Physicians Report Rare Case of a Patient Sweating Blood

Bleeding discharge from the forehead (A) and lower face (B) of a 21-year-old woman.

A bizarre medical mystery has been making the rounds this week on news sites and social media concerning an Italian woman who literally sweats blood. The story behind the story is even more intriguing.

According to a report published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a 21-year-old woman in Florence walked into a medical ward bleeding from her face and hands. The blood appeared to be real — and appeared to be hers — but doctors could find no wounds or lesions.

The woman disclosed that she had been regularly sweating blood for years. The bleeding incidents happened spontaneously, both when awake and sleeping, and could last up to five minutes. She never reported the condition, which had taken a toll on her mental health, leading to isolation and depression.

“Our patient had become socially isolated owing to embarrassment over the bleeding and she reported symptoms consistent with major depressive disorder and panic disorder,” wrote doctors Roberto Maglie and Marzia Caproni.

After examining her skin and taking samples of the fluid, the doctors confirmed that the woman was indeed sweating blood through the pores of her skin. The medical team found no evidence of psychosis or factitious disorder — the clinical euphemism for “faking it.”

Histologic analysis from a bleeding area showed normal skin without any relevant histopathologic changes

The doctors from the University of Florence published details on the perplexing case this week, revealing more layers to the mystery.

In a commentary published with the initial case report, medical historian Jacalyn Duffin of Queen's University in Canada suggests that incidents of spontaneous blood sweat actually span the globe and go back thousands of years.

There's even a name for the condition – hematohidrosis – but it's so exceedingly rare that researchers have essentially ignored the phenomenon. No one had previously connected the dots in the medical literature.

Duffin found more than two-dozen cases of the condition from around the world in the past 15 years. In these modern cases, doctors had used modern methods of diagnosis to confirm that the blood was indeed seeping through the skin.

Duffin discovered reports of spontaneous bleeding going all the way back to the writings of Aristotle. She rooted out more than 40 references from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century. While some of these writings are simple descriptions, others are the equivalent of case reports from physicians of each era.

“When I saw the Italian case, I was really skeptical, quite honestly,” Duffin told Seeker. “There are so many similarities in the clinical presentation that I basically talked myself out of skepticism and I now believe that it's possible and plausiable that it happens.”

Duffin, initially recruited to peer-review the Italian report, said she quickly became fascinated by the topic.

“I got a double whammy on that one, because I'm both a hematologist and a medical historian,” she said.

Duffin believes incidents of hematohidrosis may be underreported. Doctors are hesitant to document or publish when they comes across a condition that isn't in the medical literature. The assumption is often that the patient is faking it, or is somehow deluded.

“That raises the question, are doctors ignoring it?” Duffin said.

Read more at Seeker

The Universe Should Have Destroyed Itself at the Big Bang. Why Didn't It?

According to the standard model of particle physics, the Big Bang should have produced matter and antimatter in equal quantities. By that logic, the universe should have annihilated itself from the very beginning. If you’ve watched enough Star Trek, you know that matter and antimatter cannot exist together in the same place because they tend to destroy one another with a tremendous release of energy.

And yet, here we are, with everything around us made almost entirely of matter. What happened to all the antimatter?

The enigma of matter/antimatter asymmetry is one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics, and scientists have been searching for the answer of what tipped the balance where matter won the battle for domination of the universe.

For decades, physicists have been comparing the fundamental properties of normal-matter particles with their antimatter counterparts, looking for some  infinitesimal difference between them besides their obvious difference in electric charge — with no luck.

Physicists study the subtle differences in the behavior of matter and antimatter particles created in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Several properties have been measured to the tiniest detail, and so far, all the experiments have not found a difference.

One measurement that had not been made was what is called the “magnetic moment” of the antiproton. The magnetic moment measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force.  Recently, an international team of researchers at CERN used the Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) to measure the magnetic moment of an antiproton to incredibly high precision. Their record-breaking results have now been published in the journal Nature.

What they found, however, is that the magnetic moments of both protons and antiprotons are of opposite sign, but they are otherwise identical. This has only deepened the mystery.

