Ultracold Big Bang Experiment Successfully Simulates Evolution of Early Universe

Physicists have reproduced a pattern resembling the cosmic microwave background radiation in a laboratory simulation of the big bang, using ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber at the University of Chicago.

"This is the first time an experiment like this has simulated the evolution of structure in the early universe," said Cheng Chin, professor in physics. Chin and his associates reported their feat in the Aug. 1 edition of Science Express, and it will appear soon in the print edition of Science.

Chin pursued the project with lead author Chen-Lung Hung, PhD'11, now at the California Institute of Technology, and Victor Gurarie of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Their goal was to harness ultracold atoms for simulations of the big bang to better understand how structure evolved in the infant universe.

The cosmic microwave background is the echo of the big bang. Extensive measurements of the CMB have come from the orbiting Cosmic Background Explorer in the 1990s, and later by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and various ground-based observatories, including the UChicago-led South Pole Telescope collaboration. These tools have provided cosmologists with a snapshot of how the universe appeared approximately 380,000 years following the Big Bang, which marked the beginning of the universe.

It turns out that under certain conditions, a cloud of atoms chilled to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a vacuum chamber displays phenomena similar to those that unfolded following the big bang, Hung said.

"At this ultracold temperature, atoms get excited collectively. They act as if they are sound waves in air," he said. The dense package of matter and radiation that existed in the very early universe generated similar sound-wave excitations, as revealed by COBE, WMAP and the other experiments.

The synchronized generation of sound waves correlates with cosmologists' speculations about inflation in the early universe. "Inflation set out the initial conditions for the early universe to create similar sound waves in the cosmic fluid formed by matter and radiation," Hung said.

Big bang's rippling echo

The sudden expansion of the universe during its inflationary period created ripples in space-time in the echo of the big bang. One can think of the big bang, in oversimplified terms, as an explosion that generated sound, Chin said. The sound waves began interfering with each other, creating complicated patterns. "That's the origin of complexity we see in the universe," he said.

These excitations are called Sakharov acoustic oscillations, named for Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, who described the phenomenon in the 1960s. To produce Sakharov oscillations, Chin's team chilled a flat, smooth cloud of 10,000 or so cesium atoms to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, creating an exotic state of matter known as a two-dimensional atomic superfluid.

Then they initiated a quenching process that controlled the strength of the interaction between the atoms of the cloud. They found that by suddenly making the interactions weaker or stronger, they could generate Sakharov oscillations.

The universe simulated in Chin's laboratory measured no more than 70 microns in diameter, approximately the diameter as a human hair. "It turns out the same kind of physics can happen on vastly different length scales," Chin explained. "That's the power of physics."

The goal is to better understand the cosmic evolution of a baby universe, the one that existed shortly after the big bang. It was much smaller then than it is today, having reached a diameter of only a hundred thousand light years by the time it had left the CMB pattern that cosmologists observe on the sky today.

In the end, what matters is not the absolute size of the simulated or the real universes, but their size ratios to the characteristic length scales governing the physics of Sakharov oscillations. "Here, of course, we are pushing this analogy to the extreme," Chin said.

380,000 years versus 10 milliseconds

"It took the whole universe about 380,000 years to evolve into the CMB spectrum we're looking at now," Chin said. But the physicists were able to reproduce much the same pattern in approximately 10 milliseconds in their experiment. "That suggests why the simulation based on cold atoms can be a powerful tool," Chin said.

None of the Science co-authors are cosmologists, but they consulted several in the process of developing their experiment and interpreting its results. The co-authors especially drew upon the expertise of UChicago's Wayne Hu, John Carlstrom and Michael Turner, and of Stanford University's Chao-Lin Kuo.

Hung noted that Sakharov oscillations serve as an excellent tool for probing the properties of cosmic fluid in the early universe. "We are looking at a two-dimensional superfluid, which itself is a very interesting object. We actually plan to use these Sakharov oscillations to study the property of this two-dimensional superfluid at different initial conditions to get more information."

