A ‘ghost from the past’ recalls the infancy of the Milky Way

When our galaxy was born, around 13 billion years ago, a plethora of clusters containing millions of stars emerged. But over time, they have been disappearing. However, hidden behind younger stars that were formed later, some old and dying star clusters remain, such as the so-called E 3. European astronomers have now studied this testimony to the beginnings of our galaxy.

Globular clusters are spherical-shaped or globular stellar groupings -- hence its name- which can contain millions of stars. There are about 200 of them in the Milky Way, but few are as intriguing to astronomers as the E 3 cluster.

It is situated around 30,000 light years away, in the southern constellation of Chameleon. A team of Spanish and Italian astronomers have named it "a ghost from the Milky Way's past" in an article published recently in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

"This globular cluster, and a few similar ones -- such as Palomar 5 or Palomar 14 -- are `ghosts´ because they appear to be in the last stages of their existence, and we say ´from the past´ because they are very old. They were formed when our galaxy was virtually new-born, 13 billion years ago," says one of the authors, Carlos de la Fuente Marcos.

E 3 is hidden behind younger and brighter objects located between the cluster and Earth, but it has been possible to analyse it thanks to the Very Large Telescope (VLT) held in the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Cerro Paranal, Chile. The data obtained revealed some surprises.

"Unlike typical globular clusters, which contain hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of stars, the object studied only has a few tens of thousands of them," says De la Fuente Marcos. "Additionally, it doesn't have the typical circular symmetry, but a much distorted, almost ghostly, rhomboidal shape, contorted by the galactic gravitational waves."

According to another study on E 3 by Michigan State University (USA) researchers, published in The Astrophysical Journal, this cluster is chemically homogeneous, that is, it doesn't have several star populations in its interior.

"This is characteristic of an object that was created in block, in one single episode, like what is supposed to have happened when our galaxy was born: very large star clusters (containing millions of stars) were formed, but what remains of them today are objects like E 3, ghosts from a distant past," says De la Fuente Marcos. He explains that the study of these objects "enables us to gain insight into the infancy of the Milky Way."

Native or captured?

Despite the recently published new data on this strange globular cluster, astronomers still have to clarify if it was really formed in our galaxy or not. It is known that some of its clusters are not native to the Milky Way, but were captured, even though they can currently be seen in its interior. Long ago, our galaxy cannibalised other smaller galaxies and kept their globular clusters. The rest were formed in-situ.

In the article, it is suggested that the object analysed could be dynamically related to other clusters, such as 47 Tucanae, one of the richest and largest of the Milky Way. They could even share the same stream of stars. If this were the case, it would support the hypothesis that E 3 was captured in the distant past.

Read more at Science Daily

It's a Deal! Pact Approved to Stop Global Warming

Cheering envoys from 195 nations approved in Paris Saturday a historic accord to stop global warming, offering hope that humanity can avert catastrophic climate change and usher in an energy revolution.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius ended nearly a fortnight of gruelling UN negotiations with the bang of a gavel, marking consensus among the ministers, who stood for several minutes to clap and shout their joy, with some shedding tears of relief.

“I see the room, I see the reaction is positive, I hear no objection. The Paris climate accord is adopted,” Fabius declared.

Turning to a little green hammer with which he formally gave life to the arduously crafted pact, he quipped: “It may be a small gavel but it can do big things.”

The post-2020 Paris Agreement ends decades-long rows between rich and poor nations over how to carry out what will be a multi-trillion-dollar campaign to cap global warming and cope with the impacts of a shifting climate.

With 2015 forecast to be the hottest year on record, world leaders and scientists had said the accord was vital for capping rising temperatures and averting the most calamitous impacts from climate change.

Without urgent action, they warned, mankind faced increasingly severe droughts, floods and storms, and rising seas that would engulf islands and coastal areas populated by hundreds of millions of people.

The crux of the fight entails slashing or eliminating the use of coal, oil and gas for energy, which has largely powered prosperity since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1700s.

The burning of those fossil fuels releases invisible greenhouse gases, which cause the planet to warm and disrupt Earth’s delicate climate system.

