The Physics of Beer Tapping

An old, hilarious if somewhat juvenile party trick involves covertly tapping the top of someone's newly opened beer bottle and then standing back as the suds foam out onto the floor.

Now researchers from Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Institut Jean le Rond d'Alembert, France, have produced new insight into the science behind foaming beer bottles by exploring the phenomenon of cavitation. They present their explanation at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics.

Cavitation, a phenomenon relevant to such common engineering concerns as erosion of ship propellers, is the mechanism by which bubbles appear in a liquid such as beer after an impact, said Javier Rodriguez-Rodriguez, the lead researcher from Carlos III University.

After a sudden impact against a bottle's mouth, back and forth movement of compression and expansion waves will cause bubbles to appear and quickly collapse. The team's investigation of beer bottle-fluid interactions demonstrated that the cavitation-induced break-up of larger "mother" bubbles creates clouds of very small carbonic gas "daughter bubbles," which grow and expand much faster than the larger mother-bubbles from which they split. The rapid expansion of these daughter bubbles gives the foam buoyancy.

"Buoyancy leads to the formation of plumes full of bubbles, whose shape resembles very much the mushrooms seen after powerful explosions," Rodriguez-Rodriguez explained. "And here is what really makes the formation of foam so explosive: the larger the bubbles get, the faster they rise, and the other way around." He adds that this is because fast-moving bubbles entrain more carbonic gas.

The team's work is believed to be the first quantitative analysis of the beer bottle foam-over. "We wanted to explain the extremely high efficiency of the degasification process that occurs in a beer bottle within the first few seconds after the impact," Rodriguez said.

Read more at Science Daily

Biodiversity Higher in the Tropics, but Species More Likely to Arise at Higher Latitudes

A new study of 2300 species of mammals and nearly 6700 species of birds from across the globe helps explain why there are so many more species of plants and animals in the tropics than at higher latitudes. In a study supported by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina, researchers found that while the tropics harbor a greater diversity of species, the number of subspecies -- potential stepping stones in the process by which one species becomes two -- is actually greater in the harsher environments typical of higher latitudes.

The surprising results suggest that the latitudinal diversity gradient may be due higher species turnover -- a higher potential for speciation counterbalanced by a higher potential for extinction -- towards the poles than near the equator, the researchers say.

Scientists have known for more than a century that species diversity increases towards the equator. Think tropical rainforests -- which house two thirds of the world's species -- teeming with buzzing insects, screeching birds and howling monkeys, versus the frigid tundra, where life is largely limited to scattered trees and only a few dozen kinds of mammals, such as caribou and foxes.

Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain this pattern. One idea is that tropical regions harbor greater biodiversity because they are especially fertile grounds for the formation of new species -- i.e., "cradles of diversity." Another idea is that biodiversity hotspots are less likely to lose the species they already have.

"There's a lot of controversy over what explains the global pattern of biodiversity," said lead author Carlos Botero of North Carolina State University.

In a study to appear in the November 22 issue of Molecular Ecology, Botero and colleagues assembled a data set of climate and weather patterns across the globe, and combined it with genetic data other information for nearly 50% and 70% of all mammals and birds known to be alive today.

The team was surprised to find that while the number of bird and mammal species increases closer to the equator, the number of genetically distinct groups within each species -- known as subspecies -- is greater in the harsher environments typical of higher latitudes.

"These are environments that are colder and drier, and where the differences between the hottest and coolest months are more extreme," Botero explained.

Animals in these environments are more likely to freeze during cold winters or die during usually hot summers. "If extreme weather events wipe out a population every now and then, but don't wipe out an entire species, the populations that survive will be geographically separated and could start to diverge from one another," Botero said.

The results are consistent with a 2007 study by researchers at the University of British Columbia suggesting that -- contrary to conventional wisdom -- species arise faster in temperate zones than in the tropics. "It may be that species come and go more frequently in the temperate zones," Botero said.

Read more at Science Daily

Artificial Skin Created Using Stem Cells from the Umbilical Cord

An important scientific breakthrough, developed by the University of Granada, will aid the immediate use of artificially-grown skin for major burn patients, since the skin could be stored in tissue banks and made available when needed.

One of the problems major burn victims have is that, using the current protocols for artificial skin, they need to wait various weeks in order for it to be grown, using healthy skin from the own patient.

