ANG AKUNG MGA SCIENCE NEWS (GI-IPUN LNG NKO)

Spectacular Sky Show: Venus, Jupiter and the Moon

The most spectacular celestial sights over the next couple of weeks are reserved for the early morning sky. Two bright planets will converge, then be joined by the moon.

Kenneth L. Franklin (1923-2007), the former Chairman and Chief Astronomer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, would often make reference to our "dynamic and ever-changing sky." Such an eloquent description certainly fits our current morning sky, for these final days of January and the first days of February will be an exceptional time for predawn sky watchers with a beautiful pairing of the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter. They will appear closest together in the dawn sky of Friday, Feb. 1, and a few mornings later, the waning crescent moon will later drop by to join them. Dazzling "double planet" For the past several months, dazzling Venus has been prominent in our morning sky. And about a week ago, brilliant Jupiter also began to emerge from out of the glare of the Sun. The two planets are currently rising out of the east-southeast horizon about two hours before sunrise. From now through the end of January, the gap between the two will noticeably close, until on Feb. 1 they'll be separated by just over one-half degree, which is roughly the apparent width of the moon (The width of your fist, held at arm's length roughly corresponds to 10 degrees). Jupiter will shine brilliantly at magnitude -1.9, yet it will appear only 1/7 as bright as Venus, which will gleam at magnitude -4.0. Together they will make for a spectacular "double planet" low in the dawn twilight. In the mornings thereafter they will appear to slowly separate, but before they have a chance to get too far apart the moon will join the picture. Celestial summit meeting At last quarter (half) phase on Jan. 30, the moon will stand alone, high toward the south at sunrise. But with each passing morning, as it wanes to a slender crescent, it will shift toward the east, ultimately into the same region of the sky as our two planets.

Early on Sunday morning, Feb. 3, the moon will sit well off to the west (right) of the planets. On the following morning, Monday, Feb. 4, the show will reach its peak when, about 45 minutes before sunrise, Venus, Jupiter and the moon the three brightest objects of the night sky will form a striking isosceles triangle, with the two planets 3 degrees apart and the moon marking the vertex of the triangle just over 5 degrees below the "dynamic duo." Imagine the astrological significance that the ancients might have ascribed to a celestial summit meeting such as this! You might want to check your southeast horizon in advance to make sure that there are no tall trees or buildings that might obstruct your view of the moon which will be sitting very low to the horizon. Like a painting, this celestial tableau might, at first glance may appear rather flat and onedimensional. But by gazing at this scene long enough, our minds can perhaps picture these objects strung out across the solar system, along our line of sight as they really are. Beyond our moon figuratively a stone's throw away at 247,000 miles (397,000 kilometers) we first reach Venus, about 510 times farther out, or 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Earth. The lesser gem flanking Venus Jupiter, largest of all the planets is nearly 4 and a half times more distant than Venus at a distance of 560 million miles (901 million kilometers). Generally speaking, at least for the immediate future, conjunctions between Venus and Jupiter will come in pairs. The first conjunction takes place in the morning sky, followed about 10 months later by another in the evening sky. Then, after about two and a half years, Venus and Jupiter are again in conjunction, again in the morning sky. When Venus and Jupiter next get together, it will be in the evening sky late next fall, on Dec. 1. After that, we'll have to wait until May 2011 (morning sky) and Mar. 2012 (evening sky) for the next set of Venus-Jupiter conjunctions.

Loneliness Breeds Belief in Supernatural

People who feel lonely are more likely to believe in the supernatural, whether that is God, angels or miracles, a new study finds.

Humans have evolved as social creatures, so loneliness cuts to the quick. Living in groups was critical to the survival and safety of our ancient ancestors, and "complete isolation or ostracism has been tantamount to a death sentence," said University of Chicago researcher Nicholas Epley, who led the study. While group living isn't critical to survival in the modern world, feeling socially connected is. Feeling isolated and lonely is a very painful emotional state for people, Epley said, and can lead to ill health, both physically and mentally. "Being socially isolated is just not good for you," he said. When people feel lonely, they may try to rekindle old friendships, seek out new ones or, as Epley's study suggests, they may create social connections by anthropomorphizing nearby gadgets, such as computers or cars, pets, or by believing in supernatural events or religious figures. Pets and religion In their study, detailed in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, Epley's team tried to induce feelings of loneliness in people to see how it affected how they thought of pets and their belief in religious figures. In one experiment, college undergraduates were shown movie clips and told to try and empathize with the protagonist as best they could, in order to set them in one of three emotional states. One group was shown a clip from "Cast Away," the movie in which the main character played by Tom Hanks is deserted on a remote island, in order to induce a feeling of isolation. The second group was shown a clip from the crime thriller "The Silence of the Lambs" to promote a sense of fear. A third, control group was shown a clip from the sports comedy feature film "Major League." All three groups were then asked to describe a pet they owned or knew well and pick three traits from a list that best described them. The list included anthropomorphic traits that related to social connections (thoughtful, sympathetic) and simple behavioral descriptions (aggressive, energetic, fearful). Participants from the loneliness group were more likely to describe the pet using the anthropomorphic descriptions than those in the fear or control groups. All three groups were also asked to rate their belief in ghosts, angels, the devil, miracles, curses, and God, and again, those in the loneliness group reported stronger belief in these supernatural agents. Future predictions In another part of their study, Epley and his colleagues asked participants from the University of Chicago to fill out a personality questionnaire and were then told that the answers would be fed to a computer which would generate a future-life prediction for them. Half of the participants were

read statements implying they would be lonely later in life, while the other half were told they would be socially connected for the rest of their lives. "We tried to manipulate their loneliness, to make them feel lonely," Epley said. The participants were then asked to rate their belief in the same supernatural agents in the other study, and those in the "lonely group" reported stronger belief than those in the "connected group." The results were also compared to ratings the participants gave before they got their life predictions, and those who reported a belief in God before and were made to feel lonely reported a stronger belief after the experiment. "We found that inducing people to feel lonely made them more religious essentially," Epley told LiveScience, though he notes it won't cause any sudden conversions. Health benefits Owning pets and religious beliefs and practices are both known to increase a person's sense of well-being, but why exactly that is isnt well known, Epley said. Epley and his colleagues plan to probe the issue further to see if anthropomorphizing pets or believing in anthropomorphized supernatural agents is what is responsible for alleviating feelings of loneliness. If it is, it could provide alternate means for people to feel socially connected when connecting to humans isn't an option. "There are health benefits that come from being connected to other people, and those same benefits seem to come from connection with pets and with religious agents, too," Epley said.

Vatican slams California firm's cloning experiments

VATICAN CITY (AFP) - A leading Vatican official on Friday condemned a US company's announcement that it had created cloned human embryos from adult skin cells The medical breakthrough could ultimately lead to the development of cures for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, and other untreatable ailments. The experiments carried out by Stemagen Corp., a private company based in La Jolla, California, are the "worst exploitation of the human being which thus becomes an object of research," said Elio Sgreccia, who heads the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Sgreccia stressed that the experiments had "so far not been successful" and were also "a product of the past" as other recent experiments with human cells had been carried out without destroying embryos. Stemagen Corp. used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create the embryos. In their experiments, the researchers removed the nuclei of mature egg cells from healthy young women who had previously donated eggs for successful infertility treatments. Scientists then inserted DNA from an adult male donor into the eggs. DNA used in the experiment was retrieved from cells called fibroblasts, which are obtained from skin biopsies. Several of the reconstructed eggs continued to develop as normal embryos, and three of the embryos were shown in genetic tests to have the same DNA as their male fibroblast donors. "This study demonstrates, for the first time, that SCNT can be utilized to generate cloned human blastocysts using differentiated adult donor nuclei remodeled and reprogrammed by human oocytes," the researchers wrote in the study, which appear Thursday in the online edition of the journal "Stem Cells." They believe that some key technical factors contributed to their successful results, including the use of freshly donated oocytes from successful egg donors. Researchers said the breakthrough could lead to the creation of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for the development of treatment for as yet uncurable illnesses

Amazing Old Stars Give Birth Again

Two old stars appear to be gearing up for a second generation of planet formation, a phenomenon astronomers say they have never seen before. "This is a new class of stars, ones that display conditions now ripe for formation of a second generation of planets, long, long after the stars themselves formed," said UCLA astronomy graduate student Carl Melis, who reported the findings at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. The stars are BP Piscium in the constellation Pisces and TYCHO 4144 329 2, which resides in the constellation Ursa Major. The exact ages of the stars are unknown, but it is estimated they are at least hundreds of millions or possibly billions of years old, and might have already given birth to planets long ago.

"Most astronomers now believe that most stars are accompanied by first-generation planets of some sort, even if the planets are not massive enough to be picked up by the radial velocity [detection] technique," Melis said. Second generation of planets The unusual thing about these stars is that they appear to be giving birth to planets again. "We currently understand planet formation to occur around stars when they are very young and enshrouded in dusty and gaseous disks, the material necessary to form planetary bodies," Melis told SPACE.com. "This material is completely used up after a couple to ten million years after the star is born and is not replenished during the star's life. As such, we would never expect a star to undergo planet formation late in its life as the necessary conditions are not present." How they can do this is still unclear, but the stars seem to have kept many of their youthful qualities. For instance, the researchers found orbiting disks of gas and dust extended around the stars, and, in the case of BP Piscium, jets of gas being ejected into space. These gas-and-dust rings provide the fodder for the making of planetesimals, such as comets and asteroids that can merge to form larger bodies, along with planets. "With all these characteristics that match so closely with young stars, we would expect that our two stars would also be young," Melis said. "As we gathered more data, however, things just did not add up." Aging stars The lack of lithium gave away the true stellar ages. Since stars burn lithium as they get older, younger stars should pack large stores of the chemical element. The astronomers found, however, that BP Piscium contained much less lithium than would be expected for a young star of its mass. "There is no known way to account for this small amount of lithium if BP Piscium is a young star," Melis said. "Rather, lithium has been heavily processed, as appropriate for old stars. Other spectral measurements also indicate it is a much older star." The researchers speculate that the senior stars might be borrowing material from their neighbors to construct new worlds. "Our team believes that these stars, as they aged and began to expand into giant stars, engulfed very short-period companion stars orbiting around them," Melis said. "Interactions with these companions caused matter to be flung into disks surrounding the two stars."

AFP/NASA-HO/File Photo: View of a star cluster in outer space. Astronomers poring over a young star...

Disabled spy satellite threatens Earth

WASHINGTON - A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and could hit the Earth in late February or March, government officials said Saturday The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret. "Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, when asked about the situation after it was disclosed by other officials. "Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause." He would not comment on whether it is possible for the satellite to be perhaps shot down by a missile. He said it would be inappropriate to discuss any specifics at this time. A senior government official said that lawmakers and other nations are being kept apprised of the situation. Such an uncontrolled re-entry could risk exposure of U.S. secrets, said John Pike, a defense and intelligence expert. Spy satellites typically are disposed of through a controlled re-entry into the ocean so that no one else can access the spacecraft, he said.

Pike also said it's not likely the threat from the satellite could be eliminated by shooting it down with a missile, because that would create debris that would then re-enter the atmosphere and burn up or hit the ground. Pike, director of the defense research group GlobalSecurity.org, estimated that the spacecraft weighs about 20,000 pounds and is the size of a small bus. He said the satellite would create 10 times less debris than the Columbia space shuttle crash in 2003. As for possible hazardous material in the spacecraft, Pike said it might contain beryllium, a light metal with a high melting point that is used in the defense and aerospace industries. Breathing beryllium can lead to chronic, incurable respiratory problems. Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive, said the spacecraft likely is a photo reconnaissance satellite. Such eyes in the sky are used to gather visual information from space about adversarial governments and terror groups, including construction at suspected nuclear sites or militant training camps. The satellites also can be used to survey damage from hurricanes, fires and other natural disasters. The largest uncontrolled re-entry by a NASA spacecraft was Skylab, the 78-ton abandoned space station that fell from orbit in 1979. Its debris dropped harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and across a remote section of western Australia. In 2000, NASA engineers successfully directed a safe de-orbit of the 17-ton Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, using rockets aboard the satellite to bring it down in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. In 2002, officials believe debris from a 7,000-pound science satellite smacked into the Earth's atmosphere and rained down over the Persian Gulf, a few thousand miles from where they first predicted it would plummet.

Giant newt, tiny frog identified as most at risk

Reuters Photo: A man holds a giant Chinese salamander in this undated handout. A giant Chinese salamander...

LONDON (Reuters) - A giant Chinese salamander that predates Tyrannosaurus rex and the world's smallest frog are among a group of extremely rare amphibians identified by scientists on Monday as being in need of urgent help to survive. The Olm, a blind salamander that can survive for 10 years without food, and a purple frog that spends most of its life four meters underground are also among the 10 most endangered amphibians drawn up by the Zoological Society of London. "These species are the 'canaries in the coalmine' -- they are highly sensitive to factors such as climate change and pollution, which lead to extinction, and are a stark warning of things to come," said EDGE head Jonathan Baillie. EDGE, which stands for Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered, is a project set up a year ago to identify and start to protect some of nature's most weird and wonderful creatures. "The EDGE amphibians are amongst the most remarkable and unusual species on the planet and yet an alarming 85 percent of the top 100 are receiving little or no conservation attention," said the project's amphibians chief Helen Meredith. While last year's launch focused on at risk mammals, this year the focus shifted to neglected amphibians. "These animals may not be cute and cuddly, but hopefully their weird looks and bizarre behaviors will inspire people to support their conservation," Meredith added. Not only are the target species unique, the project itself is breaking new ground by using the internet at www.zsl.org/edge to highlight threatened creatures and encourage the public to sponsor conservation. Global warming and human depredation of habitat are cited as root causes of the problem facing the creatures from the massive to the minute. The Chinese giant salamander, a distant relative of the newt, can grow up to 1.8 meters in length while the tiny Gardiner's Seychelles frog when full grown is only the size of a drawing pin. Also on this year's list is the limbless Sagalla caecilian, South African ghost frogs, lungless Mexican salamanders, the Malagasy rainbow frog, Chile's Darwin frog and the Betic midwife toad whose male carries fertilized eggs on its hind legs. "Tragically, amphibians tend to be the overlooked members of the animal kingdom, even though one in every three amphibian species is currently threatened with extinction, a far higher proportion than that of bird or mammal species," said EDGE's Baillie.

Scientists discover huge extinct rodent

AP Photo: In this image released in London Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008 by the Royal Society, an...

LONDON - Eeek! Imagine a rodent that weighed a ton and was as big as a bull. Uruguayan scientists say they have uncovered fossil evidence of the biggest species of rodent ever found, one that scurried across wooded areas of South America about 4 million years ago, when the continent was not connected to North America A herbivore, the beast may have been a contemporary, and possibly prey, of saber-toothed cats a prehistoric version of Tom and Jerry. For those afraid of rodents, forget hopping on a chair. Its huge skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds. Although British newspapers variously described it as a mouse or a rat, researchers say the animal, named Josephoartigasia monesi, actually was more closely related to a guinea pig or porcupine. "These are totally different from the rats and mice we're accustomed to," said Bruce Patterson, the curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, adding that it was the biggest rodent he had ever heard of. An artist's rendering showed a creature that looked like a cross between a hippopotamus and guinea pig.

The fossil was found in 1987 about 65 miles west of the capital of Montevideo, near the vast River Plate estuary a muddy waterway separating Uruguay from Argentina that empties into the South Atlantic. That area is site of ancient riverbanks and other deposits where fossils have been found, he said. An Argentine fossil collector identified as Sergio Viera donated the skull to Uruguay's National History and Anthropology Museum nearly two decades ago, said museum director Arturo Toscano. It spent years hidden away in a box at the museum and was rediscovered by curator Andres Rinderknecht, who enlisted the help of fellow researcher Ernesto Blanco to study it. Blanco told The Associated Press he was shocked when he first came face to face with the fossil, saying it looked even bigger than a cow skull. "It's a beautiful piece of nature," he said in an interview. "You feel the power of a very big animal behind this." Blanco said the skull's shape and the huge incisors left no doubt they were dealing with a rodent, but he cautioned that the estimate of the animal's bulk was imprecise. The extinct rodent clearly outclassed its nearest rival, the Phoberomys, found in Venezuela and estimated to weigh between 880 and 1,500 pounds. Blanco said the rodent was far more enormous than any South American rodent alive today, surpassing even the present-day capibara that can weigh up to 110 pounds. He said the animal's teeth pointed to a diet of aquatic plants. "From what we can tell, we know it was a herbivore that lived on the shores of rivers or alongside streams in woodland areas," Rinderknecht told the AP. "Possibly it had a behavior similar to other water-faring rodents that exist today, such as beavers, which split their time between land and water." But he said the rodent appears to have had no tail, adding that follow-up studies are being planned to better determine its diet and other traits. The creature may have been a contemporary to the saber-toothed cats and giant carnivorous birds that roamed the area millions of years ago, but Blanco said it was not clear whether such predators had the power necessary to bring down the huge beast. "This investigation began about a year and a half ago but it's still not complete," Rinderknecht said, adding that the next step may be a CT scan of the skull "to better determine its interior dimensions." The research by Rinderknecht and Blanco was published Wednesday in this week's issue of biological research journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Scientists uninvolved with the finding agreed that this was one really big rodent. "I think it's a very important discovery it is certainly an immense animal," said Mary Dawson, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. She said it and other rodents grew bigger by filling the ecological niche taken elsewhere by rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. "They got large taking the role of some herbivores that were not present at that time South America was still an island continent," she said. But when North and South America were linked about 3 million years ago, the rodents were swamped by North American animals and eventually died out. "It's too bad they're extinct, I'd love to see those things," she said. Patterson said its discovery gave scientists more insight into the fauna of the prehistoric South American continent, when it hosted creatures such as marsupial predators and hoofed animals known to scientists as archaic ungulates. "These were things with trunks on their noses, huge claws on their hands, they look like somebody just made them up," he said. Little trace of big rodent is left. Its closest surviving cousin, the pacarana, is endangered. The sharp-clawed 33-pound rodent lives in the hills around the Andes Mountains. It is considered among the largest living rodents, but its slow rate of reproduction and reputation among humans as a tasty treat means its prospects are grim. Blanco said he was thrilled with the discovery of the huge rodent after so many years. "When you start to open all these boxes, often times you find all kinds interesting pieces of paleontology," he said. "The collector alerted us that it was an important fossil," Toscano said, adding that the skull remains carefully packed in a box in the museum's paleontology collection. Both Blanco and Toscano said they hoped the find would attract more resources to museums in the developing world such as Uruguay's which is so strapped for cash it has been unable to hold public exhibitions since 2000. ___ Associated Press writers Raul Garces and Alfonso Castiglia contributed to the report from Montevideo, Uruguay.

Female Figure on Mars Just a Rock

The idea that there may be life on Mars has been around for centuries, but the theory got a dubious boost from recently released photos of the surface of Mars (taken by the NASA robot Spirit) apparently showing a human-like figure. Several Internet sites have glommed onto the image and suggested the figure could be alive But what is it? Just a rock, astronomers say. It's hard enough to accurately recognize figures and faces across the room. Mars, depending on when you measure it, is about 35 million miles away. The best telescopes aren't of much help in determining surface features, and that's why NASA sent robots with cameras to Mars. The reason many people see a figure on the Martian landscape is the same reason that people see faces in clouds, Rorschach blots, and coffee stains. This phenomenon, called pareidolia, is well known in psychology, and it is the cause of many supposedly mysterious and miraculous events (including the famous "Jesus in the Tortilla"). Examples are all around us; in fact if you have a New Hampshire state quarter, you have pareidolia in your pocket or purse (take a look). Strong evidence for this psychological explanation lies in the fact that the Spirit image does not look like Martian life (since we don't know what life on Mars looks like), but instead resembles life here on Earth, specifically human life. The image is the result of human interpretation. If you look around the full image of the area (not just the close-up), you will find several rocks and features that resemble non-human Earth life, such as armadillos and snakes. In the right bottom corner, emerging from the sand, there is what looks like a lizard face wearing goggles and an airman's helmet. This is of course not the first time that NASA images have been claimed to show evidence of Martian life. A man named Richard Hoagland claimed that 1976 photographs of the Cydonia region of Mars showed a human-like face and was clear evidence of aliens. According to astronomer Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Web site, if the image really is of a man on Mars, he's awfully small: "Talk about a tempest in a teacup!" Plait said. "The rock on Mars is actually just a few inches high and a few yards from the camera. A few million years of Martian winds sculpted it into an odd shape, which happens to look like, well, a Bigfoot! It's just our natural tendency to see familiar shapes in random objects." Even though logic and science suggest that the image is of a rock and not an animal, UFO buffs and conspiracy theorists will continue to speculate.

In fact, it will actually be pretty easy to determine whether or not the image is of alien life. In later photographs of the area, either the same shape will be there or it won't. If it is, it's a rock (unless, of course, little Martian men can hold the same pose for weeks or months at a time). This is exactly how the "Face on Mars" was eventually disproven. On April 5, 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor took photographs of the same region in far higher resolution than was possible in 1976. The new images clearly showed an area heavily eroded, and that the "face" was simply the result of low image quality, pareidolia, and tricks of light and shadow. Hoagland's theory was discredited

Mars' Natural Sculptures Pose Mystery

Wind-sculpted Martian landscapes raise questions for scientists about the Red Planet's atmosphere and terrain. Sand dunes are among the "bedforms" or wind-deposited landforms that appear in new images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). However, scientists remain unsure as to whether winds on present-day Mars are strong enough to create such geological features. "We're seeing what look like smaller sand bedforms on the tops of larger dunes, and, when we zoom in more, a third set of bedforms topping those," said Nathan Bridges, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "On Earth, small bedforms can form and change on time scales as short as a day." Other bedforms on Mars take the shape of smaller and more linear ripples, in which sand is mixed with coarser particles. New details emerged about sediments deposited by winds on the downwind side of rocks. Such "windtails" show which way the most current winds have blown, Bridges said. Only rovers and landers have seen such features before, as opposed to an orbiter. With the University of Arizona's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE), MRO sees features as small as 20 inches from 155 to 196 miles above the Martian surface. Researchers can now use HiRISE images to infer wind directions over the entire planet. Scientists also previously discovered miles-long, wind-scoured ridges called "yardangs" with the first Mars orbiter, Mariner 9, in the early 1970s. New HiRISE images reveal surface texture and fine-scale features that are giving insight into how yardangs form. "HiRISE is showing us just how interesting layers in yardangs are," Bridges said. "For example, we see one layer that appears to have rocks in it. You can actually see rocks in the layer, and if you look downslope, you can see rocks that we think have eroded out from that rocky layer above."

New images show that some layers in the yardangs are made of softer materials that have been modified by wind, he added. The soft material could be volcanic ash deposits, or the dried-up remnants of what once were mixtures of ice and dust, or something else. "The fact that we see layers that appear to be rocky and layers that are obviously soft says that the process that formed yardangs is no simple process but a complicated sequence of processes," Bridges added. Some researchers have begun comparing HiRISE images with those taken by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover, in order to identify previously mysterious features such as dark streaks surrounding Victoria Crater. Others continue to find surprises while reexamining features once considered common and uninteresting. "HiRISE keeps showing interesting things about terrains that I expected to be uninteresting," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, HiRISE principal investigator. "I was surprised by the diversity of morphology of the thick dust mantles. Instead of a uniform blanket of smooth dust, there are often intricate patterns due to the action of the wind and perhaps light cementation from atmospheric volatiles

This Beetle Really Rocks

A new species of beetle that appears as if wearing a tuxedo has been named in honor of the late rock 'n' roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara Entomologist Quentin Wheeler of Arizona State University announced the discovery and naming of the beetle, now dubbed Orectochilus orbisonorum, during a Roy Orbison Tribute Concert on Jan. 25. The ending of the species name, "orum," denotes it was named after a couple. If the beetle were just named after Roy it would end in "i," and for just Barbara, the name would end in "ae." Barbara Orbison, who attended the concert along with Orbison's sons Wesley and Roy Kelton Orbison Jr., remarked on her appreciation for the new species name. "I have never seen an honor like that," she said. To mark the occasion, Wheeler presented Barbara with an original work of art titled Whirligig." Completed by ASU scientist and artist Charles J. Kazilek, the painting included nine images of a whirligig beetle on cotton watercolor paper. "The style of the print is [Andy] Warhol meets Carl Linnaeus," Wheeler said, referring to the pop art icon and the father of taxonomy (the method of classifying living things). Less than a quarter-inch long (five millimeters), O. orbisonorum belongs to the Gyrinidae family, a group of beetles that typically live on the surface of the water.

Called whirligigs because they swim rapidly in circles when alarmed, the beetles have "divided" eyes that can see both above and below the water. A band of material separates the eyes so that on first glance you'd think the insect were four-eyed. Unlike other members of the Indian Gyrinidae, however, this one has a white underbelly due to a clear cuticle through which the white internal tissues are easily visible. Its top surface is shiny black with dull patches covered with dense, tiny hairs. "The contrast between the two areas is visually very stunning," Wheeler said. The beetle's elegant appearance is one reason for the naming. "It almost looks like it's wearing a tuxedo," Wheeler said. In 2005, Wheeler, Kelly Miller of the University of New Mexico and taxonomist Paolo Mazzoldi of Brescia, Italy, discovered 65 new species of slime-mold beetle in the genus Agathidium. They named one of the beetles after Darth Vader and others for President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The new species will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Zootaxa.

What's the Coolest Place in the Universe?

Tuesday January 29, 2008 It's not Miami Beach, if that's what you were thinking. Nor is it the North Pole.

The coldest place known is inside the Boomerang Nebula. It is in the constellation of Centaurus, 5000 light-years from Earth. Planetary nebulae form around a bright, central star when it expels gas in the last stages of its life.

