Chinese baby born with two faces

Kangkang, from China’s Hunan province, is being dubbed as “mask face” baby. Kangkang, 14 months old, was born with a double face, a congenital deformity called transverse facial cleft, also known as face horizontal cleft.

Full pictures and story at Rockingfacts

38% of Americans believe God caused Japanese earthquake

At the Edge of Invasion, Possible New Rules for Evolution

Just as Galapagos finches are icons of evolution by natural selection, Australia’s cane toads may someday be icons of “spatial sorting” — a dynamic that seems to exist at the edges of invasion, altering the standard rules of evolution.

Cane toads have evolved in odd ways Down Under. Adaptations that drove their dramatic spread made individual toads less reproductively fit. Evolution through natural selection of hereditary mutations still exists, but no longer appears driven by reproductive imperatives alone. It’s also shaped by speed.
“The possibility that some traits have evolved by ‘mating betwixt the quickest’ rather than ’survival of the fittest’ warrants further attention,” wrote biologists led by the University of Sydney’s Richard Shine in the March 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Introduced to northeast Australia 75 years ago in an ill-advised attempt at beetle control, cane toads spread like fire, their range expanding at rates that grew daily. As they first arrived at his study area, Shine noticed something strange: As expected, the toads displayed myriad adaptations — longer legs, greater endurance, a tendency to move faster and farther and straighter — that affected their ability to disperse, but dispersal’s benefits were unclear.

The fastest-spreading cane toads also had the highest mortality rates. Longer, stronger toad legs led to spinal injuries. “Most obviously, why did the toads just sprint through our magnificent, food-rich flood plain in a frenetic rush to keep on going?” said Shine. After all, if the toads’ evolution is driven solely by a drive to reproduce, they would have stopped to enjoy the spoils of invasion.

“Much of what they did seemed hard to reconcile with the idea of natural selection enhancing individual fitness,” said Shine. “We started thinking about what other kinds of processes could have caused them to become such driven little robotic dispersal machines.”

In the new study, Shine describes those processes, which fall under the rubric of “spatial sorting” and are most easily understood by analogy: Imagine a race between rowboats crewed by randomly distributed oarsmen. If the race is stopped intermittently, and oarsmen randomly redistributed between boats nearest each other, boats in the lead will accumulate ever-higher proportions of skilled rowers.

Those are the dynamics of spatial sorting. Boats are organisms, rowers are genes and the crew swap is reproduction. Each newly-crewed boat is offspring. Generation by generation, organisms in the lead get faster and faster. Classical natural selection still operates — if a mutation causes an organism’s offspring to go sterile, the lineage soon ends — but it’s no longer the only driver of evolution.

Now space matters, too. Physical proximity produced by dispersal continue to shape that dispersal. Whatever drives creatures to spread farther and faster clusters at the front. If an adaptation improves dispersal but hurts survival, it matters less than usual, because the pool of potential mates is determined by their ability to cover ground.

Read more at Wired Science

'Proof of Creation' Dino Drawing Just a Mud Stain

Dinosaur or mud stain? An ancient cave drawing high on a rock formation in southeastern Utah has stirred a skirmish of sorts between creationists who believe it's proof that humans and dinosaurs lived together, and scientists who say no way.

A new research paper out on the subject probably won't change too many minds, but it is giving food for thought to those who wonder what the fuss is about.

The petroglyph at the Kachina Bridge formation in Natural Bridges Natural Monument has drawn curious visitors for years. By many accounts, it appears to be a hand-drawn plant-eating dino, like the happy green diplodocus that was the old Sinclair oil logo.

Phil Senter, a biology professor at Fayetteville State University, hiked the region with his fiancé two summers ago. "We got there and I couldn't believe it," Senter said. "It looked just like a sauropod."

Petroglyphs are common throughout parts of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, drawn several thousand years ago by early Native Americans. The drawings represent deer and many other animals, but this was one of a few depicting prehistoric animals.

Senter found that the petroglyph had been adopted by creationist groups as proof that the human artist coexisted with dinosaurs. The image can be found on several creationist websites and is part of an exhibit at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

Intrigued by the drawing, Senter contacted Sally J. Cole, a Basalt, Colo., based author and archaeologist who has written extensively on petroglyphs of the west. Cole examined the drawing and declared that it was actually a composite of two separate petroglyphs, one being a snake or serpent. The dinosaur "legs" were actually natural mineral or mud stains.

Senter and Cole published their findings in Palaeontologia Electronica, a peer-reviewed online journal. But that's not likely the end of the story.

Contacted by Discovery News, officials at the Creationist Museum criticized the report. They noted that Cole examined the drawing with binoculars rather than getting close up.

"I'm prepared to accept that the petroglyph as being a dinosaur," said David Menton, a biologist at the Creation Museum. "I'm prepared that it is some other creature. What I'm not prepared to accept is that the artist climbed up there but the authors didn't climb up. They came to the conclusion that it was nothing."

