Out of an hours-long explosion, a stand-in for the first stars

Astronomers analyzing a long-lasting blast of high-energy light observed in 2013 report finding features strikingly similar to those expected from an explosion from the universe's earliest stars. If this interpretation is correct, the outburst validates ideas about a recently identified class of gamma-ray burst and serves as a stand-in for what future observatories may see as the last acts of the first stars.

"One of the great challenges of modern astrophysics has been the quest to identify the first generation of stars to form in the universe, which we refer to as Population III stars," explained lead scientist Luigi Piro, the director of research at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, a division of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). "This important event takes us one step closer."

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous explosions in the universe. The blasts emit outbursts of gamma rays -- the most powerful form of light -- and X-rays, and produce rapidly fading afterglows that can be observed in visible light, infrared and radio wavelengths. On average, NASA's Swift satellite, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other spacecraft detect about one GRB each day.

Shortly after 12:11 a.m. EDT on Sept. 25, 2013, Swift's Burst Alert Telescope triggered on a spike of gamma rays from a source in the constellation Fornax. The spacecraft automatically alerted observatories around the world that a new burst -- designated GRB 130925A, after the date -- was in progress and turned its X-ray Telescope (XRT) toward the source. Other satellites also detected the rising tide of high-energy radiation, including Fermi, the Russian Konus instrument onboard NASA's Wind spacecraft, and the European Space Agency's (ESA) INTEGRAL observatory.

The burst was eventually localized to a galaxy so far away that its light had been traveling for 3.9 billion years, longer than the oldest evidence for life on Earth.

Astronomers have observed thousands of GRBs over the past five decades. Until recently, they were classified into two groups, short and long, based on the duration of the gamma-ray signal. Short bursts, lasting only two seconds or less, are thought to represent a merger of compact objects in a binary system, with the most likely suspects being neutron stars and black holes. Long GRBs may last anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, with typical durations between 20 and 50 seconds. These events are thought to be associated with the collapse of a star many times the sun's mass and the resulting birth of a new black hole.

GRB 130925A, by contrast, produced gamma rays for 1.9 hours, more than a hundred times greater than a typical long GRB. Observations by Swift's XRT revealed an intense and highly variable X-ray afterglow that exhibited strong flares for six hours, after which it finally began the steady fadeout usually seen in long GRBs.

"GRB 130925A is a member of a rare and newly recognized class we call ultra-long bursts," said Eleonora Troja, a visiting research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a member of the study team. "But what really sets it apart is its unusual X-ray afterglow, which provides the strongest case yet that ultra-long GRBs come from stars called blue supergiants."

Astronomers think Wolf-Rayet stars best explain the origin of long GRBs. Born with more than 25 times the sun's mass, these stars burn so hot that they drive away their outer hydrogen envelopes through an outflow called a stellar wind. By the time it collapses, the star's outer atmosphere is essentially gone and its physical size is comparable to the sun's. A black hole forms in the star's core and matter falling toward it powers jets that burrow through the star. The jets continue operating for a few tens of seconds -- the time scale of long GRBs.

Because ultra-long GRBs last hundreds of times longer, the source star must have a correspondingly greater physical size. The most likely suspect, astronomers say, is a blue supergiant, a hot star with about 20 times the sun's mass that retains its deep hydrogen atmosphere, making it roughly 100 times the sun's diameter. Better yet, blue supergiants containing only a very small fraction of elements heavier than helium -- metals, in astronomical parlance -- could be substantially larger. A star's metal content controls the strength of its stellar wind, and this in turn determines how much of its hydrogen atmosphere it retains before collapse. For the largest blue supergiants, the hydrogen envelope would take hours to fall into the black hole, providing a sustained fuel source to power ultra-long GRBs.

Writing in the July 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers note that radio observations of the GRB afterglow show that it displayed nearly constant brightness over a period of four months. This extremely slow decline suggests that the explosion's blast wave was moving essentially unimpeded through space, which means that the environment around the star is largely free of material cast off by a stellar wind.

