Scientists Discover Quick Recipe for Producing Hydrogen

Scientists in Lyon, a French city famed for its cuisine, have discovered a quick-cook recipe for copious volumes of hydrogen (H2).

The breakthrough suggests a better way of producing the hydrogen that propels rockets and energizes battery-like fuel cells. In a few decades, it could even help the world meet key energy needs -- without carbon emissions contributing to the greenhouse effect and climate change.

It also has profound implications for the abundance and distribution of life, helping to explain the astonishingly widespread microbial communities that dine on hydrogen deep beneath the continents and seafloor.

Describing how to greatly speed up nature's process for producing hydrogen will be a highlight among many presentations by Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) experts at the American Geophysical Union's annual Fall Meeting in San Francisco Dec. 9 to 13.

The DCO is a global, 10-year international science collaboration unraveling the mysteries of Earth's inner workings -- deep life, energy, chemistry, and fluid movements.

Muriel Andreani, Isabelle Daniel, and Marion Pollet-Villard of University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 discovered the quick recipe for producing hydrogen:

In a microscopic high-pressure cooker called a diamond anvil cell (within a tiny space about as wide as a pencil lead), combine ingredients: aluminum oxide, water, and the mineral olivine. Set at 200 to 300 degrees Celsius and 2 kilobars pressure -- comparable to conditions found at twice the depth of the deepest ocean. Cook for 24 hours. And voilà.

Dr. Daniel, a DCO leader, explains that scientists have long known nature's way of producing hydrogen. When water meets the ubiquitous mineral olivine under pressure, the rock reacts with oxygen (O) atoms from the H2O, transforming olivine into another mineral, serpentine -- characterized by a scaly, green-brown surface appearance like snake skin. Olivine is a common yellow to yellow-green mineral made of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen.

The process also leaves hydrogen (H2) molecules divorced from their marriage with oxygen atoms in water.

The novelty in the discovery, quietly published in a summer edition of the journal American Mineralogist, is how aluminum profoundly accelerates and impacts the process.

Finding the reaction completed in the diamond-enclosed micro space overnight, instead of over months as expected, left the scientists amazed. The experiments produced H2 some 7 to 50 times faster than the natural "serpentinization" of olivine.

Over decades, many teams looking to achieve this same quick hydrogen result focused mainly on the role of iron within the olivine, Dr. Andreani says. Introducing aluminum into the hot, high-pressure mix produced the eureka moment.

Dr. Daniel notes that aluminum is Earth's 5th most abundant element and usually is present, therefore, in the natural serpentinization process. The experiment introduced a quantity of aluminum unrealistic in nature.

Jesse Ausubel, of The Rockefeller University and a founder of the DCO program, says current methods for commercial hydrogen production for fuel cells or to power rockets "usually involve the conversion of methane (CH4), a process that produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) as a byproduct. Alternatively, we can split water molecules at temperatures of 850 degrees Celsius or more -- and thus need lots of energy and extra careful engineering."

"Aluminum's ability to catalyze hydrogen production at a much lower temperature could make an enormous difference. The cost and risk of the process would drop a lot."

"Scaling this up to meet global energy needs in a carbon-free way would probably require 50 years," he adds. "But a growing market for hydrogen in fuel cells could help pull the process into the market."

"We still need to solve problems for a hydrogen economy, such as storing the hydrogen efficiently as a gas in compact containers, or optimizing methods to turn it into a metal, as pioneered by Russell Hemley of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, another co-founder of the DCO."

Deep energy, Dr. Hemley notes, is typically thought of in terms of geothermal energy available from heat deep within Earth, as well as subterranean fluids that can be burned for energy, such as methane and petroleum. What may strike some as new is that there is also chemical energy in the form of hydrogen produced by serpentinization.

At the time of the AGU Fall Meetings, Dr. Andreani will be taking a lead role with Javier Escartin of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in a 40-member international scientific exploration of fault lines along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is a place where the African and American continents continue to separate at an annual rate of about 20 mm (1.5 inches) and rock is forced up from the mantle only 4 to 6 km (2.5 to 3.7 miles) below the thin ocean floor crust. The study will advance several DCO goals, including the mapping of world regions where deep life-supporting H2 is released through serpentinization.

Aboard the French vessel Pourquoi Pas?, using a deep sea robot from the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER), and a deep-sea vehicle from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (GEOMAR), the team includes researchers from France, Germany, USA, Wales, Spain, Norway and Greece.

Notes Dr. Daniel, until now it has been a scientific mystery how the rock + water + pressure formula produces enough hydrogen to support the chemical-loving microbial and other forms of life abounding in the hostile environments of the deep.

With the results of the experiment in France, "for the first time we understand why and how we have H2 produced at such a fast rate. When you take into account aluminum, you are able to explain the amount of life flourishing on hydrogen," says Dr. Daniel.

Indeed, DCO scientists hypothesize that hydrogen was what fed the earliest life on primordial planet Earth -- first life's first food.