The Boomerang Nebula is one of the Universe's peculiar places. In 1995, using the 15-metre Swedish ESO Submillimetre Telescope in Chile, astronomers Sahai and Nyman revealed that it is the coldest place in the Universe found so far. With a temperature of -272C, it is only one degree warmer than absolute zero (the lowest limit for all temperatures). Even the -270C background glow from the Big Bang is warmer than this nebula. It is the only object found so far that has a temperature lower than the background radiation.

The general bow-tie shape of the Boomerang appears to have been created by a very fierce wind, some 310,000 mph, blowing ultracold gas away from the dying central star. The star has been losing as much as one-thousandth of a solar mass of material per year for 1,500 years,

astronomers say. This is 10-100 times more than in other similar objects. The rapid expansion of the nebula has enabled it to become the coldest known region in the universe.

Humans Force Earth into New Geologic Epoch

By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor posted: 27 January 2008 12:51 pm ET
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Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet's geologic history has begun. Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:

Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns. Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature. Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.

Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain. The idea, first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has gained steam with two new scientific papers that call for official recognition of the shift. Vivid metaphor In the February issue of the journal GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams of the University of Leicester and colleagues

at the Geological Society of London argue that industrialization has wrought changes that usher in a new epoch. Scientists of the future will have no trouble deciding if the proposal was timely. All they'll need to do is dig into the planet and examine its stratigraphic layers, which reveal a chronology of the changing conditions that existed as each layer is created. Layers can reflect volcanic upheaval, ice ages or mass extinctions. "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion," Zalasiewicz's team writes. The paper calls on the International Commission on Stratigraphy to officially mark the shift. In a separate paper last month in the journal Soil Science, researchers focused on soil infertility alone as a reason to dub this the Anthropocene Age. (The term "age" is sometimes used interchangeably with "epoch" or to indicate a transition period between epochs.) As an example, they said, agriculture in Africa "has so degraded regional soil fertility that the economic development of whole nations will be diminished without drastic improvements of soil management." "With more than half of all soils on Earth now being cultivated for food crops, grazed, or periodically logged for wood, how to sustain Earths soils is becoming a major scientific and policy issue," said Duke University soil scientist Daniel Richter. Richter's work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Origin of a term Earth's 4.5-billion-year history is divided into major eras, then periods and finally epochs. The Holocene Epoch began after the last Ice Age. As early as the late 1800s scientists were writing about man's wholesale impact on the planet and the possibility of an "anthropozoic era" having begun, according to Crutzen,

who is credited with coining the term Anthropocene (anthropo = human; cene = new) back in 2000. That year, Crutzen and a colleague wrote in the scientific newsletter International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme about some of the dramatic changes: "Urbanization has ... increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years." Up to half of Earth's land has been transformed by human activity, wrote Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan. They also noted the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and other chemicals and pollutants humans have introduced into global ecosystems. The epochal idea has merit, according to geologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University. "In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human impact is clear, large, and growing,"Alley told ScienceNow, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "A geologist from the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name, where and when our impacts show up."

Strange Creature Immune to Pain

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience posted: 28 January 2008 08:20 pm ET
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Even though it is sensitive to touch, the naked mole rat doesn't even flinch when inflicted with burning acid. Credit: Rochelle Buffenstein/City College of New York.

As vulnerable as naked mole rats seem, researchers now find the hairless, bucktoothed rodents are invulnerable to the pain of acid and the sting of chili peppers. A better understanding of pain resistance in these sausage-like creatures could lead to new drugs for people with chronic pain, scientists added. Naked mole rats live in cramped, oxygen-starved burrows some six feet underground in central East Africa. Unusually, they are cold-blooded which, as far as anyone knows, is unique among mammals. "They're the nicest, sweetest animals I've ever worked with they look frightening, but they're very gentle," said neurobiologist Thomas Park at the University of Illinois at Chicago Scientists knew the mole rats were quite sensitive to touch perhaps to help replace their almost useless eyes. After probing their skin, Park and his colleagues unexpectedly discovered the rodents lacked the chemical Substance P, which causes the feeling of burning pain in mammals. Acid test The researchers discovered that when unconscious mole rats had their paws injected with a slight dose of acid, "about what you'd experience with lemon juice," Park said, as well as some capsaicin the active ingredient of chili peppers the rodents showed no pain. "Their insensitivity to acid was very surprising," Park told LiveScience. "Every animal tested from fish, frogs, reptiles, birds and all other mammals every animal is sensitive to acid." To explore their pain resistance further, the researchers used a modified cold sore virus to carry genes for Substance P to just one rear foot of each tested rodent. Park and his colleagues found the DNA restored the naked mole rats' ability to feel the burning sensation other mammals experience from capsaicin. "They'd pull their foot back and lick it," Park said. Other feet remained impervious to the sting of capsaicin.

"Capsaicin is very specific for exciting the fibers that normally have Substance P," Park added. "They're not the fibers that respond to a pinprick or pinch, but the ones that respond after an injury or burn and produce longer-lasting pain." Curiously, the researchers found that mole rats remained completely insensitive to acids, even with the Substance P genes. This suggests there is a fundamental difference in how their nerves respond to such pain. "Acid acts on the capsaicin receptor and on another family of receptors called acidsensitive ion channels," Park said. "Acid is not as specific as capsaicin. The mole rat is the only animal that shows completely no response to acid." Why so insensitive? Scientists theorize naked mole rats evolved this insensitivity to acid due to underground living. The rodents exhale high levels of carbon dioxide, and in such tight, poorly ventilated spaces it builds up in tissues, making them more acidic. In response, the mole rats became desensitized to acid. "To give you an idea of what they experience, we normally all breathe in carbon dioxide levels of less than 0.1 percent. If people are exposed to an air mixture with as low as 5 percent carbon dioxide, we'll feel a sharp, burning, stinging sensation in our eyes and nose," Park said. "We hypothesize that naked mole rats live in up to 10 percent carbon dioxide." Researcher Gary Lewin, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrck Institute for Molecular Medicine in Germany, noted, "People may say, 'So what it's weird, but what has it to do with human pain?' I think that is wrong, unimaginative and short sighted." Lewin noted that all vertebrate pain-receptor systems "are built in a highly similar way, so the mole rat may tell us how you can unbuild the system." Help for people Specifically, Park noted this research adds to existing knowledge about Substance P. "This is important specifically to the long-term, secondary-order inflammatory pain. It's the pain that can last for hours or days when you pull a muscle or have a surgical procedure," he explained.

As such, these findings might shed new light on chronic pain. Park said, "We're learning which nerve fibers are important for which kinds of pain, so we'll be able to develop new strategies and targets." Lewin added, "We really do not understand the molecular mechanism of acid sensing in humans, although it is thought to be pretty important in inflammatory pain. An animal that naturally lacks such a mechanism may help us identify what the mechanism actually is." Park next plans to study distantly related animals that dwell in similar circumstances, such as the Mexican free-tailed bat and the Alaskan marmot, which both spend large amounts of time in high carbon dioxide caves or burrows. "How are they surviving down there? It'd be interesting if we saw some parallels there with the naked mole rats," Park said. The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 28 in the journal PLoS Biology.

Human Viruses Kill Great Apes

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience posted: 30 January 2008 08:02 am ET
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Christophe Boesch, director of Chimpanzee Projects at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, calls for better hygiene measures for Great Ape tourism. Credit: Sonja Metzger/ Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Common human viruses are killing endangered great apes. A new study reveals a dark side to research and ecotourism, both of which ironically are aimed to help the apes and which may still do more good than harm. Scientists investigated chimpanzees hit by five outbreaks of respiratory disease between 1999 and 2006 in Cte d'Ivoire in West Africa. Nearly all the endangered chimps became sick and many died. All available tissue samples gathered from chimp victims tested positive for one of two germs human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV) or human metapneumovirus (HMPV). These viruses often cause respiratory disease in humans and, in developing countries, are a major source of infant mortality. "The viruses we found are very common," said researcher Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Robert Koch-Institute and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "Antibody prevalence in humans is almost up to 100 percent, meaning almost everybody has had contact with these viruses" and developed antibodies, naturally, designed to fight the germs. These cases represent the first confirmed evidence of viruses transmitted directly from humans to wild great apes. "Virtually all diseases that can harm us can harm the great apes since we share so many genetic and physiologic properties," Leendertz told LiveScience. Swapping diseases There is a long history of diseases spreading from great apes to humans, and perhaps from humans to great apes:

Ebola is a widespread threat to gorillas and chimps in Central Africa, and may have spread to humans from people who ate infected animals. Ebola and SARS may both have originally come from bats.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, originated from chimps and other primates.

Gorillas may have given humans public lice, or "the crabs." There have been suspicions that chimps at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania contracted polio from humans, Leendertz said.

There have also been concerns that gorillas contracted yaws, a disease related to syphilis that is not sexually transmitted, from humans, Leendertz added.

Gorillas and chimpanzees in West Africa have been killed by outbreaks of anthrax. This may have originated from cattle herded by humans, although Leendertz noted these may have been natural events that just exist there in the forests. Although research and ecotourism efforts have brought people into greater contact with endangered great apes in the wild, potentially threatening the primates, "research and tourism has a strong positive effect on great apes' survival since it reduces poaching activities in these areas and gives more 'political weight' to the apes and protected areas," Leendertz added. Indeed, studies suggest the protective effect researchers have against poachers outweighed the substantial chimpanzee death rate caused by human diseases, said Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "However, it comes with some hygienic problems which need to be addressed," he added. Keeping a distance The scientists have already stepped up guidelines to help minimize the risk of infection to chimpanzees, and they urge others to do the same. For example, Leendertz said, he and his colleagues now wear masks, keep a distance of at least 20 feet from the chimps, and disinfect their boots regularly. "We need to be much more proactive about instituting strict hygiene precautions at all ape tourism and research sites," Leendertz said. "One possibility for promoting compliance is a certification process similar to the green labeling system now used in the timber industry." Human diseases that could attack the great apes include germs "that are easily transmitted, such as respiratory disease or diarrhea-causing pathogens, and also those that persist long in the environment, since this creates a higher chance of transmission," Leendertz said.

The researchers will detail their findings in the Feb. 26 issue of the journal Current Biology.

Arctic Ice Fields 'Receding Like Mad'

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 29 January 2008 12:17 pm ET
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Ice caps on the northern plateau of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic have shrunk by 50 percent in recent decades as a result of warming temperatures. Credit: Gifford Miller, University of Colorado at Boulder

Ice fields on an Arctic island have shrunk 50 percent in the past 50 years and will be gone in 50 more, scientists said this week. Located just west of Greenland, Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world, with an area of 196,000 square miles (about 508,000 square kilometers). That's larger than California.

A study published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters reveals the expanses of ice blanketing Baffin's northern plateau in the Canadian Arctic are smaller than at any time in at least the last 1,600 years. "Even with no additional warming, our study indicates these ice caps will be gone in 50 years or less," said study researcher Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado, Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Temperatures across the Arctic have been rising substantially in recent decades as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, say the researchers. It's this warming trend they say is behind Baffin's meltdown. Ice domes Baffin's ice caps, which are domes of ice too small to be labeled ice sheets as those on Greenland are, span just four miles (about six kilometers) long. What makes the ice fields such great study sites is the fact that they are very thin, generally less than 300 feet (91 meters) thick, and they're very cold, so they don't flow and erode the landscape beneath as most glaciers do. "It's so cold that there's no water at their bed, and they're basically completely frozen to the bed," Miller said. "They preserve beneath them the landscape exactly intact upon which the first snow fell that eventually became the ice cap."

Miller and his colleagues analyzed radioactive carbon in dead plant material emerging from beneath the receding ice margins, which would tell them the last time these plants had been exposed to the atmosphere. The oldest dates are from about 1,600 years ago, suggesting the ice fields have remained intact for that long, that is, until 2005 when the scientists sampled the now-exposed plant material. In addition, they extrapolated other radiocarbon data along with satellite imagery to calculate the historical ice-cover and ice-free area in the same area. Toward the end of Little Ice Age, in the mid-1800s, permanent snow and ice covered 1,351 square miles (3,500 square kilometers) in this area. In 2002, coverage was just 41 square miles (107 square kilometers).

Warmer than normal While researchers have known that the Earth is much warmer than 150 years ago, when the Northern Hemisphere was stuck in the Little Ice Age, they are less certain about how today's temperatures compare with a warmer period in our planet's past. For instance, Miller notes there has been a debate over whether today's climate is warmer than it was during the Medieval times, about 1,000 years ago. Some of the ice fields studied formed in pre-Medieval times, Miller said, and persisted until now. "That tells us right there that the warming of the 20th century is the warmest sustained period of warming in that time," Miller said. "It clearly says we're now warmer than we were in Medieval times." Hidden behind this short-term warming and ice-cap melting, Miller explained, is a longterm period of relative cooling. "The general trend has been cooling for the past 10,000 years," Miller told LiveScience. "The fact that they are now receding like mad just makes it even more unusual because the large-scale forcing, how much energy comes in from the sun during the summer months, is getting less and less."

Brazil finds fossil of "missing link" to crocodile

Reuters Photo: An undated image of a newly discovered prehistoric crocodile (Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi) released by the Federal...

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazilian paleontologists said on Thursday they had found the fossil of a new species of prehistoric predator that represented a "missing link" to modern-day crocodiles. The well-preserved fossil of Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, a medium-sized lizard-like predator measuring about 5 1/2 feet (1.7 meters) from head to tail, dates back about 80 million years to the Late Cretaceous period. "This is scientifically important because the specimen literally is the link between more primitive crocodiles that lived in the era of the dinosaurs 80-85 million years ago and modern species," said paleontologist Ismar de Souza Carvalho of Rio de Janeiro Federal University. Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, an agile terrestrial predator of the Peirosauridae family, had different habits from today's crocodiles but it was similar in form and structure despite having longer limbs, scientists said. The fossil was found near the town of Monte Alto in Sao Paulo state and is named after the place and the local scientist who dug up the fossil in 2004 -- Arruda Campos. The new species is one of a number of important finds by paleontologists in Brazil and Argentina over the past few years.

For Better or Worse, Modern Ocean Explorers Stay Connected

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. On a six-week business trip last winter, Cassandra Lopez posted updates to her friends on Facebook, and conversed with her family on Gmail chat. What made these interactions unique was that Cassandra was on-location in the Southern Ocean, writing oceanography articles from one of the worlds most remote places. 24/7 internet access on research vessels attracts a new type of oceanographer those who want to get away from it all, but also blog about it. Cassandra was aboard the R/V Roger Revelle, a vessel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego in La Jolla, Calif. Like most large ships of its generation, it comes with advanced communication systems, as well as crew members devoted to technical support. The satellite system on the R/V Roger Revelle enables it to better serve as a laboratory for scientific research by providing constant internet access. It also has the byproduct of helping seagoing researchers and crew members maintain relationships back home.

On top of a fairly consistent email service, several crew members maintain blogs to tell friends and family about their shipboard experiences. Joe Ferris, a Second Mate, recently posted on travel plans, piracy evasion, navigation, and working out. Resident Technician Dave Langner takes advantage of the real-time camera system, which uploads snapshots from the ship to a San Diego database every ten minutes, to keep in touch with his mother. Sometimes Ill email her just before I go on deck, he says, and she can see me working from her computer screen. Veterans of ship life say that communication has improved dramatically in the past two decades. Acoustics specialist Jules Hummon recalls that when she first started going to sea in 1988, images were faxed via satellite-linked modems, and it took half an hour to transmit a page-long image of sea surface temperatures. On her first trip, she was billed by the kilobyte for two personal faxes a letter from her mother, and a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from her husband. They cost her over $100 to receive. These days, she can download reasonably-sized images through email, using the HiSeasNet satellite connection at no additional cost. These improvements have come about as a result of two innovative, long-term projects based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and funded by NSF, the Office of Naval Research, and universities in the Joint Oceanographic Institutions: HiSeasNet, which has built an infrastructure to provide constant high-speed internet to research vessels via satellite, and the ROADNet, an accompanying network that makes images and sensor data available to anybody with internet as it is being collected. Still, the ability to stay connected to land is a mixed blessing for oceanographers, who appreciate the relative simplicity of life at sea. In a survey taken of scientists and crew members on the R/V Revelles CLIVAR I8S expedition last March, most respondents echoed the sentiment of Chief Scientist Jim Swift, who listed getting away from the distractions of professional life as one of ship times primary appeals. Chris Measures, a trace metals scientist and oceanography professor, finds that better communication has increased his responsibilities at sea. Besides being constantly on-call for the six weeks of CLIVAR I8S, he was in charge of coordinating a grant proposal with researchers in the U.S., India, and Italy, which he submitted by shipboard email. The improved capacity for communication has also brought the interruptions of personal life. Seagoers fret about termite infestations and errors in bills and pet sicknesses that they can do nothing about, barring their physical presence. Furthermore, the inconsistency of satellite connections makes it difficult to have relationships with those onshore, as the expectations of communication are hard to fulfill. On a four-week trip off the coast of Indonesia, resident technician Dave Langner wondered if a relationship was floundering. She hadnt responded to some important emails I had sent, he said. It turns out she just hadnt received them. Second Mate Joe Ferris, who spends five to seven months at sea every year, doesnt bother: I only date when Im not working, he says. The oceanographer tends to fall on the adventurous end of the personality spectrum, but the demands of the oceangoing lifestyle remain at odds with the standard urge to settle down. After

more than a decade of traveling out of a ships berth to exotic locales, Joe Ferris is thinking seriously about buying property and moving his things out of storage. Few give it up completely, but many cut down in their ship time as they move into the patterns of a more stable life buying homes, finding partners, having children. Lynne Talley, a professor and researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, spent much of the 90s at sea, but she now devotes her time to teaching and writing on campus to stay closer to her family. Frequent emailing may not fully substitute for being at home, but it is remarkable that shipboard communications have evolved such that new oceanographers can compare sea time to business trips made by their friends in marketing and consulting. Many careers require travel, sa ys Cliff Buck, a graduate student at Florida State University. I dont really see this lifestyle as being all that unusual

Greatest Mysteries: What Makes a Scientist?

Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is the first of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series to run each weekday. The scientist's job is to figure out how the world works, to "torture" Nature to reveal her secrets, as the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon described it. But who are these people in the lab coats (or sports jackets, or suits, or T-shirts and jeans) and how do they work? It turns out that there is a good deal of mystery surrounding the mystery-solvers. "One of the greatest mysteries is the question of what it is about human beingsbrains, education, culture etc.that makes them capable of doing science at all," said Colin Allen, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University. Few scientists have turned the microscope (or brain scanner) back on themselves. So even though the scientific methodwith its hypotheses, data collection and statistical analysisis well documented, the method by which scientists come to conclusions remains largely hidden. "If we could understand scientifically what makes a scientist, this would potentially feed back on science itself and accelerate scientific progress," Allen said. A curious development

Two vital ingredients seem to be necessary to make a scientist: the curiosity to seek out mysteries and the creativity to solve them. "Scientists exhibit a heightened level of curiosity," reads a 2007 report on scientific creativity for the European Research Council. "They go further and deeper into basic questions showing a passion for knowledge for its own sake." According to one definition, curiosity is a sensitivity to small discrepancies in an otherwise ordered world. Studies have shown that curious people have a mixture of seemingly conflicting desires: they seek novelty and strangeness and yet they also want everything in its proper place. The curious scientist believes there is an order to the universe but is always looking for unexpected data points that will test the accepted theory. Creative tool kit To resolve the conflict between data and theory, a scientist often has to think outside the box and approach the problem from different angles. Max Planck, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once said, the scientist must have a vivid and intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination. To understand this scientific creativity, some philosophers of science have made an analogy with child development. The idea is that a scientist uses the same strategies for investigating the world as an infant does discovering his/her surroundings for the first time. "This makes scientific abilities seem like part of a very basic 'tool kit' that is not specific to science itself," Allen said. It harkens to something the astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "Everybody starts out as a scientist. Every child has the scientist's sense of wonder and awe." Unwilling subjects But others disagree with this universal scientific mind. They believe that scientists have special abilities that set them apart.

Discovering these abilities may be hard, Allen thinks, as many scientists will be reluctant to reveal them and would prefer to preserve the mystery of creativity, fearing that if it became an object of study it would lose its magic. But for Allen, this is all part of a bigger question of what lies behind anyone's behavior. "We are only just beginning to understand how the traits of organisms, including ourselves, aren't the fixed products of either genes or of environment/culture, but each of us is the product of a continual interactive process in which we help build the environments that in turn shape us," he said. A brain doesn't work in a vacuum. It makes decisions that alter its surroundings, which in turn affects later decisions. Unraveling how this constant feedback loop works in a scientist will not be easy to do with current brain imaging techniques such as fMRI. "As long as our best technology for seeing inside the brain requires subjects to lie nearly motionless while surrounded by a giant magnet, we're only going to make limited progress on these questions," Allen said.

The Enduring Mystery of Light

It goes through walls, but slows to a standstill in ultra-cold gases. It carries electronic information for radios and TVs, but destroys genetic information in cells. It bends around buildings and squeezes through pinholes, but ricochets off tiny electrons.

It's light. And although we know it primarily as the opposite of darkness, most of light is not visible to our eyes. From low energy radio waves to high energy gamma rays, light zips around us, bounces off us, and sometimes goes through us.

Electromagnetic Radiation

The Whole Spectrum

Because it is so many things, defining light is a bit of a philosophical quandary. It doesn't help that light continue to surprise us, with novel materials that alter light's speed and trajectory in unexpected ways.

Is it a wave?

What ties together microwaves, X-rays and the colors of the rainbow is that they are all waves electromagnetic waves to be exact. The substance that sloshes back and forth isn't water or air, but a combination of electric and magnetic fields.

These fluctuating fields exert forces on charged particles sometimes causing them to bob up and down like buoys in the ocean.

What separates all the various forms of light is wavelength. Our eyes are sensitive to light with wavelengths between 750 nanometers (red) and 380 nanometers (violet), where a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or about the size of a single molecule.

But the visible spectrum seen through a prismis only a small chunk of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The wavelength of light ranges from hundreds of miles for long radio waves to one millionth of a nanometer for gamma rays [graphic].

The energy of light is inversely proportional to the wavelength, such that gamma rays are a billion billion times more energetic than radio waves.

Or is it a particle?

But waves are not the whole story. Light is composed of particles called photons. This is most obvious with higher energy light, like X-rays and gamma rays, but it is true all the way down to radio waves.

The classic example of particleness is the photoelectric effect, in which light hitting a metal sheet causes electrons to fly out of the surface. Surprisingly, light longer than a certain wavelength cannot liberate electrons, no matter how bright the source is.

How Light Works A strict wave theory of light cannot explain this wavelength threshold, since many long waves should pack the same total energy as a few short waves.

Albert Einstein deciphered the mystery in 1905 by assuming that particles of light smacked into the electrons, like colliding billiard balls. Only particles from short wavelength light can give a hard enough kick.

Despite this success, the particle theory never replaced the wave theory, since only waves can describe how light interferes with itself when it passes through two slits. We therefore have to live with light being both a particle and a wavesometimes acting as hard as a rock, sometimes as soft as a ripple.

Physicists rectify light's split personality by thinking in terms of wave packets, which one can imagine as a group of light waves traveling together in a tight, particle-like bundle.

Making a spectacle

Instead of worrying about what light is, it might be better to concentrate on what light does. Light shakes, twists and shoves the charged particles (like electrons) that reside in all materials.

These light actions are wavelength-specific. Or to say it another way, each material responds only to a particular set of wavelengths.

Take an apple, for instance. Radio waves and X-rays go essentially straight through it, whereas visible light is stopped by various apple molecules that either absorb the light as heat or reflect it back out.

If the reflected light enters our eyes, it will stimulate color receptors (cones) that are specifically "tuned" to either long, medium or short wavelengths. The brain compares the different cone responses to determine that the apple reflects "red" light [graphic].

Here are some other examples of light's specific activities.

Radio waves from a local station cause the free electrons in a radio's antenna to oscillate. Electronics tuned to the station's frequency (or wavelength) can decode the oscillating signal into music or words. A microwave oven heats food from the inside out because microwaves penetrate the surface to rotate water molecules contained in the food. This molecular shuffling generates heat. Standing next to a camp fire, infrared light vibrates molecules in our skin to make us warm. Conversely, we constantly lose heat when these same molecules emit infrared light. In sunlight, several visible and ultraviolet wavelengths are missing, or dark. These "shadows" are due to the capture of photons by atoms, like hydrogen and helium, that make up the sun. The captured photon energy is used to boost the atoms' electrons from one energy level to another. An X-ray image of a skeleton is due to the fact that X-rays pass through soft tissue but are blocked by dense bone. However, even when just passing through, X-rays and gamma rays ionize molecules along their path, meaning they strip electrons from the molecules. The ionized molecules can directly or indirectly damage DNA in a cell. Some of these genetic alterations may lead to cancer. All this shows that light wears many different hats in its manipulation of matter. It is perhaps fitting then that light's true identitywave or particleis unanswerable.

Why is the Sky Blue?

Behind Light: The Strangest Little Things in Nature Shadowy T-rays: Hunting Tumors and Exploring the Universe Scientists Mess with the Speed of Light Life's Little Mysteries Optics Turned Upside Down Opticsthe study of light's path through materialsdates back to the ancient Greeks. Recently some of the rules of optics have been overturned.