Ending the vicious circle requires a switch to cleaner sources, such as solar and wind, and improving energy efficiency. Some nations are also aggressively pursuing nuclear power, which does not emit greenhouse gases.

- Ambitious global warming limit -

The Paris accord sets a target of limiting warming of the planet to “well below” 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with the Industrial Revolution, while aiming for an even more ambitious goal of 1.5C.

To do so, the emissions of greenhouse gases will need to peak “as soon as possible”, followed by rapid reductions, the agreement states.

The world has already warmed almost 1C, which has caused major problems for many people around the world particularly in developing countries, such as more severe storms, droughts and rising seas, according to scientists.

Environment groups said the Paris agreement was a turning point in history and spelt the demise of the fossil fuel industry, pointing particularly to the significance of the 1.5C goal.

“That single number, and the new goal of net zero emissions by the second half of this century, will cause consternation in the boardrooms of coal companies and the palaces of oil-exporting states,” Greenpeace International chief Kumi Naidoo said.

- Enduring money battles -

Developing nations had insisted rich countries must shoulder the lion’s share of responsibility for tackling climate change as they emitted most of the greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution.

The United States and other rich nations countered that emerging giants must also do more, arguing developing countries now account for most of current emissions and thus will be largely responsible for future warming.

On the crucial financing issue, developed countries agreed to muster at least $100 billion (92 billion euros) a year from 2020 to help developing nations.

However, following US objections, it was not included in the legally binding section of the deal.

Ahead of the talks, most nations submitted voluntary plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions from 2020, a process widely hailed as an important platform for success.

But scientists say that, even if the pledges were fully honoured, Earth would be on track for warming far above safe limits.

In an effort to encourage countries to improve their ambitions, the agreement will have five-yearly reviews of their pledges starting from 2023.

Nations most vulnerable to climate change lobbied hard for wording in the Paris pact to limit warming to 1.5C.

Big polluters, such as China, India and oil producing-giant Saudi Arabia, preferred a ceiling of 2C, which would have enabled them to burn fossil fuels for longer.

Immediately after the signing, China’s chief negotiator Xie Zhenhua told his fellow envoys the pact was not perfect.

“However, this does not prevent us from marching historical steps forward,” he said.

Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist for the World Bank who has become a prominent global advocate of climate action, also hailed the deal.

Read more at Discovery News

Full Moon to Rise on Christmas

Santa and his reindeer will have a bit of extra light this year, as a full moon is expected to reach its peak size around 6:11 a.m. ET on December 25.

A Christmas full moon last graced the skies in 1977, and will not appear again until 2034, NASA says.

December’s full moon is also known as the Full Cold Moon. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, certain Native American cultures have dubbed the event the Long Nights Moon, as the winter solstice kicks off around the same time, bringing with it the longest night of the year.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice will occur on December 22 at 11:48 a.m. ET.

From Discovery News

All Birds Descend from One Feathered Founder

The ancestry of every bird alive today can be traced back to a single “Founding Feathered Father” that lived in South America 95 million years ago, according to a new study.

The common ancestor of living birds, described in the journal Science Advances, likely lived much later than previously estimated. Prior reports suggested that the founding bird lived up to 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.

Dinosaurs (that didn’t evolve into birds) were still prevalent in South America 95 million years ago, yet the Founding Feathered Father would have been a standout.

“This ancestor would have looked like a bird, not like a dinosaur, and might have been capable of full flight, like many other birds from the Late Cretaceous,” co-author Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Ornithology told Discovery News.

The “many other birds” he mentioned went extinct, however, with just the one South American species being a direct ancestor of today’s birds.

For the study, Cracraft and colleague Santiago Claramunt, also from the AMNH, estimated the age of modern birds using molecular clocks calibrated with information obtained from 130 fossils representing all major bird families.

While the genetic data strongly indicates when and where the bird ancestor lived, the precise identity of this species remains a great mystery, even with the new evidence.

“There are no good candidates for this common ancestor of modern birds,” Cracraft said. “The avian fossil record of the Late Cretaceous of South America and West Antarctica is poor and fragmentary.”