The burst's long-lived X-ray flaring proved a more puzzling feature to explain, requiring observations from Swift, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton satellite to sort out. As the high-energy jet bores through the collapsing star, its leading edge rams into cooler stellar gas and heats it. This gas flows down the sides of the jet, surrounding it in a hot X-ray-emitting sheath. Because the jet travels a greater distance through a blue supergiant, this cocoon becomes much more massive than is possible in a Wolf-Rayet star. While the cocoon should expand rapidly as it exits the star, the X-ray evidence indicates that it remained intact. The science team suggests that magnetic fields may have suppressed the flow of hot gas across the cocoon, keeping it confined close to the jet.

"This is the first time we have detected this thermal cocoon component, likely because all other known ultra-long bursts occurred at greater distances," said Piro.

The astronomers conclude that the best explanation for the unusual properties of GRB 130925A is that it heralded the death of a metal-poor blue supergiant, a model they suggest likely characterizes the entire ultra-long class.

Read more at Science Daily

Pressure cell for reproducing deep-Earth chemistry

A new pressure cell invented by UC Davis researchers makes it possible to simulate chemical reactions deep in the Earth's crust. The cell allows researchers to perform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements on as little as 10 microliters of liquid at pressures up to 20 kiloBar.

"NMR is our window into the chemical world," said Brent Pautler, a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at UC Davis and first author on the paper published July 2 in the online edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie. "It lets us see chemical reactions as they are happening."

The new device allows researchers for the first time to study chemical reactions in liquid water under pressure, without it freezing into a solid.

"We were able to get to the point where we could no longer ignore the compressibility of the water molecules," Pautler said. "This is the first time this has ever been reported."

Geochemists want to know what kind of chemistry is happening deep in the Earth's crust, beyond the reach of boreholes. These chemical reactions could affect water and minerals that eventually migrate to the surface, or the behavior of carbon cycling between the Earth's depths and the surface.

"Aqueous fluids deep in the Earth are the great unknown for geochemists," said Chris Colla, a graduate student in Earth & Physical Sciences at UC Davis and co-author on the paper. "By doing NMR we can get an inside view of what is occurring deep in the Earth's crust."

For example, Pautler, Colla and colleagues have already looked at calcium ions in solution. Dissolved calcium ions can be surrounded by four, six or eight water molecules. High pressure forces dissolved calcium into an eight-water state, they found.

The high-pressure measurements could also shed light on chemical processes involved in hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," and the behavior of buried nuclear waste over long periods of time. Fracking is the process of extracting oil and gas by injecting liquids under high pressure into rocks.

The high-pressure NMR cell was built in the machine shop at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory with the help of Peter Klavins, research specialist in the Department of Physics, and Steve Harley, a former UC Davis graduate student now at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Read more at Science Daily

Korean Mummy's Hernia Diagnosed 300 Years Later

This diagnosis is 300 years too late.

An autopsy of a Korean mummy entombed in the 17th century shows that the middle-age man suffered from a potentially painful hernia during his lifetime, according to a new study.

The mummy, only discovered last year, had been buried in a royal tomb of Korea's Chosun (or Joseon) Dynasty in Andong, a city in modern-day South Korea. The well-preserved remains belonged to a man who was about 45 years old and 5 feet, 3 inches (160.2 cm), the researchers said in their report published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. Based on his topknot hairstyle, archaeologists concluded that the man was married.

Before he died, the middle-age man may have roamed the streets of Andong with pain in his chest and abdomen. Perhaps he was sometimes short of breath or nauseated. But he wouldn't have known what was wrong with him; doctors have only been able to diagnose his condition, known as Bochdalek-type congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH), with the advent of radiological imaging technologies, such as X-ray and computed tomography (CT) scans, in the 20th century.

Bochdalek hernias arises from a birth defect that causes a hole in the diaphragm, the dome-shaped muscle that stetches across the bottom of the lungs. Other organs in the abdomen might push through this hole into the chest cavity, compressing one or both of the lungs and moving the heart.

