Antarctic Lake May Contain Extreme Life Forms

Lake Vostok in Antarctica isn’t like most of the world’s other lakes. You can’t see it from surface level, because it’s been buried under two miles of ice for the past 15 million years. And unlike other bodies of water that recycle their contents fairly quickly, the water in Lake Vostok only recycles about once every 13,000 years from some unknown source. It’s under too much pressure from all the ice above it to freeze, but it can’t easily escape either, and it’s uncontaminated by human activity or chemicals.

That’s why scientists think it may be a treasure trove of extremophiles — that is, organisms which have evolved to live in the harshest, most inhospitable conditions.

Studies of ice from just above the liquid lake have revealed dozens of types of bacteria and fungi, and also genetic fragments that might suggest the presence of fish and crustaceans, according to a 2013 Nature news article. A Russian scientist also reported that the ice contained a previously unknown type of bacteria, whose DNA was different from other known species. But other scientists disputed those finds, saying that the samples had been tainted by anti-freezing chemicals used to keep the drill working.

In late January, researchers managed to drill down to the lake again, and this time, they say they’ve devised a method to obtain an uncontaminated 1-liter sample of the lake’s water, according to RT.com. That may help resolve the mystery of whether life exists in Lake Vostok.

Since the lake was discovered in 1996, scientists have used radar to explore it and the ice above it, which took thousands of years to accumulate.

There are about 200 other lakes under Antarctica, which actually contains about 70 percent of the world’s entire fresh water supply.

From Discovery News

Will Gravitational Waves Ever Be Found?

It’s official: data from the Planck satellite has revealed no signs of gravitational waves embedded in the cosmic microwave background, the primordial ‘echo’ of the Big Bang that occurred nearly 14 billion years ago.

This landmark result contradicts the now-infamous BICEP2 announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves last March — but this is not the end of gravitational waves, nor the theories behind inflation. In fact, according to cosmologists, we can expect the search to intensify over the coming months and years.

After the details behind the Planck observations were revealed this week, Discovery News was able to speak with cosmologist Kendrick Smith, of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, to find out what impact these Planck data will have on our quest to understand what happened when the universe was born.

To recap, in March 2014, researchers of the BICEP2 telescope made a very public announcement that they had discovered the fingerprint of gravitational waves in the most ancient radiation observed in the distant universe — the cosmic microwave background, or simply, the CMB. This radiation is the remnants of the Big Bang and therefore originates from the genesis of our universe.

By studying the CMB, cosmologists are looking into a cosmic time capsule of sorts — the features etched into this radiation were created moments after the Big Bang, so their structure can reveal the conditions (and therefore the physics) of our universe back in the beginning of time.

How the universe began is “one of the biggest open questions cosmologists are trying to answer,” said Smith. “There are several different theories on what happened shortly after the Big Bang … the problem isn’t that we don’t have a successful theory, it’s that we have too many successful theories! We’re trying to narrow down the possibilities.” Although Smith isn’t directly involved in this week’s joint BICEP2/Planck publication, he is a member of the international Planck Collaboration.

One theory is that the universe underwent a rapid expansion immediately after the Big Bang and one possible way to detect whether that inflationary period occurred is to look for gravitational waves etched into the CMB.

The BICEP2 telescope, based near the South Pole, is designed to specifically seek out a type of polarization in the ancient CMB radiation called “B-mode polarization.” Should B-modes be detected, it’s a sign that gravitational waves are present, proving certain inflationary universe theories.

“By searching for these gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, we can narrow down the physics of the Big Bang,” said Smith.

And that’s what the BICEP2 team thought they’d found in their observations of a small patch of sky. There appeared to be a very strong B-mode signal that couldn’t (at the time) be explained by any other phenomena.

“In the original BICEP2 result, they saw B-mode polarization in the CMB at a level that roughly corresponded to the largest gravitational wave signal that would be consistent with our observations so far,” Smith added.

But just because the signal looked like evidence for gravitational waves, the BICEP2 researchers had underestimated the impact of the magnetized dust that fills our galaxy.