Physicists have slowed and even stopped pulses of light in laser-cooled gases and other materials. Astonishingly, they have also clocked pulses going faster than light's speed limit of 186,000 miles per second. The law of reflection says that a light ray bounces off a surface at the same angle that it came in at. But recent experiments have shown that this law is broken in certain fluids. Researchers have combined different materials to create super-lenses that focus light sharper than previously thought possible. The science fiction dream of cloaking has been made a reality by a device that makes objects invisible to microwaves. Michael Schirber

The electromagnetic spectrum: Light is much more than what meets the eye. Credit: George Frederick for LiveScience

Optics Turned Upside Down Opticsthe study of light's path through materialsdates back to the ancient Greeks. Recently some of the rules of optics have been overturned. Physicists have slowed and even stopped pulses of light in laser-cooled gases and other materials. Astonishingly, they have also clocked pulses going faster than light's speed limit of 186,000 miles per second. The law of reflection says that a light ray bounces off a surface at the same angle that it came in at. But recent experiments have shown that this law is broken in certain fluids. Researchers have combined different materials to create super-lenses that focus light sharper than previously thought possible. The science fiction dream of cloaking has been made a reality by a device that makes objects invisible to microwaves.

Greatest Mysteries: How Does the Brain Work?

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 02 August 2007 09:04 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. Our brains can fathom the beginning of time and the end of the universe, but is any brain capable of understanding itself? With billions of neurons, each with thousands of connections, one's noggin is a complex, and yes congested, mental freeway. Neurologists and cognitive scientists nowadays are probing how the mind gives rise to thoughts, actions, emotions and ultimately consciousness. The complex machine is difficult for even the brainiest of scientists to wrap their heads around. But the payoff for such an achievement could be huge. If we understand the brain, we will understand both its capacities and its limits for thought, emotions, reasoning, love and every other aspect of human life, said Norman Weinberger, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. Brain teasers What makes the brain such a tough nut to crack? According to Scott Huettel of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, the standard answer to this question goes something like: The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe ... complexity makes simple models impractical and accurate models impossible to comprehend.

While that stock answer is correct, Huettel said, its incomplete. The real snag in brain science is one of navel gazing. Huettel and other neuroscientists cant step outside of their own brains (and experiences) when studying the brain itself. A more pernicious factor is that we all think we understand the brainat least our own through our experiences. But our own subjective experience is a very poor guide to how the brain works, Huettel told LiveScience. Whether the human brain can understand itself is one of the oldest philosophical questions, said Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, a biologist who studies jellyfish as models for human neural processing of visual information. Mental mechanics Scientists have made some progress in taking an objective, direct look at the human brain. In recent years, brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed scientists to observe the brain in action and determine how groups of neurons function. They have pinpointed hubs in the brain that are responsible for certain tasks, such as fleeing a dangerous situation, processing visual information, making those sweet dreams and storing long-term memories. But understanding the mechanics of how neuronal networks collaborate to allow such tasks has remained more elusive. We do not yet have a good way to study how groups of neurons form functional networks when we learn, remember, or do anything else, including seeing, hearing moving, loving, Weinberger said. Plus these clusters of brain cells somehow give rise to more complex behaviors and emotions, such as altruism, sadness, empathy and anger. Huettel and his colleagues used fMRIs to discover a region in the brain linked with altruistic behavior. "Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Teresa, Huettel said, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviors like altruism.

Who am I? The prized puzzle in brain research is arguably the idea of consciousness. When you look at a painting, for instance, you are aware of it and your mind processes its colors and shapes. At the same time, the visual impression could stir up emotions and thoughts. This subjective awareness and perception is consciousness. Many scientists consider consciousness the delineation between humans and other animals. So rather than cognitive processes directly leading to behaviors (unbeknownst to us), we are aware of the thinking. We even know that we know! If this mind bender is ever solved, an equally perplexing question would arise, according to neuroscientists: Why? Why does awareness exist at all? Ultimately, Weinberger said, understanding the brain will enable us to understand wh at it truly is to be human.

Greatest Mysteries: How Many Species Exist on Earth?

By Andrea Thompson, Staff Writer posted: 03 August 2007 09:18 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday.

The prospect of discovering little green men on other planets has long captured our imaginations, but many scientists are just as excited about finding new life forms in our

own backyard.

Though humans have shared the planet with millions of other creatures for thousands of years, we know surprisingly little about our neighborswe dont even know exactly how many flora and fauna call Earth home.

The National Science Foundations Tree of Life project estimates that there could be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on the planet, but science has only identified about 2 million.

Weve only touched the surface of understanding animal life, said entomologist Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. Weve discovered just 10 percent of all living things on this planet.

Environmental index

Taking an exact count of Earths creatures may not seem like the most important task, but taxonomy, the science of discovering, describing and categorizing living things, is the foundation for understanding life on this planet, Fisher said.

Knowing just who we share the planet with is of particular concern now because global warming, deforestation and other signs of human development are threatening many species, which may be essential to the functioning of ecosystems or may have inherent value in terms of developing medicines or other products.

As Fisher puts it, knowing what kind and how much life is out there could make society more bio-literatewe would better understand the impacts that human activities have on other living things.

We could have kind of a Dow Jones index of the environment, Fisher said.

No simple answer

Though taxonomists have been cataloguing plants and animals for more than 250 years, they still have no exact answer to the question, How many species are on Earth?

Its a very simple question, but we have no simple answer, Fisher said.

One of the reasons we cant get an accurate count is that the bulk of the things that have yet to be discovered and described are in the realm of the very small: insects, bacteria and other microbes.

Weve done a pretty good job of categorizing from the size of a fly up, but anything below that is far less known, said Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Another part of the problem is that the tradition of taxonomy has been confined to the developed world for the bulk of its existence, leaving out the enormous diversity of much of the southern hemisphere, which is less developed on average.

Species arent equally distributed across the Earth; they have these hotspots, Fisher said.

For example, says AMNH entomologist Randall Schuh, as of 2003 there are about 2,000 known plant-eating bug species in North America, but only 200 in Australia, while the sampling of Australias plant diversity that Schuh has done since then suggests that there could be as many as 3,000 plant-eating bug species in Australia.

Complicating the matter are cryptic species, which look the same to the human eye, but genetically are quite different, making them that much harder for scientists to classify.

When we go out in nature and we see individual organisms, they dont wear little name tags, they dont tell us what they are, Schuh said.

New tools

But taxonomists now have new tools such as DNA sequencing that are making distinguishing one species from another, particularly cryptic species and smaller creatures, much easier.

Were going to find more and more things through these tools, theres no doubt about

it, Schuh said.

Biologists are also combining their knowledge in projects such as the Tree of Life, the bug-focused Planetary Biodiversity Inventory co-headed by Schuh and the Census for Marine Life (a network of researchers in more than 70 nations engaged in a 10-year initiative to assess the diversity and abundance of marine life), all of which are intended to identify, catalogue and connect lineages of Earths millions of species.

I think now we can, if we put some resources behind it, address this exciting fact that 90 percent of life is yet to be discovered on the planet, Fisher said.

Greatest Mysteries: Who Are You?

By Melinda Wenner, Special to LiveScience posted: 07 August 2007 09:13 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. You might think you know yourself, but youre wrong. Scientists who study how the brain shapes identity and behavior say that we are actually quite unaware of who we really are. Much of what drives our actions and shapes our personality is unconscious. The nature of consciousness has long baffled psychologists and cognitive scientists, but recent research is bolstering a consensus, said Ezequiel Morsella, a psychologist at Yale University.

If you think of the brain as a set of different computers, each of which performs different complicated tasks and proceduress, consciousness is like the Wi-Fi network that integrates the computers activities so that they can work together, Morsella explained. For example, if you are carrying a hot plate of food to the table, one of your brains computers will tell you to drop the plate because its burning your skin, whereas another will tell you to hold on so the food doesnt end up on the floor. The brain requires the Wi-Fi network of consciousness so that the different computers can interact, hash things out and determine what you do. Its a physical state that integrates systems in the brain that would otherwise not be integrated, Morsella said in a telephone interview.

More than meets the mind So when it comes to our actions, consciousness really just skims the surface. Most of what drives what we do is embedded in neural networks not readily accessible by conscious thought, said Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University. The intuitive everyday idea about the sense of self and its control over behavior is as incorrect as the idea that the earth is flat, Morsella agreed. Although we think of ourselves as independent agents, were not. Everything we do is influenced by unconscious processes and our environment, he added. For instance, while we can be aware of some of our urges, we are often unaware of the processes that created them. My eye may have scanned a picture of a hamburger in a magazine, and then a few minutes later, I have this urge, Morsella said. Were unaware of the evolutionary sources of a lot of behavior. Other times, were not even aware of the urges. Research has shown, for instance, that compared to what would be expected by chance alone, more men named Ken move to live in Kentucky and more Florences move to live in Florida; more men named Dennis become dentists and more Lauras become lawyers. According to John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale University, these surprising findings are most likely the result of our evolutionary-driven attraction to things similar to usan urge stemming from the idea that we should mate with people who resemble us because they are more likely to share our genes and help to propel them into the next generation.

Most people, of course, are unaware of ever having such urges. It is clearly an unconscious influence, as no one would claim name-letter overlap as a reason for making these important life choices, Bargh wrote of the findings. Understanding ourselves Given the limited role that conscious thought plays in shaping behavior and personality, and the complexity of all the other systems that influence us, its not easy to understand how we become the people we become. Most brain research today focuses on how individual systems work, but perhaps science needs to approach the brain in a different wayby designing experiments to tease out the activity of multiple systems at once, said LeDoux. We need to understand how information processed by many systems, both conscious and unconscious, simultaneously determines how we think, act and feel, and more generally, how we are who we are, he told LiveScience.

Greatest Mysteries: What Causes Mass Extinctions?

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience posted: 08 August 2007 09:28 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. They are known ominously as the Big Fivethe five greatest mass extinctions over the past 500 million years, each of which is thought to have annihilated anywhere from 50 to 95 percent of all species on the planet.

Many unsolved mysteries remain regarding these disasters, perhaps the greatest of which is what caused each of them. But research is uncovering how these extinction events dictated the fate of life on this planetfor instance, determining which animals first crawled onto land and which ruled the oceans. The main suspects behind these catastrophes seem to come either from above, in the form of deadly asteroids or comets, or from below, in the form of extraordinarily massive volcanism. Occasionally, however, unexpected culprits arisefor instance, otherwise innocuous forests. The K-T extinction The most recent of the Big Five is the most familiar onethe cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs. The end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, otherwise known as K-T, killed off all dinosaurs save birds roughly 65 million years ago, as well as roughly half of all species on the planet, including pterosaurs. Not only did mammals sweep across the planet after K-T, but sharks expanded across the seas, explained American Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontologist Jack Conrad. "Throughout the Age of Dinosaurs, you always had these large reptile carnivores dominating the water, such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs," Conrad explained. "Only after they die do you see big sharks becoming really prevalent. You probably wouldn't have seen orcas or blue whales either had reptile dominance of the seas not gone by the wayside." Although research suggests the planet was on the verge of environmental upheaval before the K-T extinction event, the straw that broke the dinosaur's back is widely thought to have been an impact with an asteroid or comet. Still, a number of researchers contend evidence commonly linked with such an impact, such as the metal iridium, which is rare on the Earth's crust, could also be caused by the massive volcanic eruptions at the Deccan Flats in India, another popular contender for the dinosaur-killing catastrophe. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction The end-Triassic, or Triassic-Jurassic extinction event about 200 million years ago is thought by many to possibly have set dinosaurs on the path to their 135-million-year domination of much of life on Earth. It also ended life for roughly half of all species.

Until this disaster, mammal-like creatures known as therapsids were actually more numerous than the ancestors of the dinosaurs, known as archosaurs. "The dinosaurs definitely survived better than the early proto-mammals did, and the extinction event might have entirely tipped it in their favor," said Rutgers University paleobiologist George McGhee. Of the Big Five, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction has the fewest number of scientists currently researching it, "although that's changing right now," said Columbia University paleoecologist Paul Olsen. Its cause remains under great debate, with the best contender so far being the massive volcanic eruptions at the "Central Atlantic magmatic province," a region that encompassed a staggering 4.2 million square miles (11 million square kilometers), an area larger than Canada. Another main possibility could be an astronomical impact, Olsen said, although as with the K-T event, the evidence for both types of catastrophe can get maddeningly blurry. The Permian-Triassic extinction The largest of the Big Five was the end-Permian or Permian-Triassic extinction event roughly 250 million years ago, which eliminated as much as 95 percent of the planet's species. Before this extinction, marine animals were mostly filter feeders stuck in place on the seafloor, such as crinoids or "sea lilies." Afterward, the seas became far more complex with mobile creatures such as snails, urchins and crabs. The most likely final trigger for the end-Permian was again massive volcanism, this time at the Siberian Traps, which spewed as much as 2.7 million square miles (7 million square kilometers) of lava out, an area nearly as large as Australia. Recent evidence suggests, however, that the end-Permian may have been long in the making. The late Devonian extinctions The late Devonian extinction events were actually two sharp pulses of death about 360 million years ago, each just 100,000 to 300,000 years apart.

Each pulse was accompanied by a massive drop in temperature, with the steaming seas of the Devoniansurface temperatures of which were about 93 degrees F (34 degrees C)dropping to about 78 degrees F (26 degrees C), "and marine organisms would not have liked that at all," McGhee said. As to what caused these cold snaps, the everpopular suspects are ash and dust kicked up by either astronomical impacts or massive volcanism. At that time, plants had made it onto land, as had spiders, scorpions and similar creatures. Right before the extinction events, the first proto-amphibians made it onto shore. However, the invasion of the so-called elpistostegaliansdistant relatives of the coelacanth"got wiped out by these extinction events," McGhee explained. "It wasn't until at least another 10 million years later that we got footprints from vertebrates on land again, this time from the ichthyostegalians, the proto-amphibians we're all descended from. Who knows how the world might have been different." The Ordovician-Silurian extinctions The earliest of the Big Five, the end-Ordovician or Ordovician-Silurian extinction events some 444 million years ago, are reckoned by many to be the second largest. These also consisted of a pair of die-offs, apparently involving massive glaciation and a resulting fall in sea levels. The cause of this glaciation remains a mystery, but one idea was that land plants actually caused it, pulling so much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that global cooling resulted, McGhee explained. Curiously, even though the end-Ordovician led to a huge loss of life, in a way it actually had very little impact on the persistence of lineages. Although the four other Big Five extinction events led to huge changes in which animals rose to prominence, the same animals that dominated before the end-Ordovician dominated afterward. Otherwise, "one neat thing about mass extinction events is that they're often reset buttons, where you change what dominates the globe," Conrad said. "You open the door to things like us to live."

Greatest Mysteries: What Causes Gravity?

By Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 10 August 2007 09:20 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. In the deepest depths of space, gravity tugs on matter to form galaxies, stars, black holes and the like. In spite of its infinite reach, however, gravity is the wimpiest of all forces in the universe. This weakness also makes it the most mysterious, as scientists can't measure it in the laboratory as easily as they can detect its effects on planets and stars. The repulsion between two positively charged protons, for example, is 10^36 times stronger than gravity's pull between themthat's 1 followed by 36 zeros less macho. Physicists want to squeeze little old gravity into the standard modelthe crown-jewel theory of modern physics that explains three other fundamental forces in physicsbut none has succeeded. Like a runt at a pool party, gravity just doesn't fit in when using Einstein's theory of relativity, which explains gravity only on large scales "Gravity is completely different from the other forces described by the standard model," said Mark Jackson, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Illinois. "When you do some calculations about small gravitational interactions, you get stupid answers. The math simply doesn't work." Gremlins of gravity The numbers may not jibe, but physicists have a hunch about gravity's unseen gremlins: Tiny, massless particles called gravitons that emanate gravitational fields.

Each hypothetical bit tugs on every piece of matter in the universe, as fast as the speed of light permits. Yet if they are so common in the universe, why haven't physicists found them? "We can detect massless particles such as photons just fine, but gravitons elude us because they interact so weakly with matter," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "We simply don't know how to detect one." Turner, however, isn't despondent about humanity's quest for gravitons. He thinks we'll eventually ensnare a few of the pesky particles hiding in the shadows of more easily detected particles. "What it really comes down to is technology," Turner said. Physicists aren't using mechanical wizardry to discover gravitons just yet, however. Efforts are currently focused on confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, which is the graviton's distant cousin particle responsible for giving matter mass. Finding the 'toilet' Sheldon Glashow, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, once called the Higgs the "toilet" of the standard model of particle physics. Turner explained that Glashow coined the term because the Higgs performs an essential function: Keeping the standard model functioning, at least in an intellectual way. "Really, the Higgs is more like a plumber with duct tape, holding the standard model together," Turner said. "A lot of the inelegance of it's all wrapped up in the Higgs." And rightly so, he noted, because it's required to make the other forces involving mass such as gravitymake sense. "At the same time, the Higgs can be frustrating because it doesn't shed much light on gravity," Turner said, assuming that the particle is eventually discovered. Accelerating answers Discovering elusive particles such as the Higgs is something like traveling through time. By using enormous machines to whiz particles close to the speed of light, then smash

them together, engineers can mimic the incredible energies present during the early universe. So early in the universe's existence, particles were too energetic to stick together and form more familiar protons, neutrons and the like. The Tevatron, Fermilab's 4-mile-circumference (6.3-kilometer) particle accelerator, may have already spotted the Higgs in accelerator data, according to physicists' Web logs. But Turner said the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) circling 17 miles (27 kilometers) beneath France and Switzerland should clearly confirm it within a few years. "I think it will be a sigh of relief when the Higgs is discovered," he said. Will particle accelerators, however, eventually pop out a graviton? Xavier Siemens, a gravitational theorist at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, said showing gravity acts like a wave needs to happen first. "Classically, we can measure waves, and waves are made up of particles," said Siemens, who is also a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that looks for wave-like evidence of gravity. By detecting gravitational waves, there would be grounds to suggest gravitons really existand begin seeking it out. "At this point it seems like science fiction. Theoretically, however, we should be able to detect single gravitons," Siemens said. "But how is the big question

Greatest Mysteries: How Did the Universe Begin?

By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 13 August 2007 08:30 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. How did the universe come to be? It is perhaps the greatest Great Mystery, and the root of all the others. The rest of humanity's grand questionsHow did life begin? What is consciousness? What is dark matter, dark energy, gravity?stem from it. "All other mysteries lie downstream of this question," said Ann Druyan, the author and widow of astronomer Carl Sagan. "It matters to me because I am human and do not like not knowing." Even as the theories attempting to solve this mystery grow increasingly complex, scientists are haunted by the possibility that some of the most critical links in their chain of reasoning is wrong. Fundamental mysteries According to the standard Big Bang model, the universe was born during a period of inflation that began about 13.7 billion years ago. Like a rapidly expanding balloon, it swelled from a size smaller than an electron to nearly its current size within a tiny fraction of a second. Initially, the universe was permeated only by energy. Some of this energy congealed into particles, which assembled into light atoms like hydrogen and helium. These atoms clumped first into galaxies, then stars, inside whose fiery furnaces all the other elements were forged. This is the generally agreed-upon picture of our universe's origins as depicted by scientists. It is a powerful model that explains many of the things scientists see when they look up in the sky, such as the remarkable smoothness of space-time on large scales and the even distribution of galaxies on opposite sides of the universe. But there are things about it that make some scientists uneasy. For starters, the idea that the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation early in its history cannot be directly tested, and it relies on the existence of a mysterious form of energy in the universe's beginning that has long disappeared.

"Inflation is an extremely powerful theory, and yet we still have no idea what caused inflationor whether it is even the correct theory, although it works extremely well," said Eric Agol, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington. For some scientists, inflation is a clunky addition to the Big Bang model, a necessary complexity appended to make it fit with observations. Nor was it the last such addition. "We've also learned there has to be dark matter in the universe, and now dark energy," said Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. "So the way the model works today is you say, 'OK, you take some Big Bang, you take some inflation, you tune that to have the following properties, then you add a certain amount of dark matter and dark energy.' These things aren't connected in a coherent theory." "What's disturbing is when you have a theory and you make a new observation, you have to add new components," Steinhardt added. "And they're not connected ... There's no reason to add them, and no particular reason to add them in that particular amount, except the observations. The question is how much you're explaining and how much you're engineering a model. And we dont' know yet." An ageless universe In recent years, Steinhardt has been working with colleague Neil Turok at Cambridge University on a radical alternative to the standard Big Bang model. According to their idea, called the ekpyrotic universe theory, the universe was born not just once, but multiple times in endless cycles of fiery death and rebirth. Enormous sheet-like "branes," representing different parts of our universe, collide about once every trillion years, triggering Big Bang-like explosions that re-inject matter and energy into the universe. The pair claims that their ekpyrotic, or "cyclic," theory would explain not only inflation, but other cosmic mysteries as well, including dark matter, dark energy and why the universe appears to be expanding at an ever-accelerating clip. While controversial, the ekpyrotic theory raises the possibility that the universe is ageless and self-renewing. It is a prospect perhaps even more awe-inspiring than a universe with a definite beginning and end, for it would mean that the stars in the sky, even the oldest ones, are like short-lived fireflies in the grand scheme of things.

"Does the universe resemble any of the physical models we make of it? I'd like to hope that the effort society pours into scientific research is getting us closer to fundamental truths, and not just a way to make useful tools," said Caltech astronomer Richard Massey. "But I'm equally terrified of finding out that everything I know is wrong, and secretly hope that I don't."

Greatest Mysteries: Why Do We Desire Things?

By Melinda Wenner, Special to LiveScience posted: 15 August 2007 08:32 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. Chocolate, vanilla or strawberry? The question of why we want the things we want elicits impassioned answers from scientists in a number of different disciplines, but some argue were still a long way away from understanding our desires and preferences in any meaningful way. We may be able to predict how we will behave in particular conditions, or know that clear preferences emerge in certain situations, but we know very little about where these inclinations come from in the first place, according to one social scientist. For instance, New York University sociologist Dalton Conley contends that despite decades of research, experts still know little about what truly drives our desires. I think the answers out there right now offered by a variety of fields are too facile theyre actually tautological, or logically circular truisms that reveal nothing, Conley told LiveScience.

The root of the problem Sociologists, evolutionary psychologists and economists all have different ideas about what drives our preferences, Conley said, yet none really get to the bottom of the issue. For instance, its easy to come up with evolutionary explanations for our preferences after the fact, Conley said. You can spin an evolutionary argument for pretty much anything that you see, he contended, making it more of a rationalization than a testable hypothesis. Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad from Canadas Concordia University, who has recently published a book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, agrees that the problem is complicated. There is a difference, he explained, between understanding how a mechanism operates and why it occurs. We might know that a womans food preferences change according to where she is in her menstrual cycle, he said, but understanding why our preferences change in this way is an entirely different issue. Set from birth? Saad is, however, certain that biology drives most of what we do. Contrary to what social scientists thinkthat were born with empty mindsI argue for the exact opposite causal mechanism, Saad said in a telephone interview. Yale social scientist Joseph Simmons agrees that biology is a big piece of the puzzle. We dont learn to fear electric shocks or loud noises or even threatening faces, but rather, these preferences seem innate, he told LiveScience. Shaped by surroundings But Simmons argues that experience plays a large role in molding what we want, too. For instance, he said, preferences can be shaped if an experience is accompanied close in time by one that is strongly liked or disliked. One reason why advertisers often use humor, sex and other emotionally evocative stimuli in their advertisements is because of the assumption that the company will benefit from its association with those stimuli, Simmons said.

Preferences also change according to a persons state of mind and mood. A woman is more likely to buy The Economist magazine when she is thinking of herself as a businesswoman, he said, but more likely to buy Cosmopolitan if she thinking of herself primarily as a female, he said. Unanswered questions Simmons says that one big remaining question concerns how social context influences desire. We are beginning to understand how word-of-mouth shapes preferences and fads, but there is still a tremendous amount to learn, he said. Conley, the NYU sociologist, argues that these kinds of questions beg for carefully designed experiments and a willingness for social scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists to work together to arrive at interdisciplinary answers. To do this, we need to bring these disciplines physically closer together, agreed Simmons. These scientists need to begin attending the same conferences, publishing in the same journals and speaking the same language, he said. That is, of course, assuming that these questions can ultimately be answered, noted Conley. It might be like quantum physicsit might be unanswerable, Conley said.

Greatest Mysteries: What Drives Evolution?

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 16 August 2007 01:24 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. From bizarre butterfly spots to rainbow-colored lizards to adaptations that allow squirrels and even snakes to "fly," physical innovations in the natural world can be mind-boggling. Natural selection is accepted by scientists as the main engine driving the array of organisms and their complex features. But is evolution via natural selection the only explanation for complex organisms? "I think one of the greatest mysteries in biology at the moment is whether natural selection is the only process capable of generating organismal complexity," said Massimo Pigliucci of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, "or whether there are other properties of matter that also come into play. I suspect the latter will turn out to be true." Flexible genes Some scientists are proposing additions to the list of evolutionary forces. "Over the past decade or two, scientists have begun to suspect that there are other properties of complex systems (such as living organisms) that may help, together with natural selection, explain how things such as eyes, bacterial flagella, wings and turtle shells evolve," Pigliucci told LiveScience. One idea is that organisms are equipped with the flexibility to change their physical or other features during development to accommodate environmental changes, a phenomenon called phenotypic plasticity. The change typically doesn't show up in the genes. For instance, in social bees, both the workers and guards have the same genomes but different genes get activated to give them distinct behaviors and appearances. Environmental factors, such as temperature and embryonic diet, prompt genetic activity that ends up casting one bee a worker and the other a guard.

