Downy Beast Suggests All Dinos Sported Feathers

Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" might need a little more revising -- a newly discovered dinosaur species offers hints that feathers were much more common among the ancient beasts than once thought.

Researchers unearthed hundreds of fossils of a new genus and species of plant-eating dinosaur called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus in Siberia that sports both feathers and scales. The finding suggests that most dinosaurs had feathers, which they used for insulation or attracting mates, only later relying on the fringes for flight, according to a study detailed today (July 24) in the journal Science.

"Here, for the first time, we have found featherlike structures in a dinosaur is far from the lineage leading to birds," said study co-author Pascal Godefroit, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Belgium.

Scientists have long known that birds descended from dinosaurs. Since the mid-1990s, paleontologists in China have been finding feathered dinosaur skeletons from about 20 different groups, but they all belonged to a single lineage, theropods, which includes Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptors. In fact, some scientists believe T. rexmay have sported some feathers itself.

Godefroit and his colleagues found hundreds of skeletons of the same species, from a lineage of plant-eating dinosaurs known as ornithischians, which lived about 160 million years ago during the middle to late Jurassic period. Researchers found the fossils buried in the bottom of what appears to have been a large lake.

"It was a small animal, not very impressive," Godefroit said. It was about 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) long; walked on two long, slender legs; and sported very short arms, he said.

The little dinosaur skeleton was equipped with preserved long filaments resembling downy feathers around its arms and legs. Because the animal couldn't fly, the scientists think these filaments may have served as insulation. The specimen also had more-complex feathers that it may have used to entice mates, Godefroit said. The animal had a long tail, covered in large, thin scales.

The preservation of soft tissues such as feathers and scales is extremely rare, the researchers said, which explains why relatively few feathered dinosaur fossils have surfaced before. "The conditions for preserving feathers are really exceptional," Godefroit said.

"This is the first time birdlike feathers have been found in dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds," said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, who was not involved in the research. "This unexpectedly reveals that such feathers would likely have been present in most groups of dinosaurs," Zelenitsky told Live Science in an email.

Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, agreed that feathers probably existed in the common ancestor of all dinosaurs. The idea is not a new one, he said; two other fossils of plant-eating dinosaurs found in China had simple, filamentlike feathers, but it was debatable whether these were related to bird feathers, or evolved independently. Now, this new evidence "seals the deal that feathers were also present in plant-eating dinosaurs," Brusatte told Live Science.

As for the fossil scales, they resemble modern birds' scales, which are actually aborted feathers, the researchers said. In chickens, for example, genes in the skin control the development of feathers. If these genes are modified, the chicken will sprout feathers on its legs, like that of an English chicken. Perhaps primitive dinosaurs had already developed this genetic mechanism of preventing feathers from developing in certain parts of their bodies, Godefroit said.

Read more at Discovery News

Tonga May Have Been a Vast Seafaring Empire

The seafaring empire of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean once spanned more than a thousand miles, serving as the hub through which distant settlements exchanged artifacts and ideas, researchers say.

This finding could help explain the rise of monumental structures throughout the Pacific starting about 700 years ago, scientists added.

Tonga is an archipelago of about 160 Polynesian islands, with the core of the kingdom covering an area of about 195,000 square miles (500,000 square kilometers). The islands, located about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand, were first settled about 2,800 years ago by the Lapita people.

Beginning about 800 years ago, a powerful chiefdom arose in Tonga, unique in Oceania — that is, the islands of the South Pacific — in how it successfully united an entire archipelago of islands. However, much remained unknown about how far Tonga's influence actually reached.

"How much voyaging and interaction occurred in the prehistoric Pacific has been debated for centuries," said lead study author Geoffrey Clark, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.

To learn more about the extent of Tonga's empire, scientists chemically analyzed nearly 200 stone tools excavated from the centers of its leaders, especially artifacts from the royal tombs on Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga. They also chemically analyzed more than 300 stone artifacts and rock samples taken from other Pacific islands, such as Samoa.

"All of the work has been done with a large Tongan workforce from the community who are now being funded to conserve many of the monumental tombs," Clark said.

They found that stone artifacts in Tonga often matched rock samples from Samoa and Fiji — in fact, 66 percent of stone tools analyzed from Tonga were long-distance imports. One tool apparently was made from rock that came from as far away as Tahiti, about 1,550 miles (2,500 km) east of Tongatapu. In contrast, stone tools from a monumental stone mound in Samoa were made from local sources of rock.

