Paris Attacks: Inside the Minds of Terrorists

Coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic State Friday using a combination of suicide bombs and automatic weapons left at least 128 people dead across Paris.

As the city mourns, ordinary citizens around the world express sympathy for and solidarity with the French capital this weekend. World leaders have condemned the attacks, with French President Francois Hollande calling the assault “an act of war.” European governments have also beefed up security and called for heightened vigilance from the general public, reports Agence France-Presse.

How could something like this happen? It’s a question that security and intelligence officials around the world consider in order to prevent future incidents. Psychologists, social scientists and other researchers have also investigated this subject by studying the minds of terrorists.

Why Do Terrorists Attack Civilian Areas?

Yesterday’s attacks in the French capital targeted restaurants, a soccer game and a concert hall, exactly the kinds of places the average young Parisian or tourist would want to be on a Friday night.

In “Ciottone’s Disaster Medicine (Second Edition)“, which devotes a chapter to the psychology of terrorism, author Robert Ciottone explains:

Terrorists seek to destabilize individuals and societal organizations by undermining the cognitive, affective, and valuative perspectives they have of the physical, interpersonal, and sociocultural aspects of the world. In other words, terrorists seek to reshape the frame of reference by which people know about, have emotional reactions to, and attach relative importance to the world of objects and places, of people and of laws, and of rules, customs, and expectations.

Because of the disparity between the resources available to governments versus terrorist organizations, civilian targets offer terrorists the possibility of a greater return on investment, so to speak. These areas are chosen not because of military or political significance but for other strategic reasons because terrorists strike where populations feel most secure.

How Do Terrorists Choose Their Targets?

Instead of seeking to maximize economic or physical impact, terrorists make decisions based on “emotional and visceral factors,” according to a study published in June in the journal Risk Analysis.

These targets are specifically considered not only to instill fear in a particular demographic but also demonstrate the capability of the organization to bolster support amongst its followers.

In “The logic of terrorism: Terrorist behavior as a product of strategic choice,” author Martha Crenshaw explained that “pectacular humiliation of the government demonstrates strength and will and maintains the morale and enthusiasm of adherents and sympathizers.”

Terrorists of course can never be assumed to be fully rational actors, which explains major flaws in the decision-making, but also makes it more difficult for security analysts to predict their next move, the immediate impact of which is extremists’ chief concern.

The authors of the Risk Analysis study note that “passions and visceral factors influence an agent to behave extremely myopically and to seek immediate rewards, disregarding any detrimental effects.”

Who Are Terrorists Typically?

Aside from being collectively bound to an extreme ideology, terrorists generally have one other demographic connection: They’re often young men, which may be explained by behavioral biology, according to the recently released book “Evolutionary Psychology and Terrorism.”

In early adulthood, young men are more prone to risk-taking behaviors, previous studies have found. They also have higher levels of testosterone. Testosterone “makes them more susceptible to influence by other males, who are usually older,” Jason Roach of the University of Huddersfield said in a statement in September upon the book’s release. “That is why you will find that it is younger males who do the suicide bombing, but the direction comes from older men.”

Suicidal terrorists in particular “seek care and guidance from stronger personality figures,” according to the Risk Analysis study, and crave the attention they get for their extremely violent actions.

Read more at Discovery News

Exoplanet's Global Winds Let Rip at 5,400 MPH

A windy day on HD 189733b is nothing to take lightly.

The planet, located about 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula, has winds reaching 5,400 mph, roughly 20 times faster than anything ever experienced on Earth.

Granted, everything about HD 189733b is extreme. It’s about 10 percent bigger than Jupiter, but its located 180 times closer to its parent star than Jupiter is to the sun, far closer than even Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system.

Scientists estimate its temperature reaches almost 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

HD 189733b orbits its host start every 2.2 days, at a breakneck speed of 341,000 mph.

Scientists at the University of Warwick were able to measure velocities on the day and night sides of the planet. They discovered the 5,400 mph wind blowing from the day to the night side.

“As parts of HD 189733b’s atmosphere move towards or away from the Earth the Doppler effect changes the wavelength of this feature, which allows the velocity to be measured,” lead researcher Tom Louden said in a statement. “This is the first ever weather map from outside of our solar system.”

