Russian Firm Plans Commercial Space Station

Buoyed by plans for commercial space taxis, a Russian company plans to build and launch a privately owned outpost in orbit for tourists, scientists and other paying visitors.

RSC Energia, which designed and built the Russian modules of the International Space Station, is partnering with Russian commercial space startup Orbital Technologies to manufacture the new hub, currently known as Commercial Space Station.

Unlike the International Space Station, the CSS will be assembled on the ground and put into orbit by a single Soyuz rocket, according to Orbital Technologies CEO Sergey Kostenko.

Designs for the seven-person outpost are complete and construction is expected to begin in 2012 or 2013. Launch would take place about two years later. Prices to stay on the station have not yet been determined, Kostenko said in an interview.

“I’m very optimistic about space tourism in the future,” he said.

Orbital Technologies is working with the U.S.-based Space Adventures, which arranged eight privately paid visits to the International Space Station via Russian Soyuz vehicles and which recently announced an agreement to market Boeing’s planned commercial crew capsules.

Kostenko said his firm is looking to partner with Boeing, SpaceX, Russia, China and any other country or company with the capability of flying people to and from the Commercial Space Station.


“All space transportation systems are welcome,” he said.

The outpost, which will be left unoccupied between visits, will have some science facilities for experiments. Kostenko said he expects about half the visitors simply will want to look out the windows.
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Each seven-member crew will include one commander who is a professional astronaut and six non-professional fliers, Kostenko said.

The project is similar to plans by Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace for inflatable habitats for tourism, science and entertainment.

“Bigelow is a competitor. That's all I’m going to say about that,” Kostenko said.

Orbital Technologies plans to put its station in the same orbit as the International Space Station and make it available as a emergency evacuation shelter.

Image: The Commercial Space Station includes sleeping berths for four, leaving three visitors to bunk down in their space taxi or a nook in the station. It is being designed so that vehicles from any country or company can berth. Top: Commercial Space Station. Bottom: Commercial Space Station in section (Orbital Technologies, Ltd.) [source]

In to the Cristal Caves

NGC goes inside one of the greatest natural marvels on the planet - a giant crystal cave described as Superman's fortress, with magnificent crystals up to 36 feet long and weighing 55 tons. A team of experts venture into the cavern, enduring scorching-hot temperatures that could kill a human after just 15 minutes of exposure. They'll push the boundaries of physical limitation to explore a crevasse that could lead to another - and perhaps more spectacular - crystal cave.


Cavers exploring Naica's Los Crystales cave where more than a hundred giant crystals have grown.

Jaguar Builds A Twin-Turbine Electric Supercar You Can’t Have

PARIS — One of the joys of the modern auto show is the flight of fancy known as the concept car. In the interest of generating buzz and flexing muscles, automakers trot out impossibly beautiful design and engineering studies that have no hope of production, machines that will never see a showroom or roll down a public road under their own power. At this year’s Paris auto show, Jaguar unveiled the C-X75, a twin-turbine-equipped, electrically powered, four-wheel-drive, 205-mph slice of wonderful that you won’t ever be able to buy.

You can be forgiven if the curves look familiar. The C-X75 was created to celebrate Jaguar’s 75th anniversary, and as such, it purposely recalls iconic speed sleds like the XJ13 of the 1960s and the XJ220 of the 1990s.

The C-X75’s voluptuous lines hide a range-extending hybrid powetrain akin to the one found in the Chevrolet Volt; four 195-horsepower electric motors, one at each wheel, are paired with two 80,000-rpm gasoline turbines that live under the Jag’s rear lid. Jaguar claims that each motor weighs a scant 50 kg and that, in total, the car is capable of producing 780 hp and 1180 lb-ft of torque. Power is stored in a 19-kWH, 330-pound lithium-ion battery pack that can provide up to 68 miles of electric-only driving. 62 mph arrives in a scant 3.4 seconds.



Like most supercar concepts, the Jag boasts a host of staggeringly expensive, eye-candy-laden features. The turbines, axial-flow micro units that were developed in concert with Bladon Jets, are the result of a joint project with the British government-sponsored Technology Strategy Board. The car’s interior is a mass of TFT screens, polished metal, and stretched leather. The aluminum bodywork houses an adjustable-vane exhaust—those turbines have to breathe, after all—and a carbon-fiber-clad rear diffuser that looks like the business end of a Transformer in heat.

In short, the C-X75 is impractical. In many ways, it’s disconnected from reality. It likely cost more than a hundred government toilets and has as much chance of ending up in our driveway as the Eiffel Tower. And, crucially, it plucks a few heartstrings by name-checking history and the cars we loved when we were little.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of thing we go to auto shows to see.

Newly Discovered Planet May Be First Truly Habitable Exoplanet

A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.
To astronomers, a "potentially habitable" planet is one that could sustain life, not necessarily one that humans would consider a nice place to live. Habitability depends on many factors, but liquid water and an atmosphere are among the most important.

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."

The findings are based on 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "Advanced techniques combined with old-fashioned ground-based telescopes continue to lead the exoplanet revolution," said Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution. "Our ability to find potentially habitable worlds is now limited only by our telescope time."

Vogt and Butler lead the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. The team's new findings are reported in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and posted online at arXiv.org. Coauthors include associate research scientist Eugenio Rivera of UC Santa Cruz; associate astronomer Nader Haghighipour of the University of Hawaii-Manoa; and research scientists Gregory Henry and Michael Williamson of Tennessee State University.

The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system other than our own solar system. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.

The most interesting of the two new planets is Gliese 581g, with a mass three to four times that of the Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt.

Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has a somewhat checkered history of habitable-planet claims. Two previously detected planets in the system lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.

"We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone--one too hot and one too cold--and now we have one in the middle that's just right," Vogt said.

The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet's surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the "terminator"), with surface temperatures decreasing toward the dark side and increasing toward the light side.

"Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude," Vogt said.

The researchers estimate that the average surface temperature of the planet is between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius). Actual temperatures would range from blazing hot on the side facing the star to freezing cold on the dark side.

If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to the Earth's, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth. The surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than Earth's, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet, Vogt said.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of Gliese 581 using the HIRES spectrometer (designed by Vogt) on the Keck I Telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The spectrometer allows precise measurements of a star's radial velocity (its motion along the line of sight from Earth), which can reveal the presence of planets. The gravitational tug of an orbiting planet causes periodic changes in the radial velocity of the host star. Multiple planets induce complex wobbles in the star's motion, and astronomers use sophisticated analyses to detect planets and determine their orbits and masses.

"It's really hard to detect a planet like this," Vogt said. "Every time we measure the radial velocity, that's an evening on the telescope, and it took more than 200 observations with a precision of about 1.6 meters per second to detect this planet."

To get that many radial velocity measurements (238 in total), Vogt's team combined their HIRES observations with published data from another group led by the Geneva Observatory (HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Search project).

In addition to the radial velocity observations, coauthors Henry and Williamson made precise night-to-night brightness measurements of the star with one of Tennessee State University's robotic telescopes. "Our brightness measurements verify that the radial velocity variations are caused by the new orbiting planet and not by any process within the star itself," Henry said.

The researchers also explored the implications of this discovery with respect to the number of stars that are likely to have at least one potentially habitable planet. Given the relatively small number of stars that have been carefully monitored by planet hunters, this discovery has come surprisingly soon.

"If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so nearby," Vogt said. "The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy."

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Scientists Genetically Engineer Silkworms to Produce Artificial Spider Silk

A research and development effort by the University of Notre Dame, the University of Wyoming, and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. has succeeded in producing transgenic silkworms capable of spinning artificial spider silks.

"This research represents a significant breakthrough in the development of superior silk fibers for both medical and non-medical applications," said Malcolm J. Fraser Jr., a Notre Dame professor of biological sciences. "The generation of silk fibers having the properties of spider silks has been one of the important goals in materials science."

Natural spider silks have a number of unusual physical properties, including significantly higher tensile strength and elasticity than naturally spun silkworm fibers. The artificial spider silks produced in these transgenic silkworms have similar properties of strength and flexibility to native spider silk.