When observing any radiation from beyond the Milky Way, we have to stare through a thin fog of interstellar dust and it just so happens that this dust can also generate B-mode polarized radiation. To compensate for this interference, the European space-based Planck telescope, which is sensitive to frequencies generated by the CMB and galactic dust, was tasked to map the magnetic fingerprint of galactic dust. Planck’s mission was completed in 2013, but its huge database is still being processed and interpreted.

Last March, the BICEP2 team only had access to a preliminary Planck dataset and concluded that, in the BICEP2 field of view, the impact of galactic dust was minimal and the B-mode signal they’d detected originated in the CMB.

“They thought it had to be cosmological gravitational waves rather than dust based on a number of statistical analyses, which were mainly driven by very approximate measurements of dust emission in our galaxy,” said Smith.

Although no one in the cosmological community disputed the fact that BICEP2 had detected B-mode polarization, they argued that too little was known about the galactic dust and that the signal was just as likely gravitational waves as it was dusty interference, urging caution against concluding that it had to be gravitational waves. And this week’s paper, a collaborative effort between Planck and BICEP2 scientists, has shown that there are no detectable traces of gravitational waves in the BICEP2 data.

“What this recent joint Planck/BICEP paper did is take Planck measurements, that are at a different frequency to BICEP2, combine them with the BICEP measurements, so that now with multiple observing frequencies, one can make a clear statistical separation between the cosmological gravitational wave signal and the dust signal,” said Smith.

In other words, the B-mode polarization that BICEP2 originally detected was caused by dust and not gravitational waves.

“That’s interesting to comment on as often data analysis is very subtle; a paper may have multiple interpretations or loopholes. But this paper is not one of them,” he said. “The conclusion is very clear: when you combine the observing frequencies of BICEP and Planck, all of the B-mode (polarization) in the sky can be accounted for by dust and there’s no evidence that any of it is gravitational waves.”

So what now? Although the March announcement may have been premature, the search for gravitational waves continues. Cosmologists are now armed with a comprehensive map of the obscuring dust in our galaxy. Smith hopes that, over the next 5 years, extensive multifrequency observations may start to root out the illusive B-mode polarization generated by gravitational waves. But they may not.

“There are working models for how the Big Bang might’ve worked that produce large levels of gravitational waves and there are working models for how the Big Bang might’ve worked that produced gravitational waves at such tiny levels that they’ll never be measured. Either one is a possibility, so it’s hard to speculate.”

As for the massive interest that surrounded the gravitational wave drama that unfolded in a very public arena, Smith isn’t surprised that this particular cosmological study has garnered such public excitement.

Read more at Discovery News

Barking Norwegian Lemmings Tell Predators to Back Off

If you try to go near a Norwegian lemming, you'll hear about it. The small rodent uses its distinctive bark and unusual coloring as a stern warning to those who would think to mess with it, a Swedish researcher has determined.

Making its living in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Kola peninsula in Russia, the Norwegian lemming (Lemmus lemmus) is reddish brown on its back, yellow on its sides, white on its chin and cheeks, and black on its head, neck, and shoulders.

It's rare for small rodents to make aggressive defenses of themselves, but the Norwegian lemming bucks that trend: It will scream loudly, lunge, and even bite aerial predators such as the long-tailed skua.

The video below (not part of the study) offers a glimpse of the lemming's defensive call in action.

Malte Andersson, of the University of Göteborg in Sweden, wanted to find out if the creature's audacious coloring and tendency to shriek under pressure served a purpose.

In field observations, Andersson found that Norwegian lemmings were overwhelmingly more likely than brown lemmings to issue a "be-gone!" warning call when a potential predator, such as a human, approached them.

Their coloring, meanwhile, was built to stand out. Observers in field tests found L. lemmus easier to pick out in their natural surroundings than the other most common rodent in the area, the grey-sided vole.Taken together, the coloring and behavior were thought by Andersson to be an instance of aposematism -- using coloration and other tactics as a warning to a potential predator that, in this case, some rodents are more trouble to mess with than they're worth.

