species and other members of the human family tree collectively known as "hominins," as well as other animals, were already in the region, so there could have been sudden devastation as when Italy's Mount Vesuvius erupted and killed nearly everyone in its path.

"Major volcanic eruptions and the environmental devastation that followed might have greatly reduced hominin populations living in the rift zone," Hutchison said. "The eruptions themselves would have made certain sections of the rift uninhabitable, potentially for many thousands of years. These mechanisms provide a means of reducing and isolating certain populations which might have promoted human adaptation and evolution at this time."

"This suggests," he added, "that our earliest ancestors not only had to deal with changing climate but also (with) the environmental devastation caused by major explosive eruptions."

Earlier research supports that the region was heavily populated with hominins long before our species emerged on the scene. Yohannes Haile-Selassie and Denise Su of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History said "more than one species of early hominin co-existed during Lucy's time" starting at about 3.8 million years ago. Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), they explained, "was the only potential human ancestor species that roamed in what is now the Afar region of Ethiopia."

Read more at Discovery News

Land of Giants Located in Ireland

The land of giants. It sounds like something from a fairy tale, but it arguably exists in a region of Northern Ireland where a cluster of people with a genetic predisposition grow abnormally tall.

In Mid-Ulster, about 1 in 150 people carry a genetic mutation to the AIP gene that leads to an overproduction of growth hormone resulting in acromegaly, also known as gigantism. The hormone disorder is spurred by a tumor on the pituitary gland, a pea-sized organ at the base of the brain.

"This is probably the highest proportion of giants in the whole world in that little part of Northern Ireland," Marta Korbonits, professor of endocrinology at Barts and the London School of Medicine Queen Mary, tells Seeker. Korbonits led the team that discovered the link between the AIP gene defect in Irish populations and gigantism in 2011.

In their latest research, Korbonits and her team calculated that the AIP gene defect traces back 2,500 years. The team found the variant in Charles Byrne, a man born in 1761 who grew to be 7 feet, 6 inches tall and was known as the "Irish giant," as well as in 18 other Irish families.

Symptoms vary depending on whether the disease first appears in childhood or as an adult. "The disease usually develops in children between 10 and 20, although we have a few cases younger than 10, and some between 20 and 30," Korbonits explained.

In children, there's rapid growth, which can be accompanied by joint pain, disabling headaches, vision problems, type II diabetes, facial distortion and enlarged hands and feet. In adults, if symptoms develop late, adults don't get taller, because their bones are already fused and may in fact shrink due to developing a curvature in the spine. Other symptoms include muscle weakness, hypertension and difficulty sleeping.

"While these people might look big and powerful and strong, the long-term effects of excess IGF-1 and growth hormone are very disabling for these patients," explains Anthony Heaney, endocrinologist and professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

"We have this fascination with these really large, powerful people, and yet they themselves have a lot of morbidity and potential mortality from this disorder," Heaney continues.

Treatments are available and include surgery, medication or radiation therapy, but how effective those options are depends largely on the progression of the disease. Usually by the time clinicians get involved, patients have already developed large tumors, and complete control of the tumor and hormone regulation is hard to achieve. Even the best surgical centers in the world are just 50 percent effective at achieving that control, Heaney notes.

Monitoring the lineage of the gene variant lets researchers keep an eye out for children who inherit the defect. Early clinical intervention can help to prevent the worst of the symptoms.

Read more at Discovery News

T. Rex Had Little Use for Its Puny Arms

Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex — the most complete and best-preserved T. rex skeleton ever found — temporarily surrendered her arm to science. And the preliminary results suggest it wasn't doing her much good anyway.

Tests on Sue's arms at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois showed few signs of stress, according to The Field Museum in Chicago, where this giant beast dominates the museum's main hall. The tests suggest that when this fearsome predator was alive more than 65 million years ago, she didn't use those itty-bitty arms very often, museum scientists said.

"It's very early yet, but it seems like there aren't many signs of stress on the bones that would indicate frequent use," Peter Makovicky, associate director of dinosaurs at the museum, said in a statement. "Based on what we know now, it looks like T. rex didn't use its arms much, at least not as an adult, but there's still a lot to learn."

T. rex's comically small front limbs have long stumped scientists. Some have argued that the arms had a purpose, pointing out that the bones are short but thick and could have supported bulging muscles. Others think the arms were basically vestigial (a small remnant of an ancestor). T. rex wasn't the only carnivorous dinosaur to have stubby limbs. An allosaur called Gualicho shinyae discovered in Argentina this year also had surprisingly small arms for its body size. G. shinyae is only distantly related to T. rex.

The finding shows that "tyrannosaurs' [arms] really aren't unusual," biologist Thomas Carr told Live Science when the allosaur discovery was announced. "It's not just a one-off [finding]," he said.

Sue the T. rex was unearthed in Montana in 1990. She's 40.5 feet (12.3 meters) long and 13 feet (4 m) tall, and her skull alone weighs 600 lbs. (270 kilograms). Sue's jaw is pockmarked with holes that may have been caused by a parasitic infection. If so, the disease was serious and may have killed the mighty predator.