Silk fibers have many current and possible future biomedical applications, such as use as fine suture materials, improved wound healing bandages, or natural scaffolds for tendon and ligament repair or replacement. Spider silk-like fibers may also have applications beyond biomedical uses, such as in bulletproof vests, strong and lightweight structural fabrics, a new generation athletic clothing and improved automobile airbags.

Until this breakthrough, only very small quantities of artificial spider silk had ever been produced in laboratories, but there was no commercially viable way to produce and spin these artificial silk proteins. Kraig Biocraft believed these limitations could be overcome by using recombinant DNA to develop a bio-technological approach for the production of silk fibers with a much broader range of physical properties or with pre-determined properties, optimized for specific biomedical or other applications.

The firm entered into a research agreement with Fraser, who discovered and patented a powerful and unique genetic engineering tool called "piggyBac." PiggyBac is a piece of DNA known as a transposon that can insert itself into the genetic machinery of a cell.

"Several years ago, we discovered that the piggyBac transposon could be useful for genetic engineering of the silkworm, and the possibilities for using this commercial protein production platform began to become apparent."

Fraser, with the assistance of University of Wyoming researcher Randy Lewis, a biochemist who is one of the world's foremost authorities on spider silk, and Don Jarvis, a noted molecular geneticist who specializes in insect protein production, genetically engineered silkworms in which they incorporated specific DNAs taken from spiders. When these transgenic silkworms spin their cocoons, the silk produced is not ordinary silkworm silk, but, rather, a combination of silkworm silk and spider silk. The genetically engineered silk protein produced by the transgenic silkworms has markedly improved elasticity and strength approaching that of native spider silk.

"We've also made strides in improving the process of genetic engineering of these animals so that the development of additional transgenics is facilitated," Fraser said. "This will allow us to more rapidly assess the effectiveness of our gene manipulations in continued development of specialized silk fibers."

Since silkworms are already a commercially viable silk production platform, these genetically engineered silkworms effectively solve the problem of large scale production of engineered protein fibers in an economically practical way.

"Using this entirely unique approach, we have confirmed that transgenic silkworms can be a potentially viable commercial platform for production of genetically engineered silk proteins having customizable properties of strength and elasticity," Fraser said. "We may even be able to genetically engineer fibers that exceed the remarkable properties of native spider silk."

The genetic engineering breakthrough was announced Sept. 29 by Fraser, Lewis and Kraig Biocraft CEO Kim Thompson at a press conference on the Notre Dame campus.

New Key to Tissue Regeneration: Drug Treatment Triggers Sodium Ions to Regrow Nerves and Muscle

Sodium gets a bad rap for contributing to hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Now biologists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences have discovered that sodium also plays a key role in initiating a regenerative response after severe injury. The Tufts scientists have found a way to regenerate injured spinal cord and muscle by using small molecule drugs to trigger an influx of sodium ions into injured cells.

The approach breaks new ground in the field of biomedicine because it requires no gene therapy; can be administered after an injury has occurred and even after the wound has healed over; and is bioelectric, rather than chemically based.

In a paper appearing as the cover story of the September 29, 2010, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, the Tufts team reported that a localized increase in sodium ions was necessary for young Xenopus laevis tadpoles to regenerate their tails - complex appendages containing spinal cord, muscle and other tissue.

Like human beings, who regenerate fingertips only as children, these tadpoles lose the ability to regenerate their tail with age. Most remarkably, it was shown that such "refractory" tadpoles whose tails had been removed could be induced to make a perfect new tail by only an hour of treatment with a specific drug cocktail.

The findings have tremendous implications for treating wounds sustained in war as well as accidental injuries. The treatment method used is most directly applicable to spinal cord repair and limb loss, which are highly significant medical problems world-wide. It also demonstrates a proof-of-principle that may be applicable to many complex organs and tissues.

"We have significantly extended the effective treatment window, demonstrating that even after scar-like wound covering begins to form, control of physiological signals can still induce regeneration. Artificially causing an influx of sodium for just one hour can overcome a variety of problems, such as the decline in regenerative ability that comes with age and the effect of regeneration-blocking drugs," said Tufts Professor of Biology Michael Levin, Ph.D., corresponding author on the paper and director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts. Co-authors were Research Associate Ai-Sun Tseng, Postdoctoral Associate Wendy S. Beane, Research Associate Joan M. Lemire, and Alessio Masi, a former post-doctoral associate in Levin's laboratory.

The transport of ions in and out of cells is regulated by electronic security doors, or gates, that let in specific ions under certain circumstances. A role for sodium current in tissue regeneration had been proposed in the past, but this is the first time the molecular-genetic basis of the ion flow has been identified, and a specific drug-based treatment demonstrated. Until now, advances in this model system had involved administering therapies before the injury was sustained.

"This is a novel, biomedically-relevant approach to inducing regeneration of a complex appendage," noted Levin.

The Tufts research established a novel role in regeneration for the sodium channel Nav1.2, a crucial component of nerve and cardiac function. It showed that local, early increase in intracellular sodium is required for initiating regeneration following Xenopus tail amputation, while molecular and pharmacological inhibition of sodium transport causes regenerative failure. The new treatment induced regeneration only of correctly-sized and patterned tail structures and did not generate ectopic or other abnormal growth.

"The ability to restore regeneration using a temporally-controllable pharmacological approach not requiring gene therapy is extremely exciting," said the researchers.

Of critical importance, they said, was the discovery that the tail could be induced to regenerate as late as 18 hours after amputation, revealing that tissues normally fated for regenerative failure still maintain their intrinsic characteristics and can be programmed to reactivate regeneration.

Amphibians such as frogs can restore organs lost during development, including the lens and tail. The frog tail is a good model for human regeneration because it repairs injury in the same way that people do: each tissue makes more of itself. (In contrast, regeneration in some other animals occurs through transdifferentiation (one cell type turns into another cell type) or adult stem cell differentiation. Furthermore, though small, the Xenopus larval tail is complex, with muscle, spinal cord, peripheral nerves and vasculature cells.

The National Institutes of Health, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Department of Defense and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the work.

No Evidence for Clovis Comet Catastrophe, Archaeologists Say

New research challenges the controversial theory that an ancient comet impact devastated the Clovis people, one of the earliest known cultures to inhabit North America.
Writing in the October issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologists Vance Holliday (University of Arizona) and David Meltzer (Southern Methodist University) argue that there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations. "Whether or not the proposed extraterrestrial impact occurred is a matter for empirical testing in the geological record," the researchers write. "Insofar as concerns the archaeological record, an extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist."

The comet theory first emerged in 2007 when a team of scientists announced evidence of a large extraterrestrial impact that occurred about 12,900 years ago. The impact was said to have caused a sudden cooling of the North American climate, killing off mammoths and other megafauna. It could also explain the apparent disappearance of the Clovis people, whose characteristic spear points vanish from the archaeological record shortly after the supposed impact.

As evidence for the rapid Clovis depopulation, comet theorists point out that very few Clovis archaeological sites show evidence of human occupation after the Clovis. At the few sites that do, Clovis and post-Clovis artifacts are separated by archaeologically sterile layers of sediments, indicating a time gap between the civilizations. In fact, comet theorists argue, there seems to be a dead zone in the human archaeological record in North America beginning with the comet impact and lasting about 500 years.

But Holliday and Meltzer dispute those claims. They argue that a lack of later human occupation at Clovis sites is no reason to assume a population collapse. "Single-occupation Paleoindian sites -- Clovis or post-Clovis -- are the norm," Holliday said. That's because many Paleoindian sites are hunting kill sites, and it would be highly unlikely for kills to be made repeatedly in the exact same spot.

"So there is nothing surprising about a Clovis occupation with no other Paleoindian zone above it, and it is no reason to infer a disaster," Holliday said.

In addition, Holliday and Meltzer compiled radiocarbon dates of 44 archaeological sites from across the U.S. and found no evidence of a post-comet gap. "Chronological gaps appear in the sequence only if one ignores standard deviations (a statistically inappropriate procedure), and doing so creates gaps not just around [12,900 years ago] but also at many later points in time," they write.