Astronomers used HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, in La Silla, Chile, to watch the planet as it passed in front of its host star, relative to the telescope’s line of sight.

“The surface of the star is brighter at the center than it is at the edge, so as the planet moves in front of the star the relative amount of light blocked by different parts of the atmosphere changes. For the first time we’ve used this information to measure the velocities on opposite sides of the planet independently, which gives us our velocity map,” Louden said.

The research is being published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

From Discovery News

Pieces of Roman Sign Reunited After 2,000 Years

Two fragments of a marble Roman sign have been pieced together in England after 2,000 years apart, yet revealing only one part of the original meaning.

The fragments were discovered more than 100 years apart in Silchester Roman Town, at a site that is now being excavated by archaeologists of the University of Reading, UK.

One marble fragment, inscribed with the letters “AT,” was unearthed in 1891 and is now part of Reading Museum’s Silchester Collection. The other piece, etched with the letters “BA,” was found 33 feet away at the same site in 2013.

Analysis of the stone fragment by Roger Tomlin, an authority on the inscriptions of Roman Britain, confirmed the pieces were from the same object.

Both fragments boast the same style and size of lettering, and the dimensions of the slab match as well, he concluded.

“Matching pieces which were discovered over 100 years apart to a 2,000-year-old object is incredibly rare,” Mike Fulford of the University of Reading said in a statement.

Pieced together, the fragments read At(e)ba(tum), or “of the Atrebates,” the French tribe who likely founded Silchester in the 1st century BC.

“We now know what the bottom line of the sign reads. However, the top line remains a mystery,” Fulford said.

The mysterious sign was possibly destroyed by the legendary Boudica, the rebel queen of the Iceni (a British tribe) who unsuccessfully attempted to defeat the Romans in the first century AD.

The fragments were likely part of a slab of marble from Purbeck in Dorset, which was either a sign commemorating the construction of a significant building, or a dedication to a deity.

Read more at Discovery News

Amazon Deforestation Could Cause Extreme Droughts

Since 1970, humans have cut down about 20 percent of the Amazon rain forest in South America. Though the pace of deforestation had slowed in recent years, it’s now picking up again, thanks to an improved global economy that’s boosted demand for farmland, and recently-enacted Brazilian laws and policies that promote development of the wild.

But if we revert to the aggressive rates of deforestation seen in the mid-2000s, the denuded Amazon eventually is going to exact a vengeance of the people who caused it — and a lot of others in South America, in the form of punishing long-term drought.

That’s the takeaway from a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. It predicts that by the mid-21st Century, the Amazon basin, which covers 40 percent of South America’s land mass, will suffer a devastating drop in precipitation. The projected norm for annual rainfall actually will be less than the region currently receives during drought years.

“Maintaining low deforestation rates in the Amazon is essential to ensure survival of the Amazon forest,” said lead author Dominick Spracklen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, in a press release.

Destroying trees creates a water problem because trees are an important factor in regulating the exchange of water, energy and gases between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Cutting down forests can alter local temperature, humidity and rainfall, though the results are tricky to forecast. To do so, the study’s authors did a meta-analysis of 96 different models.

The Amazon already is showing signs of water distress. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 reported that precipitation has decreased 25 percent since 2000 over a wide swath of the southeastern Amazon, and that vegetation in that area has suffered from the drying out.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Pluto Was Turned Into Pop Art

Before July, we only had a very vague and very fuzzy idea about what Pluto would look like up-close. Now, since the NASA New Horizons flyby, we’re becoming intimately familiar with the tiny, complex world’s icy plains, mountains, chemical composition and tenuous, yet intricate, atmosphere.

The mission’s findings so far have been nothing short of revolutionary — we have a complex, dynamic world living in what was once thought to be a dead and frozen region of the solar system.

With all this diversity on Pluto, it can be hard for planetary scientists to discern the different types of surface features for scientific study, so they have produced what, at first, looks like an iconic Andy Warhol creation. They’ve created a psychedelic Pluto, blotted with highly contrasting colors.

Although science often imitates art, this interpretation of Pluto’s famous hemisphere holds critical scientific purpose. The technique is known as “principal component analysis” and it is used to see slight changes in surface composition. The observation was captured with New Horizons’ Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 as the spacecraft was nearing closest approach of the dwarf planet — at a range of 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers).