If beneficial, this flexibility could be passed on to offspring and so can lead to the evolution of new features in a species. "This plasticity is heritable, and natural selection can favor different kinds of plasticity, depending on the range of environmental conditions the organism encounters," Pigliucci said. Made to order Self-organization is another evolutionary force that some experts say whips up complex features or behaviors spontaneously in living and non-living matter, and these traits are passed on to offspring through the generations. "A classic example outside of biology are hurricanes: These are not random air movements at all, but highly organized atmospheric structures that arise spontaneously given the appropriate environmental conditions," Pigliucci said. "There is increasing evidence that living organisms generate some of their complexity during development in an analogous manner." A biological illustration of self-organization is protein-folding. A lengthy necklace of amino acids bends, twists and folds into a three-dimensional protein, whose shape determines the protein's function. A protein made up of just 100 amino acids could take on an endless number (billions upon billions) of shapes. While this shape-shifting takes on the order of seconds to minutes in nature, the fastest computers don't have the muscle yet to pull off the feat. The mechanism that triggers the final form could be a chemical signal, for instance. Novelties in nature The environment also could drive changes in an animal's appearance or phenotype, a phenomenon that intrigues many biologists. For instance, Sean Carroll, a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discovered butterflies in East Africa have different colorings depending on when they hatch. Those hatching during the wet season emerge with brightly colored eyespots while their dry-season relatives wear neutral cryptic coats. Biology has a pretty good understanding of how animals develop from a fertilized egg to a fully formed organism.

"We just don't understand how ... the environment and [the] genetic blueprint interact during development," said Theunis Piersma of the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Piersma's research on shorebirds called red knots has revealed the birds can morph their phenotypes depending on their migration routes. When brought into captivity and placed in colder temperature environments, the shorebirds' flight muscles and organs shrink to reduce heat loss. The birds pass on to offspring the capacity to make these changes. So the mystery is starting to clear around how diverse species with an array of features evolve. The field, which had relied in the past mostly on fossil records, got a boost with the development of genetic techniques and the integration of diverse sectors of science, connecting genetics, biology, ecology and computer science. While scientists are shedding light on natural mechanisms that work to shape species, many questions in the field are brewing on the lab-bench. And the original question examined by Charles Darwinwhat is the mechanism that causes new species to evolvehas yet to be fully explained. And another related question looms: How important are chance events, as opposed to natural selection, to shaping organisms?

Greatest Mysteries: What Happens Inside an Earthquake?

By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor posted: 17 August 2007 01:40 pm ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. When a sizable earthquake strikes, experts can explain exactly where it started and what type of fault is involved and maybe even predict how long aftershocks will last. But the strange truth is that seismologists and geophysicists are quite unsure of what happens inside the planet during a quake.

Earthquake physics has undergone a revolution during the past decade, thanks to new insights from lab experiments, field studies of exhumed faults and better theories.

But the nature and behavior of the forces that keep faults from moving and then suddenly fail are still unknown.

And when faults do move, something is missingthere is little to no evidence of the extremely high levels of friction and melting that would be expected to follow above ground when two giant rocks slid against each other.

"There are many reasons to believe that something exotic is happening," said Caltech geophysicist Tom Heaton.

"The problem of frictional sliding in earthquakes is one of the most fundamental problems in all of Earth science," Heaton said. "It has been a 30-year mystery story of figuring out the basic physics of the earthquake problem."

Gentle earthquakes

Most earthquakes happen where tectonic plates meet and glide against each other. Quakes occur when the frictional stress of the movement exceeds the strength of the rocks, causing a failure at a fault line. Violent displacement of the Earth's crust follows, leading to a release of elastic strain energy. This energy takes the form of shock waves that radiate and constitute an earthquake.

One of the strangest things about earthquakes is how gentle they are, Heaton said.

For instance, some scientists thought they had figured out how to simulate miniearthquakes in the lab. But when they scale up the energies observed in the lab to the size of real faults, the model would predict extensive melting on faults. And such models predict devastation far beyond what killed more than 500 people this week in Peru, more than 80,000 people in the 2005 Pakistan quake or more than a quarter of a million people in the 2004 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra.

"Earthquakes would be so violent that no living thing could survive the shaking," Heaton said.

Therefore, no one has actually simulated anything close to a real earthquake yet.

A machine design problem

The simulation problem lies partly in the fact that it's very difficult to make lab machines generate all the environmental conditions that occur miles below ground during an earthquakeincluding high stress, high pressure, elevated temperatures and a slip rate of about a yard per second (about the pace at which we walk).

David Goldsby and his rock mechanics colleagues at Brown University have designed machines that can apply the high stresses of temblors to rock specimens so the geophysicists can study friction at depth.

"We can apply normal stresses as high as occur throughout the entire seismogenic zone of the Earth's crust, about 10 kilometers [6 miles] in depth," he said.

That's incredibly impressive and important for earthquake science, but it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, because what happens inside the Earth is so strange in magnitude and physics.

"No apparatus in the world is yet capable of meeting all of these criteria," Goldsby said.

Normal friction

Above ground, friction is a steady, stubborn force that opposes motion. Friction generates heat, as people with cold hands know, and increases with the stress you put on objects.

So the heat on faults during sliding should increase with depth in the Earth. The rocks should definitely melt where they meet.

But underground, during earthquakes, two huge, hard, weight-pressurized rock slabs slip past or under each other. And nothing melts. Usually.

That's weird. It could be because the friction and thus the heat are much lower than you'd expect from rocks above ground, Goldsby said.

Earthquake friction works like this, Heaton said: It starts out high when there is little to no movement; then friction plummets to zero as the rocks move fast; then friction goes to high again when the rocks slow down.

That weird behavior of friction during an earthquake might be the reason there is little to no melting, Goldsby said. If friction is low when the rocks move fast, then much less heat is generated and no detectable melting occurs.

Maybe some other mechanism kicks in before the rocks get to their melting phase, Heaton said.

One explanation is "flash heating." Faults are stuck in place by very high forces. Once faults start sliding, if they slide fast enough, they become extra slippery at microscopic contact points, like skaters on ice. Heat is generated, but the result is a zero-friction, high-temperature cushiony flash of light or superheated gas called plasma that yields no detectable melted material, Heaton said. When the faults slow down, they stick tight again.

Another idea is that pressurized water in the rocks during a slip could decrease the stress on the fault and therefore the friction, Goldsby said. Faults might ride on a cushion of steam, allowing the fault to slide at low friction and the rock heat would not reach the melting point.

Ripple in the rug

The key to understanding earthquakes is actually not where they start but how the fracture spreads, and that has a lot to do with the weird behavior of underground friction,

Heaton says.

The highest sliding velocities happen at the leading edge of a pulse of slip that runs through the Earth like a ripple in a rug, says Heaton, who described this fault behavior in a landmark paper 17 years ago.

Think of a fault as a rug that you want to move, he said. You can just pull the rug from the edge. That's the hard way to move it. The easy way to move a rug is to "put a little bump in it and move the bump and when you're done, you've offset the rug," he explained.

Friction is in a yin-yang arrangement with those slip-pulses, it turns out, Heaton said. "The slip in the pulse depends on the friction, but it turns out the friction turns on how fast the slip is happening," he said. "That's a math problem, a positive feedback system. They are notoriously unstable."

If you knew how big a pulse would be, you could predict an earthquake's magnitude, but the exotic behavior of friction underground botches all that up, Heaton said.

Still, the revolution in the field of earthquake physics has brought new insights, Goldsby said.

"I am not only hopeful but certain that we will learn even more about how earthquakes occur in the coming decade," he said. "This knowledge will help us understand how to mitigate the damaging effects of earthquakes and help prevent the loss of life, and may someday allow us to detect earthquake precursors."

Greatest Mysteries: Where is the Rest of the Universe?

By Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 20 August 2007 07:29 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. Scientists trying to create a detailed inventory of all the matter and energy in the cosmos run into a curious problemthe vast majority of it is missing. "I call it the dark side of the universe," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, referring to the great mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. In fact, only 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe has been found. The other 96 percent remains elusive, but scientists are looking in the farthest reaches of space and deepest depths of Earth to solve the two dark riddles. Missing matter Einstein's famous equation "E=mc^2" describes energy and matter (or mass) as one and the samemaps of the cosmos refer to the energy-matter combination as energy density, for short. The problem with detecting dark matter, thought to make up 22 percent of the universe's mass/energy pie, is that light doesn't interact with it. But it does exhibit the tug of gravity. Initial evidence for the mysterious matter was discovered 75 years ago when astrophysicists noticed an anomaly in a jumble of galaxies: The galactic cluster had hundreds of times more gravitational pull than it should have, far outweighing its visible mass of stars. "We can predict the motions of the sun and planets very accurately, but when we measure distant things we see anomalies," said Scott Dodelson, an astrophysicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "Dark matter is currently the best possible solution, even though we've never seen any of it." Another hallmark of dark matter is gravitational lensing, similar to the effect of light passing through a piece of polished glass. Massive objects like the sun can bend light, but

colossal clouds of dark matter create "bubbles" in the cosmos that magnify, distort and duplicate the light of galaxies or stars behind them. Gravitational lensing recently exposed evidence of the unseen mass in the Bullet cluster as well as in a ring around a cluster of colliding galaxies called ZwCl0024+1652. Particle hunt In spite of the ghostly evidence, pieces of dark matter have yet to be pinned down by researchers. "Until we actually discover particles, we're not home yet," Dodelson said. Particle physicists have detected neutrinos, which are extremely lightweight particles that pour out of the sun and hardly interact into ordinary matter, but Turner said they make up an extremely small fraction of dark matter in the universe. "We arrested one of the members of the gang, but not the leader of the gang," Turner said of neutrinos. He thinks the leader is actually a WIMP: a weakly interactive, massive particle. Unfortunately, WIMPS are just a theory so far. The thinking goes that WIMPs are very heavy, yet like neutrinos they rarely bump into matter to produce a detectable signal. But the idea that WIMPSsuch as theoretical axion or neutralino particlescan bump into visible matter at all gives scientists hope. "This is a story that may soon be at its end," Turner said, noting that the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search in the Soudan mine of Minnesota and other experiments below the ground should be sensitive enough to detect a WIMP. The anti-gravity Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is dark matter's big cousin, dark energy. The invisible force is thought to be a large-scale "anti-gravity," pushing apart galactic clusters and causing the unexplainable, accelerating expansion of the universe. Turner thinks dark energy is the biggest mystery of them alland quite literally, since physicists predict that it makes up 74 percent of energy density in the universe. "So far, the greatest achievement with dark energy is giving it a name," Turner said of the elusive force. "We are really at the very beginning of this puzzle."

Turner described dark energy as "really weird stuff," best thought of as an elastic, repulsive gravity that can't be broken down into particles. "We know what it does, but we don't know what it is," Turner said. While astrophysicists look deep into space to gather more details about dark energy's effects, Turner noted that theoretical physicists are focusing on explaining how the force actually works. And at this point, he joked, any physicist's explanation for dark energy is probably good enough to consider. "We're at this very early stage, at the crime scene of dark energy's existence, if you will," Turner said. "It's a highly creative period, and now is the time for ideas."

Greatest Mysteries: Is There a Theory of Everything?

By Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 21 August 2007 07:37 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is one of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series running each weekday. Ancient philosophers thought wind, water, fire and earth were the most basic elements of the cosmos, but the study of the small has since grown up. Physicists continue to carve the known universe into particles to describe everything from magnetism to what atoms are made of and how they remain stable. Yet striking similarities in the world of quantum mechanics, as the study of particles and their forces is known, has led to a one of the most important questions in modern science: Is there a single theory that can describe everything?

"We understand a lot about the universe up to the first few energetic microseconds, but earlier than that our physics break down," said Mark Jackson, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. "But those first moments are where the really interesting things happened." If a theory can be designed to withstand the incredible energies of the early universe as well as incorporate gravity, Jackson said, then a universal theory of physics could become a reality. Standard frustration The "standard model" of physics views particles as infinitesimal points, some of which carry basic forces. In spite of the fact that it fails to include gravity and becomes gibberish at high energies, the time-tested theory is the best tool scientists have for explaining physics. "You hear people complain about how good the standard model is," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "It's an incomplete model, and yet we can't find flaws in it." Turner explained that discovering a mass-inducing particle, called the Higgs boson, remains the next big test for the standard model. If discovered, the heavy particle would definitively show that properties like electromagnetism and radioactivity are really different facets of the same force. "It's the miracle that allows us to combine them together," Turner said of the Higgs, which may be found someday in the collisions of particle accelerators that "rewind" matter to the intense energies of the early universe. Stringing in gravity The stubbornness of the standard model has been too much for some physicists, however, leading to new theories that include gravity and work at extremely high energies. Perhaps the most popularized of them all is string theory, which describes particles as strands of energy vibrating at different "frequencies." To explain the point-like nature of particles, string theory holds that strings are wrapped up in 10 or 11 dimensions six to seven more than are currently recognized.

The idea is similar to viewing a building from far away. At great distances it looks like a point, but moving closer it appears flat and eventually as a three-dimensional structure. Wrapped within the building are extra dimensions that become smaller and smaller: pipes, and nooks and crannies within the pipes, the spaces between the nooks and crannies and so on. The inability so far for string theory to prove up to 11 tiny dimensions exist is a hang-up for many, but Jackson thinks some strings could have been stretched across the universe into "superstrings"--ones large enough to detect in space today. In spite of a present lack of such evidence, Jackson is confident string theory will weather the storm. "It's hard to imagine that the universe has two different sets of rules for physics. When does it turn one off and the other one on?" Jackson reasoned. "We know there is quantum mechanics and we know there is gravity, so it seems there should be one overall theory. I'm betting my career that it's string theory." Supersymmetric search Fermilab cosmologist Scott Dodelson also finds a unified theory logical, but doesn't think a big departure from the standard model is required to conjure one up. "There are basically two approaches; one is the bottom-up, which is taking data and fixing pieces of a theory to make it more elegant," said Fermilab cosmologist Scott Dodelson. "The other approach is top-down, starting with an elegant theory and working down toward the data. My chips are on the bottom-up people wanting to get down and dirty with data." In either case, physicists, theorists and cosmologists alike are waiting for high-energy experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe to go online. They hope to find not only the Higgs in the aftermath of colliding particles, but also particle "superpartners" that Dodelson described as the overweight, hidden cousins of more familiar electrons, neutrinos and the like. "They're too heavy to have been seen so far," Dodelson said, adding that the intense energies LHC-like machines may be enough to get them to "pop out" of colliding particles. If so, the mystery of dark matter (much of the universe's missing mass) could be solved in addition to creating a more formidable standard model of physics.

"We may eventually pierce the 'cloak' of dark matter and detect supersymmetric particles in the lab," Dodelson said. "It would introduce a whole new class of particles and create a new standard model."

Greatest Mysteries: How Did Life Arise on Earth?

By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 22 August 2007 08:22 am ET
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Editor's Note: We asked several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries today, and then we added a few that were on our minds, too. This article is the last of 15 in LiveScience's "Greatest Mysteries" series. Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, and for much of that history it has been home to life in one weird form or another. Indeed, some scientists think life appeared the moment our planet's environment was stable enough to support it. The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized mats of cyanobacteria called stromatolites in Australia that are about 3.4 billion years old. Ancient as their origins are, these bacteria (which are still around today) are already biologically complex they have cell walls protecting their protein-producing DNA, so scientists think life must have begun much earlier, perhaps as early as 3.8 billion years ago. But despite knowing approximately when life first appeared on Earth, scientists are still far from answering how it appeared.

"Many theories of the origin of life have been proposed, but since it's hard to prove or disprove them, no fully accepted theory exists," said Diana Northup, a cave biologist at the University of New Mexico. The answer to this question would not only fill one of the largest gaps in scientists' understanding of nature, but also would have important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe. Lots of ideas Today, there are several competing theories for how life arose on Earth. Some question whether life began on Earth at all, asserting instead that it came from a distant world or the heart of a fallen comet or asteroid. Some even say life might have arisen here more than once. "There may have been several origins," said David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We usually make 'origins' plural just to indicate that we don't necessarily claim there was just a single origin, but just an origin that didn't happen to get blasted by giant [asteroid] impacts." Most scientists agree that life went through a period when RNA was the head-honcho molecule, guiding life through its nascent stages. According to this "RNA World" hypothesis, RNA was the crux molecule for primitive life and only took a backseat when DNA and proteinswhich perform their jobs much more efficiently than RNAdeveloped. "A lot of the most clever and most talented people in my field have accepted that the RNA World was not just possible, but probable," Deamer said. RNA is very similar to DNA, and today carries out numerous important functions in each of our cells, including acting as a transitional-molecule between DNA and protein synthesis, and functioning as an on-and-off switch for some genes. But the RNA World hypothesis doesn't explain how RNA itself first arose. Like DNA, RNA is a complex molecule made of repeating units of thousands of smaller molecules called nucleotides that link together in very specific, patterned ways. While there are scientists who think RNA could have arisen spontaneously on early Earth, others say the odds of such a thing happening are astronomical.

"The appearance of such a molecule, given the way chemistry functions, is incredibly improbable. It would be a once-in-a-universe long shot," said Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University. "To adopt this [view], you have to believe we were incredibly lucky." The anthropic principle But "astronomical" is a relative term. In his book, The God Delusion, biologist Richard Dawkins entertains another possibility, inspired by work in astronomy and physics. Suppose, Dawkins says, the universe contains a billion billion planets (a conservative estimate, he says), then the chances that life will arise on one of them is not really so remarkable. Furthermore, if, as some physicists say, our universe is just one of many, and each universe contained a billion billion planets, then it's nearly a certainty that life will arise on at least one of them. As Dawkins writes, "There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack."

Shapiro doesn't think it's necessary to invoke multiple universes or life-laden comets crashing into ancient Earth. Instead, he thinks life started with molecules that were smaller and less complex than RNA, which performed simple chemical reactions that eventually led to a self-sustaining system involving the formation of more complex molecules. "If you fall back to a simpler theory, the odds aren't astronomical anymore," Shapiro told LiveScience. Trying to recreate an event that happened billions of years ago is a daunting task, but many scientists believe that, like the emergence of life itself, it is still possible. "The solution of a mystery of this magnitude is totally unpredictable," said Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University in New Jersey. "It might happen next week or it might take a thousand years."

8 Worlds Where Life Might Exist

By Seth Shostak SETI Institute posted: 23 March 2006 06:47 am ET

Mars is 700 billion billion tons of iron and rock, wrapped in an unfamiliar landscape of canyons, craters and calderas. Nonetheless, the most compelling thing we could find on this enormous, orange orb would be a microgram of wet chemistry able to reproduce, move, grow, and evolve. Our fascination with life on other worlds is an extension of our interest in life on Earth. "Animal Planet," National Geographic, and zoos are all reflections of our curiosity about other forms of life. Much of that curiosity is simply a primeval, hard-wired interest in things we could eat, and things that might eat us. After all, life is highly competitive, and it pays to know the competition (unless, of course, you're General Motors). So curiosity about extraterrestrial life is both understandable and long-standing. Today, many of our efforts to find DNA's alien equivalents focus on distant locales; for example, the use of spaceborne telescopes to sort through the spectra of extrasolar worlds, looking for atmospheric gases that would be evidence of biology. But there's also a backyard effort: the hunt for life nearby. Life in the solar system. Life whose remove is measured in hundreds of millions of miles - not hundreds of trillions. The idea of looking for proximate protoplasm is old. In the nineteenth century, Mars, Venus, and even the pulverized, dusty crust of the Moon were all considered possible loci for life. Such optimism soured in the early space age, when probes revealed Mars' dry, ultraviolet-stung surface and Venus' autoclave temperatures (the Moon had long been out of play). By the 1980s, many scientists believed that the worlds beyond our own were just inanimate balls of rock, whirling silently about an indifferent Sun. That pessimism now seems, if not quite quaint, at least questionable. The number of nearby worlds where biology might arise is on the uptick. Life requires a few basic ingredients: (1) raw materials, (2) a solvent (water being first choice), and (3) energy to drive it all. The first is probably not a problem on any rocky hunk of junk in the solar system. The handful of elements necessary for life is available just about everywhere. The latter two requirements are coupled, since energy is necessary to keep fluids liquefied. The outer realms of the solar system are cracking cold, and in these remote places the Sun's feeble rays are insufficient to keep water from freezing granite-hard. For that reason, researchers have usually opined that any solar system body skulking in the dark expanses beyond Mars' orbit will be in perpetual, frozen rictus. But science grooves on surprises. And one of the big surprises of the past few decades is the discovery of worlds that are warm despite being situated in places where the Sun doesn't shine. Consequently, there are now more than a half-dozen objects among Sol's minions that are considered possible hosts for life. As a handy guide to these neighborhood biomes, useful for

impressing relatives or strangers on the bus, we offer the following inventory, thoughtfully separated into two categories: the sunny, and the not so sunny. Starting with the former, we begin, most obviously, with: Earth. Our world is the poster child for solar-powered planets. Most flora and fauna on Earth with some important exceptions such as the bacteria that live in deep rock - are ultimately animated by the roaring nuclear fusion taking place in the Sun's heart. On Earth, it's usually chlorophyll that converts this radiant energy into chemical compounds to energize our existence (or bulge our waistlines). Venus. Despite the fact that Venus, our sister planet, has been described as purgatory personified, there are some researchers who still hold out hope for life there. David Grinspoon, at the Southwest Research Institute, notes that the thick, sulfuric acid-ridden clouds of this planet might be a stable environment for floating life. Venusian acidophiles - analogs to a type of bacteria that can withstand highly acidic environments on Earth - might eke out an existence there. "It's a long shot," Grinspoon admits, but he insists that we shouldn't rule out life on this nearby world. Mars. Then and now, everyone's favorite, inhabited extraterrestrial planet. While Mars' highly reactive and powder-dry landscape is practically guaranteed to be sterile, there is indirect evidence for watery aquifers a few hundred feet beneath the surface. If these liquid reservoirs exist, life may have found refuge within. Today's Martians - if any - would be alive thanks to internal, geologic heat sources that keeps these putative aquifers warm. Nonetheless, we classify the Red Planet as a Sun-powered world simply because any life would presumably have arisen during those long-gone salad days when liquid water pooled on the surface. Titan. This large moon of Saturn, revealed in detail by NASA's Cassini mission, and subject to shameless examination by the Huygens probe, is far too cold for liquid water. But its air is thick with hydrocarbons. David Grinspoon has suggested that the Sun's weak ultraviolet light might rip apart some of these atmospheric compounds, producing acetylene. Falling into the liquid lakes of methane and ethane below, this gas (best known for firing blowtorches on Earth) could serve as a food for microscopic life. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No. Turning to the not-so-sunny abodes for possible life, we find they are all airless moons at the distance of Jupiter or beyond. Reference to our own natural satellite would suggest that there's nothing quite as desolate and dead as a moon without an atmosphere. After all, small bodies cool fast, and in the more-than-four billion years since their birth, the satellites of the outer solar system - where the Sun's warmth is meager - should have cooled to temperatures beyond a penguin's worst imaginings. However, moons are plentiful around the gas giant planets (where at least 98 percent of all satellites in the solar system hang out), and multiple moons interact in ways that can heat them up. In these systems, sibling satellites engage in gravitational tugging matches that cause them to be squeezed and stretched by their planetary parent. The resulting friction can produce everything from warm oceans to active volcanoes and geysers. (The energy ultimately comes from the rotation and the orbital motion of both moons and planets.) Known as "tidal heating", this warming of moons seems to be a common occurrence. Indeed, it's something we might have noticed centuries earlier if we didn't live on a planet whose moon is an only child. The best known of these tidally heated satellites are: Europa. There's good evidence, mostly from its changing magnetic field, that this ice-covered world orbiting Jupiter has an ocean lying 10 miles or so beneath its crusty exterior. At the bottom

of this vast, cryptic sea, volcanic vents might be spewing nutrients and hot water into a cold, dark abyss, providing both the food and energy for simple life. Ganymede and Callisto. Both of these jovian moons show magnetic field variations similar to those of Europa, suggesting that they, too, might be hiding large, watery oceans. Given their thicker ice skins, finding that life - if it exists - would be even more daunting than for Europa. Enceladus. In the news recently, this Saturnian satellite seems to be a giant Slurpee - an icy moon that, thanks to tidal heating, is spouting geysers of water into space. An unexpected entry in the horse race of habitability, Enceladus is the first other world for which we have convincing evidence of liquid water. And where there's liquid water ... Bottom line? We can now list eight worlds (including Earth) in a nine-planet solar system that are possible places for life. This is not quite as plentiful as the ancient Greeks believed - after all, they assumed that everything they could see in the sky was populated, including the stars. But our knowledge of both the requirements for life and the conditions of the solar system far exceeds that of Aristotle and his buddies. And in fact, our count of habitable worlds may still be low. For example, there's Neptune's moon Triton, on whose surface the Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered geysers. Perhaps Triton is also a candidate for life. Then there are the short-period comets, which are routinely warmed by passage close to the Sun. They, too, might surprise us with habitable environments. The bald truth is that we still haven't found a single shred of extraterrestrial life. But it's remarkable, and heartening in a perverse kind of way, that the places worth searching now greatly exceed our abilities to do so. There's plenty of frontier left, even nearby.