And, she adds: "We believe the serpentinization process may be underway on many planetary bodies -- notably Mars. The reaction may take one day or one million years but it will occur whenever and wherever there is some water present to react with olivine -- one of the most abundant minerals in the solar system."

Enigmatic evidence of a deep subterranean microbe network

Meanwhile, the genetic makeup of Earth's deep microbial life is being revealed through DCO research underway by Matt Schrenk of Michigan State University, head of DCO's "Rock-Hosted Communities" initiative, Tom McCollom of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Steve D'Hondt of the University of Rhode Island, and many other associates.

At AGU, they will report the results of deep sampling from opposite sides of the world, revealing enigmatic evidence of a deep subterranean microbe network.

Using DNA, researchers are finding hydrogen-metabolizing microbes in rock fractures deep beneath the North American and European continents that are highly similar to samples a Princeton University group obtained from deep rock fractures 4 to 5 km (2.5 to 3 miles) down a Johannesburg-area mine shaft. These DNA sequences are also highly similar to those of microbes in the rocky seabeds off the North American northwest and northeastern Japanese coasts.

"Two years ago we had a scant idea about what microbes are present in subsurface rocks or what they eat," says Dr. Schrenk. "Since then a number of studies have vastly expanded that database. We're getting this emerging picture not only of what sort of organisms are found in these systems but some consistency between sites globally -- we're seeing the same types of organisms everywhere we look."

"It is easy to understand how birds or fish might be similar oceans apart, but it challenges the imagination to think of nearly identical microbes 16,000 km apart from each other in the cracks of hard rock at extreme depths, pressures, and temperatures" he says.

"In some deep places, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the environment is highly dynamic and promotes prolific biological communities," says Dr. McCollom. "In others, such as the deep fractures, the systems are isolated with a low diversity of microbes capable of surviving such harsh conditions."

"The collection and coupling of microbiological and geochemical data made possible through the Deep Carbon Observatory is helping us understand and describe these phenomena."

How water behaves deep within Earth's mantle

Among other major presentations, DCO investigators will introduce a new model that offers new insights into water / rock interactions at extreme pressures 150 km (93 miles) or more below the surface, well into Earth's upper mantle. To now, most models have been limited to 15 km, one-tenth the depth.

"The DCO gives a happy twist to the phrase 'We are in deep water'," says researcher Dimitri Sverjensky of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD.

Dr. Sverjensky's work, accepted for publication by the Elsevier journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, is expected to revolutionize understanding of deep Earth water chemistry and its impacts on subsurface processes as diverse as diamond formation, hydrogen accumulation, the transport of diverse carbon-, nitrogen- and sulfur-fed species in the mantle, serpentinization, mantle degassing, and the origin of Earth's atmosphere.

In deep Earth, despite extreme high temperatures and pressures, water is a fluid that circulates and reacts chemically with the rocks through which it passes, changing the minerals in them and undergoing alteration itself -- a key agent for transporting carbon and other chemical elements. Understanding what water is like and how it behaves in Earth's deep interior is fundamental to understanding the deep carbon cycle, deep life, and deep energy.

This water-rock interaction produces valuable ore deposits, creates the chemicals on which deep life and deep energy depend, influences the generation of magma that erupts from volcanoes -- even the occurrence of earthquakes. Humanity gets glimpses of this water in hot springs.

Says Dr. Sverjensky: "The new model may enable us to predict water-rock interaction well into Earth upper mantle and help visualize where on Earth H2 production might be underway."

The DCO is now in the 5th year of a decade-long adventure to probe Earth's deepest geo-secrets: How much carbon is stored inside Earth? What are the reservoirs of that carbon? How does carbon move among reservoirs? How much carbon released from Earth's deep interior is primordial and how much is recycled from the surface? Are there deep abiotic sources of hydrocarbons? What is the nature and extent of deep microbial life? And did deep Earth chemistry play a role in life's origins?

The $500 million global collaboration is led by Dr. Robert Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Read more at Science Daily

Possibility of Cloning Quantum Information from the Past

Popular television shows such as "Doctor Who" have brought the idea of time travel into the vernacular of popular culture. But problem of time travel is even more complicated than one might think. LSU's Mark Wilde has shown that it would theoretically be possible for time travelers to copy quantum data from the past.

It all started when David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford, came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the paradoxes that would occur if one could travel back in time. For example, would it be possible to travel back in time to kill one's grandfather? In the Grandfather paradox, a time traveler faces the problem that if he kills his grandfather back in time, then he himself is never born, and consequently is unable to travel through time to kill his grandfather, and so on. Some theorists have used this paradox to argue that it is actually impossible to change the past.

"The question is, how would you have existed in the first place to go back in time and kill your grandfather?" said Mark Wilde, an LSU assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and with the Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT.

Deutsch solved the Grandfather paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner.