These findings revealed that Tonga was the center of a maritime empire that goods flowed toward as tribute from distant locales. The researchers suggest these exotic artifacts may have served as status symbols among Tongan elites.

"Complex societies like the Tongan maritime chiefdom had extensive contacts with other island groups," Clark told Live Science. "The chiefdom was an important interaction hub through which ideas, goods and people could move over large distances."

In addition, these findings could help explain puzzling discoveries seen elsewhere in Oceania.

"It has been observed that many of the significant chiefdoms in the Pacific began to build monumental architecture around the same time as one another — 1300 to 1500 A.D. — and it's been unclear why this should be, as the societies are often separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean," Clark said. This new work suggests the formation of the Tongan state may have stimulated these widespread changes in the Pacific.

In the future, the researchers want to find and examine stone tools from before the rise of the Tongan state to understand how interactions between Tonga and other islands changed over time.

Read more at Discovery News

Carving Defaced by King Tut's Possible Father Found

A newly discovered Egyptian carving, which dates back more than 3,300 years, bears the scars of a religious revolution that upended the ancient civilization.

The panel, carved in Nubian Sandstone, was found recently in a tomb at the site of Sedeinga, in modern-day Sudan. It is about 5.8 feet (1.8 meters) tall by 1.3 feet (0.4 m) wide, and was found in two pieces.

Originally, it adorned the walls of a temple at Sedeinga that was dedicated to Queen Tiye (also spelled Tiyi), who died around 1340 B.C. Several centuries after Tiye's death — and after her temple had fallen into ruin — this panel was reused in a tomb as a bench that held a coffin above the floor.

Archaeologists found that the god depicted in the carving, Amun, had his face and hieroglyphs hacked out from the panel. The order to deface the carving came from Akhenaten (reign 1353-1336 B.C.), a pharaoh who tried to focus Egyptian religion around the worship of the "Aten," the sun disk. In his fervor, Akhenaten had the name and images of Amun, a key Egyptian god, obliterated throughout all Egypt-controlled territory. This included the ancient land of Nubia, a territory that is now partly in Sudan.

"All the major inscriptions with the name of Amun in Egypt were erased during his reign," archaeology team member Vincent Francigny, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told Live Science in an interview.

The carving was originally created for the temple of Queen Tiye — Akhenaten's mother — who may have been alive when the defacement occurred. Even so, Francigny stressed that the desecration of the carving wasn't targeted against Akhenaten's own mom.

Today, only one column and a plethora of blocks survive from Queen Tiye's temple, which has not been excavated, Francigny said.

The archaeologists also found that, after Akhenaten's death, the god's face and hieroglyphs on this carving were restored. This restoration may have been done during the reign of the boy king Tutankhamun (reign 1336-1327 B.C.), who is famous for his rich tomb.

"The name of Amun as well as his face were first hammered out and later carved anew, proving that the persecution of this god extended to this remote province during the reign of Akhenaton and that his images were restored during the following reigns," Francigny and Claude Rilly, director of the French archaeological mission in Sedeinga, wrote in the most recent edition of the journal Sudan and Nubia.

Akhenaten's religious revolution did not last. Shortly after his death, Tutankhamun, who may have been Akhenaten's son, assumed the throne and returned Egypt to its former polytheistic religion.

This particular carving would have been restored either during King Tut's reign or one of his successors'.

An ancient record tells of Tutankhamun's efforts to try to undo the revolution Akhenaten had unleashed. The account blasts Akhenaten, claiming that his revolution led the gods to abandon Egypt.

Read more at Discovery News

Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko Wears the World’s Most Unbelievable Camo

The incredible satanic leaf-tailed gecko does a spot-on impression of a leaf. "Thank you, thank you," the gecko says. "I'll be here for the three to five years of my expected lifespan."

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare once asked, apparently in Romeo and Juliet, which I just learned from Google because I did not pay attention in that class in college. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I think this means that a name doesn’t matter for much, because it’s just, like, words or something.

But don’t tell that to Madagascar’s most excellently named, not to mention most beautiful, critter: the satanic leaf-tailed gecko (sorry, aye-aye, but you’re a close second on both the name and the beauty). That’s its actual name, and you can be damn sure the gecko is proud of it. But monikers aside, this masterfully camouflaged little lizard, with a leafy tail complete with missing chunks that look to have rotted away, is a testament to natural selection.