Presented by the New Horizons surface composition this week at the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in National Harbor, Md., this false-color view of Pluto is testament to how complex the world really is.

The splashes of vibrant hues highlight slight color differences between Pluto’s distinct regions. Immediately, Pluto’s plains and canyons pop into view. We can distinguish between the older, more cratered region of Pioneer Terra (to the north) and compare it with the astonishingly young ice flows in Sputnik Planum (the western lobe of Tombaugh Regio — Pluto’s huge heart-shaped region). To the far right (east) of the observation, we can see the shadows cast over Pluto’s bizarre “snakeskin”-like Tartarus Dorsa region.

Read more at Discovery News

Could 'Pale Orange Worlds' Lead Us to Alien Life?

A pale blue dot may not be the only hint of life beyond the solar system. New research suggests astronomers pay attention to pale orange worlds as well, since they may resemble what Earth looked like earlier in its history.

During Earth’s so-called Archean era, some 2.5- to 3.8 billion years ago, the atmosphere had little oxygen and much more methane, thanks in large part to organisms called cyanobacteria that filled the seas.

Computer models show that methane released by the bacteria left Earth periodically wrapped in an orange blanket of hydrocarbons, the result of sunlight breaking down the methane and molecules recombining in the atmosphere.

A similar phenomenon can be seen today at Saturn’s moon Titan, though its hydrocarbon haze is not tied to biological activity.

“In the later Archean, when there was a lot of methane there were times when our entire planet was enshrouded by hydrocarbons,” Giada Arney, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington, said at the American Astronomical Society’s planetary sciences meeting in Maryland this week.

“When we look at Earth through time, we would see that Earth has looked very different at different epochs in its geological history. When we ask the question ‘What does an Earth-like planet look like?’ the answer depends on the time period that we’re thinking about.

“Pale orange dots can be Earth-like planets too,” Arney said.

Baby Earth’s blanket of hydrocarbons helped shield the planet from damaging ultraviolet radiation, much like ozone does today. The haze also helped Earth cool off, by reflecting solar heat back into space. Gradually, Earth’s climate and environment changed, leading to the rich diversity of life that exists today.

Astronomers may be able to find chemical footprints of similar early processes unfolding beyond the solar system.

Read more at Discovery News

Don’t You Dare Call the Deepstaria Jellyfish a Whale Placenta

Deepstaria jellyfish aren't usually this active–this one is caught up in the wash of the submersible. It looks a lot like a hot air balloon, doesn't it? Or does a hot air balloon look like Deepstaria? Something to think about.

The internet could have sworn it was looking at a whale placenta. Not that many folks could say they’ve ever seen a whale placenta, but it seemed to be a reasonable explanation for the underwater video that popped up in May 2012 of a dancing curtain of flesh. Hell, it could be a NEW SEA MONSTER, as the YouTube title yelled.

That guess was closer, but this was no monster. It was one of the weirdest jellyfish in the sea, Deepstaria. This underwater oddity relies not on long stinging tentacles to catch its prey, but on its entire body. It’s a floating blanket, enveloping victims and then cinching its bottom bit shut to create a balloon of death. And it doesn’t appreciate people calling it a whale placenta.

Roaming the oceans are two species of Deepstaria, named after the submersible Deepstar that first spotted one intact in the 1960s. Deepstaria reticulum, shown at top, features that beautiful red hue, while the other, Deepstaria enigmatica, appears whiter. Otherwise, they look largely the same.

“Most jellies would have a relatively small bell and then relatively long tentacles,” says Steven Haddock, a biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “These guys have the really big bell that’s almost like a trash bag or something, and pretty much no tentacles.”

Deepstaria are real loosey-goosey, tumbling around the deep. They seem to be able to manage some measure of undulation, but have nowhere near the power of your typical jelly. (Interestingly for such strange jellyfish, their closest known relative is the most typical of jellies, the moon variety, which you’ll find in any self-respecting aquarium.)

The thing is, in the deep ocean, being spry isn’t necessarily an advantage. Deepstaria does just fine by suspending in the water column and waiting for prey to crash into it. “They can be a meter large, so they could certainly have small fish and shrimp end up inside of that bell,” says Haddock. When the jelly detects something in there, it tightens the edge of the bell shut like a drawstring on a fleshy trash bag.