A computed tomography (CT) scan of the mummy hinted that something was wrong with the placement of the man's organs. An autopsy confirmed that there was indeed a hole in his diaphragm and that several of his organs were herniated, including the right lobe of his liver, part of his stomach and part of his colon, the scientists said.

The researchers, led by Yi-Suk Kim of Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, looked for other complications that may have been caused by the man's condition, such as perforation or strangulation of his herniated organs, which often causes death in Bochdalek CDH patients today. However, the scientists found no such evidence for these problems.

"This means that the CDH itself might not have been the main cause of death in his case," the authors wrote. "He could have lived with CDH in this lifetime while experiencing a few signs of respiratory disturbances. We suspected that the functional defects caused by the CDH in the present male mummy case might have been largely compensated for as he grew older."

Read more at Discovery News

Were Ancient Child Skulls Gifts to the Lake Gods?

Children's skulls found at the edges of Bronze Age settlements may have been a gruesome gift for the local lake gods.

The children's skulls were discovered encircling the perimeter of ancient villages around lakes in Switzerland and Germany. Some had suffered ax blows and other head traumas.

Though the children probably weren't human sacrifices killed to appease the gods, they may have been offered after death as gifts to ward off flooding, said study co-author Benjamin Jennings, an archaeologist at Basel University in Switzerland.

Lake dwellers
Since the 1920s, archaeologists have known that ancient villages dotted Alpine lakes in Switzerland and Germany. However, it wasn't until the 1970s and 1980s that many of the sites were excavated, yielding hunting tools, animal bones, ceramics, jewelry, watchtowers, gates and more than 160 dwellings. Tree rings on wooden artifacts from the sites suggest people lived there at different periods between 3,800 and 2,600 years ago. [Mummy Melodrama: Top 9 Secrets About Otzi the Iceman]

The Bronze Age lake dwellers regularly faced flooding. Whenever lake levels rose, they would pick up and move to dry land, only to return once the waters receded. To adapt to this watery threat, the people built houses on stilts or on sturdy wooden foundations, and created palisades, or fences, made from bog pine, the researchers wrote in the June issue of the journal Antiquity.

But in addition to finding evidence for such architectural adaptations, archaeologists also unearthed more macabre details of life (and death): children's skulls and skeletal remains encircling the villages at the palisade edges. Many of these ancient skulls were placed there long after their initial burial, at a time when the settlements experienced the worst inundation from rising lake levels, the researchers wrote.

Gift to the gods

In the current study, Jennings and his colleagues took a closer look at the fossil skeletons.

Most were from children under age 10, and though the skeletal remains revealed tooth decay and signs of respiratory ailments, those health troubles would not have been severe enough to warrant a mercy killing, the researchers wrote in the journal article.

The skulls showed evidence of head trauma from battle-axes or clubs, though the injuries don't have the uniformity associated with a ritual killing. As a result, it's more likely the youngsters were felled in warfare, rather than killed as a sacrifice for the gods, the researchers wrote.

Either way, it's clear these weren't ordinary burials, he said.

"Across Europe as a whole there is quite a body of evidence to indicate that throughout prehistory human remains, and particularly the skull, were highly symbolic and socially charged," Jennings told Live Science in an email.

At these sites, "the remains are found at the perimeter of the settlement — not inside and not outside, but at a liminal position on the border between in and out," Jennings added. And at one of the sites, the remains were placed at the high-water mark of the floodwaters. Taken together, the details of the burial suggest the remains were placed as an offering to protect against flooding, Jennings said.

Read more at Discovery News

Baby Thought Cleared of HIV Has the Virus Again

A girl who was born HIV-positive but was treated early and showed no signs of the disease for years has seen her infection return, US doctors said Thursday.

The girl's story had raised hopes that doctors may have found a way to cure young children who are born HIV-positive, simply by giving them strong anti-retroviral drugs shortly after birth.

"Certainly, this is a disappointing turn of events for this young child, the medical staff involved in the child's care and the HIV/AIDS research community," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Known widely as the "Mississippi baby," she was born to an HIV-positive mother in 2010 and was given a potent dose of anti-retroviral medication 30 hours after birth.