Sterile layers separating occupation zones at some sites are easily explained by shifting settlement patterns and local geological processes, the researchers say. The separation should not be taken as evidence of an actual time gap between Clovis and post-Clovis cultures.

Holliday and Meltzer believe that the disappearance of Clovis spear points is more likely the result of a cultural choice rather than a population collapse. "There is no compelling data to indicate that North American Paleoindians had to cope with or were affected by a catastrophe, extraterrestrial or otherwise, in the terminal Pleistocene," they conclude.

A Pod Car of One's Own

About 15 years ago I asked my family why we didn't have personal vehicles that move on tracks around town instead of cars. Little did I know that there were other people actually making it happen. A new generation of pod cars is poised to take off down the tracks.

Pod cars are usually called personal rapid transit or PRT, and several systems have been around since the gas crisis of the 1970s. They're different from trams or elevated trains that have connected cars for passengers. Instead, PRT involves small automated pods that carry up to six passengers from point to point. Imagine something like a gondola moving horizontally on tracks.

The beauty of PRT is that you can choose your destination and your fellow passengers. Anyone who has been squashed into an armpit on the subway knows what I'm talking about. PRT cars are electric-powered, quiet, don't require drivers and use very little energy and land. So why aren't they everywhere?

Actually PRT systems do exist stateside in West Virginia, Florida, Texas and Micigan. But as Crosscut.com's Curtis Johnson points out, these early versions were like the first IBM personal computers -- slow and clunky. The PRT in Morgantown, W.V., has become known for its long delays. New systems are more advanced.

London's Heathrow Airport is testing one built by ULTra PRT and the city of San Jose is conducting a PRT feasibility study, Jim Witkin writes on the New York Times Wheels blog. Heathrow's futuristic system includes 21 vehicles that run among three stations. A ride in either direction of the 1.2-mile guideway takes about six minutes, according to ULTra's site.

Even the slickest, most modern PRT systems face significant hurdles. The city of Winona, Minn., wanted to build one but their application for $25 million in federal funding to build a test facility was denied. Critics also worry that PRT will draw riders away from other forms of public transport, which already face budget strains. Plus, gaining the right of way for such a system is no easy task.

The bike, the bus, a carsharing service and rides from friends have made it possible for me to stay car-free, but a pod car system could make it even more tempting to ditch car ownership, if you only need one to get you down that last mile. That's the dream: a pod of one's own.

Photo: A PRT vehicle that's part of the new ULTra network being tested at London's Heathrow Airport. Credit: ULTra.

Unmanned Airplanes Coming to a Terminal Near You

* Unmanned aircraft could be making their way from the battlefield to the airport.
* These planes would most likely be used to police the skies, patrol borders and transport cargo.
* The human fear factor will likely prevent the idea of a passenger airline without a human at the helm, however.

Unmanned airplanes have almost become another branch of the military, dropping bombs, spying on terrorist camps and even threatening enemy aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now government and aviation experts are planning to make room for more robot aircraft over domestic skies: working as airborne traffic cops, patrolling the border and maybe even shuttling cargo between cities.

It's not a sci-fi fantasy. In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration is now studying how to safely fit these unmanned aircraft into the nation's busy commercial airspace.

"The success in the military has started to bleed over to the civilian environment," said Wesley Randall, a former Air Force logistics officer and professor at Auburn University's department of supply chain management. "People are saying this isn't a niche, gee-whiz technology. These are things you need to think about."

The FAA granted Randall and his colleagues at Auburn a $300,000 grant last week to do safety-related analyses of unmanned aerial systems. The government currently permits some law enforcement agencies to fly remote-control aircraft with a waiver from federal rules.

But the numbers of unmanned vehicles -- and their uses -- are growing. That means a greater chance of something going wrong.

Randall and his team will consider how and where robot craft should fly -- which altitude, which routes and at what times.

There are bigger questions as well. Should these drones be part of the FAA's air traffic control system and get directions from control towers? Should remotely-operated pilots with joysticks have the same training as commercial pilots? Who's responsible if there's a crash?

Peter Singer is author of the new book "Wired For War" and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. He says that unmanned aircraft are inching closer to prime-time, following a well-trodden march of technology from military to civilian uses.

"Nobody is saying that all humans will be replaced in war," Singer said. "But there are always evolving roles in war and civilian society. Next couple decades there will be some kind of pairing of humans and unmanned systems."

That synergy of man and machine is already happening in the military.

Northrop Grumman is building the world's first unmanned combat aircraft for the Navy. The $635 million X-47B takes its test flight from an aircraft carrier deck in December. Last year, Air Force officials awarded "aircraft wings" to 24 new cadets to pilot unmanned aerial systems.

Even though commercial pilots use automatic controls to fly and land modern jetliners, the human fear factor will likely prevent the idea of a passenger airline without a human at the helm. "Somebody could invent a remotely piloted airliner and nobody would fly it," Randall said.

But cargo planes might work. Randall notes that unmanned airplanes could carry cargo loads across unpopulated areas or the ocean. Without a crew compartment, these planes won't need to be pressurized for human occupants.

"They are inherently more green," Randall said. "They use less gas, have less weight and overall less waste."

Hybrid Panthers Helping Rare Cat Rebound in Florida

A researcher holds three Florida panther kittens in Everglades National Park in June 2006.

Breeding rare Florida panthers with Texas cougars created tough hybrids that one scientist calls the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of cougars.

And, like action heroes, these vigorous offspring may well rescue the Florida subspecies from extinction, according to Stephen O'Brien, an animal geneticist who co-authored new research on the North American big cat.

Florida panthers are considered a subspecies of cougar, big cats found across the Americas that are also called pumas or mountain lions, depending on the region.

In the 1900s people hunted the Florida panther out of most of its southeastern U.S. range, driving the few remaining animals into rugged South Florida swamps.

Inbreeding within this tiny population caused heart problems and reproductive defects that would have killed off the Florida panther—deemed endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—by the early 21st century.

As a last-ditch effort, in 1995 the U.S. government released eight female cougars from a wild Texas population into Florida.

This cougar infusion increased the number of Florida panthers threefold, to about a hundred, said O'Brien, chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland.

In addition, the offspring produced were genetically diverse animals that were stronger and lived longer, the 30-year study revealed.

Texas Cougars Shuffled Genetic Deck

Since the early 1980s, O'Brien and colleagues have closely monitored several Florida panthers via radio transmitters and microchips, occasionally anesthetizing animals to take blood samples. Those samples revealed a "marked increase" in DNA diversity after the Texan animals were introduced.

The team also measured survival rates of kitten litters and adult cats.
For instance, 23 out of 29 Florida panthers surveyed that were older than a year died between 2002 and 2004, compared with just 22 out of 47 hybrids, according to the study, published today in the journal Science.

The scientists also measured the animals' fitness, or ability to survive. One unusual measure of fitness, O'Brien noted, involved recording how a cougar reacted when the animal attempted to escape scientists' capture by climbing up a tree.

Most Florida panthers would cower in the tree. But trapped hybrids were more than twice as likely than Florida panthers to leap out of the tree and sail over the scientists' heads to safety, he said.

"Virtually every measure," he said, "showed the animals that had the mixed ancestry did better."

In a sense, releasing the Texan cougars restored the genetic flow that humans had interrupted, O'Brien added. In the 19th century, Florida panthers would sometimes mate with western cougars, naturally "shuffling the deck" genetically, he said.

"We don't feel like we've fiddled so much with nature, like making a hybrid between a lion and a tiger."

Florida Panthers Not Out of the Woods

In general, the research shows that bringing in new genes to aid a failing population "can be deliriously successful," O'Brien said.

"It's really not rocket science—if you have enough habitat and don't inbreed much, millions of years of evolution have given these species what it takes to survive and to prosper."

Even so, conservationists can't yet say hasta la vista to the Florida panther's problems.

"It was a very bold experiment and it has clearly paid off," said Elizabeth Fleming, Florida representative for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife.

But "now is the biggest challenge of all: We need to conserve existing habitat for these animals, as well as allow them to expand into some areas of their former range."