Spanish scientists, from the Tissue Engineering Research Group, from the Dept. of Histology at the University of Granada, have managed, for the first time, to grow artificial skin from stem cells derived from the umbilical cord. Their study, published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, shows the ability of Wharton jelly mesenschymal stem cells to turn to oral-mucosa or skin-regeneration epithelia.

To grow the artificial skin, the researchers have used, in addition this new type of epithelia covering, a biomaterial made of fibrin and agarose, already designed and developed by the University of Granada research team. The work has been carried out in the laboratories of the Faculty of Medicine, alongside the Experimental Unit of the Granada “Virgen de las Nieves” University Hospital Complex.

Prior studies from this same research team, which received recognition in the World Congress on Tissue Engineering, held a few months ago in Seoul (S. Korea), already pointed to the possibility that Wharton stem cells could be turned into epithelia cells. This current work is the confirmation of those initial studies and its application to two regeneration structures: skin and oral mucosa, increasingly needed in injuries in these parts of the body.

Instant Use

One of the problems major-burn victims currently have is that, in order to apply the current techniques of artificial skin, a number of weeks are needed. That is because the skin needs to be grown from parts of the patient’s healthy skin. “Creating this new type of skin using stem cells, which can be stored in tissue banks, means that it can be used instantly when injuries are caused, and which would bring the application of artificial skin forward many weeks”, as explained by Antonio Campos, Professor of Histology at the University of Granada and one of the authors of this study.

Read more at Science Daily

Adopt a Skull and Save a Collection That Helped Debunk Phrenology

The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia wants you to adopt a skull. Among their strange and fascinating collection of medical artifacts and anatomical specimens is a collection of 139 skulls collected in the 1800s by Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl, who was trying to debunk the then-popular pseudoscience of phrenology.

Your $200 donation pays for the initial restoration and remounting of a skull of your choosing, and gets your name on a small plaque next to your adopted skull for the next year.

The catalog of the skulls hints at many interesting stories. Some specimens have already been adopted, including the skulls of a Viennese prostitute, a notorious Thai criminal, and a tightrope walker who broke his neck (adopted by the editors of a blog called Skull-A-Day). The same goes for Geza Uirmeny of Hungary (or possibly Romania), who attempted suicide at age 70 by cutting his throat, but remarkably survived, and perhaps even more remarkably “lived until 80 without melancholy.”

And, alas, there’s Andrejew Sokoloff, who belonged to a Russian sect that practiced castration as a safeguard against ungodly lust. Sokoloff “died of self-inflicted removal of testicles,” according to museum records, but his skull will be well cared for thanks to the generosity of Judy and George Wohlreich.

There are roughly 100 skulls still awaiting adoption, says museum curator Anna Dhody. They include sailors, soldiers, robbers, and Gypsies. Anton Mikschik, a 17-year-old Moravian shoemaker’s apprentice, killed himself after getting caught stealing. Maria Falkensteiner, a Tyrolean maidservant, was just 22 when she died of meningitis. Joska Soltesz, a Hungarian reformist and soldier, died of pneumonia at 28.

The skulls have been in the museum’s collection since 1874. They include only 14 women, but represent a wide range of ages, from 8 to 80. Many died in poorhouses or jails, or from suicide or execution, which probably made it easier for Hyrtl’s associates to obtain the remains without facing resistance from surviving relatives. Such practices would be completely unacceptable today, but for 19th century anatomists it was standard procedure. In at least one case Hyrtl apparently employed the services of a grave robber.

Hyrtl taught anatomy at the University of Vienna, and he was a consummate collector. His personal collection may have once included the skull of Mozart. In addition to human skulls, he possessed 800 fish skeletons and more than 300 “organs of hearing” from a variety of animals.

Hyrtl lived during the heyday of phrenology, the idea that the brain was made up of discrete mental organs, each with a specific function. The size of each organ in a given person was thought to indicate the strength of the corresponding mental faculty. These ranged from things like benevolence and cautiousness to the propensity to bear lots of offspring. Because the skull remains soft during infancy, the thinking went, its external bumps reflected the size of the mental organs underneath — and, by proxy, the character of the person.

“Phrenology was an accepted science, and what went hand in hand with that at the time was the assumption that the Caucasian race was the most superior race,” Dhody said.