"All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist," said first author Christian Smorra in a statement "An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”

Antiprotons are artificially generated at CERN and researchers store them in a reservoir trap for experiments. BASE uses a cryogenically-cooled trap that captures the antiprotons with electrical and magnetic  fields,  since no physical container can hold antimatter. This team added an additional trap in an attempt to make the most precise measurements ever, to what scientists call a “parts-per-billion level of uncertainty.”

The team wrote in their paper that “the extraordinary difficulty in measuring [the magnetic moment of an antiproton] with high precision is caused by its intrinsic smallness; for example, it is 660 times smaller than the magnetic moment of the  positron.”

"The measurement of antiprotons was extremely difficult and we had been working on it for ten years,” said Stefan Ulmer, spokesperson of the BASE group. “The final breakthrough came with the revolutionary idea of performing the measurement with two particles.... That created higher precision in the measurements."

They created and captured the antiprotons in 2015 and held them for a record-breaking 405 days in the traps.

The team was able to measure the magnetic force of the antiproton to a level that is 350 times more precise than ever before. They said this is the equivalent of measuring the circumference of the earth to a precision of four centimeters.

Read more at Seeker

Bandit-Masked Dinosaur With Striped Tail Evolved to Escape Tyrannosaurs

Sinosauropteryx in the likely open habitat in which it lived 130 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous

Since the taxon Dinosauria was formally named in 1842, dinosaurs have mostly been depicted as drab-hued beasts. New fossils and high-tech methods for analyzing ancient pigments, however, are now revealing the true colors and bold feather patterns of some of these long-gone animals.

The latest dinosaur to receive a reconstructive makeover is Sinosauropteryx, which according to a paper in the journal Current Biology had a striped tail, feathers of different shades of brown, and a raccoon-like “bandit mask” on its face. All of these features likely helped the slender and wily species, which could grow up to 3 1/2 feet long, to blend visually into its environment.

Senior author Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol told Seeker that big dinosaurs were also camouflaged while animals this big today are not. “This tells us that the predators back then were scarier than today,” he said. “Jurassic Park would be really scary if it ever was to happen.”

Vinther, lead author Fiann Smithwick, and their team studied the remnants of pigmented feathers from three of the best-preserved specimens of Sinosauropteryx. This was a carnivorous dinosaur that lived around the prehistoric Jehol Lake region in what is now Liaoning, China, around 130 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous. Distribution of the fossilized compound melanin allowed the scientists to reconstruct the dinosaur’s stripes and coloration.

While stripes are easily seen against a bright white or dark background, they can help to camouflage an animal in most natural settings. A dark stripe around the eyes — like a mask — can function in a similar way.

“Mammals often have bandit masks for different reasons than birds,” Smithwick, also from the University of Bristol, explained to Seeker. “Along with anti-glare, mammals tend to use them as warning colors or for social communication, while birds more often use them to hide the eyes as a form of camouflage.”

The best-preserved fossil specimen of Sinosauropteryx from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota of China and an interpretive drawing of the bones, stomach contents, and darkly pigmented feathers. The scale bar represents 50 mm (about 2 inches).

Since today’s birds are essentially living dinosaurs, the scientists believe the latter explanation can apply to Sinosauropteryx.

The recreation of this dinosaur’s appearance negates a prior reconstruction attempt by another research team. In the earlier version, Sinosauropteryx was depicted as having a dark blotch on its legs and lower underside.

Smithwick said that the artist of this older drawing “appears to have mistaken the internal organs preserved in the fossil for original colors…Many of the fossils have dark organic remains in the abdomen because internal organs also contain melanin, as does the eye.”

2010 digital reconstruction of Sinosauropteryx. New research has eliminated the black underside and legs and has changed the recreation in other respects.

For the new study, Smithwick and his team created 3D models of the striped, masked dinosaur and photographed them under different lighting conditions to determine how the visual features could have best hidden the animal from potential predators. The images support that Sinosauropteryx was active during the day and must have spent a lot of time in direct sunlight.

The images further show that the dinosaur was countershaded, meaning that its feathers were darker on the top than on the sides and underbelly. Existent animals living in open habitats, such as savannahs, tend to have lighter coloration higher up on their sides than do forest dwellers.

Application of these principals to Sinosauropteryx indicates that the dinosaur lived in a savannah-type habitat with minimal vegetation.

A prior study led by Vinther found that another dinosaur from the Jehol Lake region, Psittacosaurus, exhibited the gradual countershading pattern, suggesting that it lived in a forest.