The research team varied the conditions that prevailed early in the history of the expansion of their simulated universes by quickly changing how strongly their ultracold atoms interacted, generating ripples. "These ripples then propagate and create many fluctuations," Hung said. He and his co-authors then examined the ringing of those fluctuations.

Today's CMB maps show a snapshot of how the universe appeared at a moment in time long ago. "From CMB, we don't really see what happened before that moment, nor do we see what happened after that," Chin said. But, Hung noted, "In our simulation we can actually monitor the entire evolution of the Sakharov oscillations."

Read more at Science Daily

5 Surprising Cultural Facts About Syria

News reports suggest the United States will respond to last week's chemical weapons' attacks in Syria with targeted military strikes.

But despite the looming U.S. involvement and the growing crisis in the region, most Americans know relatively little about the country or its history. From its ancient cities to the current conflict, here are five cultural facts about Syria.

1. The Syrians

About 23 million people live in Syria, and the majority of those people, about 74 percent, are Sunni Muslims. Another 12 percent of the population is made up of Alawites, a sect of Shia Muslims. Despite being a minority, Alawites have dominated the government for decades; President Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite. About 10 percent of the population is Christian, and another small percentage is made up of Druze, a mystical religious sect with elements common to several monotheistic religions.

Whereas most people in Syria speak Arabic, about 9 percent of the population -- mostly in the northeast -- speak Kurdish.

2. Ancient history

Syria has been a cradle of civilization for at least 10,000 years. It was home to the ancient majestic city of Ebla, which flourished from 1800 B.C. to 1650 B.C. A vast trove of 20,000 cuneiform tablets unearthed in the city provided an unprecedented look at everyday life in Mesopotamia at the time. Since then, it has been part of the major empires of history: At various times, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Macedonians and Romans ruled the region.

3. Notable places

The biggest cities in the country -- Aleppo, in the northwest, and Damascus, in the southwest -- are truly ancient. Damascus was first mentioned in an Egyptian document dating to 1500 B.C. Carbon dating from archaeological sites near Tell Ramad, just outside of Damascus, suggests that site has been occupied as far back as 6300 B.C.

Aleppo may be one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world: There is evidence of human inhabitance of the area from about 6000 B.C., and because the city was along the Silk Road, it saw bustling trade for centuries.

4. Modern history

For nearly four centuries, Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire. Along with what is now Lebanon, Syria came under French control after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, and became an independent country in 1946. Because the area was once one territory, Syria has traditionally tried to exert influence over Lebanon, and from 1976 to 2005, Syrian troops occupied portions of Lebanon, ostensibly to protect Lebanon from outside threats. (Demonstrations in Lebanon successfully removed Syrian presence in the country after the assassination of Lebanon's Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.)

Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father, was in power from 1971 until his death in 2000. The elder Assad violently squelched dissent and killed thousands of people in a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982. The current president Assad assumed his position after his father's death.

5. Current conflict

The civil war was set in motion after President Bashar al-Assad violently suppressed pro-democracy demonstrations in 2011. Rebel groups began to organize to oust Assad. However, those groups have increasingly been composed of Islamist factions, making the United States wary of assisting them.

In February 2012, several world leaders condemned the massacre by government forces of 300 people in the city of Homs. The United Nations estimates that about 100,000 people have been killed in fighting so far, with millions displaced by the conflict.

In August of last year, President Barack Obama said, "a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation."

Read more at Discovery News

Walking Shark Found Strolling in Waters

A walking shark, which uses its fins like legs, has just been discovered taking a stroll off a remote Indonesian island, according to the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries.

Scientists from Conservation International and the Western Australian Museum made the unusual find. Their timing could not have been better.

“The epaulette (long-tailed carpet) shark, Hemiscyllium halmahera, uses its fins to walk across the ocean floor in search of small fish and crustaceans,” Emmeline Johansen of Conservation International’s Asia Pacific Field Division, told Discovery News.

“The discovery comes at a time when Indonesia is significantly ramping up its efforts to protect shark and ray species that are now considered vulnerable to extinction, including whale sharks and manta rays.”

The shark, which sports distinctive spots over most of its narrow body, lives in waters off of the eastern Indonesian island of Halmahera. Females lay small egg cases under coral ledges. The baby sharks hatch, coming into the world small, and generally lead a sedentary life with very limited dispersal.