Now the jelly just has to get the food into its gob. How it does so is still a bit of a mystery, but naturalist Ron Larson has a hunch. Like other jellyfish, Deepstaria has stinging cells called nematocysts, he says, only instead of covering the tentacles, they likely cover the bell or other concentrated patches of flesh. Deepstaria also has little hair-like structures lining the bell called cilia, which collectively act as a conveyor belt to ferry the prey toward the mouth.

Deepstaria jellyfish create a balloon of death to overwhelm their prey. They’re available now for kids’ parties at a very low fee.

So say something like a little copepod crustacean makes the mistake of wandering into the bell. “Eventually the copepod is going to hit some of the nematocysts, which will stop it from swimming,” Larson says. “And then the cilia and muscular contractions are going to help get the prey close enough to the lips—the oral arms we call them—so that it can eventually get into the stomach.”

You may have noticed from these here GIFs that Deepstaria has a sort of mesh structure running through its body. And you may assume that mesh is for supporting the bell, which is just a seventh of an inch thick. In fact, these lines are connected to the stomach, and help carry nutrients throughout the jelly’s body. After all, a jellyfish three feet wide has a whole lot of surface area to provide for. The muscle that cinches the bell closed is particularly hungry for energy.

And Deepstaria needs every inch of that surface area. Food is scarce in the deep compared to, say, a bustling coral reef. By evolving to be so big, the jelly casts a bigger net to better its chances of snagging prey.

At least one critter, though, can wander into Deepstaria scot-free: the isopod. These crustaceans aren’t winning any titles for their good manners. One species, for instance, will crawl into a fish’s mouth, devour its tongue, and replace the organ with its body because hey, someone was bound to. It’s a parasite if there ever was one.

Here’s a good shot of an isopod catching a ride in a Deepstaria enigmatica and looking coy as all hell.

The variety that hangs out inside Deepstaria, though, may or may not be parasitic—the relationship between host and parasite here still isn’t clear. “They’re probably just taking a little bit of a tax on what the jelly eats,” Haddock says. “Whatever the jelly captures, the isopod takes its share. It could be parasitic, but if it ate too aggressively it would destroy the jelly and it would no longer have that nice habitat for itself.”

What is clear is that the isopods are great at finding these hosts. “I don’t know if we’ve ever seen one of those jellies that doesn’t have one of those things in it,” Haddock says. And the isopods might be setting up shop in Deepstaria and Deepstaria alone—scientists haven’t found them on any other variety of jelly.

Stranger still, Deepstaria don’t roll in big groups like other jellies might, which would theoretically make it difficult for the isopod to get its offspring to other jellyfish. “If you think about how far between those jellies are from each other,” Haddock adds, “it’s pretty incredible that [the isopods] could find and set up that association.”

Read more at Wired Science

After Mass Extinction: Just Animals at Extremes

As human civilization drives more and more animals to extinction, what will be left? Extreme sizes will likely become the new norm, according to research published in the latest issue of the journal Science.

“Survivors tend to be either much smaller or much larger than most of their relatives,” lead author Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania told Discovery News. “Those extremes favor survival through either fast breeding and large populations, or large ranges and ability to weather the storm.”

Sallan and co-author Andrew Galimberti, who is now a graduate student at the University of Maine, focused on marine animal body-size trends after what is called the end-Devonian mass extinction that occurred 359 million years ago. The researchers believe, however, that their findings, when combined with prior research, suggest patterns that could affect all animal life — both marine and terrestrial — after all known mass extinctions.

Their analysis of 1,120 fish fossils spanning the period from 419 to 323 million years ago determined that, in line with a theory known as Cope’s rule, the fish tended to evolve larger body sizes because of the evolutionary advantages of being larger. These include avoiding predation and being better able to catch prey.

On the other hand, they also found support for yet another theory, known as the Lilliput Effect, which holds that after mass extinctions, there is a temporary trend toward small body sizes.

Sallan also said that it will “take 5–20 million years (for surviving animals) to recover in species numbers and begin diversifying.”

The present mass extinction is unprecedented in terms of speed and ultimate triggers, she said, yet “it is likely that recovery will take just as long as every other event: tens of millions of years. Ecosystems will remain fragile during that entire time, with many additional species lost.”