Aposematism is more commonly seen in creatures such as frogs, snakes, and insects than in herbivorous mammals, making the little lemming stand out in a crowd yet again.

Read more at Discovery News

Cannibalism Suspected in Seal Deaths Off Scotland

Grey seals feasting on their own kind, and not ship propellers, is the likely reason behind the mysterious deaths of 86 seals in Scottish waters over the last five years, according to new research.

Between 2009 and 2014, 86 seal carcasses in Scotland each had the same wound: a "corkscrew"-patterned cut that worked in a spiral around the seal's body.

Prior to a new report by Scotland's Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), the deaths were strongly suspected to have been caused by the seals getting caught in the propellers of ships.

But late last year the SMRU researchers, in the midst of trying to further nail down the propeller theory in an Isle of May study, got a surprise when they were able to witness and record an adult male grey seal cannibalizing a young seal.

The seal was recorded attacking and killing a weaned grey seal pup, leaving behind the same corkscrew injury pattern. After being tagged and tracked, the adult male was later implicated in at least eight killings of pups in the same manner.

Six additional carcasses were also documented in the study area, although their deaths were not directly attributed to that specific adult male.

Of the newer carcasses observed during the latter part of 2014, the SMRU wrote in its report: "The wound patterns seen on the grey seal pups at the Isle of May clearly resembled those that have been recorded as corkscrew wounds on previous grey and harbour seal cases in Scotland."

The team's analysis of the 14 pups' injuries found 12 of them to be consistent with the corkscrew patterns seen in the prior cases.

"This clearly suggests that a proportion of the cases previously identified as the result of interactions with propellers were in fact due to grey seal predation," the team wrote.

Grey seals were also implicated last November in the mutilations of more than 1,000 harbor porpoises along the Dutch coastline.

Read more at Discovery News

Oldest Stars in Universe Younger Than Thought

The very first stars in the universe need to reset their birthday clocks: these ancient objects burst into existence more than 100 million years later than scientists previously thought, according to new research.

A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the light from some of the very first stars and galaxies lit up the universe and ended a period known as the "dark ages." New measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite — which studied the cosmic microwave background, or the light left over from the Big Bang — indicate that this period of light began about 100 million years later than Planck's previous estimate. The new results are based on an additional year of observations recorded by the satellite.

"While these 100 million years may seem negligible compared to the universe's age of almost 14 billion years, they make a significant difference when it comes to the formation of the first stars," Marco Bersanelli of the University of Milan and a member of the Planck Collaboration, said in a statement.

The end of the dark ages

Some of the first stars and galaxies to be born in the early universe helped end what is often referred to as the universe's "dark ages." The stars not only lit up the skies with their light, but also cleared away a fog consisting of hydrogen atoms that had come to fill cosmos.

This haze of gas that filled the universe blocked most wavelengths of light, which is why this time is referred to as "dark."

The powerful photons created by stars and galaxies ripped the atoms apart, or ionized them, which is why this era is known as reionization. Galaxies called quasars burst into existence around this time; at the center of a quasar is a supermassive black hole that ejects powerful jets of light and matter into the universe.

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show that the universe was entirely clear of this fog by about 900 million years after the Big Bang, the ESA statement said. But when did it begin?

Previous observations by Planck cited the start of reionization as being about 450 million years after the Big Bang. The new results used a larger data set, taken between 2009 and 2013, and pushed that measurement forward by 100 million years.

Because stars and galaxies drove the start of reionization, scientists with the Planck collaboration say the new measurement also indicates about when those stars and galaxies started forming.

"These things are basically two sides of the same coin," François Bouchet, of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and a member of the Planck Collaboration, told Space.com. Bouchet said that Planck can identify the average starting time of star and galaxy formation, but not when specific stars were born. Rare stars have been identified that may have formed before the end of the dark ages.