“So the dinosaurs we find in these lake beds are from different habitats around these lakes,” Vinther said.

“Countershading only works when viewed from the side, as it is about counterilluminating your shadows,” he added. “When viewed from above, your general color on the back should hopefully match the floor pretty well. However, this is all about not being spotted from a distance.”

The reconstructed color patterns of Sinosauropteryx shows its counter-shaded pattern along with the striped tail and bandit mask. The scale bar represents 100 mm (about 4 inches).

Carnivorous dinosaurs, such as relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex, were found in the same deposits as Sinosauropteryx. These included meat-loving species like Dilong and Yutyrannus, both of which were known to have excellent vision. It is therefore likely that Sinosauropteryx evolved its camouflage to escape predation by these larger dinosaurs.

Sinosauropteryx also had very long legs and the longest relative tail length of any known carnivorous dinosaur. Tails can help with balance and fast turns when running, so this dinosaur probably attempted to make hasty getaways when tyrannosaurs approached.

And camouflage can help the hunter as well as the hunted.

“We have direct evidence of predation by Sinosauropteryx, as one fossil has a complete lizard in its stomach representing its last meal — such a substantial one that it almost completely fills the abdominal cavity,” Smithwick said.

“The lizard has limb proportions suggesting it would have been a fast runner and was better suited to running in open areas. So this corresponds well to our results suggesting Sinosauropteryx was fast moving and lived in open areas,” he added.

Read more at Seeker

Mongolian Microfossils Could Be Earth’s First Animals

Assorted microfossils from the Ediacaran Khesen Formation, Mongolia. Each fossil is on the order of 200 microns maximum dimension.

Transitional moments are often hard to pinpoint in evolutionary history. Because changes to species can occur gradually over long periods of time, it is difficult to know exactly when birds diverged from non-avian dinosaurs or when humans branched off from their primate ancestors.

The mother of all such moments — when microbes evolved into animals — is even more challenging to identify given the long-ago age of that landmark event.

A newly found assemblage of microfossils dating to 540 million years ago could help to solve the mystery. The authors of the discovery, writing in the journal Geology, believe it is possible that many of the fossils belong to the putative animal Megasphaera.

“If the fossils do represent an animal, it would be the oldest animal in the fossil record,” lead author Ross Anderson of Yale University and the University of Oxford told Seeker.

He added, however, that “interpretations of the group of organisms which the fossil represents have proved controversial over the last 20 years.”

Some researchers have concluded that similar fossils are of sulphur-oxidising bacteria. Still others think they are the remains of green algae.

Reconstructions showing what many researchers believe is a 600-million-year-old animal embryo undergoing cellular division. The images were based on three-dimensional X-ray views of microfossils found at Doushantuo Formation, South China.

Shuhai Xiao of Harvard University and colleagues, writing in the journal Nature in 1998, were among the first to propose that such fossils are the remains of multicellular animal embryos. Since then, numerous “embryo-like” fossils have been unearthed at the 600-million-year-old Doushantuo Formation of South China.

The Mongolian fossils, discovered at that country’s Khesen Formation to the west of Lake Khuvsgul, are younger. Anderson and his team dated them to 540 million years ago.

The scientists decided to excavate the site in northern Mongolia because it consists of numerous phosphorites, which are sedimentary rocks that contain a high proportion of calcium phosphate. The rocks at Doushantuo are of a very similar composition.

“In terms of the fossils present (at Khesen) there are a lot of similarities” with those at Doushantuo, Anderson said. “The fossils are also preserved in the same manner as those found in the Doushantuo Formation, yielding the exceptional cellular level of preservation.”

He and his colleagues suspect that many of the microfossils preserve different stages of embryonic development whereby cells divide and multiply.

“For example,” he said, “we have specimens with only a single internal cell, but others with up to 100.”

As for how single-celled organisms evolved into multicellular ones, there are many possibilities.

Anderson explained that an increase in the availability of oxygen; genomic evolution, which may provide new biological equipment; changes in nutrient cycling; continental reconfiguration, which opens up new habitats; and greater predation could have been factors.

He added that evaluating these hypotheses requires a good temporally calibrated fossil record to test correlations to environmental change. Since the Mongolian microfossil assemblage extends both the location and timing of Megasphaera, it moves the researchers one step closer to that goal.

