Opinion: More Archaeological Finds Coming Through Tech

Is there anything left to discover? Have the most important temples, tombs, pyramids, cities, and civilizations been found?

After centuries of archaeological finds, it’s a common sentiment that little remains to be discovered. “I was born too soon to explore the cosmos and too late to explore the Earth,” is a popular refrain on the Internet.

I would argue that the greatest age of discovery is happening right now. And the real fun is just about to begin.

Machu Picchu was not known to the outside world until 1911, but what lost cities are awaiting discovery today? An archaeologist in Kurdistan has announced that Musasir might have finally been located. This near-mythical city is thought to be the origin of the temple design made famous by Athens’ Parthenon and copied on courthouses and state buildings around the world, including the U.S. Capitol.

On the other side of the world, three ancient Mayan cities were recently discovered and researchers say they think there are more are in the surrounding area.

Decades of underwater research have provided us with a good understanding of our maritime past. But there has been one looming gap: ancient warships.

Epic tales of naval engagements fill the ancient histories, but evidence has been elusive. No battle site has ever been located and only three full-sized warship rams have been found in the entire Mediterranean. That is, until now.

After years of searching, the site of the Battle of the Egadi Islands was discovered off the coast of Sicily, the Soprintendenza del Mare and RPM Nautical Foundation announced in May. The site has yielded eleven warship rams, as well as armament and amphoras that were meant to resupply Hamilcar Barca’s forces, Hannibal’s father.

Actual warship remains are re-writing everything scholars assumed about ancient naval warfare. How important was this battle? It was the decisive climax to the First Punic War and it is no stretch to say this victory was the first step on Rome’s path to becoming an empire. This is not simply among the great underwater discoveries of our time; it is one of the most significant archaeological finds of all time.

A small village in Greece might be home to the greatest discovery of the new century. If you haven’t been watching for news from Amphipolis, you should be. The largest ancient tomb ever found in Greece has been dated to the period of Alexander the Great.

A 16-foot lion statue sits atop the tomb and two sphinxes guard an entrance bricked up with granite blocks weighing a ton each. As the excavation progresses, archaeologists have uncovered two incredible female caryatid statues, mosaic floors and three chambers.

Who is buried inside? No one knows, but everyone has a theory as archaeologists dig further inside every day.

The list from the last few years goes on and on and includes Lawrence of Arabia’s desert camp; perfectly preserved Black Sea and Baltic shipwrecks, some with masts still standing; Captain Kidd’s and Blackbeard’s shipwrecks; and a Gate to Hell in Turkey complete with animals that died from getting too close.

Pavlopetri was not identified as the world’s oldest sunken city until 2008. Seventeen new pyramids were discovered in Egypt in 2011 alone, using infrared satellite technology, while a previously unknown pharaoh named Woseribre Senebkay and the necropolis of his dynasty were found earlier this year.

These are not minor discoveries, but finds that are rewriting what we know of history.

What sorts of things might we discover in the near future? A brief list might include a Viking ship in North America, the lost Roanoke colony in Virginia or the tomb of Alexander the Great. Remember, while the terracotta army has been excavated, the tomb of China’s First Emperor has yet to be touched.

These are things we can imagine because we know about them from historical texts. But the most amazing discoveries will likely be ones we cannot even consider because they predate writing.

Written history covers less than a percent of human time on Earth. Even from well-documented periods, such as the Roman Empire, we know very little about the Illyrians or Celtic Britain. These prominent cultures stood up to Rome, but are incorrectly assumed to be minor because we lack their histories.

We have history-based bias, but there are many unrecorded conquerors, battles and Romeo and Juliets in the vastness of prehistory whose stories are waiting to be told. Prehistoric finds like Hoyo Negro’s earliest American (found 2010), the Hobbit-like species Homo floresiensis (found 2003), and insight into the first artists (2013) suggest the best stories may await discovery.

Read more at Discovery News

Rare 'Selenelion' Possible on Wednesday's Lunar Eclipse

Observers of Wednesday morning's total lunar eclipse might be able to catch sight of an extremely rare cosmic sight.

On Oct. 8, Interested skywatchers should attempt to see the total eclipse of the moon and the rising sun simultaneously. The little-used name for this effect is called a "selenelion," a phenomenon that celestial geometry says cannot happen.

And indeed, during a lunar eclipse, the sun and moon are exactly 180 degrees apart in the sky. In a perfect alignment like this (called a "syzygy"), such an observation would seem impossible. But thanks to Earth's atmosphere, the images of both the sun and moon are apparently lifted above the horizon by atmospheric refraction. This allows people on Earth to see the sun for several extra minutes before it actually has risen and the moon for several extra minutes after it has actually set.