This species is one of just nine known walking sharks in the entire world. All have very restricted ranges that do not cross deep water. For instance, H. halmahera is found only on Halmahera, H. freycineti is found only in Raja Ampat, and H. galei is located only in Cendrawasih Bay in West Papua.

Six of the nine walking sharks come from Indonesia, a country that’s home to at least 218 overall species of sharks and rays. It also hosts well over 75 percent of the world’s coral species.

The rocky sea floor terrain is no problem for the walking shark, as you can see in this video.

“After nearly three decades as the world’s largest exporter of dried shark fins and other shark and ray products, Indonesia is now focusing on the tremendous economic potential of its sharks and rays as living assets,” Johansen said. “In the last six months’ alone, two of the country’s top marine tourism destinations, Raja Ampat and West Manggarai (home of the famed Komodo National Park) have declared their waters as fully protected shark and ray sanctuaries.”

Read more at Discovery News

'Terror Bird' Was Just a Scary-Looking Vegetarian

Giant prehistoric ‘terror birds’ looked so fierce that many paleontologists assumed they were terrifying predators, but new research finds that the would-be carnivores were probably herbivores.

The terror bird, aka Gastornis, grew to nearly 7 feet tall. It lived between 55 to 40 million years ago in Europe and possessed a huge, sharp beak.

“The terror bird was thought to have used its huge beak to grab and break the neck of its prey, which is supported by biomechanical modeling of its bite force,” Thomas Tütken from the University of Bonn, who led the research, was quoted as saying in a press release. “It lived after the dinosaurs became extinct and at a time when mammals were at an early stage of evolution and relatively small; thus, the terror bird was thought to have been a top predator at that time on land.”

Wrong, according to the latest findings, presented by Tütken and his team at the Goldschmidt conference in Florence this week.

An early clue came by way of footprints likely left behind by an American cousin of Gastornis. The footprints do not show imprints of sharp claws, which would have been expected as tools to grapple prey. Today’s raptors, for example, sport such sharp claws.

Another clue is more obvious — the bird’s hefty size and build. Can you imagine Sesame Street‘s Big Bird (with a big beak) running swiftly after prey? All of that bulk would not make for a very swift hunter. Some researchers theorized that terror birds ambushed prey, but even that seems pretty far-fetched.

To further explore the possibilities, Tütken and colleagues took a geochemical approach. They analyzed the fossilized bones of the birds, focusing on calcium isotope composition. Isotopes are atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons.

In prior experiments, the scientists determined that the calcium isotopic composition becomes “lighter” as it passes through the food chain. They tested the method first with herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs — including top predator T. rex — as well as mammals living today. For this latest study, they applied the method to terror bird bones housed at the Geiseltal collection at Martin-Luther University in Halle.

They discovered that the calcium isotope compositions of terror bird bones are similar to those of herbivorous mammals and dinosaurs, and not to carnivorous ones.

“Tooth enamel preserves original geochemical signatures much better than bone, but since Gastornis didn’t have any teeth, we’ve had to work with their bones to do our calcium isotope assay,” Tütken explained.

As for many scientific puzzles, the case isn’t completely closed just yet.

“Because calcium is a major proportion of bone — around 40 percent by weight — its composition is unlikely to have been affected much by fossilization,” he said. “However, we want to be absolutely confident in our findings by analyzing known herbivores and carnivores using fossilized bone from the same site and the same time period. This will give us an appropriate reference frame for the terror bird values.”

Read more at Discovery News

Melting Snow Reveals Iron Age Sweater

A boat neck sweater made of warm wool and woven in diamond twill was a dominating fashion trend among reindeer hunters 1,700 years ago, according to researchers who have investigated an extremely well preserved Iron Age tunic found two years ago under melting snow in Norway.

Announced last March, the finding has been detailed in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.

“Due to global warming, rapid melting of snow patches and glaciers is taking place in the mountains of Norway as in other parts of the world, and hundreds of archaeological finds emerge from the ice each year,” Marianne Vedeler, from the University of Oslo, Norway, and Lise Bender Jørgensen, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, wrote.