Read more at Seeker

First Jurassic ichthyosaur fossil found in India

Articulated skeleton of Ophthalmosaurid ichthyosaur at the excavation site south of Lodai village, situated 30 km northeast of Bhuj town, the headquarters of Ka-chchh District in Gujarat state, western India.

A new near-complete fossilized skeleton is thought to represent the first Jurassic ichthyosaur found in India, according to a study published October 25, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Guntupalli Prasad from the University of Delhi, India, and colleagues.

Ichthyosaurs, literally 'fish lizards' in Greek, were large marine reptiles which lived alongside dinosaurs in the Mesozoic Era. While many ichthyosaur fossils have been found in North American and Europe, in the Southern Hemisphere, their fossil record has mostly been limited to South America and Australia.

Now, the authors of the present study report what they believe to be the first Jurassic ichthyosaur found in India, from the Kachchh area in Gujarat. The near-complete skeleton, nearly 5.5m long, is thought to belong to the Ophthalmosauridae family, which likely lived between around 165 and 90 million years ago. It was found among fossils of ammonites and squid-like belemnites, and its tooth wear patterns suggest it predated such hard, abrasive animals.

While the authors have not yet been able to pinpoint the ichthyosaur's species, they believe that a full identification could inform on possible ophthalmosaurid dispersal between India and South America. They hope that unearthing more Jurassic vertebrates in this region could provide further insights into the evolution of marine reptiles in this part of the globe.

Lead author Guntupalli Prasad notes: "This is a remarkable discovery not only because it is the first Jurassic ichthyosaur record from India, but also it throws light on the evolution and diversity of ichthyosaurs in the Indo-Madagascan region of the former Gondwanaland and India's biological connectivity with other continents in the Jurassic."

From Science Daily

'Mega-carnivore' dinosaur roamed southern Africa 200 million years ago

Fabien Knoll, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, lies next to the new exceptionally large carnivorous dinosaur footprints found in Lesotho.

An international team of scientists has discovered the first evidence that a huge carnivorous dinosaur roamed southern Africa 200 million year ago.

The team, which includes researchers from The University of Manchester, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, have found several three-toed footprints measuring 57cm long and 50cm wide.

This means the dinosaur would have an estimated body length of around nine metres (30 feet) and be a little less than three metres tall at the hip. That's four times the size of a lion, which is currently the largest carnivore in southern Africa.

The footprints belong to a new species, named Kayentapus ambrokholohali, which is part of the group of dinosaurs called "megatheropod." The term "Megatheropods" describes the giant two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs, such as the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) which fossil evidence shows was around 12 metres long.

This study, which is published in PLOS ONE, also reveals that these footprints make up the largest theropod tracks in Africa.

The tracks were found on an ancient land surface, known as a palaeosurface, in the Maseru District of Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa. The surface is covered in 200 million years old 'current-ripple marks' and 'desiccation cracks' which are signs of a prehistoric watering hole or river bank.

Dr Fabien Knoll, Senior Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, said: 'The latest discovery is very exciting and sheds new light on the kind of carnivore that roamed what is now southern Africa.

'That's because it is the first evidence of an extremely large meat-eating animal roaming a landscape otherwise dominated by a variety of herbivorous, omnivorous and much smaller carnivorous dinosaurs. It really would have been top of the food chain.'

What makes the discovery even more important is that these footprints date back to the Early Jurassic epoch, when it was thought the size of most theropod dinosaurs was considerably smaller. On average they were previously thought to be around three to five metres in body length, with some records showing they may have reached seven metres at the very most. It is only much later in the Jurassic and during the Cretaceous, which starts 145 million years ago, that truly large forms of theropods, such as T. rex, appear in body and trace fossil records.

Dr Lara Sciscio, postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town, said: 'This discovery marks the first occurrence of very large carnivorous dinosaurs in the Early Jurassic of southern Gondwana -- the prehistoric continent which would later break up and become Africa and other landmasses. This makes it a significant find. Globally, these large tracks are very rare. There is only one other known site similar in age and sized tracks, which is in Poland.'

The ancient surface where these footprints were found is also covered with the tracks of much smaller theropod dinosaurs.

Read more at Science Daily

6,000-year-old skull could be from the world's earliest known tsunami victim

This is the cranium of a person who lived in what's now Papua New Guinea, 6,000 years ago.