As a consequence of this atmospheric trick, for many localities east of the Mississippi River, watchers will have a chance to observe this unusual sight firsthand. Weather permitting, you could have a short window of roughly 2 to 9 minutes (depending on your location) with the possibility of simultaneously seeing the sun rising in the east while the eclipsed full moon is setting in the west.

Regions of Visibility

From Newfoundland, the start of the partial stages of the total eclipse begins about 30 to 45 minutes before moonset.

A growing scallop of darkness will appear on the upper left part of the moon when it sets as the sun is coming up. Across eastern Nova Scotia, only the lowermost portion of the moon will be in view as it drops below the western horizon. Farther to the west and south along the Atlantic seaboard, the moon will rise completely immersed in the Earth's shadow.

Then again, sighting a selenelion might be problematic feat. Twenty-five years ago, in the August 1989 issue of Sky & Telescope, Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer who extensively studied the visibility of the moon when it was low in the sky, noted that the full moon only becomes visible when it is about 2 degrees up and the sun is about 2 degrees below the horizon.

So, depending on the clarity of your sky, you might have up to roughly 10 to 15 minutes before sunrise for the sky to still be dark enough, and the moon to be high enough above any horizon haze for it to be clearly visible. And keep in mind that this holds only for the uneclipsed portion of the moon. You might, however, be able to mitigate the effects of a brightening sky somewhat by using binoculars or a telescope.

If the moon is totally eclipsed prior to sunrise, you probably are going to have to scan the western horizon with binoculars as the twilight brightens in order to still detect some semblance of the Moon, which will somewhat resemble a very dim and eerily illuminated mottled softball.

A Peculiar Moonset

People who live in those portions of the United States and Canada that are a few hundred miles inland from the Eastern Seaboard should have a good view of the Moon's emergence from the umbra somewhat later. The low, partially eclipsed Moon in deep-blue twilight should offer a wide variety of interesting scenic possibilities for both artists and astrophotographers. From Toronto and points south through the eastern Ohio Valley and into the Piedmont to the Florida Gulf Coast, a peculiar-looking, waxing crescent moon with its cusps pointing downward will appear to set beyond the western horizon.

Farther west, across the western Great Lakes and down through the Deep South to the Gulf of Mexico, the moon will appear to be notched on its lower right side by the shadow.

Read more at Discovery News

Early Image of Beardless Jesus Found

Archaeologists in Spain have unearthed one of the earliest known images of Jesus, shedding new light on the appearance of Christianity in Spain.

Engraved on a glass plate (called a paten) which dates back to the 4th century A.D., Jesus is depicted beardless and with short, curly hair. He wears what appears to be a philosopher’s toga and is flanked by two equally beardless male characters, thought to be the apostles Peter and Paul. All men have halos over their heads.

The plate, which measures 8.6 inches in diameter, is believed to have held Eucharistic bread in early Christian rituals. It was unearthed, broken in several fragments, inside a religious building in the ancient town of Cástulo in Andalusia.

According to Marcelo Castro, head of the FORVM MMX excavation project, the building was erected in the second half of the fourth century A.D. and abandoned about a century later.

“We know it dates back to the 4th century, in part because popes in the following centuries ordered all patens to be made out of silver,” Castro told The Local.

The dating coincides with the rule of Roman emperor Constantine, who ended the persecutions of Christians.

Representing the earliest depiction of Jesus found in Spain, the glass plate features greenish hues and is in an excellent state of preservation. Archaeologists managed to piece together 81 percent of its original area.

According to Castro, the plate is in line with the Christ in Majesty iconography. Copying Roman and Byzantine styles, the early Christian artists always portrayed Jesus in the center of the composition, often flanked by other sacred characters.

In the glass paten, Jesus holds the Cross in one hand — a symbol of the resurrection — and the Holy Scriptures in the other. Both the figures on his sides, possibly the apostles Peter and Paul, carry a roll in their hands.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Is Our Urge to Stereotype So Strong?

Comedian Bill Maher’s recent sweeping generalizations of Islam created an outcry against such religious stereotyping. But it wasn’t the first time someone publicly stereotyped an entire religion, and it likely won’t be the last. So why do we do it?

It’s part of a basic human urge to communicate, said Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University and a professor of psychiatry. And people may be even more likely to stereotype when it comes to religion, Koenig said, because of the intense passion around the subject.

It’s also part of human nature to categorize, said Stephanie Madon, a professor of psychology at Iowa State. In fact, it’s an essential component to learning from experience.