Hot Deal! Pluto, the Last Oasis for Life

By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 20 May 2003

ELIZABETH LAGANA/SPACE.com

It might be a few billion years before an ad like this appears in your local paper, but it could show up for good reason. According to a new computer model designed to understand how the conditions for life might arise in unlikely places, humble Pluto and its surroundings will have warmed to downright pleasant temperatures long after the Earth has been consumed by an expanding, dying Sun. "It's Miami Beach for millions of years, potentially longer," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, says of Pluto's future. Stern used existing data on the outer solar system, added in the latest theoretical expectations for the Sun's evolution, and analyzed it all from a biological perspective. His results will be published in the journal Astrobiology. The swelling Sun

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Pluto is a cold and almost certainly lifeless world right now, not a place you'd even want to visit on holiday, let alone invest in. But that will change as the solar system ages and the tiny planet basks in a growing solar glow. In its senior years, the Sun is expected to swell to 100 times its present size and grow a thousand times more luminous, likely vaporizing Earth and the other inner planets but possibly making the outer solar system a final oasis. The scenario might invigorate a whole swath of the solar system near Pluto, known as the Kuiper Belt, which harbors several round worlds that are a good fraction of Pluto's size, Stern explained in a telephone interview last week. Pluto's surface presently ranges from -400 to -346 degrees Fahrenheit (-240 to -210 degrees Celsius). The small ninth planet and its Kuiper Belt neighbors -- count among these Neptune's largest moon, Triton -- all are thought to contain ample frozen water, which when melted is one of life's essential ingredients. Observations indicate these objects also harbor organic molecules, such as hydrocarbons, that are potential building blocks for life. "You've got all the right conditions in place for something potentially interesting to happen," Stern said. Adding warmth to the fringes of the solar system could create what he calls a Delayed Gratification Habitable Zone (DGHZ). Added benefits The known habitable zone now straddles Earth's orbit. Astrobiologists are eager to study the same region of space around other Sun-like stars in hopes of finding signatures of life. But in just a billion years, the Sun could be 11 percent brighter, other scientists say, rendering Earth an inhospitable greenhouse. In 5 billion years, the Sun could swell to 100 times its present size. As the Sun expands and brightens, the habitable zone will move outward, past Mars, past Jupiter, and finally to Pluto's realm. The DGHZ might enjoy some benefits that would encourage life, says Stern, who leads NASA's New Horizons robotic mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, slated for launch in 2006. For one, the swelled Sun, officially termed a red giant, would produce far fewer harmful UV rays, known to cause injurious genetic mutations. "Because of this, the need for a protective ozone layer around distant DGHZ worlds is greatly reduced," Stern said. Earth's high-altitude ozone layer is part of what makes this planet livable. An artist's view of Pluto, today, with the dim Sun in the distance and a thin crescent moon, Charon, in the upper left. NASA/David Seal Orbit: 248 Earth years Time to rotate: 6.4 Earth days Mass: 0.2% of Earth's Diameter: 1,430 miles (2,300 km), or 18 percent of Earth's Distance from Sun: 39.5 times as far as Earth, on average

In addition, because Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) are widely dispersed, there are fewer collisions compared with the inner solar system, where Earth has been catastrophically rocked over the eons, its biology challenged several times over and possibly even forced to restart. The big question Being habitable is not the same as being inhabited, Stern is careful to point out. In Pluto's balmy future, life would have to either arise or arrive. No one knows which scenario was at the root of terrestrial life or how it played out. Stern acknowledges that the DGHZ in our solar system might be only of academic interest to humans today, since its inception is so far off in time. But other stars have already evolved to the red giant phase, and their DGHZs might be places to look for signs of life, especially if icy-organic objects, like Pluto and the KBOs, are common around other stars. "If our solar system is at all typical, then there could be billions of such systems in the galaxy today with habitable Plutos and Kuiper Belts," Stern said. Finding DGHZs around other stars would help answer one of biology's most vexing questions: How long does it take life to arise? Here's why: Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. Firm evidence for life goes back just more than 2 billion years. But nobody knows when life began or how long it took for organic material to develop into life. It might have been spontaneous or might have been a very plodding process. Because distant DGHZs would be hospitable for relatively brief periods -- millions to tens of millions of years -- finding some would show that life can indeed get going in a hurry. Meanwhile, with humans not even slated for travel to Mars, it's hard to imagine mounting a crewed mission to Pluto, let alone settling down there. But when the time comes -- and if our species is still around as Earth begins to fry -- perhaps Pluto will in fact be hot property, complete with beachfront resorts. Stern said the planet could become "a low-gravity waterworld, with a distended, puffy atmosphere." But would you really want to live there? "I'd sure take it," he said, "given the alternative."

NASA Spots Mysterious 'Spider' on Mercury

By Clara Moskowitz Staff Writer posted: 30 January 2008 3:54 pm ET

A whole new side of Mercury has been revealed in pictures taken by NASA's MESSENGER probe, which flew by the tiny planet two weeks ago in the first mission to Mercury in more than three decades. MESSENGER skimmed only 124 miles (200 kilometers) over Mercury's surface on Jan. 14, in the first of three passes it will make before settling into orbit March 18, 2011.

The photos, released today, include one of a feature the scientists informally call "the spider," which appears to be an impact crater surrounded by more than 50 cracks in the surface radiating from its center. Scientists are perplexed by this structure, which is unlike anything observed elsewhere in the solar system. "It's a real mystery, a very unexpected find," said Louise Prockter, an instrument scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the probe for the $446 million NASA mission. She said whatever event created the spider "is anybody's guess," but suggested perhaps a volcanic intrusion beneath the planet's surface led to the formation of the troughs. The last time NASA sent a probe to Mercury was in 1975, when the Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by the planet three times. MESSENGER'S first flyby gave scientists the first glimpses of Mercury's hidden side, the 55 percent of its surface that was left uncharted by Mariner 10. MESSENGER, short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, also measured another peculiar element of Mercury its magnetic field. Earth has a magnetic field surrounding it that acts as a protective bubble shielding the surface from cosmic rays and solar storms. But scientists were shocked when Mariner 10 discovered a magnetic field at Mercury, too. "The only other example in our solar system of an Earth-like magnetosphere is tiny Mercury," said Sean C. Solomon, MESSENGER Principal Investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. MESSENGER was able to fly through the magnetic field and take detailed measurements that scientists hope to use to discover the origins of the inexplicable magnetosphere. Scientists have been poring over more than 1,200 new images sent by seven instruments on the probe, and they are excited to gain new insight into the composition of Mercury's surface, the planet's history, and where its atmosphere comes from. "On the eve of the encounter I couldn't sleep at all," said Robert Strom, a MESSENGER science team member who also worked on the Mariner 10 mission. "I've waited 30 years for this. It didn't disappoint at all. I was astounded at the quality of these images. It dawned on me that this is a whole new planet that we're looking at." The satellite will further probe Mercury's mysteries in a second pass over the planet in October, followed by a third flyby in September 2009. The probe has traveled 4.9 billion miles (7.9 billion-kilometers) since it launched in August 2004. On its journey it soared by Earth once and Venus twice, offering gorgeous

views of these planets as well. In 2011 MESSENGER will become the first spacecraft to orbit the closest planet to the Sun.

The New History of Black Holes: 'Coevolution' Dramatically Alters Dark Reputation
By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 28 January 2003

Black holes suffer a bad rap. Indicted by the press as gravity monsters, labeled highly secretive by astronomers, and long considered in theoretical circles as mere endpoints of cosmic evolution, these unseen objects are depicted as mysterious drains of destruction and death. So it may seem odd to reconsider them as indispensable forces of creation. Yet this is the bright new picture of black holes and their role in the evolution of the universe. Interviews with more than a half dozen experts presently involved in rewriting the slippery history of these elusive objects reveals black holes as galactic sculptors. In this revised view, which still contains some highly debated facts, fuzzy paragraphs and sketchy initial chapters, black holes are shown to be fundamental forces in the development and ultimate shapes of galaxies and the distribution of stars in them. The new history also shows that a black hole is almost surely a product of the galaxy in which it resides. Neither, it seems, does much without the other. The emerging theory has a nifty, Darwinist buzzword: co-evolution. As a thought exercise, co-evolution has been around for less than a decade, or as much as 30 years, depending on who you ask. Many theorists never took it seriously, and no one had much evidence to support it. Only in the past six years or so has it gained steam. And only during the past three years have observations provided rock-solid support and turned co-evolution into the mainstream idea among the cognoscenti in both black hole development and galaxy formation. "The emerging picture of co-evolving black holes and galaxies has turned our view of black holes on its head," says Meg Urry, an astronomer and professor of physics at Yale University. "Previously, black holes were seen as the endpoints of evolution, the final resting state of most or all of the matter in the universe. Now we believe black holes also play a critical role in the birth of galaxies." The idea is particularly pertinent to explaining how massive galaxies developed in the first billion years of the universe. And it is so new that just last week theorists got what may be the first direct evidence that galaxies actually did form around the earliest black holes.

Chicken-and-egg question Like archeologists, astronomers spend most of their careers looking back. They like to gather photons that have been traveling across time and space since well before Earth was born, some 4.5 billion years ago. Rogier Windhorst, an Arizona State University astronomer, has peered just about as deep into the past as anyone, to an era when the universe was roughly 5 percent of its present age. Black Holes & Co-evolution: A Primer The puzzle Very compact but bright objects called quasars, which can outshine a thousand normal galaxies, were abundant when the universe was less than 10 percent of its present age. Quasars are powered by black holes weighing more than a billion suns. How did they get so big so fast? A merger may have triggered the output of energy in this galaxy, Centaurus A.

The front-running theory Co-evolution holds that galaxies and supermassive black holes evolve together, each counting on the other for its ultimate heft. If true, and once fully understood, the new theory should help solve the growth puzzle.

The evidence Early quasars appear to be surrounded by large galaxies loaded with tons of gas, which fuels star formation and feeds the black holes, a report last week suggested.

Near the quasars in time are other, normal galaxies that have likely just passed through a quasar phase, as seen in images released earlier this month. Central bulges of stars in many galaxies, such as our Milky Way, are directly related to the masses of the

Black hole mass increases with galactic bulge mass.

Earlier this month, Windhorst and a colleague, Haojing Yan, released a Hubble Space Telescope image showing the most distant "normal" galaxies ever observed. Though stretched and distorted by the technique used to spot them (an intervening galaxy cluster was used as a "gravitational lens"), the newfound galaxies, Windhorst's team assures us, resemble our own Milky Way. They are seen as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. Practically side-by-side in time, discovered in separate observations made as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, are compact but bright objects known as quasars. These galaxies-to-be shine brilliantly because, researchers believe, each has a gargantuan black hole at its core, whose mass is equal to a billion suns or more, all packed into a region perhaps smaller than our solar system.

black holes buried inside, as detailed in June of 2000. A galaxy's dimensions seem tied to its black hole's dietary habits. Most black hole mass seems to come from direct consumption (called accretion) of gas, indicating that a black hole needs a surrounding galaxy to grow.

The dark horse A halo of mysterious dark matter is thought to infuse the space surrounding each of the bulgepacking galaxies. The invisible gravity generator would play a crucial role in galaxy and black hole construction.

Dark matter is studied in The also-rans part by examining hot If co-evolution reigns, as most researchers believe, then two older gas clouds like this one. (but not-dead-yet) theories are wrong: that a galaxy forms first and directs the development of a black hole; or that a black hole is generated first, providing the seed around which a galaxy can coalesce. It is also possible that different types of galaxies form by different means, and that coevolution will only be found to describe one path to galactic adulthood. -- Robert Roy Britt Visit SPACE.com each Tuesday for another science feature. Archives

The resulting gravity pulls in nearby gas. The material is accelerated to nearly the speed of light, superheated, and swallowed. The process is not entirely efficient, and there is a byproduct: An enormous amount of energy -- radio waves, X-rays and regular light -- hyper-illuminates the whole scene. Quasars also seem to be surrounded by halos of dark matter, a cryptic and unseen component of all galaxies. Co-existing around and amongst all this, researchers are coming to realize, is a collapsing region of stars and gas as big or larger than our galaxy. It was no coincidence that the announcements of the two findings -- distant quasars and normal galaxies --were made together at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Jan. 9. Co-evolution was on the minds of the discoverers. Among co-evolution's significant impacts is its ability to render mostly moot a longstanding chicken-and-egg question in astronomy: Which came first, the galaxy or the black hole?

"How about both?" Windhorst asks. "You could actually have the galaxy form simultaneously around a growing black hole." Urry, who was not involved in either finding but was asked to analyze them, explained it this way: "We believe that galaxies and quasars are very intimately connected, that in fact quasars are a phase of galaxy evolution. In our current picture, as every galaxy forms and collapses, it has a brief quasar phase." So when a quasar goes dormant, what's left are the things we associate with a normal galaxy -stars and gas swirling around a central and hidden pit of matter. Quasars are cagey characters, however. (The term is short for quasi-stellar radio source; astronomers first mistook the objects for stars within our galaxy in the early 1960s.) When one is firing, its brightness can exceed a thousand normal galaxies. The quasar outshines its entire host galaxy so significantly that scientists have not been able to see what's really causing all the commotion. That veil is lifting as you read this, however, as telescopic vision extends ever backward in time and data is fed into powerful new computer models. Evolving idea Demonstrations of co-evolution began to emerge in the mid-1990s when researchers found hints that the existence of a significant black hole at the center of a galaxy was related to the galaxy's shape, says Martin Haehnelt of the University of Cambridge. Only galaxies with a spherical bulgelike component appear to accommodate supermassive black holes. Our Milky Way, if it could be viewed edge on, would display a good example of one of these galactic bulges: Imagine the profile of a stereotypical flying saucer, though with a wider and flatter disk. The Milky Way is smaller than many galaxies, however, and it has a correspondingly less massive black hole -- roughly 2.6 million suns worth. It almost surely once had a quasar phase, astronomers say. At any rate, in the mid-1990s no one knew for sure how prevalent black holes were. Theory and some observational data pointed to the likelihood that they were ubiquitous. Then, in the year 2000, astronomers found solid evidence that black holes lurk deep inside many and probably all galaxies that I think it is still unclear whether black holes have the classic central bulge of stars. play any role in the formation of the first Further, an analysis showed a direct galaxies." correlation between the mass in each black hole and the shape and scope of the bulge -- Sir Martin Rees and the overall size of the galaxy. University of Cambridge At an AAS meeting in June of 2000, John Kormendy of the University of Texas at Austin, presented evidence for 10 mammoth black holes whose masses were related to their galactic bulges. Kormendy worked on a large team of researchers led by University of Michigan astronomer Douglas Richstone. This along with other studies in surrounding months by other teams served as a collective turning point for coevolution, several researchers now say, advancing it to a stable quantitative footing. Not So Fast ...

"

"Subsequently the idea of the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes became more widely discussed and accepted," Haehnelt says.

Evidence continues to mount. In 2001, two separate teams showed that many smaller galaxies that don't have bulges also do not seem to contain significant black holes. Over the past six months or so, other important studies have emerged, providing independent confirmation to some of the initial work. Haehnelt: "It becomes more and more clear that supermassive black holes can significantly change the structure and evolution of galaxies." The first large-scale scientific meeting devoted to co-evolution -- a sure sign of a theory coming into its own -- was held just three months ago, sponsored by the prestigious Carnegie Observatories. There are many variations on the basic theory of co-evolution. Each version attempts to explain a vexing fact: In the blink of a cosmic eye -- just a half a billion years -- invisible spheres of matter were born, and several gained the mass of a billion or more suns and were driving the shape and texture of swirling agglomerations of newborn stars. Co-evolution is not a done deal. Perhaps, some have suggested, a huge black hole simply collapses out of a pre-galactic cloud and serves as a ready-made engine to drive further galaxy development. Even staunch supporters of co-evolution say there are still viable theories, not yet refutable, putting the immense black hole in place first, and others that have the galaxy solely responsible for driving the formation of a black hole. If black holes did grow incrementally, it is unclear whether cooperative construction reigned from the beginning, or if it kicked in after some certain amount of mass was gathered. "I think it is still unclear whether black holes play any role in the formation of the first galaxies," said Cambridge's Sir Martin Rees, who has collaborated with Haehnelt and who long ago authored some of the first scientific papers on the question. Next Page: The First Black Holes Smack in the middle of the cosmic dark ages, the first stars are born. They die young, populating a crowded universe with relatively puny black holes. How did they grow?

Continue >>> "Indeed," Sir Martin says, "there is a lot of debate about whether black holes can form in very small galaxies, and whether there is a link between the 'small' holes that form as the endpoint of the evolution of massive stars and the holes of above a million solar masses that exist in the centers of galaxies.

Another dark matter Infusing itself into the equation is an utter unknown: dark matter. This as-yet-undetected stuff permeates all galaxies, researchers believe. A halo of it surrounds our Milky Way. Dark matter does not interact with light, but it does possess great gravitational prowess, acting as invisible glue to help hold galaxies together. Dark matter is taken into account in the leading co-evolution models, but only in a general, overall sense. Some researchers, however, think dark matter, more than a black hole, is clearly connected to a galaxy's birth and development. Just last week, the first possible direct evidence was announced for dark matter halos around early quasars. The finding, by Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University and Harvard astronomer

Abraham Loeb, appears to be the first glimpse at the anatomy of the most distant quasars. Importantly, it supports the fundamental ideas of co-evolution, Loeb said. But it also makes it clear that dark matter will not be denied a chapter in any book about the theory. Laura Ferrarese, a Rutgers University physicist, analyzed the new dark matter finding. She says it shows that a supermassive black hole, the stars around it, and an all-encompassing dark matter halo are working in concert to build structure. Taken with other evidence, Ferrarese sees dark matter's role as more significant, or at least more obvious, than many theorists have considered. "There is an observational correlation between the mass of the black hole and the mass of the dark matter halo, not necessarily the mass of the galaxy itself," she said. Through this haze of fuzzy information and diverse thinking, theorists must work to explain a stark and staggering fact: Somewhere between 300 million and 800 million years after the Big Bang, the first black holes were born and managed to each gulp down a mass of more than 1 billion suns. Now before you ponder how these Sumo wrestlers of the early universe must have thrown their weight around in any evolutionary wrestling match, consider this: A black hole typically holds much less than 1 percent of the overall mass of the galaxy it anchors. Shining light on the dark ages The early history of black holes -- what went on in the 500 million years leading up to objects observable with current technology -- is tied back to the development of the very first stars. Speculating about it requires first rewinding to the very beginning. When the universe was born, there was nothing but hydrogen, helium and a little lithium. All this raced outward for about 300,000 years before anything significant happened. The gas was too compacted and therefore too hot to be stable. Gradually, the stuff of space expanded and cooled enough for gas to "recombine and stabilize to neutral states," as scientists put it. The hydrogen was still too hot to form stars, so more expansion was needed. A long stretch of boring darkness ensued, during which some ripples began to ruffle the otherwise smooth fabric of space. "For 300 million years, nothing happened," explains Windhorst, the Arizona State University astronomer. "The universe is just sitting there. Then all of a sudden the first stars began to shine." An Artist's View

A black hole scarfs gas like a pig at a trough. Slovenly habits generate a byproduct of electromagnetic energy, from radio waves to X-rays, that illuminate the entire pig pen, masking what's going on. That is what makes a quasar.
IMAGE: Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University

The exact timing for first light is not known. But the ensuing 500 million years are the so-called dark ages of cosmology. Or more precisely, they represent the illuminations of the universe and the elimination of the dark ages. "The tail end of that is what we're seeing," Windhorst says of the latest Hubble and Sloan survey observations. The first black holes Scientists once imagined galaxies forming by a sort of monolithic collapse, in which a giant cloud of gas suddenly fell inward. The modern view is one of "hierarchical merging," in which bits and pieces build up over time. A rough outline of how it all went down is fairly well agreed upon. Which Black Hole Anchors a Galaxy? The initial ripples in space drew together into knots and filaments, locally and over broader scales. Individual clumps of gas collapsed, and stars were born.

"It may be a question of being in the right

place at the right time. It could be accidental."

The first stars must have been massive, -- Roger Blandford perhaps 200 times the weight of our Sun or Caltech more. They would have been almost pure hydrogen -- the primary ingredient of thermonuclear fusion, which makes a star shine. Massive stars are known to die young. Some survive just 10 million years (the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and just reaching middle-age). A colossal explosion occurs, sending newly forged, heavier elements into space. Remaining material collapses. A mass equal to many stars might end up in a ball no larger than a city. The result: a stellar black hole. These object are so dense that nothing, not even light, escapes once inside a sphere of influence known as an event horizon. Stellar gravity wells can weigh as little as a few suns. But the inaugural versions might have been 100 times as massive as the Sun or more. During all these tens and hundreds of millions of years, more stars are being born from the detritus of the first stars. Locally denser regions of gas contract. Stars form groups of perhaps a few dozen, which might be attracted to other star clusters. Eventually, clusters of many thousands of stars develop and began to look and behave like something that could be called a sub-galaxy. Some probably harbored growing black holes near their centers. Here, theory struggles. Intuition might suggest that many of these huge stellar black holes simply merged until one central object attained enough mass to drive the shape and future development of its galaxy. If that intuition is right, however, which black hole became the center? "It may be a question of being in the right place at the right time," says Roger Blandford, a theoretical astrophysicist at Caltech. "It could be accidental." Next Page: Mega Mergers Collisions of whole galaxies would lead to black hole mergers. Not a bad way to

In fact, nobody knows for sure if the first generate fireworks and fuel growth. super-sized black holes developed from a series of mergers -- several dozen solar Continue >>> masses becomes 200, then 1,000, then 10,000, and so on -- or if they collapsed from the condensing gas cloud. "Do they start from 100 solar masses or a million solar masses? That's a good question," Blandford said. "My personal guess is that they start from a few hundred solar masses, but that's a much more speculative business."

Elusive middleweights Galaxy birth and development is a never-ending process, and clues to early black hole evolution are spread throughout our own galaxy and around the universe. Astronomers therefore examine modern-day cosmic creatures for clues to their ancestral roots. Black holes are everywhere, for one thing. Millions of the stellar sort could litter our galaxy alone, based on early discoveries of a few. If the mightiest black holes indeed developed out of the garden variety, then there ought to be some evidence lying around our cosmic backyard in the form of middleweight versions, one line of thinking goes. A handful of astronomers are convinced they have found a couple of these missing links, and in fact are arguing their case this week at a conference in California. But the case of the middleweights is among the most controversial in all of astronomy. "The existence of middleweight black holes is one of the big unanswered questions in this field," said Cambridge's Haehnelt. "The recent claimed detections are still very controversial." Regardless, most experts agree middleweights would represent, at best, pocket change to the fully grown black hole, something like Microsoft's initial millions in annual revenue compared to the billions that poured into its coffers during the tech boom. Collision in Progress

Located a "mere" 300 million light-years away, these colliding galaxies nicknamed The

Researchers on both sides of the Mice will eventually merge into a single giant middleweight argument mostly agree that galaxy. Such mergers can generate a quasar the bulk of a jumbo black hole doesn't come phase of galactic evolution. through early mergers. Once a critical mass IMAGE: NASA/HUBBLE/STScI/H. Ford et al. is achieved -- and this appears to coincide with a point in time prior to what astronomers can see today -- a black hole seems to gain most of its mass by swallowing gas from its environment. Amid all the squabbling over middleweights looms the likelihood of much larger merger candidates. Mega-mergers Galaxy merging is almost a given. It is thought to have contributed significantly to the past growth of the Milky Way, for example. The early universe, having not yet expanded much, was incredibly crowded. Like racked billiard balls, nascent galaxies were more likely to collide. If two galaxies merge, so should their black holes. Recent computer modeling speculates the event would be violent, unleashing tremendous light as gas is trapped between the two black holes and then rushes toward the more massive one. Galactic mergers take millions of years, so they can't readily be observed in progress. A recent peek into a nearby galaxy provided evidence for the scenario, however. At the heart of galaxy NGC 6240 astronomers found not one but two black holes, roughly 3,000 light-years apart and closing on an apparent merger course. The Chandra X-ray Observatory observations show that NGC 6240 is actually two galaxies that started joining forces about 30 million years ago. Feeding the Beast Other indications of mega-mergers come from relatively nearby quasars.

Richard Larson, a Yale astronomer who studies star formation in galactic nuclei, says galaxies can go through several quasar phases during their lives. In studying -- Richard Larson quasars at more reasonable distances Yale University (which also means not so far in the past), he consistently sees signs of recent galaxy mergers or other large-scale interactions that served as triggers. way to dump a lot of gas into the center of a galaxy." "Interactions and mergers are an excellent way to dump a lot of gas into the center of a galaxy," Larson explains. "The first thing this gas does is suddenly form huge numbers of stars." Bursts of intense star formation seem to last about 10 million to 20 million years around a typical quasar. Some of the gas that does not go into generating stars falls on in to the black hole. This violent phase of consumption is the one that is readily observed, because the castoff energy turns the incoming gas and dust into a glowing cloud. Eventually, the chaos settles and the new stars become visible. Later, the quasar itself is left naked. Finally, it goes dormant. Further Reading

"Interactions and mergers are an excellent

Galaxy Birth OUR TANGLED UNIVERSE : How the First Galaxies Were Born 22 May 2001: Were Sherlock Holmes a cosmologist, he might have said, "It's filamentary, my dear Watson." EARLY RIPPLES: New Filaments and nodes of Observations of Early Universe matter that led to the Help Confirm Theories of first galaxies. Formation 23 May 2002: The most detailed glimpse ever gained of the early universe shows ripples in space back before there were any stars. This finding adds support to theories of how the universe began in an initial Big Bang, inflated rapidly, then developed the first galaxies.

Star Birth HOW A STAR IS BORN: Clouds Lift on Missing Link 16 January 2001: Using a surprisingly simple technique, astronomers have illuminated a missing link in our understanding of the earliest period of star formation. SOME HELP : How Dark Matter Helped Build the First Star 15 November 2001: Astronomers have created a computer simulation showing how the first star in the universe might have formed, helping to plug a gap in understanding of the timeline of the early cosmos.

Black Holes CRAZY: Black Hole Appears, Disappears, and May Return 20 January 2003: When working with big numbers and data from faraway places, small errors can have huge consequences. Black holes, for example, can seem to pop in and out of existence, only to possibly materialize yet again. MERGERS: How Galactic Collisions Fed Black Holes 05 June 2001: The crowded early cosmos offered many free lunches to a growing galaxy. Space was tight. Collisions were frequent. Astronomers figure that the galaxy gobbling that resulted also served as a gravy train for black holes. A new image supports the idea.

Larson figures this scenario for black hole feeding probably applies to the most distant quasars, too. And it supports the notion that black holes do in fact gain most of their bulk by accreting gas. Fresh spin To sort out the specifics of co-evolution, astronomers will need to see more of the universe and inspect it in greater detail. The prospects are good, especially toward the end of this decade. A project called LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) would search for "gravitational waves" kicked up in the aftermath of black hole mergers, perhaps proving that such colossal collisions do occur. The NASA satellite is tentatively slated for launch in 2008.