Known to scientists as Uroplatus (meaning “flat tail”) phantasticus (meaning “good lord what is this thing and why is it looking at me like that?”), the satanic leaf-tailed gecko is one of 14 species in its genus, including the mossy leaf-tailed gecko, which long ago renounced Satan in favor of Mosses. These geckos are found only in Madagascar, and emerge only at night to hunt.

Satanic leaf-tailed geckos come in all manner of colors, including orange and stick.

It’s thought that they’re after mostly insects, yet little is known about their diet in the wild. In captivity, though, “satanic leaf-tailed geckos feed on almost everything they can overwhelm, including crickets, flies, spiders, cockroaches, and snails,” said herpetologist Frank Glaw of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. “Large species like Uroplatus fimbriatus and Uroplatus giganteus even accept young mice.”

And the satanic leaf-tailed gecko has its own predators aplenty, including birds and snakes and rats. If they decide to stand their ground, they stare down their foes, and “suddenly widely open their mouths, emit loud cries, show the reddish tongue and mucosa and try to bite,” said Graw (it’s no wonder locals are very much afraid of the gecko—as they are of the aye-aye, as it happens). They’ll also flash their tails to confuse the potential predator, but should that fail, they can leap deftly from branch to branch or straight down to the leaf litter.

But, really, it’s best to just avoid being seen in the first place. And that, of course, is where their amazing camouflage really comes into play. Not only does the gecko’s tail look like a dead leaf, so too does its body.

“A light line along the back together with leaf-vein-like lines and skin structures on the body can complete the perfect imitation of a dead leaf,” said Graw. And their coloration is incredibly varied, as you can see in the gallery above, coming “in all shades of beige, grey and brown, often with a mixture of lichen-like or even greenish spots which look very much like moss. This variability ensures that they have an adapted outfit for the different structures in their habitat.”

To avoid detection, leaf-tailed geckos will hang from branches, much like leaves.

Reinforcing this camouflage for the satanic leaf-tailed geckos is their behavior: They’ll spend the day hanging motionless off of branches or snuggling among dead leaves, often twisting their leafy tails around their bodies. Other larger species in the satanic’s genus have still another strategy for sleeping safely during the day, flattening their bodies against tree trunks and limbs, making good use of those famously grippy feet (a magic power derived, by the way, from countless hair-like structures that allow some geckos to even stick to inverted glass panes, not that nature would ever ask them to). Fringes and flaps along the edges of their bodies help erase their outlines and shadows, dissolving the geckos into the bark.

“Both strategies, to mimic dead leaves or tree bark, are obviously very successful to bluff diurnal predators that rely on their vision, especially birds,” said Graw. “A similar strategy has evolved in the Australian leaf-tailed geckos that resemble Uroplatus, although they are not closely related. However, it remains remarkable that these strategies have not evolved more often among geckos from other parts of the world.”

Dance Dance Evolution

But how on Earth could such ridiculously and perfectly complex camouflage evolve in the first place? Surely, some guiding hand in the sky must have said, “Yes, that’s a lovely outfit, let’s go with that one.” In reality, the satanic leaf-tailed gecko and its related species are some of the most striking manifestations of Darwin’s principle of natural selection.

Some species of leaf-tailed gecko shun leaves to blend instead into bark. Can you find the gecko in this picture? If so, great job. You just made a gecko question its worth.

First of all, it’s a harsh fact of life that some animals produce more offspring than can possibly survive. (It’s particularly harsh when you consider something like Australia’s mouse-like marsupial antechinus, whose males have so much sex that they go blind and die. They’re lucky to even make it that far, though: Females give birth to more young than they have teats. The strongest make it to a teat and survive, the others perish and tumble off of their mother.) Even if the organism can manage to not get picked off by the predator, the environment isn’t necessarily suited to nurture every single individual. There’s a certain capacity.

Offspring are born with variations, just as you and your siblings look and behave differently. And these variations either end up suiting the organism better or worse to its environment. Critters with the magic variations—say, looking a bit like the leaves they live in—have a better chance of surviving (by being more likely to escape a predator’s notice) to pass these genes along. Thus does a species adapt ever so slowly to its environment over evolutionary time. It’s been happening on Earth for billions of years. The satanic leaf-tailed gecko just happens to be one of its more fantastically molded triumphs.

Read more at Wired Science

Humans Caused 322 Animal Extinctions in Past 500 Years

Our species caused 322 animal extinctions over the past 500 years, with two-thirds of those occurring in the last two centuries, according to a paper published in a special issue of the journal Science this week.