“I have here on my desk a pencil,” she said. “The minute I see it, I recognize that, 'A ha! It is a pencil!' based on certain features I recognize. Now, I’ve been exposed to a whole host of knowledge about pencils -- I can sharpen them, they probably have an eraser -- so there are inferences I can make after I’ve categorized it as a pencil. The alternative is I see it lying there and I don’t know what it is, so I have to look at it and study it and figure out what it will offer me. You can see how inefficient it would be to get through a day.”

Take an early human who consumed a poisonous berry plant and got sick. The person may generalize that experience and avoid similar plants in the future. Of course, not all berries are poisonous.

Still, that "overuse of a rule was probably pretty good," Madon said. "It’s more beneficial than harmful to the berry eater because if you make a mistake and it’s not poisonous, well, no harm, no foul. But if you don’t apply the rule, you might get very sick or die."

In the modern world, people are able to make the subtle distinction between categorization and stereotyping.

“Categorization is the placement of an object or person in a category based on category-defining features,” explained Zlatan Križan, an associate professor of psychology at Iowa State. “Stereotyping is inferring or assuming that an object or person has features that may be common in that category. For example, identifying an individual as ‘Asian’ is categorization, and assuming they are smart would be stereotyping.”

So while it made good sense for ancient humans not to eat that berry, it doesn’t make sense for an employer to hire a man instead of a woman because he thinks men are better leaders, Madon said. In fact, categorization and stereotyping gets a lot dicier when moving from objects to people.

“There’s a tremendous variability between people of any group,” Koenig said. “To pin a label on a certain person when someone else of that race or ethnicity or religion does something stupid is just not accurate. Equating ISIS with all Muslims is just flat out wrong. It’s far beyond being even remotely sensible for anyone who knows anything about the Muslim religion and what is in the Koran.”

Controlling that urge to generalize and stereotype in today’s society is critical to living together peacefully, Koenig said.

“Statements (like Maher’s) can incite people to do harm to others,” Koenig said.

Even making an accurate assumption based on a stereotype can be offensive, Madon said.

Read more at Discovery News

Mummified Fetus Reveals Ancient Surgical Procedure

A 19th-century mummified fetus that underwent an ancient surgical procedure while in its mother's womb has been discovered by researchers in Italy, according to a new report.

The procedure was apparently done when a mother's life was in danger or the fetus had already died.

The investigators found the mummy after a devastating magnitude-6.3 earthquake occurred in L'Aquila in central Italy on April 6, 2009. The earthquake resulted in more than 300 deaths and damaged many buildings in the nearby area, including the historical St. John the Evangelist church in the village of Casentino. The floor of the church partially collapsed, exposing underground rooms holding mummified human bodies, which included the newfound fetus that dates back to 1840, according to the researchers' estimates.

When the researchers examined the fetus mummy using a radiograph, they saw a fetal skeleton that was not fully connected or articulated, which means that some of the bones were not in the exact same position to each other as they likely were when the fetus was alive. They were not able to establish the sex of the fetus, as they could not determine the morphology of its pelvic and jaw bones, which scientists use to identify sexual characteristics of skeletons. The researchers did estimate the fetus was at 29 weeks of development inside its mother's womb.

A few features of the mummy suggested that an operation had taken place. The fetus' skull had been dissected in several places and disconnected from the spine, while its arms had been separated from the rest of the body at the joints, none of which typically occurs in the process of post-mortem examinations. All of these characteristics "strongly suggest a case of embryotomy," which was a procedure that occurred before removing the fetus from the womb, study author Ruggero D'Anastasio of University Museum at University of Chieti, Italy, told Live Science.

This likely case of embryotomy "is the only anthropological proof of this surgical practice up to now in this geographical region," he added.

Embryotomy was a common practice in ancient times, D'Anastasio said. The procedure was practiced in Alexandria and then in Rome during the first and second centuries, the researchers wrote in the study. Physicians typically performed it when a mother's life was threatened due to delivery complications or when the fetus was already thought to be dead in the womb.

According to some reports, however, "embryotomy was the most extreme method of abortion during the medieval period," they wrote.

The remains of this fetus had been reassembled to match its anatomic shape, including the fragments of the skull being placed at the top of the mummy inside a headgear. The careful reassembly and dressing of the fetus indicates a high sense of compassion for the death of unborn children within the local community at the time, the researchers said.

The other human remains found at the site likely date back to the 19th century or earlier, as confirmed by a scientific method of age determination called radiocarbon dating and information gathered from personal objects. Those items include rings and rosary beads, shoes and clothes, as well as the textiles and shrouds used for wrapping the mummified bodies.