The researchers were, however, able to determine that the common ancestor lived in South America for at least 25 million years before major changes started to occur. Different species began to rapidly originate from the Founding Feathered Father. This branching off of species is known to biologists as diversification.

“Rapid diversification around 66 million years ago has been interpreted as the effect of empty ecological niches left by the mass extinction (which killed off the dinosaurs and many other animals),” Claramunt said. “But our results show that rapid diversification began before the mass extinction event and coinciding with a long-term cooling trend at the end of the Cretaceous.”

During this cooling trend, some members of the founding bird’s population left South America. These birds, evolving into various different species along the way, reached Africa, Europe and Asia through North America. Early bird populations also made their way to Australia and to New Zealand through Antarctica.

The authors then believe that both environmental change and plate tectonics affected bird evolution. The latter happens in many ways, they explained. By connecting and disconnecting land, plate movements impact travel routes, even for flying animals. The resulting land formations can then affect climate, with topographical changes, such as the rise of mountains, influencing weather trends and temperatures.

Read more at Discovery News

Invasive Cuban Lizard Settling Down in Bermuda

It could be trouble ahead for the critically endangered Bermuda skink, a lizard that may soon have to share its turf with the non-native, invasive Cuban brown anole.

The Cuban lizard was first observed on the island by Florida International University PhD student James Stroud, during a two-year survey of Bermuda’s lizard populations.

“The Cuban brown anole most likely reached Bermuda by human transport,” Stroud told FIU News. “These lizards hitch rides between ports as unintended stowaways amongst cargo, usually in nursery plants and building materials.”

For its part, the Bermuda skink is the only lizard native to the island and is listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) “Red List” of threatened species. It has lost homes to habitat destruction and has to dodge predators such as cats.

The present problem for the skink is that Cuban anoles have shown themselves to be highly adaptive, settling in wherever they find themselves — comfortable making do in natural or manmade habitats and able to eat a variety of prey. They spread quickly and tend to crowd out resources, such as habitat and food, normally reserved for native species.

A bit of good news for the skink is that the two lizards’ ranges have not yet collided.

The Cuban anoles Stroud observed were found in central Bermuda, at all stages of life. They originated in Cuba and the Bahamas, and today they’re among the most widespread of lizards. They can be found in U.S. Gulf Coast states from Florida to Texas and they also call home states such as Hawaii and California. They can also be found in other Caribbean islands as well as parts of Asia.

From Discovery News

Wreck Full of Ancient Roman 'Ketchup' Found

Italian archaeologists have discovered the wreck of a Roman ship laden with thousands of jars containing the ketchup of the ancient Romans — a pungent, fish-based seasoning known as garum.

Considered a delicacy, the smelly liquid was mass produced in factories, especially in Spain and Portugal.

Resting at a depth of more than 650 feet in the waters off the Ligurian coast near Alassio, the vessel is estimated to be 98 feet long and dates between the first and the second century A.D.

The jars are now piled up on the seafloor. Ironically, they are a shelter to fish.

“From the size of the jar-made mound we estimate the ship was carrying between 2,000 and 3,000 amphoras, or clay jars,” team leader Simon Luca Trigona, coordinator of the technical services of underwater archaeology at the archaeological superintendency of Liguria, told Discovery News.

Trigona’s team worked with the Carabinieri scuba diver police force to localize the wreck, whose existence was signaled two years ago by a local fisherman.

Once the wreck site was identified, the team used a remote operated vehicle (ROV) with a claw to retrieve one of the jars.

“It has not been possible yet to recover a jar with residues that can be analyzed. However, the one we brought to light, which is identical to all the others, is of a shape that was used exclusively for garum,” Vincenzo Tiné, Superintendent of Archaeology of Liguria, told Discovery News.

Made from fermenting fish in saltwater, garum was basically the ketchup of the ancient Romans. It featured a much appreciated sweet and sour taste, and was used in almost on every dish, often substituting expensive salt.

The vessel had probably left the port of Cadiz in Spain, which at the time was an important center for the fish sauce industry, and was sailing along the coast headed to Rome.

Indeed, a couple of wine jars likely used by the crew and produced in the area around the river Tiber, point to Rome as the vessel’s port of provenance.