A hundred animals do not make up a truly viable population—for the subspecies to make it, their range needs to be expanded into other parts of Florida, Fleming said.

To that end, her organization is working with landowners to buy conservation easements, which would allow the predators to move onto land dedicated solely as wildlife habitat.

Meanwhile, some male Florida panthers are already striking out into new territory themselves, Fleming noted. (See "Cougar Reports on the Rise in Eastern U.S.")

"One made it all the way to Georgia," she said, "only to be shot by a deer hunter."

Original Models: A Look at Iconic Tech Prototypes

Super Soaker
1989
If necessity is the mother of invention, trial and error is the father. In these prototypes of now-iconic products, you can still glimpse the sweat and ingenuity it took to bring them to life.

Lonnie Johnson was trying to build a better refrigerator, based on a low-cost heat pump that circulated water instead of Freon. But when one of his custom-machined brass nozzles blasted a stream of water across his bathroom, Johnson—by day an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—realized he had the makings of something way more fun. A shotgun-style air pump and a series of check valves allowed for sniperlike range and accuracy with little exertion. Selling the idea to toy companies, though, was more of an effort. After seven years of frustration, Johnson scrapped his difficult-to-manufacture Plexiglas “pressure containment vessel” for an empty 2-liter soda bottle. It wasn’t slick, but it was easy to make. In 1990, the toy maker Larami brought the Power Drencher to store shelves; it sold roughly 2 million of them in the first year alone. Rebranded as the Super Soaker, the line has raked in sales of more than $200 million to date.



Push-Button Telephone
1948
Dialing an old rotary phone was a laborious, time-intensive task: Your house could burn down before you finished cranking out the number for the fire department. In the late 1940s, switchboard operators already had a more efficient push-button setup that used tones instead of electrical pulses to signal each digit. So Bell Labs engineers set out to adapt that system for customers. Gutting a Western Electric 302 tabletop rotary, they installed a set of ten 3-inch metal reeds. Pressing a button plucked a specific reed, producing a unique sound. Thirty-five test units were deployed to phone company employees’ homes in Media, Pennsylvania, but the yearlong trial was a bust. Moving or bumping the phone warped the reeds, and any static on the line—or even talking—while dialing caused interference. Push-button phones didn’t become consumer-ready until 1963, when solid-state electronics replaced the reeds, generating foolproof digital tones.


Apple I
1975
A 25-year-old engineer at Hewlett-Packard, Steve Wozniak was using his spare time to design a language interpreter for a new 8-bit microprocessor called the MOS 6502. But even though the motherboard he created was smaller and less complex than other kits on the market, and even though Wozniak gave away the schematics for free, hobbyists still found the board difficult to build. So Woz and his high school pal Steve Jobs, who was working at Atari, decided to sell preassembled boards—which they dubbed the Apple I. They built them at night in Jobs’ parents’ garage, paying Jobs’ sister $1 a board to insert chips. In 1976, they produced 200 units and sold 150 of them for $500 apiece, a tidy 100 percent markup over cost. The only drawback to the Apple I: It offered dynamic RAM but no permanent storage, so you had to plug in your own cassette drive to save anything.


Motorola DynaTAC
1973
Martin Cooper built the world’s first cell phone in just 90 days. “All of the necessary technology existed in one place or another in our research labs,” says Cooper, a VP who oversaw development of Motorola’s Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage handset. “But when you see the stuff we jammed into this unit, you marvel that they ever made it work.” Without large-scale integrated circuits, engineers had to stuff thousands of resistors, capacitors, inductors, and ceramic filters into a 4.4-pound package. The biggest challenge was a device Motorola researchers had invented called a triselector, which enabled simultaneous talking and listening. All mobile devices until then were press-to-talk walkies. Unfortunately, the triselector was as big as a double cheeseburger; Cooper and his team managed to scale it down to a 10th of that size. After erecting a 900-MHz base station in Manhattan, Cooper stood on Sixth Avenue and successfully called—where else?—Bell Labs.

Ancient Egypt's Pyramids: Norwegian Researcher Unlocks Construction Secrets

Scientists from around the world have tried to understand how the Egyptians erected their giant pyramids. Now, an architect and researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) says he has the answer to this ancient, unsolved puzzle.
Researchers have been so preoccupied by the weight of the stones that they tend to overlook two major problems: How did the Egyptians know exactly where to put the enormously heavy building blocks? And how was the master architect able to communicate detailed, highly precise plans to a workforce of 10,000 illiterate men?

A 7-million-ton structure

These were among the questions that confronted Ole J. Bryn, an architect and associate professor in NTNU's Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art when he began examining Khufu's Great Pyramid in Giza. Khufu's pyramid, better known as the Pyramid of Cheops, consists of 2.3 million limestone blocks weighing roughly 7 million tons. At 146.6 meters high, it held the record as the tallest structure ever built for nearly 4000 years.

What Bryn discovered was quite simple. He believes that the Egyptians invented the modern building grid, by separating the structure's measuring system from the physical building itself, thus introducing tolerance, as it is called in today's engineering and architectural professions.

The apex point a key

Bryn has studied the plans from the thirty oldest Egyptian pyramids, and discovered a precision system that made it possible for the Egyptians to reach the pyramid's last and highest point, the apex point, with an impressive degree of accuracy. By exploring and making a plan of the pyramid it is possible to prepare modern project documentation of not just one, but all pyramids from any given period.

As long as the architect knows the main dimensions of a pyramid, he can project the building as he would have done it with a modern building, but with building methods and measurements known from the ancient Egypt, Bryn says.

In a scientific article published May 2010 in the Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, Bryn discusses aspects that can explain the construction of a multitude of the Egyptian pyramids by taking the building grid, and not the physical building itself, as the starting point for the analysis.

A new map

If the principles behind Bryn's drawings are correct, then archaeologists will have a new "map" that demonstrates that the pyramids are not a "bunch of heavy rocks with unknown structures" but, rather, incredibly precise structures.

Ole J. Bryn's findings will be presented and explained at the exhibition The Apex Point in Trondheim from September 13th to October 1st. The exhibition is an official part of the program to celebrate the centenary (1910-2010) of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Cassini Makes First Dive Inside Saturn’s Radio Aurora

The Cassini spacecraft has made the first observations from within the radio aurora of another planet than Earth. The measurements, which were taken when the spacecraft flew through an active auroral region in 2008, show some similarities and some contrasts between the radio auroral emissions generated at Saturn and those at Earth. Results were presented this week by Dr Laurent Lamy at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome, and recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.
"So far, this is a unique event," said Lamy (Observatoire de Paris, France). "Whereas the source region of Earth's radio aurora has been studied by many missions, this is our first opportunity to observe the equivalent region at Saturn from the inside. From this single encounter, we have been able to build up a detailed snapshot of auroral activity using three of Cassini's instruments. This gives us a fascinating insight into the processes that are generating Saturn's radio aurora."

Cassini encountered the auroral region at a distance of 247 million kilometres from Saturn's cloud tops (about 4 times Saturn's radius). High above the spectacular visible-light displays of Saturn's Northern and Southern Lights, auroral emissions occur this far from the planet at radio wavelengths. The emissions are generated by fast moving electrons spiralling along Saturn's magnetic field lines, which are threaded through the auroral region.

On 17 October 2008, Cassini's MAG (magnetometer), RPWS (radio) and CAPS (electrons) instruments detected three successive curtains of active auroras. An international team of scientists has now combined magnetic, radio and particle in situ observations to build up a picture of the local radio source properties and the surrounding auroral plasma. They also identified the magnetic field lines along which radio aurora are emitted.

"The instrument that measures radio waves, RPWS, can tell us the direction that each radio wave detected is travelling. By mapping this information onto magnetic field lines, we can work out the location of each radio source. In addition, we can project the source locations along the field lines that curve down to Saturn's southern pole and visualise a radio oval comparable to the auroral features commonly seen at ultraviolet wavelengths. Unusually, the oval observed during this event is strongly distorted, which indicates a particularly enhanced auroral activity," said Lamy.