For now, scientists with Planck think of reionization as an "instantaneous" event — "instantaneous" on a cosmological time scale, that is — but of course, Bouchet explained, it must actually be an event that took place over a period of time.

"As with any physical process, will take some time," Bouchet said. "Later on, we will want to know what is the duration of that period. We want to be able to say when 20 percent of the universe was reionized, and then 30 percent and 50 percent and 100 percent. We want to have a full history of reionization. That's the ultimate goal."

Oldest light in the universe

The Planck telescope can study reionization by looking at the cosmic microwave background: a static haze of light that fills the entire universe. This light was created by the Big Bang, and has radiated through the universe ever since. In that time, it has picked up information about the events that have taken place in the cosmic history.

When the universe began to emerge from the dark ages, hydrogen atoms were ripped apart into protons and electrons. The electrons interacted with the CMB and left an imprint in the light's "polarization" — or the orientation of the light waves, according to the ESA statement. Planck scientists have picked up on that subtle change.

Read more at Discovery News

This Amazing Little Critter Just Might Be Immortal

The hydra is one of the few creatures on Earth that looks exactly like a palm tree, another being the dancing palm tree during Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show. But let’s not speak of the dancing palm tree.

Listen, I don’t want to live forever. First of all, it’d take a really long time to work enough to save up for that long of a retirement. And I dunno, I’m a writer. I live by deadlines. And there ain’t no bigger deadline than your own inevitable death.

But there’s one creature that doesn’t need to get hung up on retirement or deadlines, and accordingly it could well be immortal. This is the bizarre existence of the hydra, a half-inch tube of jelly that inhabits fresh water all over the world, where it lives a long, long time under the right conditions—and if you don’t assault it.

Yet even then, it has remarkable powers of regeneration. Cut it in half and you’ll eventually end up with two hydra. Mix a bunch of them up in a test tube, break them all apart into single cells, and still they’ll re-form into a ball and split off as individuals. Yeah, I know, that doesn’t really seem possible. But stick with me here.

As Kermit once said, it’s not easy being green. These transgenic hydra, which are loaded with a green florescent protein, would no doubt confirm that if they too had a puppeteer making them say stuff.

Who Wants to Live Forever

This is a supremely simple animal, belonging to the same group as jellyfish, the cnidarians. “I sometimes describe hydras sort of like a little free-living piece of intestine,” said hydrobiologist Rob Steele of the University of California, Irvine. At one end is a sticky disk, which the hydra uses to anchor itself, and at the other is a mouth and tentacles packed with stinging cells, which fire toxic harpoons into prey. Holding the quarry in place, the hydra then ratchets its mouth over the victim—typically a tiny crustacean called a water flea—until it’s entirely enveloped.

Back in the ‘90s, a fella named Daniel Martinez gathered up 60 of these creatures and isolated them in their own tiny tanks. Hydra reproduce asexually, budding off little clones, so Martinez had to pick those young out and toss them. After four years of this, not only were the hydra still alive, but they looked good as new. Four years may not sound like a long time, but the rule in nature is that the smaller you are, the shorter you live. Thus can small insects last only a matter of weeks, while blue whales keep ticking for nearly a century. Something the size of a hydra living for four years is just ridiculous.

So Martinez published his findings, declaring the hydra potentially immortal. Unsurprisingly, this rustled a few people’s jimmies. “So he published that result,” Steele said, “and then the naysayers came along and said, ‘Well maybe the average lifespan of hydra is six years, so you didn’t do the experiment long enough.’ So he went back and restarted the experiment, and I think he’s now at about year eight,” making his hydras the oldest known specimens. “He’s going to do it for 10 years, and then he says never again. If 10 years isn’t enough for them, that’s their problem.”

I should reiterate: The hydra is thought to be potentially immortal. “To say that it’s immortal implies that there might actually be hydra running around that have lived for 10,000 years,” Steele said. “I don’t know that that’s possible. But it has the potential from what we know about it for being immortal.”