According to Trigona, the cargo ship shows for the first time that the Romans did not only follow the traditional direct route from southern Spain, off the Balearic islands and Corsica to Rome.

Read more at Discovery News

The Strange Saga of the Harlequin Beetle and the Pseudoscorpion

A comically long-legged harlequin beetle. To its right is the miniscule pseudoscorpion, which spends most of its time mating on the beetle's back. One might argue, then, that this baby does indeed have back.

Say what you will about the calamity that is air travel, but at least the planes have roofs. And at least the other passengers aren’t trying to throw you out mid-air because of said problem with the roof. At least no one is having sex all around you, and at least when you land, your plane doesn’t up and start getting busy with another plane.

Welcome to Harlequin Beetle Airlines, where the skies aren’t so much friendly as they are sexually awkward. The passengers are teeny-tiny arachnids called pseudoscorpions, which crawl under a harlequin beetle’s wings and latch on with their claws and strap in with silken seat belts. The dominant males among the pseudos shove other males off and get busy with a harem of females right on the back of the harlequin—itself a bizarre creature whose males tread on wildly elongated front legs.

It’s hard to imagine an odder couple out there. So this, ladies and gentlemen, is an Absurd Creature of the Week twofer: the strange saga of the harlequin beetle and the pseudoscorpion.

Arachnids do a lot of things really well (like straight-up murder). But one thing they can’t do is fly to new resources. A lot of spiders will do something called ballooning, simply letting out a line of silk for the wind to pick up and drag it into the sky, but pseudos live in the rainforests of South and Central America, where foliage is too dense for wind to penetrate. Plus, they only hang out in dead ficus trees. So they need some way to get to the next fallen plant.

A closer shot of the pseudoscorpion on a lovely backdrop of harlequin beetle.

Luckily the harlequin beetle also loves itself a dead ficus tree, specifically as a place to lay its eggs. When these hatch, the resulting larvae bore into the wood and begin pupating. Meanwhile, pseudos in the tree are milling about hunting.

“They tend to favor termites, and they tend to favor larvae of termites, which are slow moving,” says biologist Melvin Bonilla. “So they’re not super agile in terms of their hunting prowess.” Pseudos do, however, come equipped with those claws. And while they don’t have the famous stinger of actual scorpions, they use their claws to inject prey with paralyzing venom.

After several months of pupation, the harlequins emerge as adults—and the pseudos stand ready. The tiny arachnids swarm the beetles, pinching their bellies to get them to open up their wing covers, known as elytra. When the gates open, the pseudos clamber onto the beetles’ backs and hold on tight as their rides take flight.

To avoid any unscheduled skydives, the pseudos grasp at ridges on a beetle’s cuticle. Their claws also produce a silk that the pseudos will attach to the surface as a kind of safety harness (in that sense, Spider-Man firing silk from his wrists is more like a pseudoscorpion than a spider, which produces silk from its bum, but whatever).

Next comes the pseudoscorpion free love. Several males and females can end up riding one beetle, which is alright by the females, but not so great for any male that isn’t the alpha. “Usually the largest male will try to push the other males off so that he can then dominate the mating arena and use that as a way to access the females,” says Bonilla.

The male harlequin is unique among beetles in looking like it’s mad flexing in flight.

Lesser pseudos vanquished, the largest male shacks up with the females in a way that can only be described as unorthodox. Right there on the beetle’s back he’ll deposit a sort of stalk, topped with a ball of fluid that holds the spermatophore—the package of sperm. All of it looks a bit like a translucent flower, or maybe the Eye of Sauron.

Next the pseudo male grabs a female by the claw—not aggressively, mind you, just suggestively—to pull her over. If she’s into it, she’ll position herself over the flower and do a dip. “What’ll happen then is that ball of fluid will push against the spermatophore and into her sexual aperture,” Bonilla says. “And that ball of fluid will help the spermatophore stay there while the sperm is being transferred.” The male will do the same with as many other females as he can manage.

Eventually the harlequin beetle reaches its destination: another dead ficus tree. When it lands, the female pseudos disembark and develop their eggs in an external brood sac on their bellies, while the male typically stays on the beetle. The pseudos waiting in the tree climb aboard, males and females alike. Our triumphant male fights off any new males, as he did before, ideally winning the right to mate with the arriving female passengers.