Earth also has radio auroral emissions and these new results show that the process that generates radio aurora appears to be the same at both planets. Interestingly, there are two minor differences between the aurora at Earth and Saturn. At Earth, there is a cavity in the plasma above the auroral oval that rises for several thousand kilometres. The new observations show that this is not seen at Saturn. Secondly, radio sources were crossed at much further distances from the planet. These discrepancies reflect intrinsic differences between the two magnetospheres, in terms of dimensions and planetary rotation speed.

Cassini crossed high latitude auroral field lines during 40 orbits in 2008, but this is the only time that the instruments detected unusually strong electric currents in that region in space with in situ evidence of an active aurora.

"We think that the unusual conditions responsible for these intense electric currents might have been triggered by a solar wind compression squeezing Saturn's magnetic field and producing the observed auroras," said Emma Bunce, a team member from the University of Leicester in the UK.

Animation: Visualisation of the sources of a radio aurora at Saturn. The animation is based on Cassini observations using the RPWS instrument. On the left hand side are the radio sources as seen from Cassini. The right hand side shows the projection of the radio sources down onto the southern pole of the planet.

King Herod's Palace Contained Luxury Theater Box: Big Pic

Sept. 22, 2010 -- Archaeologists have uncovered a 400-seat theater complete with a luxury box at King Herod's winter palace.

In this photo, we see remnants of the frescoes that originally adorned the complex around 15 B.C. The private box had been richly decorated with paintings and plaster moldings, which were created by Roman artists commissioned by Herod.Although the private box is a recent discovery, the theater was first excavated in 2008, discovered a short distance from Herod's mausoleum.

The Romans appointed Herod the king of Judea around 40 B.C. Under his rule, Herod expanded the Jewish second temple, known as the Temple Mount, and initiated public works projects.

Frilly-Horned Dino Found on 'Lost Continent'

* Two new species of dinosaurs are found in southern Utah where a long island once existed.
* One of the dinosaurs had a frill of horns along the top edge of its head and above its eyes.
* It's unusual that such a variety of large dinosaurs existed within such a small space at one time.

frilly dinosaur

A newly found dinosaur featured strangely folded frill of horns on the top edge of its head and the horns that stick out sideways from above the eyes.

Two spectacular new species of horned, triceratops-like dinosaurs have been found in southern Utah, report paleontologists. The ornately frilled rhino-sized dinos are more than just eye candy, however. They are deepening a mystery about a long lost island that supported a seemingly impossible number and variety of dinos at the same time.

The giant plant-eating Kosmoceratops richardsoni and Utahceratops gettyi were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in rocks that were once part of a long island called Laramidia, which was separated from the rest of North America by a wide, shallow, north-south running seaway.

"It's a freaky dinosaur," said Matthew Lamanna, assistant curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, commenting on Kosmoceratops. "If it were made into a kid's toy, it'd be a very popular one."

Among the things that make Kosmoceratops stand out are the strangely folded frill of horns on the top edge of its head and the horns that stick out sideways from above the eyes -- more like a longhorn steer than a dinosaur. The scientists are quite sure that none of these and other unusual features are artifacts of burial or damage after death for one simple reason:

"We actually have more than one skull," said paleontologist Scott Sampson, research curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History and lead author of a paper describing the new dinosaurs in the journal PloS ONE. Sampson is better known to children as "Dr. Scott," the host of the PBS Kids program, "Dinosaur Train."

Over the last few decades discoveries of Laramidian dinosaurs from Alberta to New Mexico have been revealing an unusually large number of both individuals and species living within a short span of time and varying from north to south.

For many years it was primarily the remnants of the northern end of Laramidia, found in Alberta, Canada, which were yielding great numbers of new dinosaur species from the late Cretaceous. Now the discoveries in Utah are beginning to catch up by representing the southern end of Laramidia.

Researchers have been surprised to find that instead of one or two species of dinosaur reaching across a large land mass -- as is the case with large mammals today -- there appear to have been many kinds of horned dinosaurs sharing the island.

Just how such large animals managed this is unknown, said Sampson. One possibility is that they had slower metabolisms than comparably-sized mammals, and so needed less energy and less food and space, Sampson explained.

It might also be that dinosaurs were just more prolific than comparable large mammals of today, says paleontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland. Fossilized nests show that this sort of dinosaur could lay a dozen eggs every year. A comparable mammal might have a single offspring every year that may take a dozen years to mature.

"Dinosaurs seemed to be more like weeds than trees," said Holtz. It could also be that the land was more productive in the late Cretaceous and could support more animals, he said.

As for what the ornate horns of the new dinos were used for, that's unknown, but the best best is they were all about looks.

"It was initially thought that they must be used as weapons," said Sampson. "It's much more likely it was used for show" to attract mates and/or repel competitors.

Toxic Foam Chokes Brazil River

Open Sewer

Photograph by Alexandre Carvalho, FotoArena/Getty Images

Toxic foam chokes Brazil's most polluted waterway, the Tietê River, on September 4 in the town of Pirapora do Bom Jesus (map).

The foam is caused mostly by untreated household runoff from nearby São Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil, according to Malu Ribeiro, water-program coordinator for the local environmental nonprofit SOS Mata Atlântica. The runoff flows directly into the river via waste pipes, she added.

The organization has tracked the river's water quality since 1993, a few years after foam pollution was first detected.

The foam forms when water mixes with phosphate and phosphorus—ingredients found in products such as biodegradable detergents, Ribeiro said.

The phenomenon occurs in Brazil's June-to-August dry season, when lowered water levels make the pollutants more concentrated.

A severe drought made the foam especially abundant this past August, the driest month in Brazil since 1943, according to the country's National Institute of Meteorology.

Elsewhere in Brazil, arid conditions have also left the Amazon River at its lowest level in 47 years, according to the Agence France-Press news service.

Video: How the Red Sea Could Have Parted

Wired Science News for Your Neurons Clear Spring Skies Emerge on Titan

Spring on Saturn’s moon Titan looks to be sunny and mostly cloud-free, according to a new analysis of data from the Cassini spacecraft.

Titan is the only body in the solar system other than Earth known to have liquid lakes, clouds and perhaps even rain. But instead of water, frigid Titan’s lakes and clouds are made of liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane.

While Earth’s northern hemisphere is moving into autumn, Titan’s northern hemisphere has been shifting from winter to spring for most of the six years Cassini has been there. A full year on Saturn — and therefore on all its moons — lasts 30 Earth years, and each season lasts about seven years.

Throughout the northern winter, Titan’s poles were shrouded in heavy clouds. But as the seasons changed, the clouds cleared, says planetary scientist Sebastian Rodriguez of the University of Paris Diderot.

“Over the past six years, we’ve found that clouds appear clustered in three distinct latitude regions of Titan: large clouds at the north pole, patchy cloud at the south pole and a narrow belt around 40 degrees south,” Rodriguez said in a press release. “However, we are now seeing evidence of a seasonal circulation turnover on Titan — the clouds at the south pole completely disappeared just before the equinox and the clouds in the north are thinning out.”
Rodriguez and colleagues presented the first long-term study of Titan’s weather that includes the spring equinox, which occurred in August 2009, at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome on September 22.

The team used more than 2000 images from Cassini’s VIMS (Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer) instrument to analyze the moon’s cloud patterns. They found that in the winter, north polar clouds of ethane form 18 to 30 miles up in the lower portion of Titan’s atmosphere by a constant influx of ethane and small particles from an upper layer. In the southern hemisphere, clouds are produced by air humid with methane upwelling from the surface.

Thanks to a mission extension, Cassini will continue to study Saturn and its moons until operating until May 2017, a few months past Saturn’s northern summer solstice. This will let scientists observe seasonal changes all the way through from mid-winter to mid-summer in the northern hemisphere.

“We have learned a lot about Titan’s climate since Cassini arrived at Saturn, but there is still a great deal to learn,” Rodriguez said. “With the new mission extension, we will have the opportunity to answer some of the key questions about the meteorology of this fascinating moon.”