She continued taking the medications until the age of 18 months, when doctors lost track of her. When she returned five months later, doctors could find no sign of the virus, even though she had not been taking her daily pills.

The child continued to stay off treatment and showed no sign of the virus for more than two years.

"Typically, when treatment is stopped, HIV levels rebound within weeks, not years," said Deborah Persaud, professor of infectious diseases at the John Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore.

Persaud described the child's response as "unprecedented."

Now age four, she was tested during a routine clinical care visit earlier this month, and was found to have detectable HIV levels in her blood.

She also had a decreased T-cell count and the presence of HIV antibodies, signaling that her body was fighting the infection and that HIV was actively replicating again in her body.

The girl, whose identity has not been released, is now being treated once again with anti-retroviral medication and is doing well, Fauci said.

"The case of the Mississippi child indicates that early anti-retroviral treatment in this HIV-infected infant did not completely eliminate the reservoir of HIV-infected cells that was established upon infection but may have considerably limited its development and averted the need for anti-retroviral medication over a considerable period," said Fauci.

Researchers must now turn their attention to understanding why and how the child went into remission, with the hope of extending that time period even further in future cases, he said.

Read more at Discovery News

The Feisty Shrimp That Kills With Bullets Made of Bubbles

This is what it looks like when a pistol shrimp gets stung by a bee. I jest, of course. Everyone knows that bees can’t swim. That giant claw is perfectly natural: The shrimp uses it to snap so hard that it briefly heats the water to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The greatest, smoothest gunslinger of all time—and I say it knowing full well I’m going to get emails for this opinion—is Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, aka Blondie, of Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti westerns. I mean, at a public hanging the guy sat back and sniped the rope to free the accused, then blasted off the hats of the men in attendance. Because let’s be real: Wearing a hat to an execution is bad form.

But the greatest real-life gunslingers have to be the pistol shrimp, aka the snapping shrimp, hundreds of species with an enormous claw they use to fire bullets of bubbles at foes, knocking them out cold or even killing them. The resulting sound is an incredible 210 decibels, far louder than an actual gunshot, which averages around 150.

Pound for pound, pistol shrimp are some of the most powerful, most raucous critters on Earth. Yet at the same time they are quite vulnerable, allying with all manner of creatures and even forming bizarre societies to protect themselves from the many menaces of the ocean bottom.

The Life Despotic

The pistol shrimp has two claws, a small pincer and an enormous snapper. The snapper, which can grow to up to half the length of the shrimp’s body, does not have two symmetrical halves like the pincer. Instead, half of it is immobile, called a propus, which has a socket. The other half, called a dactyl, is the mobile part. It has a plunger that fits into this socket. The shrimp opens the dactyl by co-contracting both an opener and closer muscle. This builds tension until another closer muscle contracts, setting the whole thing off with incredible force.

“Mama Said Knock You Out” is the anthem of the pistol shrimp, which most of the critters, having never met their mothers, feel somewhat conflicted about.

When the plunger slams into this socket it displaces water that jets out at 105 feet a second, a velocity so high that its pressure drops below the vapor pressure of water. Tiny bubbles already present in the water suddenly swell in this low pressure, then collapse when the pressure climbs again.

“You essentially create this cavitation bubble,” said coral reef biologist Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institute. “And when the bubble collapses, it generates that snap sound,” as opposed to the impact of the claws themselves making the noise.

More importantly, the collapse of the bubble generates, for a split second, temperatures of 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly as hot as the surface of the sun, and also, oddly, a flash of light. The resulting shockwave bombards the shrimp’s prey, which if it’s lucky will die instantly because it’s then dragged into the pistol shrimp’s burrow and consumed. That’s not so fun if you’re half-conscious (see the awesome BBC video below). It’s such a powerful blast that some species use it to drill into solid basalt rock, snap after snap, to make a comfy little home, like an aquatic version of Dig Dug, only with fewer dragons, or whatever those things are.