Tsunamis spell calamity. These giant waves, caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and underwater landslides, are some of the deadliest natural disasters known; the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed over 230,000 people, a higher death toll than any fire or hurricane. Scientists studying the effects of tsunamis have now shed light on what could be the earliest record of a person killed in a tsunami: someone who lived 6,000 years ago in what's now Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. Their skull was found in geological sediments having the distinctive hallmarks of ancient tsunami activity. This means, scientists posit in a new paper in PLOS ONE, that this skull could be from the earliest known tsunami victim.

"If we are right about how this person had died thousands of years ago, we have dramatic proof that living by the sea isn't always a life of beautiful golden sunsets and great surfing conditions," says John Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at The Field Museum and one of the study's authors. "Maybe this individual can help us as scientists to convince skeptics today that all of us on earth must take climate change and rising sea levels seriously as the threats they truly are."

The skull in question was found in 1929, buried in the ground near the small town of Aitape on the northern of Papua New Guinea, about 500 miles north of Australia. Terrell has been doing archaeological and anthropological research in this coastal region of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, since 1990. The new PLOS One study is a continuation of that work, contributed to by the University of New South Wales, l'Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Auckland, New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, the University of Papua New Guinea, Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery, and The Field Museum. As a member of this international team, Terrell says he has long wondered what to make of this tantalizing human find.

"The skull has always been of great archaeological interest because it is one of the few early skeletal remains from the area," says Mark Golitko of the University of Notre Dame and The Field Museum. "It was originally thought that the skull belonged to Homo erectus until the deposits were more reliably radiocarbon dated to about 5,000 to 6,000 years. Back then, sea levels were higher and the area would have been just behind the shoreline."

In 2014 Golitko and others went back to the exact place where this skull had been found to look for new clues about what killed this individual. "We have now been able to confirm what we have long suspected," says James Goff at the University of New South Wales in Australia, the report's first author. "The geological similarities between the sediments at the place where the skull was found and sediments laid down during the 1998 tsunami that hit this same coastline have made us realise that human populations in this area have been affected by these massive inundations for thousands of years."

"Given the evidence we have in hand, we are more convinced than before that this person was either violently killed by a tsunami, or had their grave ripped open by one -- leading to their head but not the rest of their body being naturally reburied where it then remained undiscovered in the ground for some 6,000 or so years," explains Goff.

Read more at Science Daily

Alvarezsaurid dinosaur from the late Cretaceous found in Uzbekistan

This is an image of alvarezsauridae gen. et sp. indet., posterior caudal vertebrae.

Bones from an Alvarezsaurid dinosaur were discovered in Uzbekistan and could shed light on the evolution and origin of the species, according to a study published October 25, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alexander Averianov of Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia and Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution, USA.

Previous studies have described Alvarezsauridae as small, long-legged, bipedal dinosaurs with short forelimbs that featured bird-like hands. Since Alvarezsaurid remains are extremely rare, there is plenty to learn about the evolution of this species.

The authors of this study analyzed previously excavated Alvarezsaurid remains from the Turonian Bissekty Formation of Uzbekistan. They examined the vertebrae, the bird-like bone that fuses the wrist and knuckle known as the carpometacarpus, and pieces of what would be the fingers or toes, known as the phalanx. They then measured and compared the shapes and sizes of these bones with those from similar species from the literature.

The authors state that the characteristics for the Alvarezsaurid bones are so distinctive that it could be identified just from the seven bones collected at the Bissekty Formation. These distinctive features included rounded vertebrae located close to the tail, a large and depressed second metacarpal, and a robust second digit with a claw-like end.

While there are competing theories about where the Alvarezsaurid originated, the authors suggest that the discovery of an Alvarezsaurid at this site in Uzbekistan indicates that this group had an evolutionary history in Asia and provides evidence that this continent could have been where the clade originated.

Lead author Hans Sues says: "Our paper reports the discovery of the earliest known alvarezsaurid dinosaur from the Northern Hemisphere, based on 90-million-year-old fossils from Central Asia. Alvarezsaurids were unusual small predatory dinosaurs that had very short but powerfuly built arms that ended in a single large digit."