It’s all bunk, of course. Today that’s obvious. Hyrtl didn’t buy it either, but his reasons weren’t entirely scientific. A devout Catholic, he believed that the mind and brain developed according to God’s plan and therefore had no relationship to any measurements of the skull, which like any part of the body would be subject to forces in the natural world. He set out to prove this by collecting skulls.

He hoped to show — and did — that there was as much variation in cranial anatomy within the European Caucasian population as there was between different racial groups. His findings undermined the racist suppositions of the phrenologists.

Although he was already famous in academic circles, Hyrtl did not make a lot of friends with this line of inquiry and seems to have been forced into early retirement from the university as a result, Dhody says. “He definitely made waves.” By the end of his life he found himself in financial trouble, and began selling off collections. The Mütter bought the skulls and an assortment of other anatomical specimens from Hyrtl in 1874 for 6,410 Austrian thalers, or about $4,800 at the time.

Read more at Wired Science

This Parasite Eats a Fish’s Tongue — And Takes Its Place

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A fish walks into a bar and takes a seat. The bartender asks what he wants to drink, but the fish doesn’t say anything. So the bartender asks, “What, cat got your tongue?” The fish grabs a cocktail napkin and writes out, No, actually, it was an isopod. An isopod got my tongue and by “got” I mean she ate it.

That joke may not be funny to you, but it’s hilarious to the tongue-eating isopod. You see, in the Gulf of California there actually exists a critter, Cymothoa exigua, that targets a fish by infiltrating its gills and latching onto its tongue. It proceeds to not only consume the organ, but will then replace it with its own body, providing the fish with a new fully functioning tongue it uses (probably a bit begrudgingly) to grind food against tiny teeth on the roof of its mouth.

This remarkable attack is the only known instance in the animal kingdom of a parasite functionally replacing an organ of its host. And while C. exigua targets several other fish, attaching to their tongues and draining their blood, only with the rose snapper does it devour and completely replace the organ as an operating structure, according to marine biologist Rick Brusca of the University of Arizona. And he stresses that while there are hundreds of such species of tongue-targeting isopods, contrary to many media reports, only C. exigua can actually truly assume the duties of the organ.

If you can believe it, this is a love story at heart. And the rose snapper’s face is the stage on which it unfolds.

These isopods are protandrous hermaphrodites: They first mature into males, but then switch sexes to become females. The magic starts when more than one C. exigua lands in a given fish’s gills. When the first one infiltrates it begins to mature into a male, but when the second one appears, said Brusca, it “stimulates the first one to change sex and become a female and crawl from the gills up through the throat and attach to the tongue, and then this new second one is the male that will impregnate her.”

The female next anchors herself to the tongue with seven pairs of legs, each tipped with a highly muscularized spine that looks a bit like a scorpion’s stinger. It is here where she’ll mate and spend the rest of her life experiencing the world as the snapper does, only, you know, without the excruciating pain.

As she grows, she molts just like any other arthropod and feeds on the snapper’s tongue not by gnawing away, but by sucking the blood out of it. “They have five sets of jaws,” said Brusca, “and all five of them are modified into these stiletto-like devices, and a couple of them are like long lances, if you will, that slice open the tissue of the host fish. And then the others operate together kind of like a soda straw to draw the blood up out of the wound that they’ve created.”

In this way C. exigua will slowly drain the life out of the snapper’s tongue, which atrophies from the tip on back, bit by bit, until nothing but the muscular stub remains. This the isopod now grasps with her rearmost three or four pairs of legs, essentially becoming the fish’s new tongue. And the isopod has likely evolved like this to keep her host alive, according to Brusca, allowing her more time to rear her young.

But once the tongue is gone, the female is left without a food supply. So as her young continue to develop, she lives solely on stored energy supplies, according to Brusca. Scientists aren’t yet sure at what point the young are released, or how exactly they find fish of their own, but Brusca reckons that the female may wait until her host is schooling with other fish to cut her offspring loose from the brood pouch, giving the young plenty of targets.

What happens next is like that scene in Titanic where the band goes down with the ship, except that those guys probably hadn’t been randomly switching sexes and eating fish tongues. With her procreation complete, the female isopod, who lost her ability to swim as she matured, “probably lets go and leaves or gets swallowed, but she’s out of the picture,” said Brusca. “And now you’ve got a fish with no tongue, so it’s not going to survive either. So it’s really a case of true parasitism. In fact, the fish ends up getting sacrificed for the sake of the isopod.”