"Meaning that, if you kill your grandfather, you do it with only probability one-half," Wilde said. "Then, he's dead with probability one-half, and you are not born with probability one-half, but the opposite is a fair chance. You could have existed with probability one-half to go back and kill your grandfather."

But the Grandfather paradox is not the only complication with time travel. Another problem is the no-cloning theorem, or the no "subatomic Xerox-machine" theorem, known since 1982. This theorem, which is related to the fact that one cannot copy quantum data at will, is a consequence of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle, by which one can measure either the position of a particle or its momentum, but not both with unlimited accuracy. According to the Uncertainty Principle, it is thus impossible to have a subatomic Xerox-machine that would take one particle and spit out two particles with the same position and momentum -- because then you would know too much about both particles at once.

"We can always look at a paper, and then copy the words on it. That's what we call copying classical data," Wilde said. "But you can't arbitrarily copy quantum data, unless it takes the special form of classical data. This no-cloning theorem is a fundamental part of quantum mechanics -- it helps us reason how to process quantum data. If you can't copy data, then you have to think of everything in a very different way."

But what if a Deutschian closed timelike curve did allow for copying of quantum data to many different points in space? According to Wilde, Deutsch suggested in his late 20th century paper that it should be possible to violate the fundamental no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Now, Wilde and collaborators at the University of Southern California and the Autonomous University of Barcelona have advanced Deutsch's 1991 work with a recent paper in Physical Review Letters. The new approach allows for a particle, or a time traveler, to make multiple loops back in time -- something like Bruce Willis' travels in the Hollywood film "Looper."

"That is, at certain locations in spacetime, there are wormholes such that, if you jump in, you'll emerge at some point in the past," Wilde said. "To the best of our knowledge, these time loops are not ruled out by the laws of physics. But there are strange consequences for quantum information processing if their behavior is dictated by Deutsch's model."

A single looping path back in time, a time spiral of sorts, behaving according to Deutsch's model, for example, would have to allow for a particle entering the loop to remain the same each time it passed through a particular point in time. In other words, the particle would need to maintain self-consistency as it looped back in time.

"In some sense, this already allows for copying of the particle's data at many different points in space," Wilde said, "because you are sending the particle back many times. It's like you have multiple versions of the particle available at the same time. You can then attempt to read out more copies of the particle, but the thing is, if you try to do so as the particle loops back in time, then you change the past."

To be consistent with Deutsch's model, which holds that you can only change the past as long as you can do it in a self-consistent manner, Wilde and colleagues had to come up with a solution that would allow for a looping curve back in time, and copying of quantum data based on a time traveling particle, without disturbing the past.

"That was the major breakthrough, to figure out what could happen at the beginning of this time loop to enable us to effectively read out many copies of the data without disturbing the past," Wilde said. "It just worked."

However, there is still some controversy over interpretations of the new approach, Wilde said. In one instance, the new approach may actually point to problems in Deutsch's original closed timelike curve model.

"If quantum mechanics gets modified in such a way that we've never observed should happen, it may be evidence that we should question Deutsch's model," Wilde said. "We really believe that quantum mechanics is true, at this point. And most people believe in a principle called Unitarity in quantum mechanics. But with our new model, we've shown that you can essentially violate something that is a direct consequence of Unitarity. To me, this is an indication that something weird is going on with Deutsch's model. However, there might be some way of modifying the model in such a way that we don't violate the no-cloning theorem."

Other researchers argue that Wilde's approach wouldn't actually allow for copying quantum data from an unknown particle state entering the time loop because nature would already "know" what the particle looked like, as it had traveled back in time many times before.

But whether or not the no-cloning theorem can truly be violated as Wilde's new approach suggests, the consequences of being able to copy quantum data from the past are significant. Systems for secure Internet communications, for example, will likely soon rely on quantum security protocols that could be broken or "hacked" if Wilde's looping time travel methods were correct.

"If an adversary, if a malicious person, were to have access to these time loops, then they could break the security of quantum key distribution," Wilde said. "That's one way of interpreting it. But it's a very strong practical implication because the big push of quantum communication is this secure way of communicating. We believe that this is the strongest form of encryption that is out there because it's based on physical principles."

Today, when you log into your Gmail or Facebook, your password and information encryption is not based on physical principles of quantum mechanical security, but rather on the computational assumption that it is very difficult for "hackers" to factor mathematical products of prime numbers, for example. But physicists and computer scientists are working on securing critical and sensitive communications using the principles of quantum mechanics. Such encryption is believed to be unbreakable -- that is, as long as hackers don't have access to Wilde's looping closed timelike curves.

Read more at Science Daily

Cockroaches Munched on Dinosaur Poop

Scientists now have an answer to a question you never knew you had: What happened to all the dinosaur dung? Cockroaches vacuumed it up, a new study suggests. One animal's waste is another animal's gourmet meal.