Some species of snapping shrimp take up residence in sponges for protection. I love the expression on this little one’s face more than almost everything.

The creature has weaponized bubbles. (Another ocean critter, the mantis shrimp, produces cavitation bubbles when it rapidly strikes prey with its clubs, though it’s unclear if it evolved to use the bubbles or if they’re just a welcome destructive side effect). And pistol shrimp are far from conservative with their snapping. In fact, vast colonies of them all firing off at each other or their prey have been known to disrupt sonar equipment with a cacophony likened to the crackling of burning twigs. Yet there is an upside to all the racket.

“Anywhere you go swimming in the tropics, if you listen around you, you can hear these things,” said Knowlton. “And some people have argued that instead of thinking about snapping shrimp sounds as an obstacle to hearing what it is you’re trying to hear, you can also use the sounds of snapping shrimp and other things on coral reefs to assess the health of the reefs.” Lots of noise means lots of life (and lots of pissed off sonar operators).

Like many crustaceans, the pistol shrimp will willingly shed its claws if attacked, because it’s better to lose a pincer than your life, but that won’t stop the noise for long. As complicated a structure as its snapping claw is, the shrimp will grow another—in a surprising way.

Relieve a pistol shrimp of its snapping claw and it’ll grow back not another snapper, but a pincer like its remaining claw. But what’s the fun in having two pincers? After the next molting of its exoskeleton, the original pincer starts looking more and more like a snapper, eventually growing to the full size and strength of the lost pistol. The shrimp has switched weapon hands, modifying the existing pincer to more quickly get back into fighting shape.

Things can glitch, though, and a pistol shrimp can end up with two pistols if it loses a pincer and it grows back as the wrong type, according to Knowlton. Dual-wielding snappers sounds awesome, sure, but they need pincers to dig into the stunned prey once they’ve gotten them back into the burrow. Think of the claws as complementary forks and knives … knives that actually are more like guns. OK think of them as forks and guns.

Social Security

For all their orneriness, pistol shrimp are really quite easy to get along with—if you have something to offer them. While many species pair into monogamous lifetime bonds, others have mastered the art of symbiotic relationships, teaming up with all manner of other sea critters. Taking shelter in the three-dimensional maze that is coral, for instance, a shrimp in turn dutifully attacks the giant, voracious crown-of-thorns starfish that come to feed on its host, blasting the fiend’s tube feet to drive it away. Others take shelter in the stinging tentacles of sea anemones, just like the famous clownfish.

Pistol shrimp will pair up with gobies to live in and protect a single burrow. It’s a friendship that at any moment could be undone by the shrimp accidentally snapping the goby in the face and knocking it unconscious. Not unlike most friendships, really.

Another species will dig a sandy burrow and invite a goby over. The lovely new couple will hover at the entrance on the lookout for both prey and predator. “The goby provides advance warning to the shrimp,” said Knowlton. “And in many cases [the shrimp] puts its long antennae, one of them at least, on top of the goby. So if the goby runs back into the burrow, the shrimp withdraws as well.” In exchange, the pistol shrimp, a quite accomplished digger, constantly excavates the burrow to keep it tidy.

But most incredible of all symbiotic snapping shrimp relationships are the handful of species that actually form societies of hundreds of individuals inside sponges, an extremely advanced level of organization known as eusociality. The shrimp are ruled by a larger queen and king, the only ones who breed, surrounded by their doting subjects.

“It’s remarkable in the sense that of all the millions of species in the ocean, a few species of snapping shrimp are the only marine animals that do this,” said marine biologist Emmett Duffy of the Smithsonian Institution, who was the first to describe these societies. “But what in some ways is more remarkable is how similar these things are ecologically to some of the social insects.” Think ant and bee colonies that we know so well, only wetter.

Read more at Wired Science

Why Some Chimps Are Smarter Than Others

Chimpanzees don't just get their smarts by aping others — chimps, like humans, inherit a significant amount of their intelligence from their parents, new research reveals.

Researchers measured how well 99 captive chimpanzees performed on a series of cognitive tests, finding that genes determined as much as 50 percent of the animals' performance.