It’s still not known quite why C. exigua goes so far in its parasitism of rose snappers, where in other species it merely sips from the tongue — not destroying it and taking over its job. “Maybe the tongue in the rose snapper is particularly susceptible,” said Brusca. “Maybe it doesn’t have as good a vascularization as other fish tongues.”

There’s still much to be learned here, but the advantages of such a lifestyle are clear: The female isopod not only gets a steady meal, but also a perfectly safe bunker in which to raise her young. Like any other creature, her purpose is to pass along her genes. And with her mission accomplished, she goes down with the ship.

Read more at Wired Science

'Man-Eating Monster Dino' Made Way for T. Rex

A newly discovered predatory dinosaur from Utah is so large that it may represent the biggest species of meat-eating dino that ever lived in North America.

The dinosaur, Siats meekerorum a.k.a. "Man Eating Monster," is described in the latest issue of Nature Communications. The specimen was just a juvenile, but conservatively it measured at least 30 feet long and weighed 9,000 pounds.

The name Siats pays homage to a human-chomping monster from legends of the Ute native tribe of Utah.

"Siats still had a lot of room to grow, and there is only a 4-inch difference between the estimated femur length of a juvenile Siats and an adult Acrocanthosaurus (the second largest predator in North America), so we think a safe estimate for an adult Siats is that it at least vied with Acrocanthosaurus (11,000 pounds) for the No. 2 slot," lead author Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News.

"However, our upper estimate on Siats is a body mass larger than T. rex (currently in the No. 1 spot), so future material may reveal Siats grew up to be one of the biggest predators known around the globe," added Zanno, who is director of the Paleontology and Geology Research Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Zanno, who is also an assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University, co-authored the paper with Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum of Natural History.

The researchers analyzed the remains for Siats, which were unearthed at the Dakota Formation in Emery County, Utah. The fossils reveal that the huge dinosaur lived approximately 98 million years ago at the dawn of the Late Cretaceous.

It was a carcharodontosaur, which refers to a type of enormous carnivorous dinosaur known, not just for their size, but also for their jagged, sharp teeth.

Zanno and Makovicky believe that the mere existence of these apex predators prevented tyrannosaurs at the time from evolving into even larger beasts. It was only when Siats and other carcharodontosaurs mysteriously died out that tyrannosaurs like T. rex emerged.

"In the rock beds that contain the colossal bones of Siats we also find the teeth of relatively tiny tyrannosaurs about the size of a large dog," Zanno said. "This is a clear indication that tyrannosaurs were living in the shadows and carcharodontosaurs like Siats reigned at the dawn of the Late Cretaceous in North America."

She thinks it's possible that Siats even ate these small tyrannosaurs, although it probably went after less aggressive prey, such as large, plant-eating long-necked dinosaurs and primitive duckbilled dinos.

These and other animals, including crocodiles, turtles and mammals, all lived in a lush, wet coastal plain environment not far from a shallow sea that was then spreading over central North America. The sea divided the continent into smaller island landmasses.

Roger Benson, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford, told Discovery News that the finding of Siats shows that extremely large predatory dinosaurs were present in North America at the time and that “their presence would have excluded tyrannosaurs from evolving to multi-ton sizes.”

Read more at Discovery News

Israeli Wine Cellar Predates the Bible

One of the world’s oldest and largest wine cellars has just been unearthed in Israel, according to a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Baltimore.

The cellar dates to approximately 1700 B.C., and was found at a site called Tel Kabri within the ruins of a northern Canaanite city. Its age predates both the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls by hundreds of years.

The researchers christened a three-foot-long jar in the cellar “Bessie.”

“We dug and dug, and all of a sudden, Bessie’s friends started appearing — five, 10, 15, ultimately 40 jars packed in a 15-by-25-foot storage room,” Eric Cline, chair of George Washington University’s Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, said in a press release.

Cline, who co-directed the project, continued, “This is a hugely significant discovery — it’s a wine cellar that, to our knowledge, is largely unmatched in its age and size.”

The 40 jars have a capacity of roughly 8453.5 cups, meaning the cellar could have held the equivalent of nearly 3,000 bottles of reds and whites.