The hydra’s secret seems to be that it sheds its entire body and starts from scratch every few weeks. It’s essentially just a sack of stem cells, which are kind of like blank slates. These eventually specialize into, say, a cell that makes up the tentacle. But the hydra will shed this cell after just a few days, keeping it from aging and wearing out like our own cells do. “It doesn’t have any cells that hang around long enough to get old and decrepit,” Steele said, “and therefore the individual doesn’t get old and decrepit.”

So there you have it: the secret to potential immortality. (Another miniscule creature that’s worth mentioning, the adorable eight-legged water bear, has its own method of extreme longevity: It’s not immortal, but it can dry out to just a fraction of its normal water content and live for up to 10 years as a unconscious husk, only to reanimate once it again hits water.) Why the hydra would evolve such a unique way of life is still a mystery. And if you were hoping we could apply its trick to ourselves before you yourself keel over, I have some bad news. There really couldn’t be an animal more different than ourselves, so scientists don’t hold out much hope for indulging your egomania by way of the hydra. Sorry, but it’s for your own good.

The Show Must Go On

The Hydra of Greek mythology was a vicious serpent with a bunch of heads, which would grow into two if you cut one off. The hydra of the real world can do the same, only way, way more impressively. “You can poke a hole in them and they seal it up,” Steele said. “You can cut them in half and they regenerate the missing halves. You cut them into 20 pieces and you get 20 hydra.” Its ultimate trick, though, doesn’t make a lick of sense in a world governed by, you know, certain rules and stuff.

“Dissociate” is a verb, and a very good one at that, meaning to break something down into smaller bits, such as individual cells. You do not want to be dissociated. But dissociate a bunch of hydra into a soup of cells, and incredibly they emerge again as individuals.

Hydra reproduce asexually, budding off clones, as you can see here. It’s like Multiplicity, only with less pizza.

Here’s how it works. Scientists can drop 100 or so hydra in a test tube and treat them such that they dissociate into a goopy mass of cells, then spin the tube so the mass forms into a ball. “They’re all mixed up now,” Steele said. “The cells that were on the outside of tentacles are next to cells that were on the inside of the body column. Everybody’s just mixed up, there’s no pattern to the animal at that point.”

But over the course of a few days, the cells that make up the outside of the hydra somehow make their way to the surface of the sphere, while the cells that should line the gut make their way into the center. Then the inside of the sphere forms a cavity, which will be the gut, and you end up with a hollow, two-layered sphere, just like an individual hydra has an outer layer and an inner one with fluid between the two.

Read more at Wired Science

Tomato, Tomahto? Chimps Can Learn 'Dialects'

Chimpanzees specifically refer to favorite foods with distinct grunts, but the calls differ between populations, according to a new study that found chimps could then learn the "foreign" grunts, making communication easier when two groups merge into one.

The findings, reported in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, show that, like human words, chimp food calls are not fixed in their structure and that, when exposed to a new group, chimps can change their calls to sound more like their group mates.

A big topic of conversation after that is food.

"Chimpanzees produce acoustically distinct grunts in response to foods of low, medium or high quality, and in captivity they give distinct grunts for certain foods, including bananas, bread and mango," co-author Katie Slocombe of the University of York told Discovery News. "It has been shown that listeners are able to distinguish between these different grunts and extract information that helps guide their own search for food appropriately."

For the study, she and her colleagues studied what happened after two separate groups of adult chimps moved in together at the Edinburgh Zoo. Before the merger, the groups produced their particular food grunts. After the merger, the "newcomer" group significantly changed their calls to match those of the long-term residents, lead author Stuart Watson, also from the University of York, said.

The researchers offer a number of possible explanations. One is that the chimps might learn the "foreign" grunts in order to form, maintain or improve their social relationships with members of the different group.

"If one was to make an analogy with human language, it could be the process of dialect change when people move between groups of speakers of the same language and subtly modify their accents to sound like the group into which they are moving, potentially as a way to aid social integration," co-author Simon Townsend of the University of Zurich told Discovery News.

He added that the chimps might also modify their grunts to ensure that the other chimps understand them correctly.