Found in an hunting area on the Norwegian Lendbreen glacier at 6,560 feet above the sea level, the well-preserved tunic was made between 230 and 390 A.D., according to radiocarbon dating.

“It is a very rare item. Complete garments from early first millennium A.D. Europe can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” Bender Jørgensen told Discovery News.

Examinations with a scanning electron microscope and light microscopy revealed that two different fabrics, made of lamb’s wool or wool from adult sheep, are present in the tunic.

“There is no doubt that the wool was carefully chosen for both fabrics, and that both quality and natural pigmentation were taken into consideration,” the researchers said.

Indeed, the fabric was deliberately and evenly mottled, the effect obtained using two light and two dark brown alternating wool threads.

Relatively short and constructed from a simple cut, the greenish-brown tunic would have fitted a slender man about 5 feet, 9 inches tall. It featured a boat neck, had no buttons or fastenings, but was simply drawn over the head like a sweater.

The cut and size of the tunic closely resembles that of a garment excavated more than 150 years ago in a bog at Thorsbjerg, Schleswig-Holsten. Now in the Archaeological Museum in Schleswig, Germany, it was found in an early first millennium weapon deposit offering, and presumably had belonged to an officer.

“The similarity between the two tunics is very interesting as it suggests that a specific style was intended, and that this ‘fashion’ was known over a wide area. Both are woven in a weave called diamond twill that was popular over large parts of northern Europe in the period,” Bender Jørgensen said.

The sweater-like tunic showed hard wear and tear and had been mended with two patches.

“This suggest that the hunter looked after his clothing. He may, however, not have been its first owner,” Bender Jørgensen said.

According to the researchers, it is quite possible that the tunic was originally sleeveless, and that the sleeves were added at the time of the second repair.

“For the first repair the mender used a patch of the same fabric as used in the body section, while the second patch derived from the fabric used for the sleeves. The seams on this second patch are made with the same yarn as used for sewing on the sleeves,” Vedeler and Bender Jørgensen wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Chemical Weapons Cross the 'Red Line'

The United States and other countries are now contemplating military action against the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, in the wake of an alleged chemical weapons attack last week on a rebel-held area on the outskirts of Damascus. Doctors Without Borders, an international humanitarian organization, says it has treated 3,600 patients for symptoms including convulsions, respiratory difficulties, vision problems and other woes, and that 355 victims already have died.

The Obama Administration, which last year warned the Syrian regime that using chemical weapons would cross a "red line" for unacceptable behavior, now seems to be preparing to inflict punishment upon Assad, probably in the form of an air strike.

But many people are wondering why Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons is being seen by the United States as the last straw. After all, the Syrian civil war has been raging for more than two years, and 100,000 people already have died, many of them in atrocities that shock the conscience.

Last December, for example, a Syrian air force plane reportedly dropped eight cluster bombs on civilians waiting outside a bakery to buy bread in the small town of Halfaya, slaughtering 68 people.

"Anyone who has actually seen wounds from conventional artillery -- or badly treated body wounds from small arms -- realizes that chemical weapons do not cause more horrible wounds," Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes in a blog post. He argues that "the case for intervening cannot be based on chemical weapons."

But other experts say that chemical weapons, whose use was banned in warfare by a 1925 international treaty, do indeed cross a line, into a sort of brutality so extreme that the civilized world cannot afford to tolerate it. Because modern armies are equipped with protective gear, chemical weapons tend to be effective only for committing atrocities against helpless civilian populations. And in addition to inflicting excruciating pain upon victims who often die a lingering death, their use has an even more widespread, devastating psychological effect.

"Our minds are hard-wired to be afraid of poisons," explains Charles Blair, a senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists who teaches graduate courses in biodefense at George Mason University and Johns Hopkins University. "Things that you can’t see or smell or taste are very frightening to people."

The psychological trauma inflicted by chemical warfare was documented in a 2006 study of survivors of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, one of the few modern conflicts in which militaries used such weapons. Researchers found that nearly 60 percent of subjects who'd been exposed to chemical weapons during the war suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, about twice the rate of those who had been in the war but avoided chemicals. About 40 percent of the subjects who’d been exposed to chemicals suffered from severe depression, compared to only 12 percent of those without chemical exposure.

