An associate professor from the University of Mississippi Medical Center has uncovered what is quite possibly the grandaddy of all oversights. Even though the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted 148 years ago, the state of Mississippi never officially ratified the amendment on account of some sloppy paperwork. It's an oversight that has since been corrected, making it really and truly official: slavery is indeed illegal in that state.

Here's what happened.

After watching the movie Lincoln, Dr. Ranjan Batra, a neurobiologist, visited usconstitution.net to learn more about the Thirteenth and its passing. He discovered that, after Congressional approval, the measure went to the states for ratification. There were several hold-outs, including Delaware, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Mississippi. But over the course of the next few months and years, many states went on to ratify the amendment.

And in fact, Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1995 — or at least they thought they did.

Batra noticed an asterisk beside the state's name along with a note that read: "Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1995, but because the state never officially notified the US Archivist, the ratification is not official."

Not official. Holy crap.

Concerned (to say the least), and after speaking to a colleague, Batra called the National Archives' Office of the Federal Register to give them the bad news. It turns out that the resolution had indeed been passed by the Mississippi Senate and House (unanimously, at that), but for some reason the paperwork was never sent to the Office of the Federal Register.

Batra's revelation got the state scrambling. On February 7, the state finally received word from the Federal Register confirming it had officially ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, prompting senator Hillman Frazier to say, "We finally got it right."

Source: Clarion Ledger.

Image: National Archives of the United States via Smithsonian.

A quick review of history shows that fiction ain't got nothin' on real life. We've had our fair share of disturbingly diabolical cold-blooded killers, whether they be a dictator, an elusive serial killer lurking around the corner, or a scheming white collar criminal. Recognizing the role these figures play in our imaginations and nightmares, Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator Bily Mariano da Luz ("Butcher Billy") has merged our reality with fiction, matching some of history's most heinous figures with those of comic lore. The result is, perhaps not surprisingly, something that still feels uncomfortably real.

All illustrations by Bily Mariano Da Luz.

Galactus is a cosmic entity from Marvel Comics known as The Word Eater, or The World Devourer. Hitler wanted to establish a New Order in continental Europe, but I bet if he was not stopped he would sure try to make that a New World Order. And with all the heavy propaganda, charismatic oratory and firepower, I can see he was the only dictator that actually could "eat the world". Plus I needed someone that could be easily recognizable inside the Galactus Helmet. It's interesting how you can totally see it's him just by his eyes and moustache. But the real appeal for this one is sure the detail in Galactus helmet, a simple reshape in the original and it turned into a swastika.

I've been getting a lot of criticism because of that choice, but let's not forget that when you mash real people with comic books characters from the 60's, it's supposed to be silly and humourous. I'm not trying to be political by choosing sides or parties here, and I wasn't the first one to portray Bush as a villain for a laugh. My first choice for him would be Lex Luthor, because the character actually became the president of the United States modeled by Bush a few years ago in DC Comics. But the choice was so obvious to the point that wasn't very interesting, not even visually. So Two-Face fit better, I guess, both phisically and contextually.

The twisted version of Superman from the parallel universe known as The Bizarro World has a creepy square-shaped face, and I couldn't think of another man that matches him more than the truly "bizarre" former ruler of Libya.

If you have a lot of weird imagination, you can think Bin Laden creepy looks is very similar to Green Goblin's mask, but if you don't, just check the mash-up and you can confirm that. Plus the fact the archnemesis of Spiderman flies around in a glider throwing bombs, so I saw a connection there.

Probably this is the most controversial of them all. Some people get the joke right away and find the irony there, while others seem to be so annoyed to see Zuckerberg portrayed as a villain among people like Hitler and Bin Laden. But what they seem to forget is that a true mob gang needs all kinds of criminals, not just the bully type. How great would it be if in the middle of all the declared wackos and psychos there's an unsuspected tech-geek, who never killed anyone, but does the hacker work by gathering personal information from people all over the world through an unsuspected network? That would be the quintessential evil genius plan. My first choice for Zuckerberg was going to be Batman Forever's Riddler, because that is basically what he does in the film, but with a kitchen blender helmet instead of a social network. But because of all the controverse background Mark has, in the end I decide "The God of Mischief" would fit better and say it all.