Researchers from the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Slovakia stumbled on the finding by accident while researching the diet of ancient cockroaches in the now-extinct Blattulidae family. Using sophisticated imaging methods, they found particles of wood inside the roach's gut that they think came from dinosaur feces.

"Dinosaurs undoubtedly produced huge quantities of excrements," the researchers wrote in the study, detailed Dec. 4 in the journal PLOS ONE. "Although appearing trivial, cockroaches, one of the dominant insect orders during the Mesozoic were never examined as representing top candidates for partial processors of dinosaur dung."

Dung beetles and quickly maturing flies were rare during most of the Mesozoic (about 250 million to 65 million years ago). But ancient cockroaches roamed the Earth around the same time as herbivorous dinosaurs.

Using a method called synchrotron X-ray microtomography, the researchers created a virtual 3D version of a fossilized cockroach preserved in a piece of amber in Lebanon dating from the Lower Cretaceous (about 120 million years ago). The unfortunate roach expired in the act of relieving itself, leaving a partially extruded piece of fossilized poop, known as a coprolite, that contained bits of wood.

The wood particles had smooth edges, suggesting the roach didn't chew them. And the insect's digestive system wasn't capable of decomposing the wood. The most likely explanation, the researchers concluded, was that the roach ate some poop from an herbivorous dinosaur.

Other fossilized species of cockroaches have been found with undigested carbon-based debris in their guts, but only the bowel of the Blattulidae specimen contained wood. Members of the Blattulidae family represented about 1 percent of all insects and more than 30 percent of cockroaches alive during the Mesozoic, and probably co-existed with a dominant vertebrate group such as sauropod dinosaurs, the researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

This Fly Hijacks an Ant’s Brain — Then Pops Its Head Off

We humans were just so proud of ourselves when we invented the guillotine after millennia of experimenting with how best to take heads off shoulders. Maybe a bit too proud, what with that whole Reign of Terror thing. Unbeknownst to those over-enthusiastic revolutionaries, evolution already had produced its own perfect beheader — a tiny fly whose larvae burrow into ants, take control of their minds, and eventually sever their heads from the inside.

These are nature’s flying guillotines: the epically named ant-decapitating flies of the genus Pseudacteon.

Twenty years ago, Sanford Porter, then an entomologist with the University of Texas, was in South America studying fire ants and discovered their numbers were a fraction of those of their invading comrades to the north. Here in America, these two introduced species, the red and black fire ants, cause billions of dollars each year in agricultural damage, pest control costs, and sweet, sweet profits for hospitals treating their excruciating stings.

So Porter searched for a natural enemy that might be keeping southern populations in check. Following a tip from a colleague, he began seeking out fire ants fending off attacks from tiny flies. He gathered some of these besieged individuals and returned to the United States, where he soon began finding maggots in the ants’ bodies. “And around about two weeks [after that] I found that the heads would fall off,” he told WIRED, “and lo and behold I could see the pupa inside the ant’s head.”

The flies he’d observed weren’t hunting the ants. They were much too small for that. Apparently not to be bothered with the stresses of parenthood, they were infesting the creatures with their young. Here, take this for me, the flies seemed to say, I’ve got a lot going on in my life right now.

Here’s how it works. Attracted by the smell of the fire ant’s alarm pheromone, the female ant-decapitating fly hovers a few millimeters from her target. “When they get into just the right position, they dive in,” said Porter, who is now with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The fly has a sort of lock-and-key ovipositor, the shape of which varies widely between species, “and once that’s fit onto the ant’s body, around the legs somewhere, then what happens is that there’s an internal ovipositor that looks like a hypodermic needle, and that hits probably in the membranes in between the legs,” firing a tiny torpedo-shaped egg into the ant.

In only a few days the egg grows considerably inside the ant before hatching. The resulting maggot works its way through the ant into its head, where it will live for several weeks on the host’s bodily fluids, while maybe from time to time sarcastically asking what the ant is thinking about.

The lock-and-key ovipositor of a Pseudacteon pradei female.

Now, we can safely assume this is relatively distressing for the ant. Indeed, ant colonies maintain something called social immunity to isolate and exile such individuals whose behavior is deemed suspicious — for the good of the community. Yet strangely “the ant runs around, behaves outwardly normally, but even at this point the fly maggot is taking control of the behavior of the ant,” said Porter. Its confederates are none the wiser.

You see, as it develops, the larva needs its host to remain in the relative safety of the colony, where food is plentiful. Porter isn’t yet sure exactly how the maggot accomplishes this mind control, though it’s surely some sort of chemical release. (Did you catch that, CIA? A mind-controlling chemical. Query the NSA for a full transcript of my phone call with Porter for more details.)

But things get even stranger when the larva mercifully decides it’s time to kill its host. Around 24 hours before the maggot is ready to pupate, it finally mind-controls the ant out of the colony. In order for it to develop properly, the pupa needs high humidity, “so what they’re looking for is a place down deep in the leaf litter or plant litter or somewhere that they can dig down in where it remains moist and doesn’t get too hot,” said Porter.