Chemicals have been used in warfare since ancient times, when Spartan soldiers burned wood dipped in a mixture of tar and sulfur to create noxious fumes on the battlefield. But it wasn't World War I that armies on both sides began deploying industrially-manufactured poison gases -- such as lung-searing phosgene and chlorine, and mustard gas, which causes blistering when it comes into contact with skin and mucous membranes -- as weapons.

An estimated 90,000 soldiers were killed by gas attacks during the war, and about a million soldiers suffered injuries that often plagued them for the rest of their lives, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international monitoring group. In a secret report prepared at the war's end, U.S. Army Lt. Col. C.G. Douglas, a physiologist, concluded that "The particular value of the poison is found in its remarkable casualty-producing power as opposed to its killing power."

Despite their brutal effect, poison gases turned out not to be particularly effective in winning battles, because of their unpredictability.

"During the Great War, they didn't have reliable meteorology," explained John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based think tank on military and security issues. "They couldn't necessarily predict that the wind was going to blow the gas in the right or the wrong direction. Temperature and humidity also can change how chemical weapons work. In general, you'd like to be using weapons in a war that are not dependent upon guesses about weather."

The trauma of that war led nations to agree to forgo their use in warfare, but nevertheless, both the United States and the Soviet Union hedged their bets by building vast secret chemical arsenals, possibly as a deterrent against one another. In 1992, the Chemical Weapons Convention, another international treaty, banned nations who signed it from possessing such weapons at all.

The United States, which ratified the treaty in 1997, has since destroyed more than 80 percent of the nearly 30,000 tons of chemical warfare agents from its Cold War arsenal. U.S. forces, however, remain equipped with protective gear against chemical, biological and radioactive threats.

Chemical weapons became obsolete on the battlefield, but repressive regimes have turned to them for a different purpose -- attacks against civilians who lack the training and equipment to protect themselves. In 1988, for example, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein unleashed mustard gas and nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX against the Kurdish inhabitants of Halabja, a city in northern Iraq.

As many as 5,000 people died, and grisly photographs of the corpse-strewn city shocked the world.

"They're more of a taboo, because they’ve been effective against civilians," Pike explains. "And because they’ve been used against civilians horrifically."

Blair notes that different sorts of chemical weapons can be used for different purposes. Some poison gases quickly dissipate, allowing government troops to move quickly into an area and seize it. But more persistent gases can be used to keep adversaries out of an area completely.

"The high persistency agents -- remember the creature’s blood in the movie "Alien," how it would go through floors?" he said. "Some of these substances stick around like that."

Read more at Discovery News

NASA's Chandra Observatory Catches Giant Black Hole Rejecting Material

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have taken a major step in explaining why material around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is extraordinarily faint in X-rays. This discovery holds important implications for understanding black holes.

New Chandra images of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, indicate that less than 1 percent of the gas initially within Sgr A*'s gravitational grasp ever reaches the point of no return, also called the event horizon. Instead, much of the gas is ejected before it gets near the event horizon and has a chance to brighten, leading to feeble X-ray emissions.

These new findings are the result of one of the longest observation campaigns ever performed with Chandra. The spacecraft collected five weeks' worth of data on Sgr A* in 2012. The researchers used this observation period to capture unusually detailed and sensitive X-ray images and energy signatures of super-heated gas swirling around Sgr A*, whose mass is about 4 million times that of the sun.

"We think most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they are too far away for us to study how matter flows near it," said Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who led of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. "Sgr A* is one of very few black holes close enough for us to actually witness this process."

The researchers found that the Chandra data from Sgr A* did not support theoretical models in which the X-rays are emitted from a concentration of smaller stars around the black hole. Instead, the X-ray data show the gas near the black hole likely originates from winds produced by a disk-shaped distribution of young massive stars.

"This new Chandra image is one of the coolest I've ever seen," said co-author Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "We're watching Sgr A* capture hot gas ejected by nearby stars, and funnel it in towards its event horizon."