From Science Daily

Prehistoric Fossil Teeth Spark Heated Debate Over Human Evolution

Different views of an upper right molar tooth excavated near Eppelsheim, Germany

In a paper shared at the social networking site ResearchGate, Herbert Lutz and his team say they discovered “a new great ape with startling resemblances to African members of the hominin tribe.” The "plausible age” of the fossils — an upper left canine tooth and an upper right first molar — is 9.7 million years, they say.

If confirmed, that would make the teeth around 6 million years older than fossils for the early human African ancestor Australopithecus afarensis, aka Lucy, and emerged over 9 million years before anatomically modern humans were thought to have migrated out of Africa.

The fossil teeth potentially provide evidence that a human lineage evolved outside of Africa, and before major African human lineages first emerged.

Michael Ebling, the mayor of Mainz, added to the intrigue by telling the German media site Merkurist, “I would suggest that we must start rewriting the history of mankind after today.” 

Co-author Axel von Berg, an archaeologist in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, echoed the excitement when he told Allgemeine Zeitung, “This will amaze experts.”

Lutz, von Berg, and their colleagues report that the teeth exhibit characteristics similar, not only to Lucy, but also to other early hominins such as Ardipithecus ramidus and Ardipithecus kadabba. They estimate that the teeth belonged to an individual who weighed about 33 pounds. In contrast, Lucy is thought to have weighed between 45–110 pounds.

The site where the teeth were unearthed, Germany’s Eppelsheim formation, has previously yielded other important fossils. A femur excavated there in the early 19th century is believed by many to be the world’s first known primate fossil. Excavations between 1934 and 1935 that were directed by scientist Otto Schmidtgen unearthed still more primate fossils with hominoid features. These fossils, all teeth, were somehow lost during World War II, however.

The newly unearthed teeth were found at practically the same spot after 20 years of “painstaking excavations,” the researchers write, adding that, “Both teeth represent a hitherto unknown great ape with startling hominin resemblances.”

The teeth differ from all other known human ancestral remains found in Europe and Asia so far, according to the researchers. The date of the fossils was determined by the geological layer within which they were found and by surrounding microfossils. Radiometric or other more precise methods of dating have not yet been conducted.

Artist’s reconstruction of the face of Australopithecus afarensis

Despite the lofty claims about the teeth, human evolution experts have been largely underwhelmed by the new discovery.

“The possible findings of more evidence of hominids outside of Africa is interesting, especially for deep hominin history, but I don’t think the overall picture of hominid evolution will change much,” Carina Schlebusch, an assistant professor in the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University, told Seeker. “Genetics still point to a relatively recent African origin of the variation in all living humans.”

Anthropologist Monte McCrossin of New Mexico State University offered even more harsh words.

“Sadly, this discovery isn’t at all what it claims to be; it’s fool’s gold,” he wrote in a comment posted on ResearchGate. “This site in Germany has nothing whatsoever to do with human evolution.”

Paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto and other scientists suspect that one or more of the fossils found at Eppelsheim could have belonged to a genus of extinct primates known as Pliopithecus, and not hominids.

Skull of the fossil primate Epipliopithecus vindobonensis on display at the Field Museum of Natural History

Begun told Seeker that he and his colleagues theorize that the African ape and human lineages arose from a European or Western Asian ancestor that migrated to Africa about 7–9 million years ago. Some human ancestors are then thought to have migrated back to Europe and Asia, while others continued to evolve in Africa.

The complex back and forth migrations might at first seem “unnecessarily complicated,” he said, but he said similar theories help to explain the evolution of other animals, such as aardvarks and hippos.

Evidence for possible early human presence outside of Africa also goes beyond debates over the Eppelsheim teeth.

In August, it was reported that fossil footprints possibly belonging to a hominin were found on the island of Crete. They date to 5.7 million years ago. According to the authors of the paper, published in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, the individual who left the prints was bipedal, walked on the soles of its feet, and exhibited other human-like characteristics.

This year, it was also reported that a human-resembling primate, Graecopithecus freybergi, lived in the Eastern Mediterranean around 7.2 million years ago. Madelaine Böhme of the Senckengberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, Begun, and their team analyzed fossils for the primate, nicknamed El Graeco.

The oldest higher primates are known from Asia more than 40 million years ago,” Böhme told Seeker. “But hominids have surely evolved from African hominids. After 14 million years, they first enter Eurasia and diversified into Ponginae — orangutan — and Homininae.”