“The wine cellar was located near a hall where banquets took place, a place where the Kabri elite and possibly foreign guests consumed goat meat and wine,” said the other co-director Yasur-Landau, chair of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. “The wine cellar and the banquet hall were destroyed during the same violent event, perhaps an earthquake, which covered them with thick debris of mud bricks and plaster.”

Andrew Koh of Brandeis University also worked on the project. Using a technique called organic residue analysis, he studied some of the jar fragments. They yielded traces of tartaric and syringic acids, both key components in wine. Koh also detected other ingredients popular in ancient wine making (and modern day cocktails!), including honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins.

The Julia Child of wine during those times must have come from ancient Egypt, because the recipe is similar to medicinal wines that were popular for 2,000 or so years in early Egypt. News of the tasty mixture must have spread to Israel.

Read more at Discovery News

Black Hole Birth Spawned Record-Breaking Blast

On April 27, a powerful flash of radiation erupted from deep space. The flash, a gamma-ray burst (GRB), was the brightest on record, challenging some of the leading theories on how the most powerful explosions in the known Universe occur.

Triggered by the sudden collapse of a dying massive star, GRBs are thought to be energized by the resulting black hole that forms in its wake. The black hole birthing drives relativistic particles through the collapsing star material, generating a shock wave, producing a highly collimated beam of gamma-ray radiation. GRBs are considered to be the more energetic cousins of supernovae, but for the first time, this particular GRB — called GRB 130427A — was seen to occur alongside a supernova; an unprecedented observation.

“We normally detect GRBs at great distance, meaning they usually appear quite faint. In this case the burst happened only a quarter of the way across the Universe meaning it was very bright. On this occasion, a powerful supernova was also produced, something we have not recorded before alongside a powerful GRB and we will now be seeking to understand this occurrence,” said Paul O’Brien, of the University of Leicester, who collaborated on one of the five papers devoted to GRB 130427A published in the journals Science and Astrophysical Journal Letters on Thursday (Nov. 21).

Another noteworthy factor of this event was the high number of observatories in space and on the ground that were able to slew in the direction of GRB 130427A just after it occurred. The initial discovery was made almost simultaneously by NASA’s orbiting Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, then an alert was sent out to observatories on the ground such as the Rapid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) project to watch the gamma-ray glow brighten.

Even NASA’s newest X-ray space observatory, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), was able to get in on the act, recording hard X-ray data in the GRB’s afterglow.

“We expect to see an event like this only once or twice a century, so we’re fortunate it happened when we had the appropriate collection of sensitive space telescopes with complementary capabilities available to see it,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington.

Due to GRB 130427A’s relatively close proximity and the vast quantities of data collected from the multi-instrument campaign, it has become something of a GRB “Petri dish.”

“The rapid reaction of Swift has enabled us to discover many new and unexpected aspects of GRBs, the strong confirmation of the basic theory by this new very bright burst reassures us that we are on the right track in understanding these extraordinary explosions,” said Julian Osborne, Swift team leader at the University of Leicester.

Although astrophysicists will be picking through the data for some time to come, this event has already poked a couple of holes in our understanding of how GRBs work. For example, as highlighted in Fermi data, just as the optical light from the GRB peaked, there was an anomalous spike in highly energetic gamma-rays. The energies associated with this gamma-ray peak topped out at 95 GeV, the most powerful radiation ever seen from a GRB event.

Read more at Discovery News

Darwin's Frogs Croaking Thanks to Deadly Fungus

Male Darwin's frogs raise young in their mouths, protecting them from predators until they have matured for weeks, when the fathers regurgitate them into the world. But nothing can protect them from a deadly fungus, which has helped push one of the two species of these frogs to probable extinction, and driven a decline in the second variety, new research shows.

The fungus, known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or chytrid fungus, has spread throughout the world and devastated many amphibian populations. But this is one of the first instances in which the fungus has been directly implicated in the disappearance of such a widely known species, researchers said.

Researchers looked at museum specimens of both species and found that the fungus started showing up in these and other frogs in the 1970s, about when populations of both began to decline, according to a study published today (Nov. 20) in the journal PLOS ONE.

One of the species, the northern Darwin's frog (Rhinoderma rufum), hasn't been seen since 1980 and is likely extinct. The fungus is "probably the main reason" for the frog's disappearance, said Marcus Rowcliffe, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London who wasn't involved in the present study.