Check out more at Butcher Billy's website, including animated gifs and t-shirts.

Last September we told you about how snakes are turning Guam into a spider-infested horror show. The island's brown tree snake population has reached epic proportions and is now threatening Guam's native bird species, along with neighboring islands. But where the U.S. government dropped shells on the island back in 1944, it's now planning to cover parts of it with something entirely different: dead mice laced with painkillers.

The highly invasive brown snake was introduced to Guam shortly after World War II. In just a matter of four decades, these snakes decimated 10 out of 12 native bird species, with the remaining two species forced to live in small areas, protected by snake traps.

Guam may be somewhat of a lost cause, but the real fear is that these snakes may eventually make their way to Hawaii — which would be a disaster to say the least. A 2010 study estimated that brown tree snakes would cause between $593 million and $2.14 billion in economic damage each year if they become established there. They would likely cause power outages, and a resultant decline in tourism.

To prevent this from happening, the U.S. spends more than $1 million each year to make sure airplanes and cargo are snake-free as they leave the American territory.

But starting this April, a new plan will be put into effect. A toxic mice drop will target snakes near Guam's Andersen Air Force Base — a high-risk vector area. And interestingly, the mice will be laced with acetaminophen, a substance that's toxic to brown snakes. U.S. government scientists have created a plan in which the dead mice will be dropped by hand, one by one.

AP reports:

U.S. government scientists have been perfecting the mice-drop strategy for more than a decade with support from the Department of Defense and the Department of the Interior.

To keep the mice bait from dropping all the way to the ground, where it could be eaten by other animals or attract insects as they rot, researchers have developed a flotation device with streamers designed to catch in the branches of the forest foliage, where the snakes live and feed.

Experts say the impact on other species will be minimal, particularly since the snakes have themselves wiped out the birds that might have been most at risk.

"One concern was that crows may eat mice with the toxicant," said William Pitt, of the U.S. National Wildlife Research Center's Hawaii Field Station. "However, there are no longer wild crows on Guam. We will continue to refine methods to increase efficiency and limit any potential non-target hazards."

The goal, the scientists say, is not to wipe out the snakes, but to control and contain them.

Source: AP.

Images: Janelle Lugge/Shutterstock, Eric Talmadge.

During the autumn and winter months, Mount Rainier, a stratovolcano near Tacoma, Washington, blocks the first rays of the Sun as it rises. The effect is what you see here: An expanding shadow cast against clouds tinged in hues of orange and yellow.

The photograph was taken on December 31, 2012 by Redditor PCloadletter26.

H/t Twisted Swifter.

Poor Kayla. No matter how hard she tries the moon just sits there — tauntingly — just beyond her reach. It's a daily ritual that her father decided to finally capture on video, much to our benefit.

This video, which was published to YouTube on Friday, has already attracted close to a half-million hits, and it's not difficult to see why. Kayla's moon obsession — and frustration — is an endearing reminder of our own childhood.

Writing on Reddit, Kayla's dad says the two of them "go through this routine every single day."

She will go on and on about the moon and not being able to get it whether I ask or not. I usually just 'okay' her until she stops. But this time I played around with her a bit. She enjoys it. She's 2.

The video prompted Redditor QuauSi801, who works at NASA, to extend an invitation to the pair to come visit their facilities in California.

Goodbye, Moon!

We have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. If they're out there — and surely they must be — we haven't the foggiest idea what they might be like. Or do we?

Given what we know about the universe and our own civilization, we should be able to make some educated guesses. And in fact, several decades ago, a Russian astrophysicist came up with a classification system to describe hypothetical aliens. Here's how the Kardashev Scale works.