To plunge over the event horizon, material captured by a black hole must lose heat and momentum. The ejection of matter allows this to occur.

"Most of the gas must be thrown out so that a small amount can reach the black hole," said Feng Yuan of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, the study's co-author. "Contrary to what some people think, black holes do not actually devour everything that's pulled towards them. Sgr A* is apparently finding much of its food hard to swallow."

The gas available to Sgr A* is very diffuse and super-hot, so it is hard for the black hole to capture and swallow it. The gluttonous black holes that power quasars and produce huge amounts of radiation have gas reservoirs much cooler and denser than that of Sgr A*.

The event horizon of Sgr A* casts a shadow against the glowing matter surrounding the black hole. This research could aid efforts using radio telescopes to observe and understand the shadow. It also will be useful for understanding the effect orbiting stars and gas clouds may have on matter flowing toward and away from the black hole.

Read more at Science Daily

NASA Data Reveals Mega-Canyon Under Greenland Ice Sheet

Data from a NASA airborne science mission reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile of Greenland ice.

The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

"One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped," said Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study. "Our research shows there's still a lot left to discover."

Bamber's team published its findings Thursday in the journal Science.

The scientists used thousands of miles of airborne radar data, collected by NASA and researchers from the United Kingdom and Germany over several decades, to piece together the landscape lying beneath the Greenland ice sheet.

A large portion of this data was collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice. One of IceBridge's scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.

In their analysis of the radar data, the team discovered a continuous bedrock canyon that extends from almost the center of the island and ends beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord in northern Greenland.

At certain frequencies, radio waves can travel through the ice and bounce off the bedrock underneath. The amount of times the radio waves took to bounce back helped researchers determine the depth of the canyon. The longer it took, the deeper the bedrock feature.

"Two things helped lead to this discovery," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It was the enormous amount of data collected by IceBridge and the work of combining it with other datasets into a Greenland-wide compilation of all existing data that makes this feature appear in front of our eyes."

The researchers believe the canyon plays an important role in transporting sub-glacial meltwater from the interior of Greenland to the edge of the ice sheet into the ocean. Evidence suggests that before the presence of the ice sheet, as much as 4 million years ago, water flowed in the canyon from the interior to the coast and was a major river system.

Read more at Science Daily

Mysterious Texas 'Blue Dog' Claimed to be Chupacabra

A Texas rancher named Phylis Canion believes that a strange, hairless bluish-skinned animal she discovered on her property in 2007 may be the mythical, vampiric beast called “el chupacabra,” said to be responsible for draining the blood from goats, chickens, and other livestock.

The claims are getting attention because of a new TV series called “The Unexplained Files.”

I investigated Canion’s strange carcass in April 2008 for the “MonsterQuest” TV show and for my book “Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore.” In July 2007 Canion began seeing a bluish-gray, hairless animal (actually, three of them) lurking around her ranch, and suspected them of killing over two dozen chickens over several years. Canion said, “Not long after I had seen the first , I came home and there was a chicken dead, but not carried off. It appeared to have all of the blood drained out of it.”

Canion said that whatever attacked her animals was no ordinary predator common to the area, such as a wild dog, bobcat, fox, or coyote. Eventually Canion decided to make it her mission to capture the strange-looking animal, either alive or on videotape.

“I set up a video camera and started filming where the chickens were,” she said.

Still, after weeks and months, the mysterious creature remained elusive. Then on July 14, 2007, Canion got a call from a neighbor telling her a strange animal had been found lying on the road near her ranch. She photographed the carcass, and the animal was unlike any she had ever seen. It had large ears, large fanged teeth, with grayish-blue elephantine skin.

She had it taxidermied and now displays it proudly in her home. It made national news, and many wondered whether she had finally found the elusive chupacabra. To help decide the matter, scientists offered to do genetic testing on the animal.

DNA Testing the “Chupacabra”

DNA testing of the “blue dog” was done by Michael Forstner, Ph.D., a professor in Department of Biology at Texas State University-San Marcos. Forstner described his genetic analysis of the Cuero animal.