In terms of predicted winners and losers of the current die off, the researchers suspect that, in the marine realm, sharks will unfortunately be goners.

“Since we are killing the sharks directly, they likely won’t make it this time, however, large ‘living fossil’ trash fishes (not desirable to sport anglers or for human consumption), like gar and bowfin, which are freshwater apex predators, will likely survive initially, as they have through all other extinctions, but won’t contribute much to future biodiversity.”

On land, mice and other small, fast-breeding mammals are expected to “eventually give rise to new radiations, but not for 5–20 million years,” Sallan said.

Humans are in a surprisingly good position, given that our primate and even earlier mammal ancestors were among the longer-term success stories, she said. Sallan quickly reminded, however, “survival is a prolonged process, not a one-off event.”

In fact, geophysical scientist David Jablonski of the University of Chicago has coined the term “dead clade walking,” to refer to survivors of mass extinctions that gradually die off anyway after the big wipe out. He explains that large-bodied animals ultimately become victims due to their lower population sizes and longer generation times.

Another new study, published in the journal Current Biology, suggests that as any animal dies off, there is a domino effect leading to an increased rate of extinction in other species. The authors from the University of Exeter refer to the phenomenon as “extinction cascades.”

Read more at Discovery News

Cockroach's Bite Force Is 50 Times Its Own Weight

The mighty cockroach packs a powerful bite, thanks to jaws that can grind five times stronger than a human, or with 50 times more force than the bug's body weight, researchers said Wednesday.

The creatures don't always chomp so ferociously.

Only if they need to chew through tough materials like wood will they activate certain slow twitch muscle fibers in their jaw in order to launch a force boost that is necessary for a repetitive, heavy-duty task, said the study in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Ours is the first study to measure the bite forces of ordinary insects, and we found that the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, can generate a bite force around 50 times stronger than their own body weight," said lead author Tom Weihmann from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology.

"In relative terms that's about five times stronger than the force a human can generate with their jaws."

Researchers wanted to understand the cockroach's bite because insects play a crucial role in many ecosystems and findings could enable "bioinspired engineering," said Weihmann.

So the team analyzed 300 bites made by specimen cockroaches, ranging from quick and feeble bites to powerful, long-lasting ones.

"The weaker, shorter bites were generated by relatively fast muscle fibers, while the longer, stronger bites were driven by additional muscle fibers that take time to reach their maximum force," said Weihmann.

"These slower muscle fibers give the mandibles a force boost to allow them to exert up to 0.5 Newtons during sustained grasping or chewing."

Read more at Discovery News

Stone Age Farmers Were First Beekeepers

Humans have been exploiting honey bees for almost 9,000 years, according to chemical analysis on ancient pottery from Europe, the Near East and North Africa.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a large international team of researchers and archaeologists, reveals that traces of beeswax were found trapped in the clay fabric of cooking vessels dating from between 9,000 and 4,000 years ago.

In over 20 years of research carried out at the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry, led by chemist Richard Evershed, more than 6,400 pottery fragments from over 150 Old World archaeological sites were analyzed.

“Although evidence from ancient Egyptian murals and prehistoric rock art suggests mankind’s association with the honeybee dates back over thousands of years, when and where this association emerged has been unknown — until now,” Evershed said.

Indeed, since bees leave no fossil record, they remained ecologically invisible for most of the past 10,000 years.

The researchers found the distinctive chemical fingerprint of beeswax in pottery from Neolithic Europe, the Near East and North Africa, suggesting the use of bee products was geographically widespread.

Traces of beeswax were found in Neolithic pottery from southern Britain to Denmark, from the Balkans to Algeria.

The oldest beeswax-bearing pot was found in Çatalhöyük, a nearly 9,000-year-old site in Turkey.

“Bee products were exploited continuously, and probably extensively in some regions, at least from the seventh millennium B.C., likely fulfilling a variety of technological and cultural functions,” the researcher wrote.

However climate limited the spread of bees into Northern Europe. There was no trace of bees wax in any of the 1,200 pottery samples from Ireland, Scotland and northern Scandinavia.

According to Mélanie Roffet-Salque, a chemist at the University of Bristol, and lead author of the paper, honey might have been the most obvious reason for exploiting the bee.

“It would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people,” Salque said.

Read more at Discovery News