Top image by Steve Burg.

The scale was devised by Nikolai S. Kardashev, a Soviet-era cosmologist who is still active today. Though he's 81, Kardashev works as the deputy director of the Russian Space Research Institute at Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences. During the 1950s, while both his parents were in Stalin's slave labor camps, he became an astronomy student at Moscow University's Mechanics and Mathematics department. His primary interest was in astrophysics and the theoretic potential for wormholes, but he also shared a fascination with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETIs).

It was around this time that Frank Drake launched Project Ozma — a pioneering attempt to locate ETI's by scanning the sky for radio emissions. Accordingly, Kardashev began to wonder if a good number of alien civilizations might be millions of years ahead of us, and if so, what their radio signatures might be like. Just how "loud," he surmised, could alien transmissions truly get?

This prompted Kardashev to write his seminal 1963 paper, "Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations." In it, he proposed a simple numbering system — from one to three — that could be used to classify hypothetical alien civilizations according to the amount of energy at their disposal. More specifically, he wanted to quantify the power available to them for their radio transmissions.

Today, Kardashev's scale has been expanded and re-interpreted to include more than just the capacity for communications technology. Astrobiologists and cosmologists now use the scale to simply describe the amount of energy available to an ETI for any kind of purpose. As a result, the scale is often used to speculate about the kinds of technologies and existential modalities that characterize advanced civilizations.

Here's how it works.

Kardashev Type I

In his paper, Kardashev wrote that a Type I civilization would be at a "technological level close to the level presently attained on the Earth, with energy consumption ~4 x 10¹⁹ erg/sec." That's about 4 x 10¹² Watts.

Kardashev's initial intention was to describe a civilization not too far removed from our own (again, for the purpose of rating its communicative capacities) — but one that has yet to exploit all of the solar system's resources (i.e. a pre-stellar ETI).

A Type I is typically associated with a hypothetical civilization that has harnessed all the power available to it on its home planet. As physicist Michio Kaku has said, it's a planetary scale civilization that can "control earthquakes, the weather — and even volcanoes." It will have taken advantage of every inch of space, and build "cities on the oceans."

For a civilization to attain Type I status, therefore, it needs to capture all of the solar energy that reaches the planet, and all the other forms of energy it produces as well, like thermal, hydro, wind, ocean, and so on.

More radically, Type I status would only truly be achieved once the entire planet is physically reconfigured to maximize its energy producing potential. For example, the entire mass of a planet could be reconstituted to take the form of a massive solar array to energize a civilization's power-hungry machinery.

Quite obviously, we are not a Type I civilization (at least not by this re-imagining of Kardashev's original description). Not even close. But Kaku predicts that we'll get there eventually, perhaps in a century or two.

But it could happen sooner if computational growth continues at its current breakneck pace (see Moravec, Kurzweil, and Bostrom). Hypothetically speaking, an artificial superintelligence (SAI) could get started in about three to four decades (either unilaterally, or by design).

Kardashev Type II

The next step is a big jump. And indeed, each increment of the Kardashev scale is an order of magnitude greater than the last.

Pre-dating Moore's Law and Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, Kardashev noticed that the rate of humanity's energy consumption was increasing steadily. He wrote, "...the annual increase in this energy expenditure is placed at 3-4% over the next 60 years, on the basis of statistical findings." Consequently, he predicted that, in about 3,200 years, "the energy consumption will be equal to the output of the Sun per second...i.e. 4 x 10³³ erg/sec."

This led him to speculate about a Type II civilization. For an ETI to reach K2, it would need to capture the entire energy output of its parent star.

The best way to achieve this, of course, is to build a Dyson Sphere.

Conjured by Freeman Dyson in 1959, this hypothetical megastructure would envelope a star at a distance of 1 AU and cover an inconceivably large area of 2.72 x 10¹⁷ km², which is around 600 million times the surface area of the Earth. The sun has an energy output of around 4 x 10²⁶ Watts, of which most would be available to do useful work.