Cole was not available for comment and her email is not listed on the paper. The paper states that the area is too rugged to bring in a ladder. Senter and Cole say the dinosaur drawing is a form of "paraeidolia, the psychological phenomenon of perceiving significance in vague or random stimuli, e.g., seeing animals in clouds or the face of a religious figure in a food item."

Read more at Discovery News

Science: How To Fake It

MAD ART LAB: “So you want to publish a fake science paper. Of course you do. Who doesn’t? But how do you go about it? Well, it’s a lot easier than you think. Just follow these simple steps…

Step 1: Pick a Subject
This is important. You’ll need to choose something that’s both popular and wrong. Things like “sticking needles in your skin cures disease” or “pets can telepathically detect when their owners are coming home” are pretty good. For this tutorial, though, we’ll use “common objects can bring you good luck” as an example.

Step 2: Prepare Your Experiment
Your experimental setup, of course, depends on the subject you’ve chosen. For this one, we’ll need a pair of dice and a bunch of objects to serve as good luck charms. The more the better. We want to run lots of trials, so gather up everything you can find: four leaf clovers, horse shoes, that pebble you found last week, Gerald your pet hamster, whatever happens to be lying around.”

“Step 3: Run Your Trials
Here’s where the magic starts. What you want to do is run lots and lots of trials, each with a small sample size. This will increase your chances of a false positive.

Step 4: Hunting The Wily Anomaly
Taken as a whole, your data will look pretty mundane. The chances of rolling, say, double sixes are 1 in 36, so you’re going to get about 2 or 3 per 100 rolls, give or take. Your results probably fit fairly well onto a bell curve, with most of the data points clustered in the middle and a few outliers on either side. But wait! If you rename some of those outliers “anomalies”, you’ve suddenly got a phenomenon!”

Continue reading the rest over at Mad Art Lab

Saber-Toothed Vegetarian Had Threatening Mouthful

Think "saber-toothed" and meat-eating predators like cats probably come to mind. But Brazil was once home to a saber-toothed vegetarian with teeth so scary that rivals probably backed away after seeing them.

Paleontologists also believe the 260-million-year-old animal, described in the latest issue of Science, was one of the first of its kind to sport upper and lower teeth that fit together when it bit down, a handy feature called "dental occlusion" that we humans and many other animals today enjoy.

The new species, named Tiarajudens eccentricus, was part of a group of ancient animals called therapsids, many of which are relatives of today's mammals.

"Tiarajudens was an animal the size of a large dog," project leader Juan Carlos Cisneros told Discovery News. Its general appearance was bizarre: a slightly robust animal with a short snout from which large saber teeth came out."

Cisneros, a Federal University of Piaui paleontologist, and his team analyzed the animal's remains, which consist of a smashed-up skull and some teeth. They calculate it had a total of 21 teeth on just one side of its skull. In addition to the long, pointy sabers, these included spoon-shaped incisors associated with modern herbivores, as well as large crowned teeth linked to animals like today's grass-eating cows.

"Grasses are rich in fiber and modern ruminants eat them, but in the Permian grasses didn't exist so this new therapsid probably ate stems or leaves rich in fiber that existed at the time," Cisneros said.

While the saber teeth might have helped to move or pull soft branches, the researchers suspect this "eccentric" plant eater was very territorial, showing its impressive teeth to rivals while defending land and protecting itself from predators.

Dinosaurs did not live in this animal's realm, but other large predators were around, such as 13 to 20-foot-long dinocephalians (meaning "terrible heads"), biarmosuchians and the gorgonopsians -- named after the Gorgons of Greek mythology. Each was formidable in its own right.

As human boxers today often attest, teeth can fall out after battles and for other reasons, so Tiarajudens "was constantly replacing its molar-like teeth," Cisneros said. He explained that it did this as crocodiles and most modern reptiles do today. For every three teeth, a new one popped out behind, ready to serve as a replacement.

"The process happens in waves that may take a few days," he continued. "During each wave of replacement, the animal replaces several teeth at once. Because the animal replaces every three teeth, it manages to have at least two thirds of its set of molar-like teeth always fully operational."

Read more at Discovery News

Earliest Americans Arrived Even Earlier

Everything's bigger in Texas, even the piles of debris and tools left alongside a stream some 15,000 years ago by some of the earliest known inhabitants of North America.

The newly discovered trove of 56 stone tools and thousands of flaky rock bits at an archeological site north of Austin is the largest and oldest artifact assemblage of its vintage discovered to date, says Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. Waters and a large team of colleagues describe the collection of artifacts, dubbed the Buttermilk Creek Complex, in the March 25 Science.

All across North America, a distinctive type of two-faced fluted blade shows up in layers of dirt dating to between 13,100 and 12,800 years ago. This "Clovis point" has been called the first great American invention, a technology that spread quickly among people living on the continent. Scientists used to think that the inventors and users of this particular point, which was probably fastened to wooden spears, were the first inhabitants of North America, arriving via an ancient land bridge with Siberia.