SPIN: Like Stars, Black Holes Rotate 01 May 2001: While scientists are nearly certain that matter spins violently into the vortex of a black hole, new research shows that a black hole itself can rotate, just like a star. MUSIC: The Sounds of Black Holes 09 April 2002: A CD of black hole music most likely can't compete with Britney Spears or the Soggy Bottom Boys, but a new study shows these venerable gravity instruments produce complex tunes whose underlying principles are remarkably similar to pop, bluegrass, classical or any other style you might think of. Archive of Black Hole News>>>

Dark Matter WHAT IS IT? Good question 08 January 2002: "Weve known that it exists for more than 25 years," says astronomer Virginia Trimble of the University of California Irvine. "But we dont know what the hell it is." NEW STUDY: Mystery Matter Helped Build First Galaxies 22 January 2003: Possible direct evidence has been provided illustrating the theory that the earliest galaxies developed quickly -and to surprisingly massive proportions -- with the help of mysterious and invisible dark matter

FINDING SOME: First Direct Observation of Dark Matter A vastly improved 22 March 2001: More than three dozen elusive white dwarf stars understanding of dark have been found in a halo of objects surrounding our galaxy, matter is also needed. marking the first direct evidence for previously unseen "dark Several telescopes should matter" and lending support to a widely held theory that there is contribute to this effort, but much more to the universe than meets the eye. since no one knows what the stuff is, forecasting any sort of resolution is highly speculative. And the specific mechanics of black holes must be investigated fully. For now, theorists don't even know exactly how matter is shuttled inward and consumed. Much of this work can be done by observing the nearby universe. Roger Blandford, the Caltech theoretician, has suggested a novel way to prove that early mergers were not serious contributors to black hole growth. Blandford says two primary parameters characterize black holes. Mass is the most obvious. A more subtle measurement is spin. Yes, black holes seem to spin. The idea only emerged from theory to relatively firm observations in May of 2001, and it remains unproven. But if spin can be proved a universal aspect of black holes, then the rate of spin can be used to infer something very important about a black hole's history.

"If black holes grow by merging, by combinations of black holes, they should spin down quite quickly," Blandford explains. "This then becomes a fairly good argument that, if you can show that black holes really are spinning rapidly, they probably didn't grow by merging, but would have grown by accreting gas." Most important, vision simply must be extended further back in time, beyond the quasars that are now being studied, says Karl Gebhardt, a University of Texas astronomer and a member of Richstone's team. "They're essentially the tip of the iceberg," Gebhardt says of the objects so far observed. "We are projecting from what we see in a very special number of objects to the whole sample. That is part of the problem of the uncertainty now." Hubble may extend current vision a bit, but the next boon in deep-space discovery will likely have to wait for the James Web Space Telescope, planned for launch in 2010. Billed as the "first-light machine," the JWST will be Hubble on steroids, and it should muscle its way to a better view of a good portion of the cosmic dark ages. It is ironic to think that when JWST goes up, many astronomers and cosmologists will be banking on black holes to light the way to a scientific account of the earliest epoch of the visible universe, an obscure time they have long dreamed about and can now, almost, see.

Mysterious Compound Seen as Key to Ocean Life

Cassandra Lopez University of Miami SPACE.com Sat Feb 16, 10:25 AM ET

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. When bits of natural organic matter from leaves and other sources break down, they can enter rivers and ponds and cause a buildup of yellow-brown organic matter that amasses as the tiny plants die. The drab material is known as chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM), and while its origin is fairly well known in coastal and inland waterways, scientists know far less about the origin and chemical composition of the material in the oceans. Scientists believe heterotrophs, organisms that cannot produce their own food-such as bacteriaproduce and release the mysterious group of organic chemical compounds into their surrounding environment as they decay and new studies are now focusing on understanding CDOM in the oceans.

Researchers know that CDOM, when struck by sunlight, plays a critical role in ocean chemistry, impacting reactions that can effect greenhouse gas emissions that can in turn warm the planet, sulfur compounds that can cause cloud formation that can cool the planet, and iron concentrations that are critical to ocean plants. By understanding marine CDOM, scientists will better understand life in the oceans and how organisms and compounds in the seas are affected by light. One group of U.S. scientists has been studying CDOM since 2003, with several members recently traveling aboard the research vessel Roger Revelle to look at the material both at and below the ocean's surface. According to University of California at Santa Barbara researcher Norm Nelson, nobody's done this before. Few have looked at oceanic CDOM anywhere except in the surface layer of the ocean where it's illuminated by the sun. That's why researchers are grateful for the chance to go to sea. "It's a great opportunity to go to sea to test our hypotheses and discover new things," said Nelson. "It's worth all the long hours, and the weather, and all the difficulties of travel." Because it is an emerging area of study, the CLIVAR/CO2 Steering Committee selected the researchers to participate in selected CLIVAR cruises. The CDOM group has received renewed funding from NSF for some of these cruises and NASA has recently granted funding for the optics work. So how exactly does a researcher get involved in studying matter of such mysterious origins? Often it starts out simply as curiosity. "We got into the study of CDOM by accident," said Nelson. "My colleagues discovered the presence of an unknown factor that controlled the color of the Sargasso Sea off Bermuda that wasn't phytoplankton [tiny marine plants], which we'd always assumed was the most important. I made some measurements that demonstrated it was CDOM, and a whole new area of research opened up for us." By studying the amount of light going into the ocean and the amount of light coming out of the ocean, scientists can validate ocean-color remote-sensing measurements and quantify the light available for photochemistry and photobiology. All of these are related directly or indirectly to CDOM. On the I8S CLIVAR/CO2 cruise aboard the Roger Revelle, scientists measured CDOM levels below the surface using a suite of instruments such as a hand-held profiler that principally contains light sensors, a spectrophotometer that measures how much light is absorbed by CDOM at different wavelengths (colors) of light, instruments that face upward and measure light coming from the sun, and instruments that face downward to measure the radiance spectrum ( a measure of light color bouncing back). The hand-held profiler also contains a fluorometer to measure chlorophyll in plants and a sensor to measure turbidity - the amount of tiny debris particles floating in the water.

The researchers also used an innovative instrument called the CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth recorder) rosette, a system of specialized bottles attached to a metal framework that travels deep into the water column to gather samples. As one of the primary instruments for the CLIVAR cruise, it collects water that researchers later analyze for a range of information and also houses additional sensors. In addition to the sensor data, the researchers collect actual CDOM specimens and phytoplankton, as well as information about the impact of bacteria. The detailed study of CDOM will help researchers bring Earth-based data to bear on years of satellite measurements of phytoplankton. CDOM plays an important role in controlling the color of the ocean as observed by satellites, absorbing ultraviolet and blue light and making the ocean appear more yellow. Scientists estimate the amount of chlorophyll present in seawater by measuring how green the water appears to satellites, and CDOM (in concert with the blue color reflected by ocean water) helps make the ocean appear greener than it is, throwing off estimates of how much phytoplankton is in the seas. In addition to providing fundamental information about the nature of CDOM, the new studies will allow scientists to validate remote sensing estimates of marine plant biomass and productivity and may open new possibilities for using ocean-color remote sensing with studies in areas such as photochemistry, the photobiology of ultraviolet radiation and even ocean circulation.

Ancient "devil frog" may have eaten baby dinosaurs

By Will Dunham Mon Feb 18, 5:03 PM ET

AP Photo: This undated handout artist rendering provided by Dan Klores Communications shows a Beelzebufo ampinga facing...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It was the biggest, baddest, meanest froggy ever to have hopped on Earth. Scientists on Monday announced the discovery in northwestern Madagascar of a bulky amphibian dubbed the "devil frog" that lived 65 million to 70 million years ago and was so nasty it may have eaten newborn dinosaurs.

This brute was larger than any frog living today and may be the biggest frog ever to have existed, according to paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, one of the scientists who found the remains. Its name, Beelzebufo ampinga, came from Beelzebub, the Greek for devil, and bufo -- Latin for toad. Ampinga means "shield," named for an armor-like part of its anatomy. Beelzebufo (pronounced bee-el-zeh-BOOF-oh) was 16 inches long and weighed an estimated 10 pounds (4.5 kg). It was powerfully built and possessed a very wide mouth and powerful jaws. It probably didn't dine daintily. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that Beelzebufo took down lizards and mammals and smaller frogs, and even -- considering its size -- possibly hatchling dinosaurs," Krause said in a telephone interview. "It would have been quite mean," added paleontologist Susan Evans of University College London, another of the scientists. Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even though it lived far away, Beelzebufo appears to be closely related to a group of frogs that live today in South America, the scientists said. They are nicknamed "Pac-Man" frogs due to their huge mouths. Some have little horns on their heads, and the scientists think Beelzebufo also may have had horns -- a fitting touch for the "devil frog." Beelzebufo was bigger than any of its South American kin or any other living frog -- "as if it was on steroids," Krause said. The largest one today is the goliath frog of West Africa, up to 12.5 inches long and 7.2 pounds (3.3 kg). The presence of Beelzebufo in Madagascar and its modern relatives in South America is the latest sign a long-lost land bridge once may have linked Madagascar to Antarctica -- much warmer then -- and South America, the scientists said. That would have let animals move overland among those land masses. Fossils have been found of other animals in Madagascar from Beelzebufo's time similar to South American ones. KING OF FROGS The first frogs appeared about 180 million years ago, and their basic body plan has remained unchanged. Beelzebufo lived during the Cretaceous Period at the end of the age of dinosaurs, which went extinct along with many other types of animals 65 million years ago when a huge space rock clobbered Earth.

Beelzebufo did not live an aquatic lifestyle, hopping among lily pads, the scientists said. Instead, it lived in a semi-arid environment and may have hunted like its modern-day relatives, which camouflage themselves and jump out at prey. Its first fragmentary fossils were found in 1993, and the scientists have since assembled enough fragments to piece its remains together like a jigsaw puzzle, Krause said. While it was the king of frogs, Beelzebufo is not the largest amphibian ever to have lived. Many reached truly astounding dimensions, such as the crocodile-like Prionosuchus that grew to an estimated 30 feet during the Permian Period, which ended about 250 million years ago.

Scientists capture giant Antarctic sea creatures

Reuters Photo: Animals known as tunicates which look like meter-tall glass tulips sit on the ocean floor... SYDNEY (Reuters) - Scientists studying Antarctic waters have filmed and captured giant sea creatures, like sea spiders the size of dinner plates and jelly fish with six meter (18 feet) tentacles. A fleet of three Antarctic marine research ships returned to Australia this week ending a summer expedition to the Southern Ocean where they carried out a census of life in the icy ocean and on its floor, more than 1,000 meters (yards) below the surface. "Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters -- we have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates," Australian scientist Martin Riddle, voyage leader on the research ship Aurora Australis, said on Tuesday. "Many live in the dark and have pretty large eyes. They are strange looking fish," Riddle told local radio. "Some of the video footage we have collected is really stunning -- it's amazing to be able to navigate undersea mountains and valleys and actually see what the animals look like in their undisturbed state," Riddle said.

"In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life. In other places we can see deep scars and gouges where icebergs scour the sea floor as they pass by," he said. The Australian Antarctic Division expedition will help scientists monitor how the impact of environmental change in Antarctic waters, such as ocean acidification caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, will make it harder for marine organisms to grow and sustain calcium carbonate skeletons. "It is predicted that the first effects of this will be seen in the cold, deep waters of Antarctica," said Riddle. "What we saw down there were vast coraline gardens based on calcareous organisms and these are the ones that could really be lost in an increasing acidic ocean," he said. The three ships, the Aurora Australis, France's L'Astrolabe and Japan's Umitaka Maru docked in Hoabrt on Australia's southern island state of Tasmania, with their decks full of an array of sealife including unknown species of sea creatures collected near the eastern Antarctic land mass. Some creatures, which were retrieved from between 200 - 1,400 meters (yards) below the surface, weighed up to 30 kg (65 pounds), while some 25 percent of the sealife chronicled was previous unknown. The census of life in the Southern Ocean is known as the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census (CEAMARC). The French and Japanese ships examined the mid and upper ocean, while the Australian ship studied the ocean floor. "This research will help scientists understand how communities have adapted to the unique Antarctic environment," said Graham Hosie, leader of the census project on Umitaka Maru. "Specimens collected will be sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and bar-coding of their DNA. Not all of the creatures that we found could be identified and it is very likely that some new species will be recorded as a result of these voyages." CEAMARC is part of the international Census of Antarctic Marine Life, coordinated by the Australian Antarctic Division, which will see some 16 voyages to Antarctic waters during this, the International Polar Year (2007-2009). The census will survey the biodiversity of Antarctic slopes, abyssal plains, open water, and under disintegrating ice shelves. It aims to determine species biodiversity, abundance and distribution and establish a baseline dataset from which future changes can be observed

Earth-like planets raise prospects of extra-terrestial life: study

AFP/NASA-HO/File Photo: This handout photo received on February 12, 2008 shows newborn stars as they peek out... BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP) - Planets resembling Earth can be found orbiting many sun-like stars in our galaxy, increasing the prospects of finding extraterrestial life on some of them, according to a study released Sunday University of Arizona astronomer Michael Meyer, working with NASA's Spitzer space telescope, said his research shows that between 20 percent and 60 percent of stars similar to our sun have conditions favorable for forming rocky planets like Earth. "To study the evolution of gas and dust around sun-like stars is to understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems," said Meyer, who was to present his findings Monday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "If we were thinking of what life could emerge around other stars, we might want to know how common rocky planets like Earth might be," he said of his findings, which also appear in the latest edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters. But he said a lot more research is needed to pin down the prospects for extraterrestial life somewhere in the universe. "What we need is much more data, more missions, more observations to inform what we hope will become a predicted theory of planet formation that we can use to guide our search for life in the universe," Meyer said at a press conference. The astronomer and his team of scientists studied six groups of stars -- all similar to our sun and sorted by age -- with the youngest being between 10 and 30 million years old and the oldest between a billion and three billion years old.

Get ready for the eclipse that saved Columbus

AFP/File Photo: The Moon, seen here in 2007, will turn an eerie shade of red for people... PARIS (AFP) - The Moon will turn an eerie shade of red for people in the western hemisphere late Wednesday and early Thursday, recreating the eclipse that saved Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned and the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by the Earth. But the Moon does not become invisible, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere. Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the Moon, seen from Earth, turns a coppery, orange or even brownish hue. Lunar eclipses have long been associated with superstitions and signs of ill omen, especially in battle. The defeat of the Persian king Darius III by Alexander the Great in the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC was foretold by soothsayers when the Moon turned blood-red a few days earlier. And an eclipse is credited with saving the life of Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1504. Stranded on the coast of Jamaica, the explorers were running out of food and faced with increasingly hostile local inhabitants who were refusing to provide them with any more supplies. Columbus, looking at an astronomical almanac compiled by a German mathematician, realised that a total eclipse of the Moon would occur on February 29, 1504. He called the native leaders and warned them if they did not cooperate, he would make the Moon disappear from the sky the following night. The warning, of course, came true, prompting the terrified people to beg Columbus to restore the Moon -- which he did, in return for as much food as his men needed. He and the crew were rescued on June 29, 1504. The Moon will be in total eclipse from 0301 GMT to 0351 GMT. This will be visible east of the Rocky Mountains in North America, as well as in all of Central and South America, West Africa and Western Europe. The zenith of totality is close to French Guiana.

It will be in partial eclipse from 0143 GMT to 0301 GMT, visible west of the Rockies and from the eastern Pacific, and from 0351 GMT to 0509 GMT, visible across the rest of Africa and Europe and much of South and West Asia. Under a partial eclipse, Earth's shadow, or umbra, appears to take a "bite" out of the Moon. The last total lunar eclipse took place on August 28 2007. The next will take place on December 21 2010.

ASU researcher may have discovered key to life before its origin on Earth
An important discovery has been made with respect to the mystery of handedness in biomolecules. Researchers led by Sandra Pizzarello, a research professor at Arizona State University, found that some of the possible abiotic precursors to the origin of life on Earth have been shown to carry handedness in a larger number than previously thought. The work is being published in this weeks Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is titled, Molecular asymmetry in extraterrestrial chemistry: Insights from a pristine meteorite, and is co-authored by Pizzarello and Yongsong Huang and Marcelo Alexandre, of Brown University. Pizzarello, in ASUs Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, worked with Huang and Alexandre in studying the organic materials of a special group of meteorites that contain among a variety of compounds, amino acids that have identical counterparts in terrestrial biomolecules. These meteorites are fragments of asteroids that are about the same age as the solar system (roughly 4.5 billion years.) Scientists have long known that most compounds in living things exist in mirror-image forms. The two forms are like hands; one is a mirror reflection of the other. They are different, cannot be superimposed, yet identical in their parts. When scientists synthesize these molecules in the laboratory, half of a sample turns out to be left-handed and the other half right-handed. But amino acids, which are the building blocks of terrestrial proteins, are all left-handed, while the sugars of DNA and RNA are right-handed. The mystery as to why this is the case, parallels in many of its queries those that surround the origin of life, said Pizzarello. Years ago Pizzarello and ASU professor emeritus John Cronin analyzed amino acids from the Murchison meteorite (which landed in Australia in 1969) that were unknown on Earth, hence solving the problem of any contamination. They discovered a preponderance of left-handed amino acids over their right-handed form. The findings of Cronin and Pizzarello are probably the first demonstration that there may be natural processes in the cosmos that generate a preferred amino acid handedness,

Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., said at the time. The new PNAS work was made possible by the finding in Antarctica of an exceptionally pristine meteorite. Antarctic ices are good curators of meteorites. After a meteorite falls -- and meteorites have been falling throughout the history of Earth -- it is quickly covered by snow and buried in the ice. Because these ices are in constant motion, when they come to a mountain, they will flow over the hill and bring meteorites to the surface. Thanks to the pristine nature of this meteorite, we were able to demonstrate that other extraterrestrial amino acids carry the left-handed excesses in meteorites and, above all, that these excesses appear to signify that their precursor molecules, the aldehydes, also carried such excesses, Pizzarello said. In other words, a molecular trait that defines life seems to have broader distribution as well as a long cosmic lineage. This study may provide an important clue to the origin of molecular asymmetry, added Brown associate professor and co-author Huang.

Earth's Clouds Alive With Bacteria

Clouds are alive with tiny bacteria that grab up water vapor in the atmosphere to make cloud droplets, especially at warmer temperatures, a new study shows. The water droplets and ice crystals that make up clouds don't usually form spontaneously in the atmosphere - they need a solid or liquid surface to collect on. Tiny particles of dust, soot and airplane exhaust - and even bacteria - are known to provide these surfaces, becoming what atmospheric scientists call cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). "Nucleation events and this ice formation is widely recognized as a process that is important to the initiation of precipitation, whether it be snowfall or rain," said lead author of the new study, Brent C. Christner of Louisiana State University. Biological nuceli Bacteria and other particles of biological origin are actually pretty good at collecting water vapor to form cloud droplets. "Biological particles such as bacteria are the most active ice nuclei in nature," Christner told LiveScience. "In other words, they have the ability to catalyze ice formation at temperatures warmer than a particle of abiotic origin." Whereas abiotic (or non-biological) particles such as dust are good at collecting water at temperatures below about 14 degrees F (-10 degrees C), biological particles seem to be the main active nuclei above that temperature, according to Christner's findings. This talent of bacteria could have implications for understanding cloud formation at warmer temperatures. Atmospheric bacteria To see how widespread biological nuclei were in the atmosphere, Christner and his team took samples of freshly fallen snow from sites all over the world.

Antarctic snowfall had the lowest concentrations of biological nuclei, while sites in Montana and France had the highest. Christner said this finding was expected because Antarctica is isolated geographically and far from the suspected source of most of the biological nuclei, plants. "But the concentrations weren't zero; you could still measure some level of them," Christner said. "And that implies that these particles travel large distances in the atmosphere and retain their ice nucleating" properties. Most of the biological nuclei identified in the study, detailed in the Feb. 29 issue of the journal Science, were plant pathogens. These microbes could be carried into the atmosphere from an infected plant by winds, strong updrafts or the dust clouds that follow tractors harvesting a field. Christner and others suspect that becoming cloud nuclei is a strategy for the pathogen to get from plant to plant, since it can be carried for long distances in the atmosphere and come down with a cloud's rain. The next step in determining how big a role biological particles play in cloud droplet formation is to directly sample the clouds themselves, Christner says.

Could Primordial Black Holes Deflect Asteriods on a Collision Course with Earth?
Written by Ian O'Neill

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are getting mischievous again. These artefacts from the Big Bang could be responsible for hiding inside planets or stars, they may even punch a neat, radioactive hole through the Earth. Now, they might start playing interplanetary billiards with asteroids in our solar system. Knocking around lumps of rock may not sound very threatening when compared with the small black holes' other accolades, but what if a large asteroid was knocked off course and sent in our direction? This could be one of the most catastrophic events yet to come from a PBH passing through our cosmic neighborhood

As a race, we are constantly worried about the threat of asteroids hitting Earth. What if another large asteroid - like the one that possibly killed the dinosaurs around 65 million BC or the one that blew up over Tunguska in 1908 - were to come hurtling through space and smash into the Earth? The damage caused by such an impact could devastate whole nations, or plunge the world as we know it to the brink of extinction. But help is at hand. From the combined efforts by groups such as NASAs Near Earth Object Program and international initiatives, governments and institutions are beginning to take this threat seriously. Tracking threatening Near Earth Asteroids is a science in itself, and for now at least, we can relax. There are no massive lumps of rock coming our way (that we know of). The last scare was a comparatively small asteroid called "2008 CT1" which came within 135,000 km of the Earth (about a third of the distance to the Moon) on February 5th, but there are no others forecast for some time. So, we now have NEO monitoring down to a fine art - we are able to track and calculate the trajectory of observed asteroids throughout the solar system to a very high degree of accuracy. But what would happen if an asteroid should suddenly change direction? This shouldn't happen right? Think again. A researcher from the Astro Space Center of the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow has published works focusing on the possibility of asteroids veering off course. And the cause? Primordial black holes. There seems to be many publications out there at the moment musing what would happen should these black holes exist. If they do exist (and there is a high theoretical possibility that they do), there's likely to be lots of them. So Alexander Shatskiy has gotten to the task of working out the probability of a PBH passing through the solar systems asteroid belts, possibly kicking an asteroid or two across Earths orbit. Shatskiy finds that PBHs of certain masses are able to significantly change an asteroids orbit. There are estimates of just how big these PBHs can be, the lower limit is set by black hole radiation parameters (as theorized by Stephen Hawking), having little gravitational effect, and the upper limit is estimated to be as massive as the Earth (with an event horizon radius of an inch or so - golf ball size!). Naturally, the gravitational influence by the latter will be massive, greatly affecting any piece of rock as it passes by.

Should PBHs exist, the probability of finding one passing though the solar system will

actually be quite high. But what is the probability of the PBH gravitationally scattering asteroids as it passes? If one assumes a PBH with a mass corresponding to the upper mass estimate (i.e. the mass of the Earth), the effect of local space would be huge. As can be seen from an asteroid map (pictured), there is a lot of rocky debris out there! So something with the mass of the Earth barrelling through and scattering an asteroid belt could have severe consequences for planets nearby. Although this research seems pretty far-fetched, one of the calculations estimate the average periodicity of a large gravitationally disturbed asteroids falling to Earth should occur every 190 million years. According to geological studies, this estimate is approximately the same. Shatskiy concludes that should small black holes cause deflection of asteroid orbits, perhaps our method of tracking asteroids may be outdated: "If the hypothesis analyzed in this paper is correct, modern methods aimed at averting the asteroid danger appear to be inefficient. This is related to the fact that their main idea is revealing big meteors and asteroids with dangerous orbits and, then, monitoring these bodies. However, if the main danger consists in abrupt changes of asteroidal orbits (because of scattering on a PBH), revealing potentially dangerous bodies is hardly possible." Oh dear, we might be doomed after all Source: arXiv Filed under: Asteroids, Black Holes

20 Responses to Could Primordial Black Holes Deflect Asteriods on a Collision Course with Earth?
1. Essel Says:
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:10 am

If an earth mass PBH can deflect astroids towards earth it can as well collide with earth. The probablities may not be significantly different. Should the mass of earth suddenly become double, what will happen to its orbit? Even If it passes by the moon distance what will happen to earth's orbit? Think of the tides that can be generated by 64 times as massive an object as moon? There are some tell-tale signatures of planets shifting their orbits, PBHs in the past could have played a bigger role than Jupiter in such cases? It opens up a lots of questions 2. Kosmisch biljartenbijAstroblogs Says:
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:24 am

[] Een tijdje terug schreef ik over de mogelijkheid dat de Aarde geraakt kan worden door een klein zwart gat, een primordial black hole (PBH). Dat de Aarde af en toe benaderd of zelfs geraakt wordt door planetoden of kometen was al bekend, getuige de aardscheerders die ons soms passeren en de vele kraters die we overal op Aarde aantreffen. Maar de volgende variant was mij tot vandaag nog niet bekend: dat de genoemde PBH's ook als ware biljartkampioenen de planetoden in ons zonnestelsel een zetje richting Aarde kunnen geven. De Rus Alexander Shatskiy (P.N.Lebedev Physics Institute in Moskou) heeft berekeningen uitgevoerd en daaruit blijkt dat ns per 190 miljoen jaar de Aarde bestookt zal worden door een planetode die onze kant uit is gestuurd na een botsing met een PBH. Als je het kaartje hiernaast ziet met de in het zonnestelsel rondvliegende planetoden (alle gekleurde stippen) is het ook niet verwonderlijk dat zoiets kan gebeuren. Zucht, kunnen we dan ook nooit es rustig slapen? Bron: Universe Today. []

A robot displaying your dreams

'Sleep waking' is an unusual artwork that combines recorded brainwave activity and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep with robot behaviours. The sleep waking robot plays back your dreams, or, if you will, presents an interpretive dance of your dreams, reports livescience.com. The robot is the result of a collaboration between Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns. Orellana spent a night in The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in New York. The staff wired him up and collected data of every conceivable kind: EEG, EKG, REM you name it. Orellana describes the use of the data to animate the robot in this way: "The eye position data we simply apply to the position the robots heads is looking. So if my eye was looking left, the robot looks left. "The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set. We then associated pre-programmed robot behaviours to these patterns. "Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behaviour as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where associated with dynamic behaviours (flying, scared, etc) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc). "The "behaviours" the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream." Orellana and Burns used a Kondo KHR-2HV humanoid robot for their project. Orellana believes that the sleep waking robot is a metaphor in which the robot is allowed to augment or act out human experience. The robot becomes an extension of the person.