“In this case we had the material…I mean, it’s a vertebrate. It’s not going to hard to match this, there are markers for mitochondrial DNA that are easy enough to match against almost any vertebrate on the planet, and those are available on GenBank. So we went to work and indeed that’s pretty much where we ended up…. The sequencing immediately went to the family Canidae, and our immediate concern was that this was going to turn out to be somebody’s pet dog.”

Soon, however, it became clear that it was not a dog when a genetic marker positively identified it as coyote: “We got the sequences back, uniquely within coyote there’s an area of the D-loop, which is the area of mitochondrial DNA… it gives us data on things that are closely related… Uniquely in coyotes there’s a deletion of several bases in one section, and another deletion in another area of an additional seven-base block. Turns out that the sequences that came back had those two unique deletions, and did not match any dogs or wolf. It came back with 97 percent confidence that it was Canis latrans, which is the coyote.”

Canion, expecting that the results would reveal that she had an unknown or unique animal, then commissioned a second DNA test. This one was conducted at a genetics lab at the University of California at Davis; the results were virtually identical to those found by the University of Texas, but with a slightly more specific twist: its mother was a coyote and its father a Mexican wolf. The final answer: Canion’s “blue dog” is just what two separate DNA analyses say it is: a hybrid animal.

Wildlife experts were not surprised; it’s not unusual for dogs, wolves, coyotes and other animals in the canid family to interbreed; in fact scientists and wildlife experts know what a coyote / wolf hybrid looks like; they have been studied for years. These “coywolves” do not suck blood, nor do they have blue skin, nor any of the chupacabra’s unique characteristics.

The Mystery Fades

But what about the weird grayish-blue elephantine skin color? The creature was likely afflicted with a skin diseases caused by mites called sarcoptic mange, which causes its hair to fall out. Since most people rarely see coyotes, dogs, wolves and other animals without fur in advanced stages of mange, the sick creatures can look very strange and mysterious.

As for the claims of blood-drained chickens, that too has a scientific explanation. Just because a dead animal isn’t bloody doesn’t mean that its blood has been drained. Blood will naturally begin to clot and coagulate after the animal dies, creating the appearance of missing blood. The blood of course hasn’t gone anywhere. It has just partly dried up, and the water content has evaporated. Unless the animal is professionally necropsied, it will appear that the carcass has been drained of blood.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Mega-Fish No Longer the One that Got Away

For more than a century, the mystery of the true size of a gigantic dinosaur-era fish, Leedsichthys, seemed like the one that got away for paleontologists.

However, a new study may have solved the problem. The study documented an ancient whopper Leedsichthys that may be the largest fish ever found at 16.5 meters (54 feet). The longest living fish, a whale shark, ever documented stretched 12.7 meters (41.5 feet).

The Jurassic giant, Leedsichthys problematicus, received its name because scientists couldn’t estimate the true size of the fish. Fossil hunters uncovered the first Leedsichthys fossils in the late 1800s. The fish’s remains later turned up as far apart as England and Chile.

However, much of the skeleton of Leedsichthys, including the vertebra needed to know the animal’s length, was made of cartilage. Cartilage doesn’t fossilize easily, so paleontologists had to guess from the bones of the skull, gills, fins and a few other parts.

The problem was that the gills of the fish would have grown proportionately larger than the rest of the fish, because of the gills’ need to absorb enough oxygen, according to a 2005 study by Jeff Liston of the National Museums Scotland. Therefore, estimates from the size of the gills couldn’t be trusted.

Liston made Leedsichthys his own Moby Dick and spent a decade tracking down the truth behind the whale of a fish. In 2007, he estimated that most Leedsichthys ranged from seven to twelve meters long. His most recent research may have finally harpooned the ultimate size of the ancient fish.

Liston’s recent study examined fossils from many Leedsichthys, including a particular specimen that he estimates reached 16.5 meters (54 feet). Bone analysis of that Leedsichthys suggest the fish took forty-five years to reach that length.

Leedsichthys grew to 1.6 meters long in their first years. After approximately 20 years, they hit eight to nine meters, according to the new study.

Read more at Discovery News