Read more at Discovery News

Ebola Explained: What You Should and Shouldn’t Worry About

Two days after a man in Texas was diagnosed with Ebola, Dr. Gil Mobley of Missouri showed up to his Thursday morning flight out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Aitrport dressed in protective gear to protest what he called mismanagement of the crisis by the CDC.

You should be afraid of Ebola—if you live in some parts of West Africa. But here in the United States? Not so much.

With the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the country confirmed earlier this week, people are getting nervous. But Ebola is very unlikely to be a problem or cause a major outbreak here. One of the main reasons is that it is not as easily transmitted as other diseases. It does not travel through the air like influenza—to be infected you must come into contact with fluids from an infected person.

Even more importantly, until a person is showing signs of being sick—with symptoms like fever and nausea—they are NOT contagious.

Still, some are worried about the plane the infected man traveled on before he became symptomatic, and others are worried about coming into contact with his relatives in Dallas who’ve been in the same house as he has, but don’t yet appear to be sick.

To help explain why these fears are unnecessary, we’ve taken a closer look at what the virus does in the human body, from transmission to infection to illness and death.

Transmission

“The virus doesn’t easily go from one person to the next. It seems like it does, maybe, because Ebola is scary. It is unknown and has a high fatality rate and requires isolation or quarantine and has no known cure,” said biochemist Sharon Crary, of DePauw University. Crary studies the Ebola virus and worked with the CDC’s Viral Special Pathogens Branch, where she was part of the response team for the 2000 Ebola outbreak in Gulu, Uganda.

Ebola isn’t anywhere near as contagious as the flu, for example. Or measles, which is much more of a threat in the United States now that people are no longer routinely vaccinating their children. Scientists estimate that one person infected with measles can transmit the disease to as many as 18 others; for Ebola, that number is around two.

This is because unlike influenza or measles, Ebola isn’t very stealthy. It can’t spread through the air, and it isn’t contagious before symptoms first show up, when a person might unknowingly be a walking disease distributor. Rather, the Ebola virus spreads through infected bodily fluids—such as blood, vomit, saliva, semen and feces—which need to come into direct contact with a mucous membrane (such as the inside of your eyelids, mouth, or nose) or a bit of broken skin.

Ebola.

This is why a major outbreak is unlikely in the United States. The hospitals here are equipped to handle a disease like this, and infection control officers are ready to slam the brakes on any potential spread. It should be relatively easy to contain.

Still, if you’re a health care worker in West Africa, this is a serious concern, especially because tiny, unnoticed abrasions on the skin can be a portal for viral particles (hence the need for gloves and moon suits). In regions without the necessary supplies, education or infrastructure to halt the spread of the disease, outbreaks can be catastrophic. This is what’s happening in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, where more than 3,300 people have died since December.

Infection

Though it is not that easily transmitted between people, the Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus) is frighteningly deadly: The average fatality rate is around 50 percent, but some strains kill as many as 90 percent of the people infected. There’s no specific treatment for Ebola, either. As the virus gradually claims control of a victim, it ignites a hemorrhagic fever that sometimes comes with horrific symptoms, including bloody diarrhea and vomit.

Ebola virus particles are long and skinny, and look like lethal microscopic noodles. When they get inside a person, the particles attack the immune system, liver, kidneys, and the cells that line blood vessels.

Once inside a cell, the virus begins to wage war. First, it makes many copies of its genome. Then, it hijacks the machinery that would normally help the host cell make its own proteins, and turns that into a viral protein production factory. These proteins then self-assemble into mature virus particles, which slip through the cell’s membrane and head off in search of more cells to infect.

“This cycle continues so the number of infected cells in a human increases exponentially, ” Crary said.

The first symptoms of Ebola, such as headache, high fever, aches, and nausea, don’t show up until enough cells have been infected with the virus. This can take a while.

And it isn’t until these symptoms show up that a person becomes infectious. Scientists aren’t quite sure why this is, but studies in primates have shown that there are no viral particles in blood plasma before the onset of symptoms (in monkeys infected with Ebola, this tends to happen around three days post-exposure). Early, pre-symptomatic viral loads were the highest in the spleen and lymph nodes—things that would be very, very tricky to come into contact with.

“It seems to take a lot of virus particles to exist inside a patient before that virus starts entering the bodily fluids to be accessible to another person,” Crary said. “And this high virus [concentration] doesn’t happen until later in infection, when symptoms are already starting to show.”

This is the simple reason you can’t catch Ebola by sharing an airplane, or a dinner table, or a house, with someone who isn’t showing signs of the disease. However, it appears that some people are worried about riding in the same airplanes that carried the first U.S. Ebola patient from Liberia to Texas, despite the fact that the patient was not sick while he was traveling.