Many animals are threatened with human-caused extinction now, with researchers expressing particular concern over amphibian and invertebrate (creatures without a backbone) losses. Numbers of the latter group have nearly halved as our population doubled in size over the past 35 years.

Ecologists, zoologists and other scientists believe that, without urgent steps to stem the losses, we are facing global scale tipping points from which we may never look back or recover.

"Indeed, if current rates (of human population growth) were to continue unchecked, population size would be, by 2100, about 27 billion persons -- clearly an unthinkable and unsustainable option," co-author Rodolfo Dirzo, professor of environmental sciences at Stanford University, told Discovery News.

Dirzo and his colleagues call for "decreasing the per capita human footprint," by developing and implementing carbon-neutral technologies, producing food and goods more efficiently, consuming less and wasting less.

They also say it is essential that we ensure lower human population growth projections are the "ones that prevail."

Haldre Rogers and Josh Tewksbury, authors of another paper in the same issue, believe that, "animals do matter to people, but on balance, they matter less than food, jobs, energy, money, and development."

They continued, "As long as we continue to view animals in ecosystems as irrelevant to these basic demands, animals will lose."

Keeping animals alive and ecosystems healthy translate to big bucks on a global scale. Tewksbury, director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute of the World Wide Fund for Nature, pointed out that Southeast Asia's Mekong River Basin, through its fisheries, supports 60 million people. Rogers, a researcher in Rice University's Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, added that 73 percent of visitors to Namibia are nature-based tourists, with their money accounting for 14.2 percent of that nation's economic growth.

"Whale watching in Latin America alone generates over 275 million dollars a year," Tewksbury said. "Multiple studies have demonstrated how turtles are worth more alive than dead."

In the United States, he added, shark-watching results in $314 million per year, directly supporting 10,000 jobs.

He and the other researchers point out that human health, pollination, pest control, water quality, food availability and other critical factors are also dependent on ecosystem stability.

In the United States, he added, shark-watching results in $314 million per year, directly supporting 10,000 jobs.

He and the other researchers say that human health, pollination, pest control, water quality, food availability and other critical factors are also dependent upon ecosystem stability.

Yet another paper in the latest issue of Science outlines controversial measures, beyond basic conservation efforts, to improve the current situation. These include re-wilding, meaning placement of underrepresented species back into the wild; human removal of invasive species; and, perhaps most controversial of all, de-extinction: bringing already extinct species back to life.

"People are currently grappling with the implications of de-extinction, including how to select the best candidate species," co-author Philip Seddon, a zoologist at the University of Otago, told Discovery News.

Rogers said that restoration and re-introduction have shown progress.

"The return of the bald eagle and the California condor to the skies and the wild turkey to the lands of the U.S. are great success stories," she said.

She and Tewksbury are also working on the island of Guam, where the invasive brown tree snake has rid the island of birds, causing the forests there to be without seed dispersers for 30 years. This, in turn, has contributed to financial challenges for locals.

Read more at Discovery News

New T-Rex Tracks Add to Pack-Hunting Theory

Some 70 million years ago, three tyrannosaurs stalked together across a mud flat in Canada, possibly searching for prey.

The new insight comes from several parallel tyrannosaur tracks unearthed in Canada. The dinosaur tracks provide stronger evidence for a controversial theory: That the fearsome mega-predators hunted in packs.

The ferocious beasts may have "stuck together as a pack to increase their chances of bringing down prey and individually surviving," said study co-author Richard McCrea, a curator at the Peace Region Palaeontology Center in Canada.

Paleontologists have long debated whether Tyrannosaurus rex and its cousins, such as Albertosaurus, hunted alone or in groups.

While most researchers believe the predators were lone wolves, so to speak, multiple Albertosaurus specimens found in a single bone bed in Canada's Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park have led some to propose that tyrannosaurs were pack animals.

But finding groups of bones together isn't definitive evidence for pack hunting, because bones can move after death. Other circumstances can cause fossil skeletons to accumulate in one location. For instance, many carnivores wandered individually into classic predator traps, such as the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, but probably didn't hunt together in life, McCrea said.

In 2011, a local hunting outfitter and guide, Aaron Fredlund, unearthed two tyrannosaur track marks in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia and then told McCrea's team about the discovery.

The team eventually discovered a patch 197 feet (60 meters) long by 13 feet (4 m) wide filled with footprints from multiple dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs, other small theropods, and duck-billed dinosaurs called hadrosaurs. These dinosaurs were apparently walking in the silty sediments from an overflowing river and formed the track marks about 70 million years ago. A thick layer of volcanic ash then preserved the marks, McCrea said.