But it's Sue's arms that are getting all the attention now. This month, researchers removed the arm bones from the skeleton and transported them to the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. This instrument creates extra-bright X-rays, which researchers are using to study where muscles would have attached to the bone and where blood vessels would have penetrated.

"Understanding the fine internal morphology of the skeleton will give us clues about how the arm could move and what it was used for," paleontologist Carmen Soriano, a scientist at the Advanced Photon Source, said in a statement released Oct. 12.

The final results of the scans are months away, according to the statement.

From Discovery News

Ancient Man Killed by Boomerang

When thrown properly, boomerangs can be lethal weapons. In fact, cave paintings in Australia show that they've been used as such for thousands of years, during hunting and war.

Now, scientists think they might have the remains of a boomerang-attack victim, with the discovery of an 800-year-old skeleton that has a long gash in its skull.

The bones were found eroding out of a riverbank in New South Wales' Toorale National Park two years ago. The skeleton — a male, likely between 25 and 35 years old when he died —was well preserved and appeared to have been carefully buried in a tightly flexed position. He was named "Kaakutja," a term from the local Baakantji people meaning "older brother."

Researchers found that Kaakutja ate crayfish and possum for his last meal, and that conflict was part of his lifestyle; he had two head injuries that had partially healed and fresh deadly wounds that had no signs of healing.

He had rib fractures and a wound to his upper arm. His skull was sliced down the right side of his face, from the frontal bone of his skull to his jaw, with the type of cut that's usually inflicted by a sharp-edged metal weapon. Radiocarbon dating, however, showed that Kaakutja died in the mid-13th century, 600 years before Europeans brought metal weapons to Australia.

For answers, the researchers, led by palaeoanthropologist Michael Westaway of Griffith University in Australia, turned to aboriginal weapons like stone axes and a type of wooden club known as a lil-lil.

Kaakutja's main head wound was about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long, meaning the weapon must have had a blade at least this length, the scientists reasoned. In their study, which is detailed in the October issue of the journal Antiquity, the team concluded that the sharp edge of a wooden boomerang most likely caused this lengthy cut. The researchers added, however, that they could not say for certain whether this was the fatal blow that killed Kaakutja. "Multiple wounds probably led to significant blood loss and eventual death,"they wrote.

One ethnographic account from the early 20th century claims aboriginal Australians used a type of boomerang for fighting or hunting. It was bigger and heavier with a more open curve than the typical returning boomerang and "reminds one of the blade of a sabre and its inner edge is sharp and dangerous." The case of Kaakutja could attest to the lethal power of such a weapon.

"The nature and expression of trauma suggests that some edged weapons from traditional Aboriginal culture had the capacity to inflict injuries similar to those produced by edged metal weapons," the researchers wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Craze for Hornbill's 'Red Ivory' Pushes Bird toward Extinction

A striking bird with monochrome plumage and a formidable "beak," the helmeted hornbill is being hunted to extinction, one of the latest victims of a thriving global trade in exotic wildlife.

For decades poachers in Borneo's western forests focused on capturing orangutans and sun bears, but in the past few years a surge in demand for hornbill "ivory" has pushed the avian species to the brink. The product has become so popular in China, where wealthy collectors are keen to show off their status by acquiring rare or unusual animals, that it is fetching up to five times the price of elephant tusk on the black market.

"The demand for these luxury items is just going through the roof," Chris Shepherd, from wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, told AFP. "In Asia, it's really at a scale where species like the helmeted hornbill are just being completely decimated."

Poachers aren't interested in their brilliant plumage or large bills, but a helmet-like block of reddish-gold keratin at the front of the skulls known as a casque. It's this soft, ivory-like substance that's carved by craftsmen in China into luxury ornaments, statues and jewelry — trendy top-shelf trinkets that have soared in value as so-called "red ivory" has grown more prestigious.

Experts say a single casque can fetch up to $1000, eclipsing the average black market price of traditional "white" ivory sourced from elephant tusk several times over. Researchers say thousands of these majestic birds have been killed in half a decade alone as demand for red ivory has taken off.

Yokyok Hadiprakarsa, a leading expert in helmeted hornbills, estimates as many as 500 were killed every month in 2013 — or 6,000 annually — just in West Kalimantan, a jungle-clad province in Indonesia's half of Borneo.

Helmeted hornbills had been traditionally hunted in the past by Borneo's indigenous tribes, but never at levels that posed any conservation risk. This "complete, systematic slaughter of the species" came virtually out of nowhere, Shepherd said. It wasn't until 2011 that red ivory first began showing up on websites catering to Chinese buyers and at high-end wildlife markets along the country's borders, such as in Myanmar and Laos.

Hunting rapidly intensified, especially among trafficking networks already well entrenched in West Kalimantan, a key wildlife smuggling hub with an international airport in the capital Pontianak. By the close of 2015, the species had progressed from vulnerable to critically endangered — leapfrogging two threat levels to the highest possible risk category on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "red list."