Images: 1) Clouds in Titan’s atmosphere between July 2004 and April 2010. Black areas are cloud-free and yellow are fully covered. 2) Left: A flyby of Titan on May 12, 2008 shows a large cloud capping Titan’s north pole. Right: Another flyby on December 12, 2009 shows a band of clouds at 40 degrees south, but the north pole is cloud-free. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Nantes/ University of Paris Diderot

LHC Detects Evidence of New Physics

After nearly 6 months of smashing particles, the Large Hadron Collider has seen signs of something entirely new. Pairs of charged particles produced when two beams of protons collide seem to be associated with each other even after they fly apart.

“It is a small effect, but it is very interesting in itself,” said physicist Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment. Tonelli and colleagues announced the results in a seminar at CERN September 21 and in a paper submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics.

The LHC finally got up and running in March after more than a year of false starts. Beams of protons were smashed together in the 17-mile-long ring at energies of 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) — three times the energy that had been achieved before.When two protons collide, they produce a flurry of smaller, short-lived charged particles that fly away from each other at certain angles and speeds. The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at the LHC detects the path each of these particles takes. Physicists can then use those tracks to reconstruct what happened at the heart of the collision, like reassembling shards of glass from a broken window.

In the new experiment, the CMS team took data on the charged particles produced in hundreds of thousands of collisions. The team observed the angles the particles’ paths took with respect to each other, and calculated something called a “correlation function” to determine how intimately the particles are linked after they separate. The plot of the data ends up looking like a topographical map of a mountain surrounded by lowlands and a long ridge behind it.

In the most basic case (below, left), the data looked exactly like the physicists expected it to. But in cases where at least 110 charged particles were produced, the team saw a funny ridge-like structure extending away from the mountain peak (below, right).

That ridge essentially means that particles in some pairs are flying away from each other at close to the speed of light along one axis, but are oriented along the same angle in the other axis.

It’s as if two particles somehow talked to each other when they were produced, the physicists said. This phenomenon has never been seen before in proton-proton collisions, though it resembles something seen at RHIC (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. That effect was interpreted to be from the creation of hot dense matter shortly after the collisions.

The CMS team collected the data in mid-July, and spent the rest of the summer trying to blame it on an error or artifact of the data.

“We are here today because we didn’t succeed to kill it,” Tonelli said. As far as the team can tell, the effect is real.

But where it comes from, nobody knows. There are a lot of possible explanations, and the team is not ready to choose one yet.

“This is a subtle effect, and careful work is required to establish its physical origin,” said MIT physicist Gunther Roland at the seminar at CERN. “So fire away.”



Images: 1) Image of a 7 TeV proton-proton collision in CMS producing more than 100 charged particles. 2) The correlation functions for “minimum bias” collisions (left) and for collisions that produced at least 110 charged particles (right); the new ridge is indicated with an arrow. Credit: CERN/CMS Collaboration

Life on Earth May Have Had an Icy Start

Cracks in ice could have served as a safe environment — much like a cell — for the first life on Earth to replicate and evolve.

A new study adds plausibility to the ‘RNA World’ hypothesis that argues life began with a single stranded molecule capable of self-replication.

“I always thought that the idea of an RNA world was exciting, but that RNA was a perverse choice of primordial material because it was hard to imagine chemical conditions under which they could survive on the early earth,” said biologist Philipp Holliger of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom, who led a study in Nature Communications Sept. 21.

“What we’ve found is that RNA would have been much happier in the ice than in hot hydrothermal vents, where it would have lasted only a few seconds,” Holliger said.Holliger was inspired to study how RNA replicates in icy conditions by a 2004 study that found when nucleotides — the building blocks of genetic code — are frozen in ice, they spontaneously assemble into random strands of RNA.

If nucleotides were present in the ice on early Earth, they could have formed uncountable combinations of these random genetic strands, many of which would have been meaningless. But a few of the strands might have contained the right genetic code to begin self-replication.

Over time, the replicating RNA strands would have mutated and changed with some of them surviving better than others, beginning the long chain of evolution towards more complex organisms.

By testing the process out in beakers, adding water, salts, RNA building blocks, and ribosomes — an RNA-derived molecule that serves as a center for the further RNA replication — Holliger found that liquid pockets ice would have served as an essential container for this process to occur. The cold would have also kept the molecules from degrading.

“It’s like the tortoise and the hare problem,” Holliger said. “The tortoise is slower, but it keeps on going, rather than falling apart. One thing that was available at the beginning of the Earth was time.”

A decade ago, this theory might have been dismissed because the early Earth was thought to be so hot and volcanic that ice couldn’t form. But more recently there has been evidence that the climate may have been more temperate, with areas of ice on the poles and at high altitudes, Holliger said.

If the theory of an ice RNA world is correct, it could dramatically change our search for life elsewhere in the universe.

“Ice is literally everywhere,” Holliger said . “If we can conceive of life arising and maybe thriving in ice it would considerably broaden the places to look for life, both extant and extinct.”

Images: Flickr/Anita363

Martian Moon Phobos May Have Formed by Catastrophic Blast

Scientists now have firm indications that the Martian satellite Phobos formed relatively near its current location via re-accretion of material blasted into Mars' orbit by some catastrophic event. Two independent approaches of compositional analyses of thermal infrared spectra, from ESA's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Global Surveyor missions, yield very similar conclusions. The re-accretion scenario is further strengthened by the measurements of Phobos' high porosity from the Mars Radio Science Experiment (MaRS) on board Mars Express.
These results are being presented by Dr. Giuranna and Dr. Rosenblatt at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome.

The origin of the Martian satellites Phobos and Deimos is a long standing puzzle. It has been proposed that both moons may be asteroids formed in the outer part of the main asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) and were subsequently captured by Mars' gravity. Alternative scenarios suggested that both moons were formed in situ by the re-accretion of rocky-debris blasted into Mars's orbit after a large impact or by re-accretion of remnants of a former moon which was destroyed by Mars's tidal force. "Understanding the composition of the Martian moons is the key to constrain these formation theories," says Dr. Giuranna of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Rome, Italy.

Previous observations of Phobos at visible and near-infrared wavelengths have been interpreted to suggest the possible presence of carbonaceous chondritic meteorites, carbon-rich "ultra primitive" materials, commonly associated with asteroids dominant in the middle part of the asteroid belt. This finding would support the early asteroid capture scenario. However recent thermal infrared observations from the Mars Express Planetary Fourier Spectrometer, show poor agreement with any class of chondritic meteorite. They instead argue in favor of the in-situ scenarios.

"We detected for the first time a type of mineral called phyllosilicates on the surface of Phobos, particularly in the areas northeast of Stickney, its largest impact crater," says Dr. Giuranna.

"This is very intriguing as it implies the interaction of silicate materials with liquid water on the parent body prior to incorporation into Phobos. Alternatively phyllosilicates may have formed in situ, but this would mean that Phobos required sufficient internal heating to enable liquid water to remain stable. More detailed mapping, in-situ measurements froma lander, or sample return would ideally help to settle this issue unambiguously," he added.

Other observations appear to match the types of minerals identified on the surface of Mars. Thus, the derived composition on Phobos appears more closely related to Mars than objects from other relatively locations in the solar system.

"The asteroid capture scenarios also have difficulties in explaining the current near-circular and near-equatorial orbit of both Martian moons," says Dr Rosenblatt of the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

The MaRS team, led by Dr. Martin Pätzold of the Rheinisches Institut für Umweltforschungh an der Universität zu Köln, Germany, has used the frequency variations of the radio-link between the spacecraft and the Earth-based tracking stations, in order to precisely reconstruct the motion of the spacecraft when it is perturbed by the gravitational attraction of Phobos. From this the team was able to reduce Phobos's mass. "We obtained the best measurement of its mass to date, with a precision of 0.3%," relates Dr. Rosenblatt. Phobos's volume past estimations were also improved thanks to the cameras onboard MEx. The MaRS team was thus able to derive the best-ever estimate of Phobos' density as 1.86±0.02 g/cm3. "This number is significantly lower than the density of meteoritic material associated with asteroids. It implies a sponge-like structure with voids making up 25-45% in Phobos' interior," says Dr. Rosenblatt. "High porosity is required in order to absorb the energy of the large impact that generated Stickney crater without destroying the body," confirms Dr. Giuranna. "In addition a highly porous interior of Phobos, as proposed by the MaRS team, supports the re-accretion formation scenarios."