It is possible that the Eppelsheim individual descended from one of these early migrations. On the other hand, it could belong to a lineage that remained in Asia and Europe.

Various views of the upper left canine tooth found at Eppelsheim

While experts debated the many possibilities, Lutz’s voice and that of his team was notably absent.

“Our paper provoked contradiction, which we take very seriously,” Lutz told Seeker. “We will now first reexamine the finds to see which of the proposed relationships is the most plausible one.”

Relationships refers to how the teeth should be classified.

“Under these circumstances,” he added, “we want to postpone any further comment until we have cleared the situation.”

The initial controversy over the Eppelsheim discovery has fizzled out — for now. But it’s clear that many important questions remain about human evolution, which could significantly impact our lives.

Differences in genetics, for example, can affect medical treatments. Neanderthal heritage, for example, can influence a person’s appearance, behavior, health, and even habits, such as smoking.

Read more at Seeker

Spots on supergiant star drive spirals in stellar wind

Artist's impression of the hot massive supergiant Zeta Puppis. The rotation period of the star indicated by the new BRITE observations is 1.78 d, and its spin axis is inclined by (24 ± 9)° with respect to the line of sight.

A Canadian-led international team of astronomers recently discovered that spots on the surface of a supergiant star are driving huge spiral structures in its stellar wind. Their results are published in a recent edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Massive stars are responsible for producing the heavy elements that make up all life on Earth. At the end of their lives they scatter the material into interstellar space in catastrophic explosions called supernovae -- without these dramatic events, our solar system would never have formed.

Zeta Puppis is an evolved massive star known as a 'supergiant'. It is about sixty times more massive than our sun, and seven times hotter at the surface. Massive stars are rare, and usually found in pairs called 'binary systems' or small groups known as 'multiple systems'. Zeta Puppis is special however, because it is a single massive star, moving through space alone, at a velocity of about 60 kilometers per second. "Imagine an object about sixty times the mass of the Sun, travelling about sixty times faster than a speeding bullet!" the investigators say. Dany Vanbeveren, professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, gives a possible explanation as to why the star is travelling so fast; "One theory is that Zeta Puppis has interacted with a binary or a multiple system in the past, and been thrown out into space at an incredible velocity."

Using a network of 'nanosatellites' from the "BRIght Target Explorer" (BRITE) space mission, astronomers monitored the brightness of the surface of Zeta Puppis over a six-month period, and simultaneously monitored the behavior of its stellar wind from several ground-based professional and amateur observatories.

Tahina Ramiaramanantsoa (PhD student at the Université de Montréal and member of the Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Québec; CRAQ) explains the authors' results: "The observations revealed a repeated pattern every 1.78 days, both at the surface of the star and in the stellar wind. The periodic signal turns out to reflect the rotation of the star through giant 'bright spots' tied to its surface, which are driving large-scale spiral-like structures in the wind, dubbed 'co-rotating interaction regions' or 'CIRs'."

"By studying the light emitted at a specific wavelength by ionized helium from the star's wind," continued Tahina, "we clearly saw some 'S' patterns caused by arms of CIRs induced in the wind by the bright surface spots!." In addition to the 1.78-day periodicity, the research team also detected random changes on timescales of hours at the surface of Zeta Puppis, strongly correlated with the behavior of small regions of higher density in the wind known as "clumps" that travel outward from the star. "These results are very exciting because we also find evidence, for the first time, of a direct link between surface variations and wind clumping, both random in nature," comments investigating team member Anthony Moffat, emeritus professor at Université de Montréal, and Principal Investigator for the Canadian contribution to the BRITE mission.

After several decades of puzzling over the potential link between the surface variability of very hot massive stars and their wind variability, these results are a significant breakthrough in massive star research, essentially owing to the BRITE nanosats and the large contribution by amateur astronomers. "It is really exciting to know that, even in the era of giant professional telescopes, dedicated amateur astronomers using off-the-shelf equipment in their backyard observatories can play a significant role at the forefront of science," says investigating team member Paul Luckas from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at the University of Western Australia. Paul is one of six amateur astronomers who intensively observed Zeta Puppis from their homes during the observing campaign, as part of the 'Southern Amateur Spectroscopy initiative'.

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