Death Star' Aimed at Earth

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday March 04, @02:41PM from the don't-destroy-earth-that's-where-i-keep-my-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays that could lead to a major extinction event and Earth may be right in the line of fire. Australian science magazine Cosmos Magazine reports: 'Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life. A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.'"

Unstable star threatens Earth - astronomer

By IAN STEWARD - The Press | Wednesday, 05 March 2008

A Sydney University astronomer has warned this week that the Earth could be destroyed when an unstable neighbouring star explodes. Dr Peter Tuthill said that observing WR104, a star system in the Sagittarius constellation, made him feel like he was "looking down a rifle barrel". When one of the system's central stars explodes as a supernova, it could send a narrow beam of gamma rays towards Earth. Some scientists believe gamma-ray storms have led to planetwide mass extinctions. WR104 is a spiral system 8000 light years from Earth. One of the two stars locked in binary at its centre is a Wolf-Rayet (imminent supernova) type star. Tuthill has discovered that the pole the spiral spins on points almost exactly at Earth. It recently has been discovered that gamma rays are fired out along a star system's polar axis. Tuthill said the star was a "ticking bomb". "It's worrying enough. We do live on a fragile planet and this is one of the things that could be harmful. I used to appreciate this spiral just for its

beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel." Though there was debate among scientists about the effect of gamma-radiation blasts, some predicted they could burn off 50 per cent of the ozone layer, creating "dramatic" climate events like rampant global warming or even a nuclear winter, he said. Despite the threat posed by the star, Tuthill said he was not "selling up the real estate and moving to the Moon just yet". There were plenty of uncertainties that could mean the beam missed Earth and it may not happen for thousands of years yet. However, Canterbury University astronomer Associate Professor Peter Cottrell said the death star theory was "nice speculation", but "I wouldn't get too worried". Cottrell said Earth was "pretty small" and could easily be missed by the radiation. "Crossing the road is probably more of a danger."

Team probes mysteries of oceanic bacteria: Wee creatures are key to Earth's environment
Microbes living in the oceans play a critical role in regulating Earths environment, but very little is known about their activities and how they work together to help control natural cycles of water, carbon and energy. A team of MIT researchers led by Professors Edward DeLong and Penny Chisholm is trying to change that.

The work was facilitated by the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center established in 2006 to explore microbial ocean life, most of which is not well understood. The traditional way to study bacteria is to grow them in Petri dishes in a laboratory, but that yields limited information, and not all strains are suited to life in the lab. The cast of characters we can grow in the lab is a really small percentage of whats out there, said DeLong, who is research coordinator for C-MORE. The MIT team gathers microbe samples from the waters off Hawaii, in a part of the ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre. Each liter of ocean water they collect contains up to a billion bacterial cells. For several years, researchers have been sequencing the DNA found in those bacteria, creating large databases of prevalent marine microbial genes found in the environment.

However, those DNA sequences alone cannot reveal which genes the bacteria are actually using in their day-to-day activities, or when they are expressing them. Its a lot of information, and its hard to know where to start, said DeLong. How do you know which genes are actually important in any given environmental context? To figure out which genes are expressed, DeLong and colleagues sequenced the messenger RNA (mRNA) produced by the cells living in complex microbial communities. mRNA carries instructions to the protein-building machinery of the cell, so if there is a lot of mRNA corresponding to a particular gene, it means that gene is highly expressed. The new technique requires the researchers to convert bacterial mRNA to eukaryotic (non-bacterial) DNA, which can be more easily amplified and sequenced. They then use sequencing technology that is fast enough to analyze hundreds of millions of DNA base pairs in a day. Once the sequences of highly expressed mRNA are known, the researchers can compare them with DNA sequences in the database of bacterial genes and try to figure out which genes are key players and what their functions are. The team found some surprising patterns of gene expression, DeLong said. For example, about half of the mRNA sequences found are not similar to any previously known bacterial genes. Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Life Before Its Origin On Earth: ASU Researcher May Have Discovered The Key
Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry Article Date: 02 Mar 2008 - 12:00 PST

An important discovery has been made with respect to the mystery of "handedness" in biomolecules. Researchers led by Sandra Pizzarello, a research professor at Arizona State University, found that some of the possible abiotic precursors to the origin of life on Earth have been shown to carry "handedness" in a larger number than previously thought. The work is being published in this week's Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper is titled, "Molecular asymmetry in extraterrestrial chemistry: Insights from a pristine meteorite," and is co-authored by Pizzarello and Yongsong Huang and Marcelo Alexandre, of Brown University. Pizzarello, in ASU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, worked with Huang and Alexandre in studying the organic materials of a special group of meteorites that contain among a variety of compounds,

amino acids that have identical counterparts in terrestrial biomolecules. These meteorites are fragments of asteroids that are about the same age as the solar system (roughly 4.5 billion years.) Scientists have long known that most compounds in living things exist in mirror-image forms. The two forms are like hands; one is a mirror reflection of the other. They are different, cannot be superimposed, yet identical in their parts. When scientists synthesize these molecules in the laboratory, half of a sample turns out to be "left-handed" and the other half "right-handed." But amino acids, which are the building blocks of terrestrial proteins, are all "left-handed," while the sugars of DNA and RNA are "right-handed." The mystery as to why this is the case, "parallels in many of its queries those that surround the origin of life," said Pizzarello. Years ago Pizzarello and ASU professor emeritus John Cronin analyzed amino acids from the Murchison meteorite (which landed in Australia in 1969) that were unknown on Earth, hence solving the problem of any contamination. They discovered a preponderance of "left-handed" amino acids over their "right-handed" form. "The findings of Cronin and Pizzarello are probably the first demonstration that there may be natural processes in the cosmos that generate a preferred amino acid handedness," Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., said at the time. The new PNAS work was made possible by the finding in Antarctica of an exceptionally pristine meteorite. Antarctic ices are good "curators" of meteorites. After a meteorite falls -- and meteorites have been falling throughout the history of Earth -- it is quickly covered by snow and buried in the ice. Because these ices are in constant motion, when they come to a mountain, they will flow over the hill and bring meteorites to the surface. "Thanks to the pristine nature of this meteorite, we were able to demonstrate that other extraterrestrial amino acids carry the left-handed excesses in meteorites and, above all, that these excesses appear to signify that their precursor molecules, the aldehydes, also carried such excesses," Pizzarello said. "In other words, a molecular trait that defines life seems to have broader distribution as well as a long cosmic lineage." "This study may provide an important clue to the origin of molecular asymmetry," added Brown associate professor and co-author Huang. ---------------------------Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. ----------------------------

Last great race on earth

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is often referred to as the last great race on earth. Covering more than 1,150 miles in 9-17 days, mushers and their teams of 12-16 sled dogs traverse dense forests, frozen rivers, mountain passes and vast stretches of wilderness. Add blizzards, gale force winds, temperatures far below zero, long hours of darkness and treacherous climbs, and you have the Iditarod experience! In the early 1900s, dog sleds were the only reliable form of transportation in the wintertime. They were used to deliver mail and supplies. Around 1910-1912, the sleds hauled tons of gold back from Nome during America's last great gold rush. In 1925, there was a deadly outbreak of diphtheria in Nome. Life-saving serum was transported from Anchorage to Nenana by train, but the last 674 miles were only accessible by dog sled. To learn more, check out the children's book, "The Great Serum Race: Blazing the Iditarod Trail." By the mid 1930s, the gold rush had wound down and supplies were delivered by air transport. The Iditarod Trail fell into disuse. In the late 1960s, some short dog sled races were held,

followed by the first Iditarod race in the 1973. In 1978, the Iditarod Trail was designated as a National Historic Trail. You can find many books about the Iditarod at the Library: "Racing Sled Dogs: An Original North American Sport," "Mush! Across Alaska in the Longest Sled-dog Race" and "Iditarod Fact Book: A Complete Guide to the Last Great Race." Look for biographies like "Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod" and "Father of the Iditarod: The Joe Redington Story." The Library also owns the video, "Iditarod - A Far Distant Place." This year's race began at 10 a.m. Saturday, March 1, in downtown Anchorage. Participants spent the night in Wasilla, where the race is restarted at 2 p.m. today, Sunday, March 2. You will surely hear news of the Iditarod in days to come. For more information, go to www.iditarod.com. Highlighted Activities Intermediate Microsoft Word: 7 p.m. March 5. Learn more advanced word processing skills, including how to use graphic elements, bulleting and numbering lists, cut/copy/paste functions and headers and footers. Prerequisite is Introduction to Word. This is a hands-on class. Space is limited. Register in advance at the reference desk or by calling (734) 326-6123. Everyone's Reading Book Discussion: 7 p.m. March 11. As part of the seventh annual Metro Detroit Book Discussion, join us for a sharing of ideas about "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," written by Laurie R. King. Pick up a copy of the book at the library. Please read the book before the meeting. All are welcome. Information Central is compiled by reference librarian Janet Sowards. The William P. Faust Public Library is at 6123 Central City Parkway, Westland. For more information, call (734) 326-6123.

Fear Of Snakes Natural

Reported by: Web Producer

Monday, Mar 10, 2008 @09:09am CST

Research Suggests Fear Of Snakes Natural The commonly held phobia of snakes may be completely natural. According to LiveScience.com, new research suggests humans have evolved an innate tendency to sense snakes, as well as spiders. Psychologists found that both adults and children could detect images of snakes among a variety of non-threatening objects more quickly than they could pinpoint harmless animals. Researchers at the University of Virginia says they believe this ability helped humans survive in the wild as they evolved.

Vanessa LoBue told the site, quote, "The idea is that throughout evolutionary history, humans that learned quickly to fear snakes would have been at an advantage to survive and reproduce."

Real death star could strike Earth

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The Death Star from a scene in Star Wars. A pair of locked, luminous stars that will go supernova could emit a pair of gamma rays that could act like Darth Vader's sinister space weapon upon Earth's ozone layer.

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By Charles Q. Choi, Special to SPACE.com A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, scientists now report.

Unlike the moon-sized Death Star from Star Wars, which has to get close to a planet to blast it, this blazing spiral has the potential to away.

"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down an astronomer at the University of Sydney.

The fiery pinwheel in space in question has at its heart a pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other. As they circle on from the surfaces of the stars collide in the intervening space, eventually becoming entangled and twisted into a whirling spiral by th Short fuse

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Earth | Hawaii | Star Wars | SPACE.com | Lawrence | University of Kansas | Astrophysical Journal | Dea University of Sydney

The pinwheel, named WR 104, was discovered eight years ago in the constellation Sagittarius. It rotates in a circle "every eight mon cosmic clock," Tuthill said. Both the massive stars in WR 104 will one day explode as supernovae. However, one of the pair is a highly unstable star known as the life of these massive stars right before a supernova.

"Wolf-Rayet stars are regarded by astronomers as ticking bombs," Tuthill explained. The 'fuse' for this star "is now very short to a within the next few hundred thousand years."

When the Wolf-Rayet goes supernova, "it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way," Tuthill said. "If such a 'gamm Earth to be in the way." Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival. Firing line

Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe. They can loose as much energy as our sun during its en milliseconds to a minute or more.

The spooky thing about this pinwheel is that it appears to be a nearly perfect spiral to us, according to new images taken with the Ke like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," Tuthill said. The findings are detailed in the March 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal. Unfortunately for us, gamma ray bursts seem to be shot right along the axis of systems. In essence, if this pinwheel ever releases a firing line.

"This is the first object that we know of that might release a gamma ray burst at us," said astrophysicist Adrian Melott at the Universi participate in this study. "And it's close enough to do some damage."

This pinwheel is about 8,000 light years away, roughly a quarter of the way to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. While this might s a gamma ray burst if we are unfortunate enough to be caught in the beam could be harmful to life on Earth out to these distan What might happen

Although the pinwheel can't blast Earth apart like the Death Star from Star Wars at least not from 8,000 light years away it cou even threaten life as we know it on our planet.

Gamma rays would not penetrate Earth's atmosphere well enough to burn the ground, but they would chemically damage the strato to hit us with a burst 10 seconds or so long, its gamma rays could deplete about 25% of the world's ozone layer, which protects us f the recent human-caused thinning of the ozone layer, creating "holes" over the polar regions, have only been depletions of about 3 t

"So that would be very bad," Melott told SPACE.com. "You'd see extinctions. You might see food chain collapses in the oceans, mig

Gamma ray bursts would also trigger smog formation that could blot out sunlight and rain down acid. However, at 8,000 light-years a effect there for much of a darkening effect," Melott estimated. "It'd probably cut off 1 or 2% of total sunlight. It might cool the climate ice age kind of thing." Cosmic ray danger One unknown about gamma ray bursts is how many particles they spew as cosmic rays.

"Normally the gamma ray bursts we see are so far away that magnetic fields out in the universe deflect any cosmic rays we might ob was pretty close, any high-energy particles would blast right through the galaxy's magnetic field and hit us," Melott said. "Their energ almost the same time as the light burst."

"The side of the Earth facing the gamma ray burst would experience something like getting irradiated by a not-too-distant nuclear ex see radiation sickness. And the cosmic rays would make the atmospheric effects of a gamma ray burst worse," Melott added. "But w gamma ray bursts emit, so that's a danger that's not really understood."

It remains uncertain just how wide the beams of energy that gamma ray bursts release are. However, any cone of devastation from square light-years wide by the time it reached Earth, Melott estimated. Tuthill told SPACE.com "it would be pretty much impossible t the beam in a spaceship if it really is coming our way." Don't worry Still, Tuthill noted this pinwheel might not be the death of us.

"There are still plenty of uncertainties the beam could pass harmlessly to the side if we are not exactly on the axis, and nobody is of producing a fully-fledged gamma-ray burst in the first place," he explained.

Future research should focus on whether WR 104 really is pointed at Earth and on better understanding how supernovae produce g

Melott and others have speculated that gamma ray bursts might have caused mass extinctions on Earth. But when it comes to whet "I would worry a lot more about global warming," Melott said.

(Illustration by Jeremy Traum)

Our years on Earth are numbered - all 7.59 billion of them

By Dennis Overbye Published: March 10, 2008

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In the end, there will not even be fragments. If nature is left to its own devices, about 7.59 billion years from now Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red Sun and spiral to a rapid vaporous death. That is the forecast according to new calculations by a pair of astronomers, Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and Robert Connon Smith of the University of Sussex in England.

Their report, to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is the latest and gloomiest installment yet in a long-running debate about the ultimate fate of the planet. Only last year, the discovery of a giant planet orbiting the faint burned-out cinder of a star in Pegasus had suggested that Earth could survive the Sun's death. Smith called the new result "a touch depressing" in a series of e-mail messages. But "looked at another way," he added, "it is an incentive to do something about finding ways to leave our planet and colonize other areas in the galaxy." As for sentimental attachment to any of the geographic features we might have come to know and love, Smith said: "I should add that the Himalayas are a passing thought anyway. They didn't even exist until India smashed into Asia less than 60 million years ago - the blink of an eye compared with the billions of years we are discussing."

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While he does not expect the argument to end, Smith said in an e-mail message that, if anything, in the new calculations he and Schroeder had underestimated the forces that would be dragging the Earth down toward the Sun. "So," he said, "I would be surprised if anyone were able to rescue the Earth again in a future paper." Earth's basic problem is that the Sun will gradually get larger and more luminous as it goes through life, according to widely held theories of stellar evolution. In its first 4.5 billion years, according to the models, the Sun has already grown about 40 percent brighter. Over the coming eons, life on Earth will become muggier and more uncomfortable and finally impossible. "Even if the Earth were to marginally escape being engulfed," said Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, "it would still be scorched, and life on Earth would be destroyed." About a billion years from now, the Sun will be 10 percent brighter. Oceans on Earth will boil away. The Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core about 5.5 billion years from now and start burning hydrogen in the surrounding layers. As a result, the core will shrink and the outer layers will rapidly expand as the Sun transforms itself into a red giant. The heat from this death rattle will transform the solar system; it will briefly be springtime in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune. Mercury and Venus will surely be swallowed, but the Earth's fate has always been more uncertain.

The reason is that in the course of ballooning outward, the Sun will blow off a substantial share of its mass. Thus, the Sun's gravitational grip on its planets will be weakened, and they will retreat to more distant orbits. The Earth will wind up about where Mars is now, "on the border line between being engulfed or escaping engulfment," as Livio put it. Whether or not the Earth is engulfed depends on which of two effects wins out. At the same time that the Earth is retreating to a safer position, tidal forces between it and the expanding Sun will try to drag the planet inward and downward. In 2001, an analysis of these opposing forces by Kacper Rybicki of the Polish Institute of Geophysics and Carlos Denis of the University of Liege concluded that it looked bad but that the Earth might have a chance of surviving. According to Smith and Schroeder, that chance is nil. One key to their work is a new way of calculating how much mass the Sun loses during its cataclysmic expansion, and, thus, how big it gets and how far the Earth eventually moves outward. The more mass lost, paradoxically, the bigger the Sun swells, like a balloon whose elastic weakens when it is stretched. Using a new technique, developed by Schroeder and Manfred Cuntz of the University of Texas in Arlington, the authors calculated that the lost mass would amount to a third of the Sun's original mass, compared with previous estimates of a quarter.

As a result, the red giant version of the Sun - at its maximum - will be 250 times as big across as the star is today and 2,700 times as luminous. Skimming over the flame tops of this giant, the bare, burned Earth would produce a bulge in the Sun. But friction would cause the bulge to lag as it tried to follow the Earth. The gravitational tug from the bulge would slow the Earth and would cause it to spiral inward, where friction from gases in the Sun's expanded atmosphere would slow it even more. Then it would go down. After a period of burning helium and shrinking and expanding and then finally shrinking again, the Sun will wind up as tiny cinder known as a white dwarf, fading away for eternity. Is there any way out of this fiery end for the robots or cockroaches or whoever will be running the Earth in a billion years? One option is to leave for another planet or another star system. Another option, Smith said, is to engage in some large-scale high-stakes engineering. In the same way that space probes can get a trajectory boost by playing gravitational billiards with Venus or Jupiter to gain speed and get farther out in space, so the Earth could engineer regular encounters with a comet or asteroid, thus raising its orbit and getting farther from the Sun, according to a paper in 2001 by Don Korycansky and Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan. Laughlin said that when their paper first came out, they were praised by the radio host Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives for forward thinking.

But Laughlin said they were actually not advocating the orbit-shifting project, noting that a miscalculation could lead to the comet hitting the Earth. "There are profound ethical issues involved," he wrote in an e-mail message, "and the cost of failure (an Earth-sterilizing impact) is unacceptably high." Anyway, such a maneuver would prolong the viability of the Earth for only a few billion years. After that, the planet would be stranded in the cold and dim. Laughlin noted that there was also a chance - one in three million - the Earth would be stolen out of its orbit by one of the numerous dim stars known as red dwarfs. Because these stars burn more slowly, it could supply up to a trillion years worth of warmth, he said. But the price of such near immortality could be blandness. In the intervening eons, the Earth would cool internally, and geological activity would shut down. "It seems," Laughlin said, "you can't have everything."

Fossil Hunt Finds Warning for Warming Earth

Ellen Currano Pennsylvania State University, Smithsonian Institution LiveScience.com Sun Mar 9, 1:55 PM ET

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
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Around 6:30a.m., the sun rises above the butte to the east of my camp, and its light and heat signal the start to another day of paleontological field work in the Bighorn Basin, Wyo. I move my cot and sleeping bag back into my tent, pull on my field clothes, and head over to the kitchen area for breakfast, calling out a good-morning to Eriks, my field assistant. Within an hour, we pull out of camp in Sunshine, the bright yellow SUV I've rented for the summer. A short but bumpy ride later, we're at our fossil site. We have already spent a week prospecting for a good site and digging a quarry, and our goal is to count 1,000 fossil leaves from this site. We pull blocks of rock out of the quarry using hammers, chisels, and pick-axes, and then split the blocks to find leaves. Leaves become fossils when they are rapidly buried by fine-grained mud. The mud hardens to rock, and the leaf decays, leaving its both its impression and a small gap in the rock. When we hit the rock with a hammer, it preferentially splits along the leaf fossil because of that gap.

I identify what plant species each leaf belongs to and what types of insect damage it has. Eriks records the data in my notebook and carefully wraps the keeper specimens in toilet paper to be shipped to the Smithsonian, where I will carefully check my field identifications using a microscope and reference collections. On a good day, we can count one hundred leaf fossils before heading back to camp for dinner, a moderately cool beer, and another night sleeping under the stars. I first visited the Bighorn Basin the summer after my junior year in college as a Smithsonian intern, and I fell in love with its desert scenery and abundant leaf fossils. This summer is my fourth and final field season in the Bighorn Basin collecting fossils for my PhD thesis. I will use these fossils to study the effects of climate change on plant communities and their insect herbivores. Insect damage is visible on well-preserved fossil leaves. For example, after an insect chews a hole in the leaf, the tissue around the damage toughens, essentially forming a scab around the damaged area. This is visible on fossils as a darkened rim around the hole. By collecting fossils from times that have different temperatures, I can look at how climate changes affect insect herbivores feeding in natural ecosystems. The fossils I study range in age from 60 to 52 million years old. During this time, several significant temperature fluctuations occurred. One event that is particularly relevant to modern global warming is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a rapid warming of 5-10oC that was caused by the release of at least 4,000 gigatons of carbon into the earth's atmosphere over less than 10,000 years. Insect damage on leaves from the PETM is very high, and we attribute the increase to the elevated temperature and increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This summer, I am targeting fossil sites from a cool interval to determine whether there is a decrease in insect damage, as I would expect given the PETM results. By late spring, when I will defend my thesis and Penn State, I should have an answer.

Timeline: The Frightening Future of Earth

By Andrea Thompson, and Ker Than posted: 19 April 2007 08:32 am ET
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Our planet's prospects for environmental stability are bleaker than ever with the approach of this years Earth Day, April 22. Global warming is widely accepted as a reality by scientists and even by previously doubtful government and industrial leaders. And according to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is a 90 percent likelihood that humans are contributing to the change.