“When they take over the behavior of the ant, that’s what the ant begins to seek,” he added. “When ants normally die, they end up in hot dry places because that keeps fungi and other pathogens from hurting the other ants. But that’s not what happens when they’re under control of the parasite.”

Astoundingly, this strategy has developed totally independently in the Cordyceps fungi, which invade ants’ minds in a similar manner to steer them to unfathomably precise positions in the rainforest to die. Two such completely unrelated organisms developing the same adaptation independently is known as convergent evolution, and this particular convergence is all the more incredible considering that fungi aren’t even animals. This ant-control adaptation has developed not merely between a family or order of organisms, but between kingdoms.

A Pseudacteon curvatus female with hook-shaped ovipositor.

The larva next eats away the brains and muscles and glands, completely hollowing out the head. It then pushes in and out of the ant’s mouth to create an exit route, and begins to pupate. To seal this hole, the pupa builds up a hardened tip that is the exact size of the mouth opening of the ant, protecting it as it continues to develop. And a few weeks later, a new tiny ant-decapitating fly finally crawls out of the ant’s disembodied head like Athena sprouting from Zeus, only Zeus got to remain alive.

This remarkable lifestyle, Porter theorized, is what keeps South American fire ant populations in check on their home turf. Without these specific flies in the U.S. (our native species have their own parasitic flies that don’t attack non-native species), the invasive fire ants run amok. So why not just import the southern flies to control the southern ants?

You might think this is a really bad idea, like bringing in cats to fix a rat problem and then having to bring in dogs to control the cats and pretty soon you’ve got grizzly bears running around making a mess of things. But as a parasite, ant-decapitating flies are extremely host-specific. Native varieties here in the U.S. attack native fire ant species, but very rarely touch invasive species. And likewise South American ant-decapitating flies only parasitize South American fire ants, so, theoretically, importing them wouldn’t pose a threat to our native varieties.

Read more at Wired Science

'Ugly Duckling' Pteranodons Floated, But Poorly

It might have been the ugliest duckling ever, but scientists using Canada geese for a model have determined that pteranodons, ancient flying reptiles, probably floated on water but not so prettily as their modern avian counterparts.

Like modern birds, the pteranodon had hollow bones, which would have made them light and buoyant. There is also evidence that the flying reptiles foraged in watery environments. But it takes computational modeling to work out exactly how they might have managed to float on water without drowning.

“This isn't about swimming. This isn't about diving,” clarified David Hone of Queen Mary University of London, who coauthored a paper on the work with Donald Henderson of Canada's Royal Terrell Museum of Paleontology. It's just about how the pteranodons floated.

First the researchers tested their flotation model by reproducing the depth and position of a floating Canada goose. Then they tried to make it work for a pteranodon, shifting different variables around just to make certain they covered most possible poses for the flying reptiles in the water. What they found was that the creatures probably didn't sit well on the water surface. In fact they barely could keep their mouths above the water.

“A good analogy is a human,” Hone explained. “If I just lie in a swimming pool I barely have my mouth above the water.” And any waves would make it extremely hard to breathe.

But that does not mean pteranodons were bad at foraging in water, any more than it means humans can't swim, Hone said.

“It isn't necessarily a problem,” Hone said, citing modern birds that spend much of their lives over the ocean but are rather poor at floating on the surface. “Pterosaurs are the Cretaceous albatross.”

Other researchers who have modeled behaviors of pteranodon agree that the posture in the water is not a problem.

Read more at Discovery News

Sharks Do Get Cancer: Tumor Found in Great White

Scientists have known for more than 150 years that sharks get cancer. And yet the belief persists that the animals don't suffer from the disease.

That misconception is promoted in part by those who sell shark cartilage, who claim that the substance will help cure cancer, said David Shiffman, a shark researcher and doctoral student at the University of Miami. But no studies have shown that shark cartilage is an effective treatment, and the demand for the material has helped decimate shark populations, researchers say: Humans kill about 100 million sharks per year, according to a March 2013 study (although many factors contribute to the killing of sharks, including demand for shark-fin soup).

Recently, researchers in Australia noticed a large tumor protruding from the mouth of a great white shark, as well as another mass on the head of a bronze whaler shark. The great white's tumor measured 1 foot (30 centimeters) long and 1 foot wide, according to a study describing the tumors published online in November in the Journal of Fish Diseases.

"This was a very unusual sight as we have never before seen a white shark with tumors," said Rachel Robbins, a study co-author and shark biologist at the Fox Shark Research Foundation, near Adelaide, in southern Australia.

In total, scientists have now documented tumors in at least 23 species of sharks, including the two in the new study, Robbins said. "The main take-home message from the study is that it adds to the growing evidence of tumor formation in sharks, contrary to popular belief that sharks do not suffer from such anomalies," Robbins told LiveScience.