"Genes matter," said William Hopkins, a neuroscientist at Georgia State University in Atlanta and co-author of the study published today (July 10) in the journal Current Biology.

"We have what we would call a smart chimp, and chimps we'd call not so smart," Hopkins told Live Science, and "we were able to explain a lot of that variability by who was related to each other."

Animal 'intelligence'

People don't usually talk about animal intelligence, but rather animal learning or cognition. American psychologists John Watson and B.F. Skinner developed the notion of behaviorism in the early 20th century, which said that scientists should study only the behavior of animals, not their mental processes. This was the dominant approach until about 1985.

But in the last few decades, studies have shown convincingly that animals are capable of cognition. What remained unknown was the mechanism behind it, Hopkins said. Many studies of human twins suggest that intelligence is heritable, but few studies have looked at whether this is true in other primates.

In the new study, Hopkins and his colleagues gave chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Center, in Atlanta, a battery of cognitive tests adapted from ones developed by German researchers for comparing humans and great apes. The tests measured a range of abilities in physical cognition, such as the ability to discriminate quantity, spatial memory and tool use. The tests also examined aspects of social cognition, such as communication ability.

The researchers created a genetic pedigree of the chimps, showing how they were related to each other. This would be like taking a group of 300 random people, sticking them on another planet where they could breed and have children, and testing their intelligence 50 years later, Hopkins said.

About half of the variability in the chimps' performance on the cognitive tests could be attributed to their relatedness, the results showed. "I was a little surprised by that. It was higher than I thought would be," Hopkins said.

In addition, neither the sex of the animals nor their rearing history (whether they were raised by their mother or by humans) seemed to affect cognitive performance, the researchers found.

Nature vs. nurture

In humans, some people believe that intelligence is primarily a result of schooling. But for chimps, this can't be a factor, since they don't go to school, Hopkins said. "The fact that we can establish this in an organism that has none of the baggage of our social-cultural systems points strongly to the role that genes play in their intelligence," he said.

Alex Weiss, a psychologist who studies nonhuman primates at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who was not involved in the study, said the findings were "really interesting, particularly as these findings mirror what has been found for decades in studies of human twins and human families." It provides just one more example of the similarities between chimpanzees and humans, Weiss told Live Science.

But while the results suggest that "nature" matters a bit more than "nurture" for intelligence, Hopkins said other findings don't support that interpretation. Environment and experience still have an influence on cognitive performance. For example, if you compare chimps that have been trained to use sign language to ones that haven't, the trained animals do much better on cognitive tests, he said. "So there's a case where nurture really matters."

Read more at Discovery News

200-Year-Old Bottle of Seltzer Found in Shipwreck

Polish archaeologists have recovered one of the world’s oldest intact bottles of mineral water from a shipwreck lying on the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

Still corked, the perfectly preserved stoneware bottle was produced between 1806 and 1830 by Selters, one of the oldest mineral waters in Europe.

The 12-inch bottle was found during archaeological work on a shipwreck lying at a depth of about 40 feet in the Gdańsk Bay not far from the Polish coast.

Little is known about the wreck. Archaeologists called it F-33-31 or “Głazik,” meaning boulders in Polish. Indeed, its cargo of large stones suggests the vessel was probably used for transporting construction materials along the Baltic coast.

So far, the stoneware bottle is the most valuable find retrieved from the wreck.“Probably we have found the oldest cork bottle from Selters,” Tomasz Bednarz, an underwater archaeologist of Gdańsk’s National Maritime Museum, told Discovery News.

The naturally carbonated water springs of Selters were discovered around the year 1000 on the northern slopes of the Taunus mountain range in Germany. The mineral water source was fully exploited during the mid-19th century.

From St. Petersburg to New York and from London to Florence, Selters “liquid treasure,” delivered in unique clay jugs, became a synonym of the finest mineral water. In North America, Selters was the prototype of “seltzer” artificial soda water.