In total, the team found seven tracks that were made by three tyrannosaurs. Though the researchers couldn't identify the specific species, it's likely given the period and location where they were found that Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus or Daspletosaurus left the tracks, McCrea said.

Though the other dinosaur tracks there are all pointing in random directions, the tyrannosaur footprints are parallel with each other. The tyrannosaurs also left prints of about the same depth in the wet sediments, suggesting they crossed through the area at the same time. (As the mud dries, the depth of footprints becomes shallower.)

The new find may be one of the world's oldest examples of a missed connection. "The hadrosaur footprints are much more shallow, indicating that they came later," possibly just a few hours or days after the tyrannosaurs, McCrea told Live Science.

The new tracks suggest that the tyrannosaurs may have hunted in packs to take down large prey, just as wolves do today.

"An individual wolf would not be able to take out a moose, but a pack of them would," McCrea said.

Similarly, pack hunting could explain how tyrannosaurs could kill hadrosaurs, which are almost as large as the predators, without sustaining horrific injuries, he said.

That doesn't mean tyrannosaurs would have been friendly to one another. In fact, other fossils reveal that the dinosaurs liked to head-bite each other. But the tyrannosaurs may have stuck together to hunt because it increased their odds of survival, McCrea said.

Read more at Discovery News

100,000-Year-Old Case of Brain Damage Discovered

An ancient skeleton unearthed in Israel may contain the oldest evidence of brain damage in a modern human.

The child, who lived about 100,000 years ago, survived head trauma for several years, but suffered from permanent brain damage as a result, new 3D imaging reveals.

Given the brain damage, the child was likely unable to care for himself or herself, so people must have spent years looking after the little boy or girl, according to the researchers who analyzed the 3D images. People from the child's group left funerary objects in the youngster's burial pit as well, the study authors said.

Those signs of care for a disabled person suggest that the roots of human compassion go way back, said Hélène Coqueugniot, an anthropologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the University of Bordeaux in France, and lead author of the study.

"It is some of the most ancient evidence of compassion and altruism," Coqueugniot said.

The child's skeleton was first uncovered decades ago in a cave site known as Qafzeh in Galilee, Israel, which also contained 27 partial skeletons and bone fragments, as well as stone tools and hearths.

The child, whose sex couldn't be determined, was found with a visible fracture in the skull and a pair of deer antlers placed across the chest.

The researchers wanted to know more about the damage to the child's skull, so they created a cast of the interior of it and then used computed tomography (CT) scanning to create a 3D picture of the head.

The images revealed that the child suffered a blunt-force trauma at the front of the skull that created a compound fracture, with a piece of bone depressed in the skull. It wasn't clear whether child abuse or an accident caused the injury, the researchers concluded.

In addition, tooth growth indicated that the youngster was 12 or 13 years old when he or she died, but the child's brain volume was more akin to that of a 6- or 7-year-old — likely because the head trauma permanently halted brain growth, Coqueugniot told Live Science.

The brain injury would have led to difficulties in controlling movements and speaking, as well as caused personality changes and impaired the child's social functioning, the researchers wrote in their study, which was published July 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Yet despite the youngster's severe disability, he or she was apparently cared for, in life and in death. Despite lacking the ability to survive on his or her own, the Paleolithic child lived for several years after the head injury. And when the child died, someone wanted to honor his or her memory by placing the deer antlers in his or her burial — a funerary marker that wasn't found in any of the other burials at the site, Coqueugniot said.

"He was very, very special in this group, and he has a very, very special burial," Coqueugniot said.

The findings are not the oldest example of compassion and care for the disabled in a hominid; a 500,000-year-old fossil human from Sima de los Huesos in Spain shows signs of severe brain deformity starting at birth, but that child still lived to age 5, which mean someone cared for the child despite his or her disorder.

Read more at Discovery News

'Uncontacted' Amazon People Treated for Flu

Advocates for indigenous tribes and Brazilian officials are worried that a group of people in the Amazon who had been living in isolation from the outside world may have contracted the flu — a potentially deadly disease that these individuals had never been exposed to before.

Five young men and two young women became sick after they emerged from their remote home turf in Peru in late June and made contact with people living in a settled community. On three separate occasions, they voluntarily made contact with Ashaninka people in the village of Simpatia, just across the border in western Brazil's Acre state, said Fiona Watson, a researcher and field director with the advocacy group Survival International, who spoke with Brazilian officials who went to the region. During each visit, the newly contacted individuals were friendly with the Ashaninka people and stayed for several hours, Watson said.