"Sharks get cancer," said Shiffman, who wasn't involved in the study. "Even if they didn't get cancer, eating shark products won't cure cancer any more than me eating Michael Jordan would make me better at basketball."

The belief that shark cartilage can treat cancer diverts patients from effective treatments, according to a 2004 review in the journal Cancer Research. The demand for cartilage also fuels widespread fishing for sharks. One in six known species of sharks, rays and skates are considered threatened with extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an environmental group, Shiffman said.

Read more at Discovery News

Top 10 Winter Holiday Myths

Introduction

With Thanksgiving and Hanukkah behind us and Christmas and New Year's Day still ahead, the holiday season is in full swing.

Given the mix of stories and superstitions that constitute holiday preparations and celebrations, seasonal myths can carry over year to year along with the traditions themselves. Consider those myths debunked.

Holiday Travel

Anyone flying home for the holidays last week probably saw a familiar sight at the airport: frantic passengers, long lines at the security screening and a cramped seat on a plane. The day before Thanksgiving certainly does feel like the busiest air travel time of the year.

Except it's not. In fact, some years it's not even in the top 10. In 2006, it was the 36th busiest and 55th in 2007.

The busiest travel days of the year aren't anywhere near the winter holiday season, but rather take place in the summer, on Friday in June, July and August.

Savory Dreams

If you're still recovering from that food-induced coma you received on Thanksgiving, don't blame the tryptophan in your turkey. Despite the widespread belief that the amino acid triggers sleepiness, it's actually not the turkey's fault for causing drowsiness after a Thanksgiving meal.

Rather, it's the massive amount of carbohydrates and often alcohol that lead to that inevitable post-meal nap.

Traditional Thanksgiving?

Despite celebrating in what we believed the fashion of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Thanksgiving today in no way resembles similar occasions that would have been held in the 17th century. Such events weren't organized or ritualized, according to a religious scholar at Davidson University.

When clergy did find occasion to call together parishioners to give thanks to God, Puritans didn't spend all day feasting, but rather sitting in church.

Our modern conception of Thanksgiving can be credited to a 19th-century magazine editor named Sarah Hale, who saw the holiday as a means of uniting Americans during a time of increasing factionalism.

In the Dark

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can lead to the winter blues, affecting some 5 percent of Americans. But the dark days of winter aren't as big a driver of depression in others, despite the lack of light being cited as a leading cause. Stress, sickness and other sources are more likely to blame.

Suicide Spike

Suicides don't spike during the holiday season, a grim myth with no statistical support. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate is at its lowest in December. It's actually at its highest in the spring and fall.

Read more at Discovery News

'Impossible' Alien World is Impossible. Yet There It Is

A giant extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, has been discovered orbiting a distant star. But this is no "ordinary" alien planet -- it shouldn't exist. To put it bluntly, it's an affront to current planet formation theories.

HD 106906b is a gas giant exoplanet with a mass 11 times that of Jupiter. So far, this may not seem too strange; hundreds of massive explanets have been spotted in our galaxy. But this one is peculiar in that it orbits its star 650 times the distance the Earth orbits the sun. It's this 650 AU (astronomical unit) distance that is causing some serious astronomical confusion.

"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said Vanessa Bailey, fifth-year graduate student in the University of Arizona's Department of Astronomy and lead researcher of this study.

The exoplanet was discovered using the Magellan Telescopes' Adaptive Optics (MagAO) system, based in Chile. Adaptive optics are sophisticated laser systems used by ground based observatories to remove the atmospheric "wobble" when observing the night sky. This is the same effect as removing the "twinkle" from stars when viewed with the naked eye -- upper atmospheric turbulence causes the twinkle, the same effect that obscures the view for ground based observatories.

The leading planetary formation theory posits that planets grow from the agglomeration of smaller bodies, such as asteroids. Over millions of years, the planet gains mass as its gravitational field starts to pull in more and more dust, asteroids and other junk. However, this mechanism cannot be applied to HD 106906b -- at that orbital distance, this process acts slowly, making a planet of 11 Jupiter masses an impossibility.

A second theory could be invoked: Did HD 106906b rapidly form from the rapid gravitational collapse of a knot of material in the star's protoplanetary disk? Again, this mechanism is more likely to occur very close to the host star where plentiful material can be found; at 650 AU there would be little material to trigger the collapse.

So, according to Bailey, that leaves only one explanation. But there's a problem with that one, too.

"A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit," said Bailey in a UA news release. "It is possible that in the case of the HD 106906 system the star and planet collapsed independently from clumps of gas, but for some reason the planet's progenitor clump was starved for material and never grew large enough to ignite and become a star."

However, binary pairs exhibit a mass ratio typically no more than 10-to-1, a ratio HD 106906b clearly violates. "In our case, the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1," she added.

So how the heck did the 13 million years old HD 106906b form? For now we just don't know.