Male harlequins also have to battle for females, just in a rather more dramatic way. They have those super-elongated front legs compared to the females’—limbs the males use to punt their rivals, “kind of like a hook and catapult type of device, where they try to hook the other male and catapult him away,” says Bonilla. “And usually if they do it well enough and catapult the male far enough, then that ends the battle.”

Read more at Wired Science

Tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent Possibly Found

Hungarian researchers may have finally found the lost tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Believed to contain Suleiman’s heart and intestines, the tomb is a rectangular building which was unearthed last month near Szigetvár, in southern Hungary.

Suleiman died in 1566 at age 71 in his tent outside the besieged fortress of Szigetvár, just two days before the fall of the town, which heroically resisted the Ottoman army for an entire month.

In his 46-year-long reign Suleiman conquered much of the Middle East, large parts of north Africa and most of Hungary. Undoubtedly one of the greatest rulers of 16th-century Europe, he presided over the golden age of the Ottoman empire, funding the construction of Istanbul’s most impressive architecture.

According to historical records, the sultan’s death was kept secret for 48 days, until his son Selim II could take the throne.

Suleiman’s body was taken back to Istanbul, where is now housed at the Süleymaniye Mosque. On the spot of the sultan’s death, the Ottomans placed a memorial tomb where they interred his heart and internal organs.

Norbert Pap, head of the department of Political Geography, Regional and Development Studies at the University of Pecs in Hungary, said his team is almost certain to have found the long-sought tomb.

After searching archives for hints of the tomb around the fortress, Pap and colleagues focused on the top of a vineyard near the village of Turbékpuszta.

“According to the local population, Turkish ruins used be located here, and they have reported Ottoman era archaeological artifacts on numerous occasions,” the researchers wrote in a statement.

Geophysical and remote sensing revealed the traces of several buildings, all oriented toward the southeast.

“One of them is almost exactly oriented toward Mecca,” the researchers said.

The site fits with descriptions of an Ottoman settlement called Turbék, a name derived from the Turkish word “turbeh,” meaning “tomb.”

Turbék started out as a shrine over Suleiman’s burial in the 1570s and thrived as a holy town until its destruction by the Habsburg army in the 1680s.

During a dig carried out in October and November, Pap and colleagues unearthed a rectangular building with wide walls built from bricks and stones.

Covered with stone tiles, the building had a large central room, about 26 by 26 feet. A robber pit in the middle of the structure suggests it was plundered in the late 17th century.

Some decorative elements remained intact and match in style the decorations in Suleiman’s mausoleum in Istanbul.

Read more at Discovery News

80-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Blood Vessels Never Fossilized

Tiny, delicate vessels that carried blood through a duck-billed dinosaur 80 million years ago never fossilized and still contain the beast's tissue, a new study finds.

Researchers discovered the prize specimens on the femur (leg bone) of Brachylophosaurus canadensis, a 30-foot-long (9 meters) duck-billed dinosaur that was excavated in Montana in 2007. But it wasn't immediately clear whether the blood vessels were made of organic matter originally from the dinosaur, or whether they had been contaminated over the years and were now made of bacteria or other components.

Now, several tests show that the specimens are the original blood vessels, making them the oldest blood vessels on record to survive with their original components, the researchers said.

The finding adds support to a growing pile of evidence that organic structures such as blood vessels and cells can persist for millions of years without fossilizing, they said. In fact, the blood vessels are only the latest part of the B. canadensis fossils the group is examining.

"The other major components of the bone from this dinosaur (bone matrix and bone cells) had already been studied, so we began studying the blood vessels in isolation," study lead researcher Tim Cleland, a postdoctoral researcher of chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science in an email.

The new project allowed the researchers "to focus on the vascular proteins that may hold more evolutionary information," said Cleland, who started the research while studying molecular paleontology at North Carolina State University.

To study the blood vessels, Cleland demineralized a piece of the leg bone and studied it with high-resolution mass spectroscopy. This technique uses an instrument to weigh and sequence proteins and peptides (chains of amino acids that are like proteins, but shorter). One of the proteins within the vessel, myosin, is found in smooth muscles found in the walls of blood vessels, the researchers said.