Now the elite rangers of the government's Forest Police Rapid Reaction Unit (SPORC) rarely spot these distinctive birds during jungle patrols, SPORC commander David Muhammad told AFP in Pontianak. Instead, they're uncovering just the skulls during raids on smuggler hideouts, the decapitated corpses dumped unceremoniously elsewhere.

"There is a high value placed on the heads by hunters and collectors," said Muhammad. "That's the only thing they want. The rest has no value."

The commercial trade of helmeted hornbills is prohibited by law in China and across its habitat zones in Southeast Asia: Thailand and Myanmar, as well as Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia — the three countries that share Borneo island.

But the rate of seizures — a "tip of the iceberg" indicator of the trade, said Shepherd — suggests business is booming. In the 18 months to August 2014, nearly 2,200 casques were confiscated by law enforcement in China and Indonesia, around a third just in West Kalimantan.

In one case, SPORC units intercepted four Chinese nationals at Pontianak's international airport with nearly 250 casques stashed in their luggage.

Read more at Discovery News

Great Pyramid Find: Two Mysterious Cavities With Unusual Features

The Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, has long been rumored to contain hidden passageways leading to secret chambers. Now a team of researchers has confirmed the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum contains two unknown cavities, possibly hiding a corridor-like structure and more mysterious features.

The announcement by the ScanPyramids project comes at the end of a year-long effort to use various scanning technology on Old Kingdom pyramids, including the Great Pyramid, Khafre or Chephren at Giza, the Bent pyramid and the Red pyramid at Dahshur.

Carried out by a team from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based non-profit organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation (HIP Institute) under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, the ScanPyramids project used three innovative techniques — muography, thermography and 3-D simulation — to deeply investigate the Great Pyramid of Giza.

An unknown cavity was detected at a height of about 345 feet from the ground on the northeastern edge of the monument, while a "void" was found behind the northern side at the upper part of the entrance gate.

"Such void is shaped like a corridor and could go up inside the pyramid," Mehdi Tayoubi, founder of the Paris-based Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, told Seeker.

He added that no link can be made between the two cavities at the moment.

Built for the pharaoh Cheops, also known as Khufu, the Great Pyramid is the largest of a family of three pyramids on the Giza plateau, on the outskirts of Cairo. It's the last remaining wonder of the ancient world.

A striking thermal anomaly was detected in November 2015 by French infrared specialist Jean-Claude Barré on the northern side of the monument, right where four chevrons — blocks placed according to an inverted V-shaped pattern — overhang the descending corridor.

When the pyramid was finished some 4,500 years ago, the chevrons were not visible in that area, but were hidden under casing stones that were dismantled over the centuries.

"Today we still see the remains of those chevrons and oblique stones which most probably are parts of propped missing chevrons covering a kind of void that might have existed before stones were dismantled," the researchers wrote in a statement.

In the construction of the pyramid, chevrons were not used for decoration, but to protect a void and prevent the roof from collapsing.

"Why many chevrons are put to protect such a small area at the beginning of the descending corridor?" the researchers wondered.

 After carrying out a 3-D reconstruction of the area, they decided to install three aluminum plates at the bottom of the descending corridor in an attempt to capture cosmic particles.

The technology, known as muography, relies on the muons that continually shower the Earth's surface. They emanate from the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere, where they are created from collisions between cosmic rays of our galactic environment and the nuclei of atoms in the atmosphere.

"Just like X rays pass through our bodies allowing us to visualize our skeleton, these elementary particles, weighing around 200 times more than electrons, can very easily pass through any structure, even large and thick rocks, such as mountains," Tayoubi said.

Tayoubi and his colleagues placed detectors sensitive to muons, called emulsion plates, inside the pyramid to discern dense areas from less dense areas — essentially the bones and tissue of the pyramid. When the films from the detectors were analyzed at Nagoya University in Japan, they revealed a significant excess of muons in the same direction, strongly pointing to a corridor-like void.

"The precise shape, size and exact position of this void is now under further investigation," the researchers said.

To that end, they added 12 new muon emulsion plates in the descending corridor.

"They will be collected by the end of October," Tayoubi said.

The investigation of the Great Pyramid also involved muon gas detectors, basically telescopes pointed on the northeastern side of monument from the outside.

Overall, they accumulated around 50 million muon cosmic particles, revealing muon excess at a spot close to the edge, at around 345 feet from the ground.

"This excess corresponds to an unknown cavity, measuring about 30 square feet. It's the same volume as another known cavity located on the same edge," Tayoubi said.

"Several studies from The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Nagoya university were conducted to confirm the excess of muons was not statistical fluctuation or noise," he added.

The excess was measured to be largely above 5 sigmas, corresponding to an effect with a probability above 99.9999%. In other words, the findings don't seem to have been some odd fluctuation of muons.

Read more at Discovery News