“Even though health officials maintain there is no risk to passengers, if you were a passenger on a plane that had carried an Ebola victim, it might be something you would want to know,” claims a story from ABC News

In reality, the information is completely inconsequential.

“The man was not symptomatic,” Crary said. “He didn’t have enough virus in his body to be able to be shedding any virus from his body. So there is simply no way that there is any virus on that plane that he was on.”

Sickness and Death

It wasn’t until the patient had been in Texas for several days that he began showing symptoms—about nine days after doctors suspect he was infected. Normal incubation periods range from two days to three weeks, with the majority of patients showing signs of illness between seven and 10 days after exposure, says mathematical epidemiologist Gerardo Chowell-Puente of Arizona State University.

Though these early symptoms can mimic the onset of the flu, what’s going on inside a patient’s body is very different from what happens with an influenza virus. At this point, an Ebola patient’s liver is being attacked, producing severe abdominal pain. Their blood vessels are gradually being broken down, which can lead to massive amounts of both internal and external bleeding. Organ failure might be setting in. As fluids leak from blood vessels and organs and accumulate in the body, blood pressure drops. Usually, it’s a deadly combination of abyssal blood pressure, electrolyte imbalance, and organ failure that delivers the final blow.

Nobody knows for sure how long the Ebola virus can survive outside a host. But 2007 study suggests that viral particles can survive for at least six hours at sub-Saharan Africa room temperatures—only in fluids like blood. But what we do know is that the dead are potent viral incubators that remain infectious for days, and disease transmission during traditional funeral rites is one of the ways this West Africa outbreak has persisted.

Read more at Wired Science

If the World Started Over, Would Life Evolve the Same Way?

Different strains of yeast grown under identical conditions develop different mutations but ultimately arrive at similar evolutionary endpoints.

In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai’s robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest. Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?

Many biologists argue that it would not, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. “If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction,” Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.

Desai’s yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published
in Science in June, all of Desai’s yeast varieties arrived at roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic path each strain took. It’s as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later they all converged at the Santa Monica pier.

The findings also suggest a disconnect between evolution at the genetic level and at the level of the whole organism. Genetic mutations occur mostly at random, yet the sum of these aimless changes somehow creates a predictable pattern. The distinction could prove valuable, as much genetics research has focused on the impact of mutations in individual genes. For example, researchers often ask how a single mutation might affect a microbe’s tolerance for toxins, or a human’s risk for a disease. But if Desai’s findings hold true in other organisms, they could suggest that it’s equally important to examine how large numbers of individual genetic changes work in concert over time.

Michael Desai, a biologist at Harvard University, uses statistical methods to study basic questions in evolution.

“There’s a kind of tension in evolutionary biology between thinking about individual genes and the potential for evolution to change the whole organism,” said Michael Travisano, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. “All of biology has been focused on the importance of individual genes for the last 30 years, but the big take-home message of this study is that’s not necessarily important.

The key strength in Desai’s experiment is its unprecedented size, which has been described by others in the field as “audacious.” The experiment’s design is rooted in its creator’s background; Desai trained as a physicist, and from the time he launched his lab four years ago, he applied a statistical perspective to biology. He devised ways to use robots to precisely manipulate hundreds of lines of yeast so that he could run large-scale evolutionary experiments in a quantitative way. Scientists have long studied the genetic evolution of microbes, but until recently, it was possible to examine only a few strains at a time. Desai’s team, in contrast, analyzed 640 lines of yeast that had all evolved from a single parent cell. The approach allowed the team to statistically analyze evolution.

To efficiently analyze many strains of yeast simultaneously, scientists grow them on plates like this one, which has 96 individual wells.

“This is the physicist’s approach to evolution, stripping down everything to the simplest possible conditions,” said Joshua Plotkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research but has worked with one of the authors. “They could partition how much of evolution is attributable to chance, how much to the starting point, and how much to measurement noise.”

Desai’s plan was to track the yeast strains as they grew under identical conditions and then compare their final fitness levels, which were determined by how quickly they grew in comparison to their original ancestral strain. The team employed specially designed robot arms to transfer yeast colonies to a new home every 12 hours. The colonies that had grown the most in that period advanced to the next round, and the process repeated for 500 generations. Sergey Kryazhimskiy, a postdoctoral researcher in Desai’s lab, sometimes spent the night in the lab, analyzing the fitness of each of the 640 strains at three different points in time. The researchers could then compare how much fitness varied among strains, and find out whether a strain’s initial capabilities affected its final standing. They also sequenced the genomes of 104 of the strains to figure out whether early mutations changed the ultimate performance.

Fluid-handling robots like this one make it possible to study hundreds of lines of yeast over many generations.