In a separate test, they used antibodies to detect specific proteins in a thin slice of the blood vessels. The antibodies revealed the same proteins that the mass spectroscopy did, thus confirming the results.

The researchers also tested the bones of chickens and ostriches, both of which are living relatives of dinosaurs. In both the modern and ancient samples, the peptide sequences were the same as those found in blood vessels, the scientists said.

"This study is the first direct analysis of blood vessels from an extinct organism, and provides us with an opportunity to understand what kinds of proteins and tissues can persist and how they change during fossilization," Cleland said in a statement. "This will provide new avenues for pursuing questions regarding the evolutionary relationships of extinct organisms, and will identify significant protein modifications and when they might have arisen in these lineages."

Now that researchers have sequenced a large number of bird and crocodilian genomes, there should be more information about the proteins made by these creatures. This data may, in turn, help researchers study dinosaur proteins that have survived over millions of years, Cleland said.

Read more at Discovery News

Angkor Wat Yields Astounding Buried Towers

Eight buried towers and the remains of a massive spiral structure created from sand have been discovered at Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

The massive structure — almost a mile long — contains a spiral design, with several rectangular spirals that form a giant structure, archaeologists say. “This structure, which has dimensions of more than 1,500 m × 600 m (about 1 mile by 1,970 feet) is the most striking discovery associated with Angkor Wat to date. Its function remains unknown and, as yet, it has no known equivalent in the Angkorian world,” Roland Fletcher, a University of Sydney professor, said in a statement put out by the university.

Today, the spiral structure is hard to make out on the ground, having been obscured by modern features and vegetation.

By examining the mile-long spiral structure and the stone towers, researchers date them back to when Angkor Wat was first built in the 12th century A.D.

King Suryavarman II had Angkor Wat built as a Hindu temple to the god Vishnu. The temple has a 213-foot-tall (65 meters) central tower that is surrounded by four smaller towers and a series of enclosure walls. The layout “is considered to correspond with the cosmology of Mount Meru and the surrounding Sea of Milk from which ambrosia was churned by the gods and demons,” wrote a research team in an article published this month in the journal Antiquity.

Antiquity recently published a special section dedicated to the latest archaeological research at Angkor Wat.

Spiral mystery

The spiral structure is difficult to make out from the ground, and archaeologists found it using LiDAR — a laser-scanning technology that allows scientists to detect structures obscured by vegetation or modern development.

When surveyed on the ground the structure turned out to be made of “archaeologically sterile banks of sand,” meaning it contained no artifacts from the past, wrote archaeologists Damian Evans, a researcher with École française d’Extrême-Orient, and Roland Fletcher in an Antiquity article.

“Quite how the spirals functioned is not at all clear,” Evans and Fletcher wrote. One possibility is that it is a garden that provided the temple with produce for rituals and eating, the spiral patterns possibly having a spiritual significance.

Evans and Fletcher found that the spiral structure was not in use for long. A canal that cut through the spiral design was built later in the 12th century.

“The spiral features would only have been functional for a brief period during the mid-to-late twelfth century A.D.,” Evans and Fletcher wrote. They say that it’s possible the spiral structure was never completed.

Buried towers

Another discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar and archaeological excavation, are the remains of what appear to be eight demolished towers constructed out of sandstone and laterite (a type of rock). They were found on the western side of Angkor Wat beside a gateway across the moat.

The dating is not entirely clear but it appears that many of the towers were created during the early-to-mid 12th century when Angkor Wat was being constructed.

Archaeologists found that some of the towers form a series of squares that may have supported one or more structures. They also found that many of the towers were constructed before the gateway wall.

They theorize that the towers could have supported a shrine that was in use while construction of Angkor Wat was underway.

“The configuration of the buried ‘towers’ contains the unique possibility that a shrine was built on the western side of the Angkor Wat platform during the period when the main temple was being constructed,” a research team wrote in an article published in Antiquity.

Once the main temple was constructed and work on the gateway across the western moat began, the shrine could have been torn down, researchers say.

Read more at Discovery News