Again referencing human language, Townsend said, "The word for 'apple' in German is only subtly different, 'apfel,' but correctly pronouncing it can avoid comprehension mistakes in receivers."

The researchers, however, do not use the word "language" when referring to chimp calls. While studies continue to find similarities between human language and the communication systems of other animals, the scientists say that language is much more complex than just referring to objects in the environment with vocalizations.

Townsend, for example, mentioned that human language is "syntactic," meaning that we can combine meaningful, referential words together into larger, higher-order structures, i.e. sentences, paragraphs and so on. We can also talk about objects, individuals and events in the absence of them since the words are fully symbolic.

"We can even create a new word if we feel like it, something that chimpanzees are seemingly unable to do," Watson said.

Nevertheless, other studies on animals find that many, from birds to dolphins, have very complex communication systems that involve skills we don't possess, such as the ability to share information via natural sonar. In the case of chimps, they are better than humans at naturally producing calls that carry over long distances, demonstrating that environmental conditions help to shape a particular animal's way of communicating. This holds true for humans as well, since a recent study found that tonal languages arose in humid climates where conditions facilitate the larynx's ability to produce different tones.

Read more at Discovery News

Buffalo-Sized Rodent Used Its Teeth Like Tusks

The largest rodent ever documented, an ancient creature closely related to guinea pigs but around the size of a buffalo, used its front teeth much like an elephant uses its tusks, new research concludes.

Scientists from the University of York and The Hull York Medical School used computer modeling to virtually reconstruct the skull of Josephoartigasia monesi to estimate how powerful the creature's bite could have been.

The team found that Josephoartigasia, which lived in South America about 3 million years ago, had a very powerful bite force, comparable to that of a tiger. But the researchers knew from earlier studies they'd performed that the incisors would actually have been able to withstand nearly triple that force.

This told the scientists that the ancient rodent's teeth were multipurpose, and a bit tusk-like in their functionality.

"We concluded that Josephoartigasia must have used its incisors for activities other than biting, such as digging in the ground for food, or defending itself from predators. This is very similar to how a modern day elephant uses its tusks," said Dr, Philip Cox, of the University of York.

The team's research has recently been published in the Journal of Anatomy.

From Discovery News

'Gospel of the Lots of Mary' ID'd in Ancient Text

A 1,500-year-old book that contains a previously unknown gospel has been deciphered. The ancient manuscript may have been used to provide guidance or encouragement to people seeking help for their problems, according to a researcher who has studied the text.

Written in Coptic, an Egyptian language, the opening reads (in translation):

"The Gospel of the lots of Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, she to whom Gabriel the Archangel brought the good news. He who will go forward with his whole heart will obtain what he seeks. Only do not be of two minds."

Anne Marie Luijendijk, a professor of religion at Princeton University, discovered that this newfound gospel is like no other. "When I began deciphering the manuscript and encountered the word 'gospel' in the opening line, I expected to read a narrative about the life and death of Jesus as the canonical gospels present, or a collection of sayings similar to the Gospel of Thomas (a non-canonical text)," she wrote in her book "Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary" (Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

What she found instead was a series of 37 oracles, written vaguely, and with only a few that mention Jesus.

The text would have been used for divination, Luijendijk said. A person seeking an answer to a question could have sought out the owner of this book, asked a question, and gone through a process that would randomly select one of the 37 oracles to help find a solution to the person's problem. The owner of the book could have acted as a diviner, helping to interpret the written oracles, she said.

Alternatively, the text could have been owned by someone who, when confronted with a question, simply opened an oracle at random to seek an answer.

The 37 oracles are all written vaguely; for instance, oracle seven says, "You know, o human, that you did your utmost again. You did not gain anything but loss, dispute, and war. But if you are patient a little, the matter will prosper through the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Another example is oracle 34, which reads, "Go forward immediately. This is a thing from God. You know that, behold, for many days you are suffering greatly. But it is of no concern to you, because you have come to the haven of victory."