Previous studies have indicated that small changes early in the evolutionary journey can lead to big differences later on, an idea known as historical contingency. Long-term evolution studies in E. coli bacteria, for example, found that the microbes can sometimes evolve to eat a new type of food, but that such substantial changes only happen when certain enabling mutations happen first. These early mutations don’t have a big effect on their own, but they lay the necessary groundwork for later mutations that do.

But because of the small scale of such studies, it wasn’t clear to Desai whether these cases were the exception or the rule. “Do you typically get big differences in evolutionary potential that arise in the natural course of evolution, or for the most part is evolution predictable?” he said. “To answer this we needed the large scale of our experiment.”

As in previous studies, Desai found that early mutations influence future evolution, shaping the path the yeast takes. But in Desai’s experiment, that path didn’t affect the final destination. “This particular kind of contingency actually makes fitness evolution more predictable, not less,” Desai said.

Desai found that just as a single trip to the gym benefits a couch potato more than an athlete, microbes that started off growing slowly gained a lot more from beneficial mutations than their fitter counterparts that shot out of the gate. “If you lag behind at the beginning because of bad luck, you’ll tend to do better in the future,” Desai said. He compares this phenomenon to the economic principle of diminishing returns — after a certain point, each added unit of effort helps less and less.

Scientists don’t know why all genetic roads in yeast seem to arrive at the same endpoint, a question that Desai and others in the field find particularly intriguing. The yeast developed mutations in many different genes, and scientists found no obvious link among them, so it’s unclear how these genes interact in the cell, if they do at all. “Perhaps there is another layer of metabolism that no one has a handle on,” said Vaughn Cooper, a biologist at the University of New Hampshire who was not involved in the study.

Read more at Wired Science

The Vicious Duck That Beats the Crap Out of Anything That Moves

The steamer duck uses those specialized orange knobs on its wings to positively pummel anything unfortunate enough to cross it. Except these rocks. Steamer ducks are OK with rocks.

On an Argentinian lake in November of 1981, Gary Nuechterlein witnessed a rather disturbing avian assault. A male steamer duck bit and held tight to the neck of another duck called a shoveler, while pummeling the victim with the keratinized knobs on its wings. Meanwhile, “several meters away,” Nuechterlein later wrote in a paper, “a female steamer duck displayed excitedly, calling and stretching” her neck to the sky, as if egging him on.

From time to time the steamer would drag the shoveler under, then resurface and continue beating the tar out of it as the female watched. At one point he shuffled over to her, but after 30 seconds returned to his victim and punched the poor critter 15 to 20 more times. “He then released the limp body of the shoveler,” wrote Nuechterlein, “pecked at it, and released it again.” At last he returned to the female for good, calling to her while she stretched, and the two flew off together. The shoveler eventually regained consciousness, and though seriously crippled, struggled to shore. It died 15 minutes later.

This is the avian version of Bloodsport, only without all of the terrible yet somehow endearing acting. The four species of steamer duck (so named for their penchant for flapping and running along the surface, kicking up water like steamboats) in South America are famous—at least in ornithological circles—for their brutality, getting all up in the grills of not just other steamers, but also other species in scrums lasting as long as 20 minutes. Why exactly they’ve evolved to be so aggressive, no one is yet sure.

If a flying steamer duck ever makes this face at you, don’t confuse it for friendliness. Steamer ducks ain’t got time for no friendliness.

Studying these pugnacious creatures is biologist Kevin McCracken of the University of Miami, who learned firsthand that you should watch your step around steamer ducks. “I was down in the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego and I saw some birds really close to some rocks,” he said. “And I went up to photograph and they were really upset with me, like, amazingly upset with me. And they just came right at me, and started squawking at me.”

Now, had the ducks been guarding a nest, that’d be one thing, but McCracken couldn’t find one nearby. Indeed, Nuechterlein noted in his paper that there needn’t be eggs around to get the ducks riled up and defensive. They’re simply really, really ornery. And that may be because they can take the abuse—by being built like feathered tanks.

You see, their heads and necks are relatively massive for a duck, and they’re equipped with thickened skin to handle the abuse. Because they’re so hardy, they reduce the risk of injury that would normally keep birds from engaging in such vicious battle. (As a rule, in the animal kingdom you don’t want to fight if you don’t absolutely have to. Battling for the right to mate or eat is of course important, but it’s really no use if you end up dead. It’s why there’s all kinds of non-contact battling going on out there, with fancy displays or calls, or even the puffed chest and unimaginative obscenities of the North American dude bro.)