The nature of the HD 106906 star system may help to unravel the mystery of the errant exoplanet's nature. As it's a young system, large quantities of gas and dust are still present. These "leftovers" from planetary formation may help astronomers better understand the nature of the young world, an opportunity too good to miss. We are basically looking into an astronomical Petri dish where the actual planet-building mechanism is being laid out to see.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Dogs Found Buried in Pots in Egypt

Archaeologists have found some of the most curious canine burials ever unearthed in Egypt — two well preserved dogs buried in pots some 3,000 years ago.

Nicknamed Houdini and Chewie, the dog pots were discovered at Shunet ez Zebib, a large mud-brick structure located at Abydos — one of Egypt’s oldest standing royal monuments. The site was built around 2750 B.C and was dedicated to Khasekhemwy, a second dynasty king.

It is also known for the the thousands of ibis burials in jars that had been recovered in the dunes nearby, and for the interments of other animals, mostly raptors and canines.

“The site provided a very secure structure, with conveniently soft, sandy fill that was easy for quick burials within a sacred space,” Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo, wrote in a recently published Festschrift in honor of Dieter Kessler, a renowned scholar in the field of animal cults and Egyptian religion.

A leading expert on animal mummies, Ikram analyzed the results of a 2009 excavation led by David O’Connor and Matthew Adams, respectively director and field director of the North Abydos Project at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Digging in the Shunet ez-Zebib’s southeast corner, the archaeologists unearthed several jars containing animal burials.

“Of the many jars that were recovered, only 13 have thus far been properly investigated. Of these, four were empty, three contained ibises, and five were filled with dogs,” Ikram said.

While three pots contained skeletonized remains of dogs, the last two housed Houdini and Chewie, two animals with their fur largely intact.

“Although it is common to find birds in pots, it is rare to find other animals buried in this way,” Ikram told Discovery News.

In particular, no canine burials in pots have been recorded in the many dog cemeteries scattered throughout Egypt.

“These jars were probably made and used for some sort of storage, and then re-used as coffins for the dogs. They are quite charming as the dogs are curled up in the pots,” Ikra said.

Houdini was found in a large two-handled pot, and was buried without any wrappings.

“We could not figure out how such a large animal was fit into the pot, so we named him after the magician, Houdini,” Ikram said.

The animal’s fur was brown to auburn-coppery, with portions darker and stiffer, as if they had been anointed by some substance such as oil or even resin.

“It seems as if he were put into the pot, hind limbs first, then adjusted and the rest of the body pushed in so that he was curled around,” Ikram said.

Although it is likely that Houdini is a dog, certain identification of the species is impossible as the animal could not be removed from the jar without compromising its integrity.

“The color of his almost auburn fur is unusual in a dog, as is the length of the hairs, which tend to be shorter in Egyptian dogs than the 3.5 inches found in the case of Houdini,” Ikram said.

“The only other viable identification would be a fox, but the fur’s color is not in keeping with the foxes found in Egypt today,” she added.

Not as well preserved as Houdini, Chewie was found in a large jar filled with the broken pieces of another large pot, which was used as a packing material to keep the dog in situ.

“Once the broken bits of pottery were removed, the dog contained within the pot was completely visible,” Ikram said.

The lack of evidence of any textile in the jar suggests Chewie was buried without bandages.

“The bones from his right foreleg were pushing through the skin and yellow fur,” Ikram added.

According to the researcher, both animals were mature, probably around five years of age.

“They were probably votive offerings unless they held the position of sacred animals — perhaps the pot burials are indicative of their being Sacred rather than just Votive,”Ikram said.

How the two animals were pushed into pots from which they cannot be extracted now remains a mystery.

“Without further examination and chemical testing it is not possible to understand the process by which these two animals were preserved,” Ikram said.

Read more at Discovery News

Mummy Mystery: Multiple Tombs Hidden in Valley of Kings

Multiple tombs lay hidden in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, where royalty were buried more than 3,000 years ago, awaiting discovery, say researchers working on the most extensive exploration of the area in nearly a century.

The hidden treasure may include several small tombs, with the possibility of a big-time tomb holding a royal individual, the archaeologists say.

Egyptian archaeologists excavated the valley, where royalty were buried during the New Kingdom (1550–1070 B.C.), between 2007 and 2010 and worked with the Glen Dash Foundation for Archaeological Research to conduct ground- penetrating radar studies.

The team has already made a number of discoveries in the valley, including a flood control system that the ancient Egyptians created but, mysteriously, failed to maintain. The system was falling apart by the time of King Tutankhamun, which damaged many tombs but appears to have helped protect the famous boy-king's treasures from robbers by sealing his tomb.

The team collected a huge amount of data that will take a long time to analyze properly, wrote Afifi Ghonim, who was the field director of the project, in an email to LiveScience. "The corpus was so extensive it will take years, maybe decades, to fully study and report on," wrote Ghonim, an archaeologist with the Ministry of State for Antiquities in Egypt who is now chief inspector of Giza.