The southern Darwin's frog (Rhinoderma darwinii) is still around, but has declined faster than previously thought in recent years, said Claudio Soto-Azat, a study co-author and researcher at Andrés Bello University in Santiago, Chile, who did research for the study while a student at the Zoological Society of London.

The researchers found that a small percentage of southern Darwin's frogs were infected with the fungus, although at lower rates than other species. This could mean that the fungus more easily kills them, compared to other frogs, the study noted (whereas other species can live longer with the disease, and thus more of them are found alive suffering from the infection). They also found that populations of Darwin's frogs were lower in areas with higher rates of fungal infection. In one instance in 2007, 30 wild-caught southern Darwin's frogs were sent to be captive-bred in Germany, but all 30 died from the fungus.

The fungus may have been spread to Chile by African clawed frogs, brought to the region in part to be used for pregnancy tests, in the mid-20th century. These frogs laid eggs when injected with pregnant women's urine.

Darwin's frogs are the only known species of frogs where males can get "pregnant" and hold the young within a compartment of their mouth as the tadpoles mature. They are named for Charles Darwin, who happened upon one of the two species in 1834.

Another PLOS ONE study published in June by Soto-Azat and colleagues estimated that the northern Darwin's frog bit the dust in 1982.

Read more at Discovery News

The Case of the Spinning Egyptian Statue: Solved

An ancient statue in a British museum was caught on camera mysteriously turning in its locked display case in June. The footage mystified many and made international news. According to an article in the “Manchester Evening News:”

An ancient Egyptian statue has spooked museum bosses — after it mysteriously started to spin round in a display case. The 10-inch tall relic, which dates back to 1800 B.C., was found in a mummy’s tomb and has been at the Manchester Museum for 80 years.   But in recent weeks, curators have been left scratching their heads after they kept finding it facing the wrong way. Experts decided to monitor the room on time-lapse video and were astonished to see it clearly show the statuette spinning 180 degrees — with nobody going near it.

• ”Maybe the statue has a material component that reacts to the rotation of the earth.”
   
• ”Perhaps there is magnetism that eventually turns it to face north or south? Pulled based upon the position of the sun/moon?”
   
• ”Magnetics are a possibility — some rocks have crystalline structures which can store charge.”
   
• ”It seems to only be turning while exposed to sunlight. It doesn’t move at all when it’s dark.”
   
• ”It’s releasing some kind of gas and being on glass it’s enough to let it rotate.”
   
• ”It seems to turn at a uniform rate whenever the lights are on. Could the transformer for the lights be causing a vibration at just the right frequency?”
   
• ”The sacred geometry of a pyramid creates a natural swirling vortex of energy that beams out of the top…. Perhaps this statue is emanating the same energy that pyramids do. If it’s sitting on a very clean, polished surface, it’s possible that energy is just enough to spin in it around slowly.”

For each explanation — notably including the one that turned out to be correct — counter-arguments and counter-evidence was offered. Earlier this week, a scientist finally found the definitive explanation. As a BBC News report explained:

Vibrations expert Steve Gosling placed a specialist three-axis sensor under Neb-Senu’s glass cabinet to record its movement over 24 hours. The sensor revealed traffic and footfall vibrations at busy times of the day, such as 18:00 GMT and 07:00 GMT, caused the statue to rotate.   Mr. Gosling, of 24 Acoustics engineering noise consultancy, said: “The vibration is a combination of multiple sources so there’s buses outside on the busy road, there’s footfall activity.” Movement ceased overnight. “There’s a lump at the bottom which makes it more susceptible to vibrations than the others which have a flat base,” Mr. Gosling added.

This investigation, done on behalf of a myth-busting British television show, confirmed what many scientists had long suspected. In fact that exact explanation appeared six months ago in a Discovery News analysis of this mystery shortly after it happened:

“If the object is placed on a smooth surface with very little friction to hold it in place — and unless the glass case (and the floor underneath it) is perfectly level — the statue will turn. As with the bump on the bottom of the statue, the tilt does not need to be noticeable to be effective. The statue is housed in an ordinary glass museum case, not a laboratory platform scientifically calibrated to maintain perfect level and resist vibrations. This would also explain why the statue rotates on its axis, turning more or less in one spot instead of wandering around the display case like a lost child looking for its mummy.”

Now that the mystery has been definitively debunked, some are reacting with dismissals such as “So what? It was obvious,” or “Anyone could have figured it out.”

Read more at Discovery News