“They’re enormous birds,” said McCracken, adding that males can reach 10 pounds (the famous mallard you’ve no doubt seen around your local lake tops out at 3 pounds). “You don’t want one of these things going after you.”

A white-headed steamer ducks staring down the ocean for looking at it funny.

And woe to any of the steamer’s avian neighbors that aren’t gifted with its bulk, because it could be that steamers are so persistently violent not only to chase other species away to reduce competition for their resources, but to make an example of someone. I’ll reiterate: These ducks have evolved mafia tactics. Says Nuechterlein in the paper describing the fight between the steamer and the shoveler: “Possibly observational learning is important, and holding a ‘public beating’ enhances the effectiveness of territorial displays.” And that, my friends, may be the only time “public beating” has ever appeared in a scientific paper.

Accordingly, bird species unfortunate enough to share a habitat with the steamer duck seem to know their place. When Nuechterlein was making his observations back in the ’80s, he and his colleague noticed silvery grebes and hooded grebes would suddenly skitter or dive en masse. “We puzzled over the cause of these ‘mass spooks’ in the otherwise unmolested flocks of grebes, for there were few predators and no source of human disturbance on the lake.” Only later did they notice the problem: a pair of steamer ducks approaching in a “submerged sneak” posture, with only the tops of their heads and the tips of their tails poking above the surface. They had become, in essence, the Jaws of the Andean lake.

The aforementioned public beating of the shoveler also could suggest aggressive behavior is part of winning the affection of a mate. The female did, after all, grow quite excited as the male pummeled his victim. If true, it would add yet another strange dimension to the exceedingly weird world of duck sex. It’s been well reported, so we don’t need to go into much detail here, but male ducks are notoriously forceful with their choice of mates, and in response females have evolved corkscrew vaginas that in some species twist the opposite direction of the corkscrew penis, all to give themselves more control over the reproductive process. Choosing a male based on how well he assaults another duck, though, would seem to select for such unwanted aggressiveness.

Winging It

The steamer ducks’ brazenness is all the more impressive when you consider three of the four species have grown so big they’ve lost the ability to fly. This would seem unfortunate and rather embarrassing, but we humans tend to romanticize flight. In the natural world, if you don’t use it, you lose it. There’s no point expending energy and resources developing something you aren’t going to use, much less burning vast amounts of energy to fly.

So the flightless species of steamer duck have apparently found it evolutionarily advantageous to stick to terra firma. This is partly due to the relative lack of mammalian predators to flee from (though recently the release of invasive minks, which are fond of bird eggs, has been threatening certain populations). “But they’re also hard to get at,” said McCracken. “If you’re an Andean fox,” which weighs just barely more than these birds, “going after a [10-pound] steamer duck, you’re not going to have much luck.”

A Magellanic steamer duck, so named because one once attacked Ferdinand Magellan. Yeah, that’s probably not true. Never hurts to dream, though.

And unlike migrating birds, steamers don’t have to worry about wandering in search of food. All species of steamers make their home along the coasts of southern Argentina and Chile, where they use their powerful bills to pry open mussels for a year-round supply of energy—though the unimaginatively named “flying steamer duck” will venture to inland lakes, where it sieves the water for small invertebrates like snails. “So flying is only really necessary if you’ve got to migrate,” said McCracken. “And you’ve got all this food to eat and you live in the ocean, so it’s easy to evolve flightlessness.”

Read more at Wired Science

Marble Door Revealed in Greek Tomb

Archaeologists excavating the large and mysterious mound at the Kasta Hill site at Amphipolis, Greece, have unearthed a broken marble door, Greece’s Culture Ministry announced today.

Made from marble brought from the island of Thasso, like most of the features uncovered so far in the underground space, the door fragments were found as archaeologists removed dirt from the second chamber.

According to Katerina Peristeri, the excavation’s director, the discovery leaves no doubt the structure is indeed a tomb dating to the time of Alexander the Great of Macedonia.

“Based on our findings, we are absolutely sure about our dating to the last quarter of the 4th century B.C.,” Peristeri said.

She hinted their dating relies on strong yet unpublished findings.

“We give information out to provide a clear picture [of the excavation]. However, not all the material is coming out in press releases,” Peristeri said.

Leading to the tomb’s third chamber, the marble door features a double row of dots down its center. The dots imitate nail heads, a feature common on Macedonian tomb doors.

A hinge was also discovered on the western side of the door.

“What is particularly unusual here is that the door was in two sections and hinged,” Dorothy King, a classical archaeologist not involved in the excavation, wrote in her blog.

“It was designed to open rather than merely be a ‘fake’ door designed to look like one as seen in most other Macedonian tombs,” she said.