But a number of sites in North America and one in southern Chile known as Monte Verde established that people were making a living in the Americas earlier than 13,000 years ago, and in the last decade the "Clovis First" hypothesis has gone the way of the woolly mammoth. The Buttermilk creek complex, which dates to between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago, adds to this scant but growing roster of pre-Clovis sites.

"So from Oregon to Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, 15,000 years ago we've got people all over North America that were doing a lot of things," Waters says.

This isn't news to most of his colleagues, who have convinced themselves over the last decade that Clovis-point–carrying hunters were not the first people to reach the Americas, and that in fact the technology may have been invented in the New World. "What's the big fuss?" says archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "The Clovis First thing has been dead for a good 10 years. This is just another site that confirms what's been known about other areas of the new world."

Read more at Discovery News

The Aurora, as You've Never Seen It Before : Video

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Take 22,000 high-definition photographs, a geomagnetic storm and some incredible talent and what do you get? A two-minute video of the Aurora Borealis as you've never seen it before.

Photographer Terje Sorgjerd braved -25 degree Celsius (-15 F) temperatures to capture this mesmerizing collection of photographs. Then, by assembling the 22,000 photos, he created a time-lapse video of the rich color and dynamic shapes of the Northern Lights that would normally be difficult to see. Adding the atmospheric Hans Zimmer/Lisa Gerrard song "Now We Are Free" from the movie Gladiator to the mix, and Sorgjerd has created a masterpiece.

Having lived on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (high in the Arctic circle) for 5 months, I had first-hand knowledge of trying to photograph the aurora erHaving lived on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (high in the Arctic circle) for 5 months, I had first-hand knowledge of trying to photograph the aurora erupting above my head, with limited results. Mild frostbite and many blurred photos later, I returned to my research rather than taking up sub-zero photography professionally. I have the utmost respect for what Sorgjerd has achieved here.

Read more at Discovery News

Best-ever quantum measurement breaks Heisenberg limit

PHYSICISTS have made the most accurate quantum measurement yet, breaking a theoretical limit named for Werner Heisenberg.

The most accurate quantum measurements possible are made using an interferometer, which exploits the wave nature of matter and light. In this method, two identical beams of particles are sent along different paths to a detector, with one interacting with an object of interest along the way. Recombining the beams afterwards creates an interference pattern that reflects how much the interacting beam was disturbed – providing details about the object’s properties.

Assuming that the particles interact with the object, but not with one another, the accuracy of such measurements grows in proportion to the number of particles in the beams, N. By allowing such particle interactions, Mario Napolitano of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues have now demonstrated a way to break this so-called Heisenberg limit.

They used a beam of photons to measure the small magnetic field produced by a gas made up of a million ultra-cold rubidium atoms. Normally, the spin of each photon would rotate by a certain amount, thanks to its interactions with the magnetic field of the atoms. But the frequency of the photons was chosen so that the photons also interacted with each other when they were in the gas, so that the presence of one photon altered the way a second behaved. These interactions led to a measurement accuracy that grew in proportion to N^3/2 – greater than Heisenberg’s limit

Full article at New Scientist

If you don’t understand his article try this ;-)

Wart Detected on Egyptian Queen Beauty

King Tut's grandmother, the powerful and beautiful Queen Tiye, might have had an unattractive flat wart on her forehead, according to a mummy expert.

Located between the eyes, the small protuberance was found on the mummy of the so-called Elder Lady (KV35EL). Boasting long reddish hair falling across her shoulders, the mummy was identified in February 2010 by DNA testing as Queen Tiye, the daughter of Yuya and Thuya, wife of Amenhotep III, and mother of Akhenaten.

The skin growth had gone unnoticed until Mercedes González, director of the Instituto de Estudios Científicos en Momias in Madrid, spotted it looking at the mummy during a visit to the Cairo Museum.

"I got a high-resolution image of the mummy’s face from the Egyptian museum. From the enlargement, the small growth appears compatible with a flat wart or verruca plana," González told Discovery News
Slightly raised, flat and smooth, these harmless bumps of various colors are hyperplastic epidermal lesions produced by papilloma viruses (HPV). They usually occur on the face, neck and back of hands.

However, flat warts are not commonly found on the face of ancient Egyptian mummies.

"Until now I haven't seen anything similar," González said.

The wife of the 18th dynasty King Amenhotep III, the mother of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and grandmother of King Tut, Tiye (who lived from 1415 to 1340 B.C.), is one of the most intriguing women in Egyptian history.

Described by her husband as "the lady of grace, sweet in her love, who fills the palace with her beauty, the Regent of the North and South, the Great Wife of the King who loves her," she was the most influential woman of Amenhotep III's 38-year reign.

Tiye sat by the king as an equal when portrayed in statues -- an achievement unparalleled in that time -- and appeared to be much loved by her husband.

The wealthy Amenhotep III erected a number of shrines for his queen, built her a palace, a white sandstone temple in Nubia, land of her ancestors, and even a monumental artificial lake, Lake Tiye, for her excursions in the royal barge.

"It has been quite a surprise to find a flat wart between the eyes of such an Egyptian queen," González said.

Read more at Discovery News