Throughout the book "the text refers to hardships, suffering and violence, and occasionally one finds a threat. On the whole, however, a positive outlet prevails," Luijendijk wrote in her book.

Another interesting example, that illustrates the ancient book's positive outlook, is oracle 24, which reads, "Stop being of two minds, o human, whether this thing will happen or not. Yes, it will happen! Be brave and do not be of two minds. Because it will remain with you a long time and you will receive joy and happiness."

A 'gospel' like no other

In the ancient world, a special type of book, sometimes called a "lot book," was used to try to predict a person's future. Luijendijk says that this is the only lot book found so far that calls itself a "gospel" — a word that literally means "good news."

"The fact that this book is called that way is very significant," Luijendijk told Live Science in an interview. "To me, it also really indicated that it had something to do how people would consult it and also about being as good news," she said. "Nobody who wants to know the future wants to hear bad news in a sense."

Although people today associate the word "gospel" as being a text that talks about the life of Jesus, people in ancient times may have had a different perspective.

"The fact that this is not a gospel in the traditional sense gives ample reason to inquire about the reception and use of the term 'gospel' in Late Antiquity," Luijendijk wrote.

Where did it come from?

The text is now owned by Harvard University's Sackler Museum. It was given to Harvard in 1984 by Beatrice Kelekian, who donated it in memory of her husband, Charles Dikran Kelekian. Charles' father, Dikran Kelekian (1868-1951), was "an influential trader of Coptic antiquaries, deemed the 'dean of antiquities' among New York art dealers," Luijendijk wrote in her book.

It is not known where the Kelekians got the gospel. Luijendijk searched the Kelekian family archive but found no information about where the text came from or when it was acquired.

It's possible that, in ancient times, the book was used by a diviner at the Shrine of Saint Colluthus in Egypt, a "Christian site of pilgrimage and healing," Luijendijk wrote. At this shrine, archaeologists have found texts with written questions, indicating that the site was used for various forms of divination.

"Among the services offered to visitors of the shrine were dream incubation, ritual bathing, and both book and ticket divination," Luijendijk wrote.

Miniature text

One interesting feature of the book is its small size. The pages measure less than 3 inches in height and 2.7 inches in width. The codex is "only as large as my palm," Luijendijk wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Termite Mound Oases Help Combat Climate Change

Most people consider termites to be unwanted and useless pests, but a new study finds that these insects help to combat the effects of climate change, to the point that they can even stop the spread of deserts.

Termite mounds often serve as oases of plant life in otherwise dry and desolate regions, according to the study, which is published in the latest issue of the journal Science. This may provide no comfort to homeowners with wood-chomping termites under their houses, but termites turn out to be critical to ecosystems, since the mound oases help to sustain both big and small wildlife.

“I like to think of termites as linchpins of the ecosystem in more than one way,” co-author Robert Pringle, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, said in a press release. “They increase the productivity of the system, but they also make it more stable, more resilient.”

The visuals of this are dramatic, showing how lush, green grass often grows atop termite mounds, while the surrounding land remains dry and desolate. Depending on the number of mounds, this can look like green polka dots covering a landscape when it is photographed from above.

Pringle, lead author Juan Bonachela and their colleagues focused their research on fungus-growing termites of the genus Odontotermes, but they say that their findings could apply to all types of termites that increase resource availability on and/or around their nests.

For the study, the researchers adjusted some mathematical models to account for the effects of termite mounds on desert and semi-arid landscapes in Africa, South America and Asia. Bonachela and his team now suspect that termites are far more beneficial than anyone had ever previously believed.

They explained that termite mounds store nutrients and moisture, and–via internal tunnels–allow water to better penetrate soil. As a result, vegetation flourishes on and near termite mounds in ecosystems that are otherwise highly vulnerable to “desertification,” meaning the environment’s collapse into desert.

Moisture presence overall does not change, but the tiny termites still make a big difference.

“The rain is the same everywhere, but because termites allow water to penetrate the soil better, the plants grow on or near the mounds as if there were more rain,” co-author Corina Tarnita explained.

Read more at Discovery News