A highly porous asteroid would have probably not survived if captured by Mars. Alternatively, such a highly porous Phobos can result from the re-accretion of rocky-blocks in Mars' orbit. During re-accretion, the largest blocks re-accrete first because of their larger mass, forming a core with large boulders. Then, the smaller debris re-accrete but do not fill the gaps left between the large blocks because of the low self-gravity of the small body in formation. Finally, a relatively smooth surface masks the space of voids inside the body, which then can only be indirectly detected. Thus, a highly porous interior of Phobos, as proposed by the MaRS team, supports the re-accretion formation scenarios.

The origin of both Martian moons is not, however, definitively elucidated since the density alone cannot provide the true composition of their interior. The future Russian Phobos-Grunt mission (Phobos Sample Return), to be launched in 2011, will certainly contribute to our understanding regarding the origin of Phobos.

The full text has been submitted for publication to the Planetary and Space Science journal's Special Issue on Comparative Planetology: Venus-Earth-Mars.

Nano Antenna Concentrates Light

Everybody who's ever used a TV, radio or cell phone knows what an antenna does: It captures the aerial signals that make those devices practical. A lab at Rice University has built an antenna that captures light in the same way, at a small scale that has big potential.
Condensed matter physicist Doug Natelson and graduate student Dan Ward have found a way to make an optical antenna from two gold tips separated by a nanoscale gap that gathers light from a laser. The tips "grab the light and concentrate it down into a tiny space," Natelson said, leading to a thousand-fold increase in light intensity in the gap.

Getting an accurate measurement of the effect is a first, said Natelson, who reported the results in the September 19 online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology. He expects the discovery will be useful in the development of tools for optics and for chemical and biological sensing, even at the single-molecule scale, with implications for industrial safety, defense and homeland security.

The paper by Natelson, Ward and their colleagues in Germany and Spain details the team's technique, which involves shining laser light into the gap between a pair of gold tips less than a nanometer apart -- about a hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair.

"You can ignore the fact that your car antenna is built out of atoms; it just works," said Natelson, a Rice professor of physics and astronomy, and also electrical and computer engineering. "But when you have tiny pieces of metal very close to each other, you have to worry about all the details. The fields are going to be big, the situation's going to be complicated and you're really constrained. We've been able to use some physics that only come into play when things are very close together to help figure out what's going on."

The key to measuring light amplification turned out to be measuring something else, specifically the electrical current flowing between the gold tips.

Putting the nanotips so close together allows charge to flow via quantum tunneling as the electrons are pushed from one side to the other. The researchers could get electrons moving by pushing them at low frequencies with a voltage, in a highly controllable, measurable way. They could also get them flowing by shining the laser, which pushes the charge at the very high frequency of the light. Being able to compare the two processes set a standard by which the light amplification could be determined, Natelson said. Their German and Spanish coauthors helped supply the necessary theoretical justification for the analysis.

The amplification is a plasmonic effect, Natelson said. Plasmons, which may be excited by light, are oscillating electrons in metallic structures that act like ripples in a pool. "You've got a metal structure, you shine light on it, the light makes the electrons in this metal structure slosh around," he said. "You can think of the electrons in the metal as an incompressible fluid, like water in a bathtub. And when you get them sloshing back and forth, you get electric fields.

"At the surfaces of the metal, these fields can be very big -- much bigger than those from the original radiation," he said. "What was hard to measure was just how big. We didn't know how much the two sides were sloshing up and down -- and that's exactly the thing we care about."

By simultaneously measuring the low-frequency electrically driven and the high-frequency optically driven currents between the tips, "we can figure out the voltage zinging back and forth at the really high frequencies that are characteristic of light," he said.

Natelson said his lab's homebuilt apparatus, which combines nanoscale electronics and optics, is fairly unusual. "There are a lot of people who do optics. There are a lot who do nanoscale electrical measurements," he said. "There are still not too many people who combine the two."

The custom rig gave the Rice researchers a measure of control over thermal and electrical properties that have stymied other investigators. The tips are cooled to 80 Kelvin, about -315 degrees Fahrenheit, and are electrically insulated from their silicon bases, keeping at bay stray voltages that could skew the results.

"The reason we're studying these enhanced fields is not just because they're there," Natelson said. "If you can enhance the local field by a factor of 1,000, there are lots of things you can do in terms of sensors and non-linear optics. Anything that gives you a handle on what's happening at these tiny scales is very useful.

"This is one of those rare, happy cases where you are able to actually get information -- very local information -- about exactly something you care about."

The paper's co-authors are Falco Hüser and Fabian Pauly of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany; and Juan Carlos Cuevas at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain.

Support for the project came from the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center of Excellence at Rice (LANCER), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Baden-Württemberg Siftung, the European Union through the Bio-Inspired Approaches for Molecular Electronics (BIMORE) network, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Your Body Recycling Itself -- Captured on Film

Our bodies recycle proteins, the fundamental building blocks that enable cell growth and development. Proteins are made up of a chain of amino acids, and scientists have known since the 1980s that first one in the chain determines the lifetime of a protein. McGill researchers have finally discovered how the cell identifies this first amino acid -- and caught it on camera.

"There are lots of reasons cells recycle proteins -- fasting, which causes loss of muscle, growth and remodeling during development, and normal turnover as old proteins are replaced to make new ones," explained lead researcher, Dr. Kalle Gehring, from McGill's Department of Biochemistry. "One way that cells decide which proteins to degrade is the presence of a signal known as an N-degron at the start of the protein. By X-ray crystallography, we discovered that the N-degron is recognized by the UBR box, a component of the cells' recycling system."

The powerful technique can pinpoint the exact location of atoms and enabled the team to capture an image of the UBR box, providing insight to this incredibly tiny yet essential part of our bodies' chemical mechanics.

Aside from representing a major advance in our understanding of the life cycle of proteins, the research has important repercussions for Johanson-Blizzard syndrome, a rare disease that causes deformations and mental retardation. This syndrome is caused by a mutation in the UBR box that causes it to lose an essential zinc atom. Better understanding of the structure of the UBR box may help researchers develop treatments for this syndrome.

The research was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology and received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

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Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, "No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die," as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path.

Now a team of Yale physicists has used lasers for a completely different purpose, employing them to cool molecules down to temperatures near what's known as absolute zero, about -460 degrees Fahrenheit. Their new method for laser cooling, described in the online edition of the journal Nature, is a significant step toward the ultimate goal of using individual molecules as information bits in quantum computing.

Currently, scientists use either individual atoms or "artificial atoms" as qubits, or quantum bits, in their efforts to develop quantum processors. But individual atoms don't communicate as strongly with one another as is needed for qubits. On the other hand, artificial atoms -- which are actually circuit-like devices made up of billions of atoms that are designed to behave like a single atom -- communicate strongly with one another, but are so large they tend to pick up interference from the outside world. Molecules, however, could provide an ideal middle ground.

"It's a kind of Goldilocks problem," said Yale physicist David DeMille, who led the research. "Artificial atoms may prove too big and individual atoms may prove too small, but molecules made up of a few different atoms could be just right."

In order to use molecules as qubits, physicists first have to be able to control and manipulate them -- an extremely difficult feat, as molecules generally cannot be picked up or moved without disturbing their quantum properties. In addition, even at room temperature molecules have a lot of kinetic energy, which causes them to move, rotate and vibrate.

To overcome the problem, the Yale team pushed the molecules using the subtle kick delivered by a steady stream of photons, or particles of light, emitted by a laser. Using laser beams to hit the molecules from opposite directions, they were able to reduce the random velocities of the molecules. The technique is known as laser cooling because temperature is a direct measurement of the velocities in the motion of a group of molecules. Reducing the molecules' motions to almost nothing is equivalent to driving their temperatures to virtually absolute zero.

While scientists had previously been able to cool individual atoms using lasers, the discovery by the Yale team represents the first time that lasers have just as successfully cooled molecules, which present unique challenges because of their more complex structures.