The international panel of scientists predicts the global average temperature could increase by 2 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and that sea levels could rise by up to 2 feet. Scientists have even speculated that a slight increase in Earth's rotation rate could result, along with other changes. Glaciers, already receding, will disappear. Epic floods will hit some areas while intense drought will strike others. Humans will face widespread water shortages. Famine and disease will increase. Earths landscape will transform radically, with a quarter of plants and animals at risk of extinction. While putting specific dates on these traumatic potential events is challenging, this timeline paints the big picture and details Earth's future based on several recent studies and the longer scientific version of the IPCC report, which was made available to LiveScience. 2007 More of the world's population now lives in cities than in rural areas, changing patterns of land use. The world population surpasses 6.6 billion. (Peter Crane, Royal Botanic Gardens, UK, Science; UN World Urbanization Prospectus: The 2003 Revision; U.S. Census Bureau) 2008 Global oil production peaks sometime between 2008 and 2018, according to a model by one Swedish physicist. Others say this turning point, known as Hubberts Peak, wont occur until after 2020. Once Hubberts Peak is reached, global oil production will begin an irreversible decline, possibly triggering a global recession, food shortages and conflict between nations over dwindling oil supplies. (doctoral dissertation of Frederik Robelius, University of Uppsala, Sweden; report by Robert Hirsch of the Science Applications International Corporation) 2020 Flash floods will very likely increase across all parts of Europe. (IPCC) Less rainfall could reduce agriculture yields by up to 50 percent in some parts of the world. (IPCC)

World population will reach 7.6 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau) 2030 Diarrhea-related diseases will likely increase by up to 5 percent in low-income parts of the world. (IPCC) Up to 18 percent of the worlds coral reefs will likely be lost as a result of climate change and other environmental stresses. In Asian coastal waters, the coral loss could reach 30 percent. (IPCC) World population will reach 8.3 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau) Warming temperatures will cause temperate glaciers on equatorial mountains in Africa to disappear. (Richard Taylor, University College London, Geophysical Research Letters:) In developing countries, the urban population will more than double to about 4 billion people, packing more people onto a given city's land area. The urban populations of developed countries may also increase by as much as 20 percent. (World Bank: The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion) 2040 The Arctic Sea could be ice-free in the summer, and winter ice depth may shrink drastically. Other scientists say the region will still have summer ice up to 2060 and 2105. (Marika Holland, NCAR, Geophysical Research Letters) 2050 Small alpine glaciers will very likely disappear completely, and large glaciers will shrink by 30 to 70 percent. Austrian scientist Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck says this is a conservative estimate, and the small alpine glaciers could be gone as soon as 2037. (IPCC) In Australia, there will likely be an additional 3,200 to 5,200 heat-related deaths per year. The hardest hit will be people over the age of 65. An extra 500 to 1,000 people will die of heat-related deaths in New York City per year. In the United Kingdom, the opposite will occur, and cold-related deaths will outpace heat-related ones. (IPCC) World population reaches 9.4 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Crop yields could increase by up to 20 percent in East and Southeast Asia, while decreasing by up to 30 percent in Central and South Asia. Similar shifts in crop yields could occur on other continents. (IPCC) As biodiversity hotspots are more threatened, a quarter of the worlds plant and vertebrate animal species could face extinction. (Jay Malcolm, University of Toronto, Conservation Biology) 2070 As glaciers disappear and areas affected by drought increase, electricity production for the worlds existing hydropower stations will decrease. Hardest hit will be Europe, where hydropower potential is expected to decline on average by 6 percent; around the Mediterranean, the decrease could be up to 50 percent. (IPCC) Warmer, drier conditions will lead to more frequent and longer droughts, as well as longer fire-seasons, increased fire risks, and more frequent heat waves, especially in Mediterranean regions. (IPCC) 2080 While some parts of the world dry out, others will be inundated. Scientists predict up to 20 percent of the worlds populations live in river basins likely to be affected by increased flood hazards. Up to 100 million people could experience coastal flooding each year. Most at risk are densely populated and low-lying areas that are less able to adapt to rising sea levels and areas which already face other challenges such as tropical storms. (IPCC) Coastal population could balloon to 5 billion people, up from 1.2 billion in 1990. (IPCC) Between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will experience water shortages and up to 600 million will go hungry. (IPCC) Sea levels could rise around New York City by more than three feet, potentially flooding the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. (NASA GISS) 2085

The risk of dengue fever from climate change is estimated to increase to 3.5 billion people. (IPCC) 2100 A combination of global warming and other factors will push many ecosystems to the limit, forcing them to exceed their natural ability to adapt to climate change. (IPCC) Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be much higher than anytime during the past 650,000 years. (IPCC) Ocean pH levels will very likely decrease by as much as 0.5 pH units, the lowest its been in the last 20 million years. The ability of marine organisms such as corals, crabs and oysters to form shells or exoskeletons could be impaired. (IPCC) Thawing permafrost and other factors will make Earths land a net source of carbon emissions, meaning it will emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it absorbs. (IPCC) Roughly 20 to 30 percent of species assessed as of 2007 could be extinct by 2100 if global mean temperatures exceed 2 to 3 degrees of pre-industrial levels. (IPCC) New climate zones appear on up to 39 percent of the worlds land surface, radically transforming the planet. (Jack Williams, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) A quarter of all species of plants and land animalsmore than a million totalcould be driven to extinction. The IPCC reports warn that current conservation practices are generally ill-prepared for climate change and effective adaptation responses are likely to be costly to implement. (IPCC) Increased droughts could significantly reduce moisture levels in the American Southwest, northern Mexico and possibly parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, effectively recreating the Dust Bowl environments of the 1930s in the United States. (Richard Seager, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Science) 2200 An Earth day will be 0.12 milliseconds shorter, as rising temperatures cause oceans to expand away from the equator and toward the poles, one model predicts. One reason

water will be shifted toward the poles is most of the expansion will take place in the North Atlantic Ocean, near the North Pole. The poles are closer to the Earths axis of rotation, so having more mass there should speed up the planets rotation. (Felix Landerer, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Geophysical Research Letters)

Mankind's secrets kept in lunar ark

Maurice Chittenden

IF civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a Doomsday ark on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war. Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race. A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built. The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores. As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade. According to Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the agencys research department, the first flowers - tulips or arabidopsis, a plant widely used in research - could be grown in 2012 or 2015. Eventually, it will be necessary to have a kind of Noahs ark there, a diversity of species from the biosphere, said Foing. Tulips are ideal because they can be frozen, transported long distances and grown with little nourishment. Combined with algae, an enclosed artificial atmosphere and chemically enhanced lunar soil, they could form the basis of an ecosystem. The first experiments would be carried out in transparent biospheres containing a mix of gases to mimic the earths atmosphere. Carbon dioxide given off by the decomposing plants would be mop ped up by the algae, which would generate oxygen through photosynthesis. The databank would initially be run by robots and linked to earth by radio transmissions. Scientists hope to put a manned station on the moon before the end of the century. The databank would need to be buried under rock to protect it from the extreme temperatures, radiation and vacuum on the moon. It would be run partly on solar power. The scientists envisage placing the first experimental databank on the moon no later than 2020 and it could have a lifespan of 30 years. The full archive would be launched by 2035. The information would be held in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish and would be linked by transmitter to 4,000 Earth repositories that would provide s helter, food, a water supply for survivors. Nasa sees light

A Nasa satellite has detected radiation emitted trillionths of a second after the big bang, the closest humans have got to directly observing the explosion that created the universe, writes Jonathan Leake. The pattern of radiation - at 13.7 billion years, the oldest light detected - shows how the universe expanded. The results give scientists the most detailed timeline on the evolution of the universe.

Alpha Centauri might harbor Earth-like planets

Washington, March 8 : A new study led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), has suggested that the star system Alpha Centauri might harbor Earth-like planets, which could be detected using existing techniques. As part of the study, UCSC graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around the star Alpha Centauri B and to be orbiting in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist on the planet's surface. To study planet formation around Alpha Centauri B, the team ran repeated computer simulations, evolving the system for the equivalent of 200 million years each time. Because of variations in the initial conditions, each simulation led to the formation of a different planetary system. In every case, however, a system of multiple planets evolved with at least one planet about the size of Earth. In many cases, the simulated planets had orbits lying within the habitable zone of the star. The researchers then showed that such planets could be observed using a dedicated telescope. "If they exist, we can observe them," said Guedes, who is the first author of a paper describing the new findings. The Doppler detection method, which has revealed the majority of the 228 known extrasolar planets, measures shifts in the light from a star to detect the tiny wobble induced by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. "Factors that favor the use of this technique for Alpha Centauri B include the brightness of the star and its position in the sky, which gives it a long period of observability each year from the Southern Hemisphere," said Gregory Laughlin, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University is leading an observational program to intensively monitor Alpha Centauri A and B using the 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The researchers hope to detect real planets similar to the ones that emerged in the computer simulations. "I think the planets are there, and it's worth a try to have a look," said Laughlin. According to Laughlin, five years of observations using a dedicated telescope would be needed to detect an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri B.

Geneva atom smasher sets record for beam energy

AFP/File A view of a superconducting solenoid magnet at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer Alexander G. Higgins, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 19, 7:39 am ET GENEVA Operators of the world's largest atom smasher on Friday ramped up their massive machine to three times the energy ever previously achieved, in the run-up to experiments probing the secrets of the universe. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27-kilometer (17mile) tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. The next major development is expected in a few days when CERN starts colliding the beams in a new round of research to examine the tiniest particles and forces within the atom in hopes of finding out more about how matter is made up. The collider in December had already eclipsed the record of the next most powerful machine, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago, which has been running just shy of a trillion electron volts, or TeV. The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of dark energy and matter. Scientists hope also to approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago. CERN has reported a series of successes since the collider was restarted last year after 14 months of repairs and improvements following a spectacular failure when scientists initially tried to get the machine going. CERN improved the machine during a 2 1/2-month winter shutdown to be able to operate at the higher energy. "Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC's overall design, and the improvements we've made since the breakdown in September 2008," said Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators and technology

Physicists observe quantum properties in the world of objects Demonstration ties the physics of the ultrasmall to the everyday

By Alexandra Witze Web edition : Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 Text Size

Enlarge Quantum objectA close-up view of the very small resonator, taken with a scanning electron microscope, used in the first demonstration of quantum behavior in an everyday object. The resonator is made of a thin film of aluminum nitride sandwiched between aluminum layers. The mechanically active part of the structure is the quadrilateral shape in the center. A. Cleland/UCSB Physicists have demonstrated behavior governed by rules of the quantum world, which operate at the level of atoms, in mechanical objects large enough to see. The accomplishment fulfills a long-held dream to bridge the quantum and everyday worlds. One day, researchers say, mechanical devices in a laboratory might be manipulated according to the rules of single atoms paving the way to quantum information processing or probing other unusual behaviors of the subatomic world. This is groundbreaking work, says Markus Aspelmeyer, a physicist at the University of Vienna in Austria who was not affiliated with the work. Now the door is open. Now the fun begins.

Enlarge High frequencySetting the resonator to a high vibration cycle, illustrated in this cartoon that shows the expansion and contraction cycle that occurs 6 billion times a second, enabled researchers to coax the material into a quantum ground state using just a commercial-grade refrigerator.A. Cleland/UCSB

Multiple teams have competed for years to link the quantum and everyday realms by building a tiny vibrating device and draining out as much of its energy as physically possible, reducing it to the quantum ground state. Most groups have tried to do this by building ever more powerful refrigerators to chill the material down to nearly absolute zero, or zero on the Kelvin temperature scale. But physicist Andrew Cleland of the University of California, Santa Barbara, decided instead to take a shortcut. If I took a tuning fork and wanted to get it to the quantum ground state, I would have to cool it below 50 billionths of a kelvin, he explains. There is no technology that will allow you to do that, not now. But if you push the frequency of that tuning fork up by orders of magnitude, then you only have to cool it to 50 millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Thus, by choosing a material that vibrated at extremely high frequencies in this case, 6 billion times a second Cleland and colleagues were able to use a commercially available refrigerator to reach the quantum ground state, because they didnt have to cool the system as much as they would with a material at lower frequency. The researchers also figured out a way to measure activity using a quantum bit a unit of quantum informationrather than light, which can impart energy back into the cooled-down system. The real key for us getting this experiment to work was using this particular flavor of a quantum bit, says Cleland. In the end, the system that showed quantum behavior is a simple-looking film of aluminum nitride layered between two aluminum electrodes. Cleland and colleagues were able to show not only that the device had reached its quantum ground state, but that they could control it. The scientists created a phonon, the smallest measure of vibrational energy, and watched as it moved back and forth between the resonating device and the quantum bit, they report in a paper published online March 17 in Nature. There is huge potential for using these mechanical systems in the quantum regime, says Aspelmeyer. Now we have to exploit all the possibilities that we have. Potential applications, he says, include using arrays of these resonators to control multiple quantum systems in information processing or to test predictions about Schrdinger cat states named for a hypothetical feline simultaneously alive and dead in which a system exists in a mix of states known as a superposition. Clelands team showed, somewhat indirectly, that a form of superposition existed inside their resonator. If the researchers could make a resonator with longer-lasting vibrations, scientists might be able to test superposition on the macroscopic scale.

It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

Reuters This artist's conception shows an asteroid crashing into Earth in an event that scientists believe By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent Kate Kelland, Health And Science Correspondent Thu Mar 4, 2:22 pm ET LONDON (Reuters) A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades. A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years' worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a "hellish environment" around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet. Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years. The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit. "We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review. The asteroid is thought to have hit Earth with a force a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Morgan said the "final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs" came when blasted material flew into the atmosphere, shrouding the planet in darkness, causing a global winter and "killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."

Scientists working on the study analysed the work of palaeontologists, geochemists, climate modellers, geophysicists and sedimentologists who have been collecting evidence about the KT extinction over the last 20 years. Geological records show the event that triggered the dinosaurs' demise rapidly destroyed marine and land ecosystems, they said, and the asteroid hit "is the only plausible explanation for this". Peter Schulte of the University of Erlangen in Germany, a lead author on the study, said fossil records clearly show a mass extinction about 65.5 million years ago -- a time now known as the K-Pg boundary. Despite evidence of active volcanism in India, marine and land ecosystems only showed minor changes in the 500,000 years before the K-Pg boundary, suggesting the extinction did not come earlier and was not prompted by eruptions. The Deccan volcano theory is also thrown into doubt by models of atmospheric chemistry, the team said, which show the asteroid impact would have released much larger amounts of sulphur, dust and soot in a much shorter time than the volcanic eruptions could have, causing extreme darkening and cooling. Gareth Collins, another co-author from Imperial College, said the asteroid impact created a "hellish day" that signalled the end of the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs, but also turned out to be a great day for mammals. "The KT extinction was a pivotal moment in Earth's history, which ultimately paved the way for humans to become the dominant species on Earth," he wrote in a commentary on the study. (Collins has created a website at http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/Chicxulub.html which allows readers to see the effects of the asteroid impact.

Experts confirm asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

AFP/NASA/File Artist's rendition released by NASA shows an asteroid belt in orbit around a star. A huge asteroid by Karin Zeitvogel Karin Zeitvogel Fri Mar 5, 5:43 am ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) Dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge asteroid that smashed into Earth 65 million years ago with the force of a billion atomic bombs, scientists said, hoping to lay an age-old debate to rest once and for all. The definitive verdict came from an international panel of experts who reviewed 20 years' worth of evidence about what caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction that wiped out more than half the species on the planet. They determined it was a massive asteroid, measuring around 15 kilometers (nine miles) wide, which smashed into what is today Chicxulub in Mexico. The event marked a pivotal point in history because it cleared the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth. "The asteroid is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima," the researchers said in a report published in the journal Science. "It would have blasted material at high velocity into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days." The panel of 41 scientists hope their findings will lay to rest once and for all the debate about what caused the KT extinction. Some scientists have argued that dinosaurs and species including bird-like pterosaurs and large sea reptiles were wiped out by a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now India that lasted some 1.5 million years. The eruptions spewed enough basalt lava across the Deccan Traps in west-central India to fill the Black Sea twice and were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale. But the evidence gathered for the study published in Science showed that marine and land ecosystems were destroyed rapidly in the KT extinction, leading the scientists to rule out volcanic activity as the culprit, because its effects would have whittled away at dinosaurs and other species over time. "Despite evidence for relatively active volcanism in the Deccan Traps at the time, marine and land ecosystems showed only minor changes within the 500,000 years before the time of the KT extinction," the scientists said. "Computer models and observational data suggest that the release of gases such as sulphur into the atmosphere after each volcanic eruption... would have had a short-lived effect on the planet and would not cause enough damage to create a rapid mass extinction of land and marine species." The Chicxulub asteroid, on the other hand, could very well have made short shrift of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other species, the scientists said. The impact of the large asteroid would have "triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides which created

tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan, a lecturer in geophysics at Imperial College, London and co-author of the study. The asteroid hit Earth 20 times faster than a speeding bullet and exploded into a deadly mix of hot rock and gas which would have "grilled any living creature in the immediate vicinity that couldn't find shelter," said Gareth Collins, a research fellow at Imperial College. "The final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs happened when blasted material was ejected at high velocity into the atmosphere," shrouding the planet in darkness and causing a global winter that killed off species that "couldn't adapt to this hellish environment," added Morgan. Another clue that the KT extinction was caused by a huge asteroid and not volcanic activity was evidence in geological records of "shocked" quartz in rock layers at KT boundary levels around the world. Quartz is "shocked" when it is hit very quickly by a massive force -- such as a 15kilometer-wide asteroid traveling 20 times faster than a bullet. The KT extinction marked the end of the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs and allowed mammals, and eventually humans, to become the dominant species on earth

Mysterious 'Dark Flow' May Be Tug of Other Universe

A structure, possibly another universe beyond the horizon of our own, appears to be pulling at our world.
By Irene Klotz | Thu Mar 18, 2010 04:34 AM ET

The galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 (known as the Bullet Cluster) lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of hundreds that appear to be carried along by a mysterious cosmic flow. NASA/STScI/Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al. THE GIST:

Our universe is sliding steadily in a specific direction, in what researchers are calling "the dark flow." Some suspect the flow is caused by the pull of gravity from another universe. One way to detect the flow is seeing how galaxy clusters scatter radiation left over from the Big Bang.

The universe is not only expanding -- it's being swept along in the direction of constellations Centaurus and Hydra at a steady clip of one million miles per hour, pulled, perhaps, by the gravity of another universe. Scientists have no idea what's tugging at the known world, except to say that whatever it is likely dates back to the fraction of the second between the universe's explosive birth 13.7 billion years ago and its inflation a split second later. "At this point we don't have enough information to see what it is, or to constrain it. We can only say with certainty that somewhere very far away the world is very different than what we see locally. Whether it's 'another universe' or a different fabric of space-time we don't know," Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News. Kashlinsky and colleagues have spent years building up evidence for what they call "the dark flow." They look at how the relic radiation from the Big Bang explosion scatters as it passes through gases in galaxy clusters, a process that is something akin to looking at stars through the bubble of Earth's atmosphere.

WATCH VIDEO: New findings bolster the argument that dark energy is the reason our universe is expanding. Related Links:

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With data on more than 1,000 galaxy clusters, including some as distant as 3 billion lightyears from Earth, the measurements show the universe's steady flow is clearly not a statistical fluke, Kashlinsky said. "It was greatly surprising. When we first found it, we didn't know what to do with it. We knew how extraordinarily unexpected it was," he said. The force and direction of the flow holds steady across space and through time. "It's the same flow at a distance of a hundred million light-years as it is at 2.5 billion light-years and it points in the same direction and the same amplitude. It looks like the entire matter of the universe is moving from one direction to the next," Kashlinsky said. The observation fits theoretical models of how our universe might be impacted by sibling universes, predicted by string theory, that we cannot directly detect. It's like our universe is a box and everything that it contains is inside it like milk in a carton, physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Discovery News. "If our universe is all that's there, then the liquid in the box shouldn't be sliding. Whatever is pulling it has to be bigger than the size of the box," she said. "There is a structure beyond the horizon of our universe and that structure is exerting a force on our universe and creating this flow." The research expands on previously reported results based on fewer and closer galaxy clusters. Another team of scientists has turned up independent evidence for the flow with an alternative method that spatially correlates nearby galaxies

Neutrino May Have Triggered Dark Energy

A new theory may explain the mysterious force that is causing our universe to expand at a faster and faster rate.
By Irene Klotz | Mon Dec 28, 2009 10:05 AM ET

Seventy-five percent of the universe's mass and/or energy must be comprised of dark energy to explain the universe's observed rate of acceleration. NASA/CXC/UCLA/M. Muno et al. Could a neutrino -- an electrically neutral and nearly mass-free sibling to the electron -have triggered dark energy, the anti-gravity force discovered just over a decade ago? That's the latest idea from a team of theoretical physicists who suggest that dark energy was created from neutrino condensate in the split second after the universe's birth 13.7 billion years ago. The idea sprang from calculations showing that the density of dark energy is comparable to the value of neutrino mass, said lead researcher Jitesh Bhatt, with the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Dark energy, an unknown force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, is the leading cosmological mystery of modern-day science. It was discovered in 1998 after astrophysicists noted that supernovae -- the exploded remains of massive stars -- showed an accelerated rate of expansion in the last 2 billion years or so when compared to older epochs.

Explanations for dark energy fall into two basic camps: those theories that add a new physical entity or those that change the laws of gravity, said Eric Linder with the University of California at Berkeley.

WATCH VIDEO: New findings bolster the argument that dark energy is the reason our universe is expanding. Related Links:

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light HowStuffWorks.com: Dark Matter Dark Matter Found in Colliding Galaxies

"If you search for 'dark energy' in just the titles (of research papers) in the past year, you will find 200 speculations on what dark energy is," Linder wrote in an email to Discovery News. "There are a great many hypotheses for dark energy. Some ties to neutrinos have been considered for the last several years, but nothing substantial has yet come out of them." To account for the universe's observed rate of acceleration, 75 percent of the mass and/or energy of the universe has to be comprised of a gravitationally repulsive force, or dark energy. Scientists are developing several dark energy experiments, including the NASA/Department of Energy Joint Dark Energy Mission, in an attempt to refine dark energy measurements and reveal how it operates. "It will take much more work before we can pin down the nature of dark energy," Bhatt said. "Without knowing the nature of the dark energy, our knowledge of theoretical physics would remain incomplete
\

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

Physicists outline how to manipulate the fabric of space to accelerate a craft faster than the speed of light -- in theory, anyway.
By Eric Bland | Mon Jul 28, 2008 06:33 PM ET

The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. www.orbitalvector.com It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light. Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics. "We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble. The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind. That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

The fabric of space has moved faster than light before, says Cleaver, right after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. "We're recreating the inflationary period of the universe behind the ship," said Cleaver. While the theory rests on relatively firm ground, the next question is how do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front of the ship? Cleaver and Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose manipulating the 11th dimension, a special theoretical construct of m-theory (the offspring of string theory), to create the bubble the ship would surf down. If the 11th dimension could be shrunk behind the ship it would create a bubble of dark energy, the same dark energy that is causing the universe to speed up as time goes on. Expanding the 11th dimension in front of the ship would eventually cause it to decrease, although two separate steps are required. Exactly how the 11th dimension would be expanded and shrunk is still unknown. "These calculations are based on some arbitrary advance in technology or some alien technology that would let us manipulate the extra dimension," said Cleaver. What the scientists were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available, to change these dimensions: about 10^45 joules. "That's about the amount of energy you'd get if you converted the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy via E = mc^2," said Cleaver, an energy far beyond anything humanity can currently envision creating. While the challenges to creating a warp drive are quite formidable, the concept is intriguing, says Tufts University theoretical physicist Lawrence Ford. "If there are extra dimensions and we could manipulate them, that would open up all sorts of exciting possibilities," said Ford. "I don't see this leading immediately to a warp drive, but I could see it leading to other interesting possibilities in basic scientific research," said Ford. Cleaver agrees that the creation of a real warp drive is still far away. "Warp drive isn't doable now, and probably won't be for the next several millenia," said Cleaver.

How Dark Matter Works

by Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D.

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Cite This! Close Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks article: Freudenrich, Ph.D., Craig. "How Dark Matter Works." 04 September 2007. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://www.howstuffworks.com/dark-matter.htm> 22 March 2010.

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1. Introduction to How Dark Matter Works 2. Dark Matter Composition 3. Dark Matter Detection 4. 5. 6. 7. Mass-to-Light Discoveries X-rays and Light-bending Dark Matter and the Fate of the Universe See more 7. Lots More Information 8. See all Astronomy Terms articles

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When you look up at night, you see myriads of stars spread across the sky. When astronomers look into the deepest reaches of the universe with powerful telescopes, they see myriads of galaxies, organized into large clusters and other structures. This might lead you to believe that the universe is composed mainly of galaxies, stars, gas and dust -- things that you can see. However, most astronomers believe that visible matter makes up only a small fraction of the mass of the universe. The majority of the universe is made of stuff we can't see -so-called dark matter. Exactly what is dark matter? How can we detect it? What is its importance in the universe as a whole? In this article, we'll examine these questions. We will look at the evidence for dark matter, how it can be detected and studied, the nature of dark matter, and how it helps define the structure and fate of the universe.

NASA/Robert Williams and the Hubble Deep Field Team

The Hubble Space Telescope took this "deepest ever" view of the universe. See more astronomy images.

What is Dark Matter? Simply put, dark matter cannot be seen by astronomers with telescopes. It doesn't emit or reflect enough light to detect, so it's not bright, like a star. Atoms, molecules and subatomic particles are dark matter. You and I are dark matter. Everything on Earth is dark matter. Planets, brown dwarf stars and black holes are dark matter. Basically, dark matter cannot be seen -- scientists can only estimate where it is based on gravitational effects on what they can see. We can't see dark matter, but we can detect it by its effects on normal matter through gravity (rotation, gravitational-lensing) and by the X-rays emitted by hot, dark matter. So, what actually is dark matter

Dark Matter Found in Colliding Galaxies

The first-ever direct evidence of dark matter is detected amid fallout from galactic collisions.
By Larry O'Hanlon | Mon Aug 21, 2006 09:50 AM ET

These findings provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. NASA The first direct evidence of dark matter has been detected, astronomers announced today - although they still have only an inkling of what the elusive stuff is made of. The unprecedented observations come from careful weighing of gas and stars being flung about in the most violent and massive collision in the known universe. It's a tiff between two clusters of galaxies in what's collectively called the Bullet Cluster, which has caused stars and dark matter from different galaxies to tear past each other while the more widely distributed interstellar gases collide and slow. "All the matter in a typical galaxy occupies the same space," said astrophysicist Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, speaking at a NASA press conference. "In this case the gas and galaxies are separated in space. Galaxies flew through each other but their gas clouds didn't so easily." Visualize, for instance, a cosmic million-mph collision between of two vast wads of raisin oatmeal -- with stars and dark matter comprising the raisins and oats representing the gases. The raisins would shoot through with few direct raisin-on-raisin hits, while the oats would get stuck in a patch the middle. The result is different patches of space: one with lots of hot colliding gas and two others on either side with all the dark matter and stars in visible galaxies. The astrophysicists know the visible stars still have the dark matter with them because they weighed the mass in the starry patches by measuring how those patches bend the light from far more distant objects. The more a starry region bends light, the more massive it is. In this case, the starry areas in the colliding clusters have far more mass than can be accounted for by visible stars or by interstellar gases -- since the stars left the gases behind. The only thing left to explain it is dark matter.

WATCH VIDEO: Findings bolster the argument that dark energy is the reason our universe is expanding. Related Links:

Dark and Ordinary Matter Separate in Galactic Crash Wide Angle: Dark Energy HowStuffWorks.com: Dark Matter Dark Matter Caught Behaving Strangely

"This proves in a direct and simple way that dark matter exists," said Markevitch. The discovery was made using a suite of observations from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, along with the ground-based European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan telescope. A paper on the discovery will be published in the next issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Until now the existence of dark matter was inferred by the fact that galaxies have only one-fifth of the visible matter needed to create the gravity that keeps them intact. So the rest must be invisible to telescopes. In a word, that unseen matter is "dark." The observations of the Bullet Cluster, officially known as galaxy cluster 1E0657-56, do not explain what dark matter is. They do, however, provide one solid little hint, says Douglas Clowe, a researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "We can place some constraints on dark matter particles," said Clowe. It appears that dark matter particles, whatever they are, behave more like the raisins than the oatmeal -they are either widely spaced, like stars, or have some other way of avoiding collisions with each other. It's a small clue, says Clowe, but seeing it play out in the Bullet Cluster makes it an unusually solid clue for whats so far proven to be the most mysterious stuff in the universe.

"The great news about this is that it shows once and for all that dark matter exists," said physicist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. And that means, he said, there's less need to tweak Einstein's laws of gravitation to explain whats seen in galaxies