The project is part of "the most extensive exploration in the Valley of the Kings since Howard Carter's time," he said, referring to the Egyptologist whose team discovered King Tut's tomb in 1922.

The search for undiscovered tombs

"The consensus is that there are probably several smaller tombs like the recently found KV 63 and 64 yet to be found. But there is still the possibility of finding a royal tomb," wrote Ghonim in the email. "The queens of the late Eighteenth Dynasty are missing, as are some pharaohs of the New Kingdom, such as Ramesses VIII."

That sentiment was echoed by the famous, and at times controversial, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass at a lecture in Toronto this past summer. Hawass was the leader of the Valley of the Kings team.

"The tomb of Thutmose II, not found yet, the tomb of Ramesses VIII is not found yet, all the queens of dynasty 18 [1550-1292 B.C.] were buried in the valley and their tombs not found yet," said Hawass, former minister for antiquities, during the lecture. "This could be another era for archaeology," he added in an interview.

Ghonim said that it is hard to say how many tombs remain undiscovered but it is "more than just a couple."

Locating tombs in the Valley of the Kings is difficult to do even with ground-penetrating radar, a non-destructive technique in which scientists bounce high-frequency radio waves off the ground and measure the reflected signals to find buried structures.

Radar instruments and related computing power have vastly improved in the last couple of decades, scientists say. Even so, it "is difficult to avoid false positives in a place like the Valley of the Kings. There (are) many faults and natural features that can look like walls and tombs. Our work did help refine the technology for use here and it does have a place."

In one instance, radar work carried out by a previous team suggested that tombs dating from the Amarna period (the period within the New Kingdom in which Tutankhamun lived) could be found in a certain area of the main valley. The team excavated the spot but didn't find any tombs.

When the undiscovered tombs — those that do exist — are unearthed, they may not hold their original occupants. For instance, KV 64, a small tomb discovered in 2011by a University of Basel team, was found to hold a female singer named Nehmes Bastet who lived around 2,800 years ago. She apparently re-used a tomb that was created for an earlier, unknown, occupant.

Still, Ghonim said they could indeed find a tomb whose original occupants are buried within. "It is not impossible however for one or more to be intact," he said. And if they do find such pharaohs, they may also find their brains, as work by Hawass and Dr. Sahar Saleem of Cairo University suggests the Egyptians didn't remove the brains of their dead pharaohs in the mummification process.

An ancient flood control system

While the prospect of new tombs is tantalizing, they are but one of many things the researchers looked for in the valley. Last spring, the researchers gave a taste of what was to come at the Current Research in Egyptology conference at the University of Cambridge.

We "made a number of finds, which we believe will change our understanding of how the ancient Egyptians managed and utilized the site," Ghonim wrote in the email.

The researchers discovered, for instance, the ancient Egyptians created a flood control system in the valley that, for a time, prevented the tombs from being damaged by water and debris.

They detected a deep channel that would have run through the valley about 32 feet (10 meters) below the modern-day surface. As part of their anti-flood measures the Egyptians would have emptied this channel of debris and built side channels that diverted water into it, allowing water and debris to pass through the valley without causing damage.

Still, Ghonim said they could indeed find a tomb whose original occupants are buried within. "It is not impossible however for one or more to be intact," he said. And if they do find such pharaohs, they may also find their brains, as work by Hawass and Dr. Sahar Saleem of Cairo University suggests the Egyptians didn't remove the brains of their dead pharaohs in the mummification process.

An ancient flood control system

While the prospect of new tombs is tantalizing, they are but one of many things the researchers looked for in the valley. Last spring, the researchers gave a taste of what was to come at the Current Research in Egyptology conference at the University of Cambridge.

We "made a number of finds, which we believe will change our understanding of how the ancient Egyptians managed and utilized the site," Ghonim wrote in the email.

The researchers discovered, for instance, the ancient Egyptians created a flood control system in the valley that, for a time, prevented the tombs from being damaged by water and debris.

They detected a deep channel that would have run through the valley about 32 feet (10 meters) below the modern-day surface. As part of their anti-flood measures the Egyptians would have emptied this channel of debris and built side channels that diverted water into it, allowing water and debris to pass through the valley without causing damage.

Strangely enough, the ancient Egyptians "for some reason after building it, they let it fall into disrepair rather quickly. By (the) time Tutankhamun was buried, flooding events had become a problem again," Ghonim said.

"That was bad for most tombs, but good for Tutankhamun since, at least according to one theory, flooding events effectively sealed the tomb and made it inaccessible to later tomb robbers."

Today flood control is still a problem in the Valley of the Kings, and scientists are looking at ways to protect the tombs.

"There have been many studies recommending what to do, but the need to keep the valley open and the costs involved remain a problem. There's also the need to develop a consensus on such an important thing," Ghonim said.

More discoveries and challenges

Many more finds will be detailed in scientific publications in the future, including the excavation of huts used by the workers who built the tombs and the documentation of graffiti left throughout the valley's history.

Read more at Discovery News