She noted that temples had doors that opened and closed, “but they tended to be either wood inlaid with ivory or wood covered in bronze,” King said.

Behind the two fully unearthed Caryatids (female statue) and in front of the door, Peristeri’s team also found bronze and iron nails. It’s not clear whether they belonged to the funerary carriage or something else.

As for the broken marble door, Peristeri believes it collapsed either as a result of the Bulgarian army’s bombing in 1913 or as the consequence of a severe earthquake that rumbled in Amphipolis in the 6th century A.D.

Read more at Discovery News

Exotic matter: A closer look at the perfect fluid sheds light on what happened microseconds after the Big Bang

By combining data from two high-energy accelerators, nuclear scientists have refined the measurement of a remarkable property of exotic matter known as quark-gluon plasma. The findings reveal new aspects of the ultra-hot, "perfect fluid" that give clues to the state of the young universe just microseconds after the big bang.

The multi-institutional team known as the JET Collaboration, led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), published their results in a recent issue of Physical Review C. The JET Collaboration is one of the Topical Collaborations in nuclear theory established by the DOE Office of Science in 2010. JET, which stands for Quantitative Jet and Electromagnetic Tomography, aims to study the probes used to investigate high-energy, heavy-ion collisions. The Collaboration currently has 12 participating institutions with Berkeley Lab as the leading institute.

"We have made, by far, the most precise extraction to date of a key property of the quark-gluon plasma, which reveals the microscopic structure of this almost perfect liquid," says Xin-Nian Wang, physicist in the Nuclear Science Division at Berkeley Lab and managing principal investigator of the JET Collaboration. Perfect liquids, Wang explains, have the lowest viscosity-to-density ratio allowed by quantum mechanics, which means they essentially flow without friction.

Hot Plasma Soup

To create and study the quark-gluon plasma, nuclear scientists used particle accelerators called the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. By accelerating heavy atomic nuclei to high energies and blasting them into each other, scientists are able to recreate the hot temperature conditions of the early universe.

Inside protons and neutrons that make up the colliding atomic nuclei are elementary particles called quarks, which are bound together tightly by other elementary particles called gluons. Only under extreme conditions, such as collisions in which temperatures exceed by a million times those at the center of the sun, do quarks and gluons pull apart to become the ultra-hot, frictionless perfect fluid known as quark-gluon plasma.

"The temperature is so high that the boundaries between different nuclei disappear so everything becomes a hot-plasma soup of quarks and gluons," says Wang. This ultra-hot soup is contained within a chamber in the particle accelerator, but it is short-lived -- quickly cooling and expanding -- making it a challenge to measure. Experimentalists have developed sophisticated tools to overcome the challenge, but translating experimental observations into precise quantitative understanding of the quark-gluon plasma has been difficult to achieve until now, he says.

Looking Inside

In this new work, Wang's team refined a probe that makes use of a phenomenon researchers at Berkeley Lab first theoretically outlined 20 years ago: energy loss of a high-energy particle, called a jet, inside the quark gluon plasma.

"When a hot quark-gluon plasma is generated, sometimes you also produce these very energetic particles with an energy a thousand times larger than that of the rest of the matter," says Wang. This jet propagates through the plasma, scatters, and loses energy on its way out.

Since the researchers know the energy of the jet when it is produced, and can measure its energy coming out, they can calculate its energy loss, which provides clues to the density of the plasma and the strength of its interaction with the jet. "It's like an x-ray going through a body so you can see inside," says Wang.

One difficulty in using a jet as an x-ray of the quark-gluon plasma is the fact that a quark-gluon plasma is a rapidly expanding ball of fire -- it doesn't sit still. "You create this hot fireball that expands very fast as it cools down quickly to ordinary matter," Wang says. So it's important to develop a model to accurately describe the expansion of plasma, he says. The model must rely on a branch of theory called relativistic hydrodynamics in which the motion of fluids is described by equations from Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Over the past few years, researchers from the JET Collaboration have developed such a model that can describe the process of expansion and the observed phenomena of an ultra-hot perfect fluid. "This allows us to understand how a jet propagates through this dynamic fireball," says Wang.

Employing this model for the quark-gluon plasma expansion and jet propagation, the researchers analyzed combined data from the PHENIX and STAR experiments at RHIC and the ALICE and CMS experiments at LHC since each accelerator created quark-gluon plasma at different initial temperatures. The team determined one particular property of the quark-gluon plasma, called the jet transport coefficient, which characterizes the strength of interaction between the jet and the ultra-hot matter. "The determined values of the jet transport coefficient can help to shed light on why the ultra-hot matter is the most ideal liquid the universe has ever seen," Wang says.

Read more at Science Daily