Read more at Discovery News

Earliest Case of Down Syndrome Found in Medieval Cemetery

The earliest probable case of Down syndrome in the archaeological record comes from a 5- to 7-year-old child who lived in medieval France some 1,500 years ago, new research shows.

The child, who is also the youngest example of the condition in the archaeological record, likely was not stigmatized in life, given that the body was treated in a similar way to others buried at the site, researchers say.

Archaeologists originally discovered the skeleton of the child in 1989, when they excavated it along with 93 other skeletons from a fifth- to sixth-century necropolis located just south of the Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in northeastern France. Researchers had suspected the child may have had Down syndrome, but they hadn't performed a rigorous analysis to confirm the diagnosis.

So Maïté Rivollat, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, and her colleagues studied the skull of the child, and took a computed tomography (CT) scan of it to understand its internal features.

"Two earlier publications just mentioned the possibility of Down syndrome without a detailed study," Rivollat told Live Science in an email. "The scan was a new possibility to approach the intracranial aspect of that skull."

An ancient disorder

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder in which a person has an extra copy of chromosome 21. People born with Down syndrome typically have intellectual disabilities, physical growth delays and certain facial features, including a flat nasal bridge and almond-shaped eyes that slant upward.

British physician John Langdon Down first described Down syndrome as a unique disorder in 1866. Despite this relatively recent identification of the condition, paintings and sculptures have depicted Down syndrome for centuries.

For instance, the earliest depiction of Down syndrome may come from Olmec figurines from Mesoamerica that date as far back as 1500 B.C., according to a 2011 study on the history of Down syndrome published in the Journal of Contemporary Anthropology.

In the archaeological record, the oldest probable case of Down syndrome came from a 9-year-old child who lived in England sometime between A.D. 700 and 900. (A skeleton from a Native American cemetery in California, dating to 5200 B.C., may, in fact, be the earliest archaeological case of Down syndrome, but the evidence is less conclusive, the 2011 study notes.)

A normal life?

To see if the Saint-Jean-des-Vignes child really had Down syndrome, Rivollat and her team studied the dimensions and structure of the child's skull and compared it with the skulls of 78 other children of similar ages. Their analysis showed the French child had numerous features indicative of Down syndrome, which the other skulls lacked.

For example, the skull was short and broad, and flattened at the base. In addition, it contained thin cranial bones and certain extra bone pieces. The child also had some sinus and dental abnormalities, which aren't diagnostic of Down syndrome on their own, but are indicative of the disorder when considered along with the other characteristics, the researchers point out in their study, published online last month in the International Journal of Paleopathology.

Read more at Discovery News

Dazzling New View of Europa's Frozen Red Veins

Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most fascinating worlds in our solar system. Its cracked icy crust is known to hide vast watery oceans that actively cycle oxygen and nutrients from the surface to its depths, leading astrbiologists to hypothesize about its life-giving potential. And we’re not talking about single-celled bacteria — the moon has the potential to support complex lifeforms.

Now, in a newly released view of Europa’s cracked surface, ruddy veins of hydrated salts mixed with chemicals such as magnesium sulfate or sulfuric acid break up bluish slabs of pure water ice. Compiled from data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, this image release only amplifies our fascination for the moon.

The colorized version of this observation, which measures 101×103 miles (163×167 kilometers), uses data that was collected in 1997 and 1998 during separate Galileo flybys. The spacecraft ended its mission in 2003 after NASA commanded it to crash into Jupiter’s atmosphere. This kamikaze ending was chosen as the spacecraft ran out of thruster fuel to avoid it crashing with Europa or the other Jovian satellites, potentially contaminating them with hardy Earth bacteria that may have been hiding in the probe’s components.

This view was originally released as a greyscale map after the first 1997 flyby, but after layering lower-resolution color data collected in 1998, a whole new dimension has been revealed. It is thought that the red veins reveal interactions from Europa’s surface ice with the ocean below.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could land a robotic mission near one of these veins, potentially finding an open fissure where a robotic Europa submersible could be dropped to seek out the lifeforms that may lie beneath.

From Discovery News