The team used the molecule strontium monofluoride in their experiments, but DeMille believes the technique will also prove successful with other molecules. Beyond quantum computing, laser cooling molecules has potential applications in chemistry, where near absolute zero temperatures could induce currently inaccessible reactions via a quantum mechanical process known as "quantum tunneling." DeMille also hopes to use laser cooling to study particle physics, where precise measurements of molecular structure could give clues as to the possible existence of exotic, as of yet undiscovered particles.

"Laser cooling of atoms has created a true scientific revolution. It is now used in areas ranging from basic science such as Bose-Einstein condensation, all the way to devices with real-world impacts such as atomic clocks and navigation instruments," DeMille said. "The extension of this technique to molecules promises to open an exciting new range of scientific and technological applications."

Other authors of the paper include Edward Shuman and John Barry (both of Yale University).

Neanderthals More Advanced Than Previously Thought: They Innovated, Adapted Like Modern Humans, Research Shows

For decades scientists believed Neanderthals developed `modern' tools and ornaments solely through contact with Homo sapiens, but new research from the University of Colorado Denver now shows these sturdy ancients could adapt, innovate and evolve technology on their own.
The findings by anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore challenge a half-century of conventional wisdom maintaining that Neanderthals were thick-skulled, primitive `cavemen' overrun and outcompeted by more advanced modern humans arriving in Europe from Africa.

"Basically, I am rehabilitating Neanderthals," said Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Denver. "They were far more resourceful than we have given them credit for."

His research, to be published in December's Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, was based on seven years of studying Neanderthal sites throughout Italy, with special focus on the vanished Uluzzian culture.

About 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacian culture, attributed to modern Homo sapiens, appeared in northern Italy while central Italy continued to be occupied by Neanderthals of the Mousterian culture which had been around for at least 100,000 years. At this time a new culture arose in the south, one also thought to be created by Neanderthals. They were the Uluzzian and they were very different.

Riel-Salvatore identified projectile points, ochre, bone tools, ornaments and possible evidence of fishing and small game hunting at Uluzzian archeological sites throughout southern Italy. Such innovations are not traditionally associated with Neanderthals, strongly suggesting that they evolved independently, possibly due to dramatic changes in climate. More importantly, they emerged in an area geographically separated from modern humans.

"My conclusion is that if the Uluzzian is a Neanderthal culture it suggests that contacts with modern humans are not necessary to explain the origin of this new behavior. This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology," he said. "When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It `humanizes' them if you will."

Thousands of years ago, southern Italy experienced a shift in climate, becoming increasingly open and arid, said Riel-Salvatore. Neanderthals living there faced a stark choice of adapting or dying out. The evidence suggests they began using darts or arrows to hunt smaller game to supplement the increasingly scarce larger mammals they traditionally hunted.

"The fact that Neanderthals could adapt to new conditions and innovate shows they are culturally similar to us," he said. "Biologically they are also similar. I believe they were a subspecies of human but not a different species."

The powerfully built Neanderthals were first discovered in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856. Exactly who they were, how they lived and why they vanished remains unclear.

Research shows they contributed between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic material to the people of Asia and Europe. Riel-Salvatore rejects the theory that they were exterminated by modern humans. Homo sapiens might simply have existed in larger groups and had slightly higher birthrates, he said.

"It is likely that Neanderthals were absorbed by modern humans," he said. "My research suggests that they were a different kind of human, but humans nonetheless. We are more brothers than distant cousins."

Arctic Microbes Sleep for 100 Million Years

Heat-loving bugs at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean may spend a hundred million years waiting for things to warm up, according to a new study.

Casey Hubert of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and a team of researchers analyzed bacteria populations in sediment samples from the arctic sea floor. As they surmised, microbes became very productive as samples were heated to a balmy to 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). Then something surprising happened: as the samples were heated further, bacterial activity spiked again at 55 degrees C (131 degrees F).

In other words, the bugs were flourishing in temperatures far beyond anything they'd see in the frigid confines of the Arctic Ocean.

So what's going on? Hubert thinks the bacteria are in fact thermophilic organisms that typically thrive deep in the ocean crust, where Earth's heat provides energy for them to reproduce. Water that rises out of hydrothermal vents could deposit the bugs on the cold sea floor, where they go dormant and wait. And wait some more. From New Scientist:

Hubert's theory...proposes that rising currents thrust some cells out of their deep hot niche and into the cold Arctic seawater, where they lie dormant.

Sediment buries them until the temperature rises enough for them to germinate – but this could take up to a 100 million years. "It's like there's a seed bank in the sediment of diverse thermophiles," says Hubert. These spores can remain viable for millions of years, he says, and so might wait-out the burial period and long migration down into the warmer subsurface.

It's a crazy thought -- that microbes ejected from their habitat would just hang out for a good chunk of the planet's history until they made it back home. Bacteria are famously hardy creatures, able to survive in outer space, or for millennia locked in giant salt deposits, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. But it certainly boggles the mind.

Image: Cyanobacteria

Moses' Red Sea Parting Explained by Computer Model

Modern science has reconstructed one of the most famous miracles of the Old Testament. Find out how Moses may have done it.

* A computer simulation has recreated what might be the parting of the Red Sea.
* The simulation is not on the Red Sea, which runs the wrong direction for the wind described in the Bible.
* A large lake in northern Egypt, on the edge of the Mediterranean could match the biblical "Sea of Reeds," or Red Sea.

To drive away the waters and part the Red Sea, Moses needed a different location than previously thought, according to a new study on the miraculous biblical event.

Previous studies of wind, waves and bathymetry have called on hurricane strength winds blowing from the northwest to push away the water. This exposed a long reef which allowed Moses and the Israelites to escape the advancing cavalry of Pharaoh.

The problem is: It would be nearly impossible for Israelites to stand in such a wind, much less walk to safety.

What's more, the Book of Exodus includes some nice meteorological details: "(T)he Lord drove the sea away all night with a strong east wind and turned the sea-bed into dry land."

"If you are going to match the biblical account, you need the wind from the east," said researcher Carl Drews of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Drews has been studying the Red Sea story for years as a student and now has published a paper on the matter, which was his master's thesis, in the journal PloS One.

Drews took that east wind and tried to perform a computer simulation of the event in a couple of different places.

He found that a steady 63-mile-per-hour (100-kilometer-per-hour) wind over a digitally reconstructed east-west running lake at the Mediterranean end of the Nile, near today's Port Said, would push the water west to the far end of the lake, as well as south, up the river.

The model showed that this would expose wide mud flats where the river entered the lake and leave a land bridge high and dry for four hours.

The hardest part of the study, said Drews, was reconstructing the geography of the area. He chose the area known today as Lake Manzala because it seems to fit with the Exodus story. It is oriented so that an east wind can actually blow across it lengthwise and push water to one side -- something that is not the case for the north-south running Red Sea.

Drews used research done by others regarding the past geography of that area, which was once known as Lake of Tanis, along with the earliest maps he could find to try to recreate what the site looked like in 1250 B.C. The exact date is, however, not crucial, he said.

Of course, this location raises another problem: The Nile Delta is not the Red Sea -- or is it?

"There is some controversy over the body of water they crossed," said Drews. "The Exodus text says in Hebrew 'yam suf,' (which) literally means 'Sea of Reeds.'"

That description fits the area he studied: a broad lake filled with papyrus reeds stretching to the horizon.

"Many Bible translations render 'yam suf' as 'Red Sea,'" Drews told Discovery News. "Red Sea" has become the common terminology.

However, biblical scholars Kenneth Kitchen and James Hoffmeier have explored the issue at length and have concluded that the marshy area along the Suez Canal is also an acceptable location for "yam suf."

Hoffmeier, for his part, is cautious and not sure the location fits.

"Attempts to understand biblical events in the light of geographical and climatological considerations are welcomed," said Hoffmeier, of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School at Trinity International University. "But the investigator must also incorporate a careful and contextual reading of the biblical text."

"The value of studying the event described in the Old Testament certainly lends support to the thesis that physics is a natural phenomenon, a normal part of our universe," said Stephen Baig, a researcher who has studied storm surges for the National Hurricane Center. "If there is a miracle, it is that we are able to describe such events with numbers."