But representatives from Brazil's Indian Affairs Department, or FUNAI, noticed that the group of seven showed signs of influenza during their visit on June 30, Watson said. Over the course of several days in July, these people received medical treatment for the flu and flu vaccines in case they later encounter other strains of the virus. They went back into the forest on July 11.

The news worries advocates because uncontacted groups are extremely vulnerable to diseases to which they have no immunity. Past epidemics of malaria and the flu, for example, have devastated other tribes. What's more, this particular group may be at risk of violence from illegal loggers and drug traffickers in the region. Through interpreters, these seven individuals, who speak a Panoan language, reported that they were fleeing violent attacks in their home territory in Peru; they apparently came into contact with non-Indians who had fired gunshots at them near the source of the Envira River.

"The nightmare scenario is that they return to their former villages carrying flu with them," Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, said in a statement. "It's a real test of Brazil's ability to protect these vulnerable groups. Unless a proper and sustained medical program is immediately put in place, the result could be a humanitarian catastrophe."

In light of recent events, FUNAI reopened a post in the region that had been closed since 2011 when it was overrun by drug traffickers and illegal loggers. Officials with the Brazilian agency also said they were working with Peruvian authorities to monitor and protect uncontacted people in the area.

Read more at Discovery News

Looking for ET's Industrial Pollution on Alien Worlds

If ET is anything like us, scientists may be able to ferret out advanced civilizations beyond Earth by scanning planets’ atmospheres for telltale industrial pollutants.

Researchers looked at two ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that would be easy to detect with the infrared light-splitting spectrometer being built for the James Webb Space Telescope, a follow-on to the Hubble observatory that is due to launch in 2018.

The targets would be white dwarf stars, which are much smaller than the sun. An Earth-sized orbiting planet passing by, relative to the telescope’s line of sight, would block a significant amount of the parent star’s light, allowing for relatively quick scans.

“We consider industrial pollution a biomarker for intelligent life,” Henry Lin, a Harvard University undergraduate and Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award recipient, told Discovery News.

"However, maybe this super-sophisticated alien civilization ... would consider industrial pollution a sign of unintelligent life. After all, it doesn’t seem very intelligent to pollute your own atmosphere with things that can make life difficult," he said.

Lin’s advisor and research collaborator Avi Loeb, also at Harvard, offers a caveat: Perhaps ET purposely engineered or terraformed its atmosphere to make a cold planet like Mars habitable.

“In principle, there might be a reason for why pollution is a good thing,” Loeb told Discovery News.

Lin, Loeb and atmospheric chemist Gonzalo Gonzalez Abad, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, studied two types of easily detectable CFCs -- tetrafluoromethane (CF4) and trichlorofluoromethane (CCl3F), both of which are produced by industrial processes.

Based on computer models, they estimate that planets circling in the so-called "habitable zone" of parent white dwarf stars would have a two-minute transit, relative to Earth's line of sight, every 10 hours. The habitable zones are temperature regions where water can exist as a liquid on a planet's surface. Water is believed to be necessary for life.

Read more at Discovery News

Record-Setting Bug Is Bigger Than Your Hand

The largest aquatic insect ever documented -- boasting scary-long mandibles and jumbo-jet wings -- has been discovered in China.

Local villagers in the country's Sichuan province came upon several specimens of the creature, which resembled a large dragonfly, and brought them to the Insect Museum of West China.

It turns out the villagers had made an incredible entomological find: a record-setting giant dobsonfly with a wingspan of more than 8 inches.

The find was bad news only for the poor South American helicopter damselfly, which was bounced from its previous place atop the largest-aquatic-insect hill when its wingspan of "only" 7.5 inches was bested.

The dobsonfly itself is not exactly a shocking creature to witness. There are more than 200 species of it worldwide, and they make a living in parts of Asia, South America and Africa. What is shocking it the size of the new find: dobsonflies of similar size had until now been unheard of.

The long, pincerlike mandibles are used for mating -- males use them to impress the ladies and hold them in place during the mating. Its wings, meanwhile, hardly ever see any use, as the bug spends most of its life under or on top of water, or laying low underneath rocks.

The giant dobsonfly can be a great barometer of water cleanliness. No slob, it has a preference for clean water that's relatively free of pollutants and a "goldilocks" pH level that's not too high or low. The big-winged bug will simply pack up and change addresses if a body of water doesn't meet its exacting standards.

From Discovery News