It's difficult to predict when we ourselves could become a Type II, but physicist Stuart Armstrong says we could start the project in a few decades. And once underway, it would be subject to rapidly escalating construction speeds (fleets of robots would be powered by the newly-constructed portions of the Dyson shell).

With all this energy, an advanced civilization — probably one that's postbiological in nature — would use it to power its supercomputers and fuel its other endeavors (like interstellar colonization waves).

Kardashev Type III

Which leads to the next increment in the scale. Kardashev described a Type III like this: "A civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ~4 x 10⁴⁴ erg/sec." Needless to say, that's a tremendous amount of energy — somewhere between 10³⁶ Watts to 10³⁷ Watts (give or take a few).

Every inch of a K3 galaxy would be colonized, with every scrap of matter — and all its billions of stars — exploited for energy. From the perspective of an outside observer, a galaxy occupied by a K3 civ would appear completely invisible, save for the heat leakage which would register in the far infrared (around 10 microns in wavelength).

It would take a civilization anywhere from 100,000 to a million years to transition itself from a Type II to a Type III. Even at modest speeds, it wouldn't take a civilization very long (from a cosmological perspective) to completely colonize a galaxy.

From our vantage point, this would look like a hole in a galaxy, or an inexplicably large swath of open space.

Take the Boötes Void, for example, a huge chunk of the universe that's almost completely devoid of stars and galaxies. Speculatively speaking, this could be a large portion of the universe that has been overtaken by K3 civilizations.

Interestingly, Fermilab's Richard Carrigan has argued that we should look for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations not in our own galaxy, but in neighboring galaxies. His idea is that we should look for civilizations that are transitioning from Type II to Type III. These colonization waves would look like a massive bubble that's spreading outwards from the originating star.

Discovery's Ray Villard elaborates:

It's imaginable that a super-civilization would begin a wave of colonization that spread out to neighboring solar type stars from its home base. Each offshoot would "astro-form" the colonized planetary system by constructing a Dyson sphere around the host star.

Carrigan envisions seeing "Dyson bubbles" in nearby galaxies. These would be clusters of Dyson spheres that enclosed a grouping of stars colonized by a Type II Kardashev civilization. The logic is that after you've built a backyard fence you can start to conceptualize building the Great Wall of China and still hope to gain perspective on the process, Carrigan writes.

These would be detected as anomalous dark voids in a galaxy's disk. When these voids were observed in infrared light they would glow brightly with the heat radiation from the surfaces of Dyson spheres. This would show that they are not that simply voids where solar-type stars are conspicuously missing.

A good candidate for such a search would be the Andromeda Galaxy, which is only 2.5 million light years away. At most, we'd be glancing back a couple of million years into the past, which is not significant from a cosmological perspective.

What would an advanced civ do with all this energy? Well, if many futurists are to be believed, flipping one's and zero's. A Type II and III civilization may be completely based in digital substrate.

Kardashev Type IV? V?

Though Kardashev never went past a Type III, others have taken his idea to the next level. A Type IV would be an ETI (or merging groups of ETIs) that has harnessed all the power of a galactic supercluster, and a type V would — you guessed it — have the entire power of the universe at its disposal.

Unfounded assumptions?

While the Kardashev scale offers considerable food for thought, it is not without its problems.

First and foremost, and stating the obvious, no empirical evidence exists indicating the presence of K2 or K3 civilizations in our galaxy and/or galactic neighborhood. In fact, the Fermi Paradox — what's been dubbed "The Great Silence" — would indicate that civilizations never become migratory, thus making a Type III very unlikely. If Kardashev civilizations exist, we should expect to see large swaths of neighboring galaxies "disappear" from the visual spectrum — yet we do not.

We haven't found any Dyson spheres, either. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. Dysonian SETI is largely underway — an attempt to find the "gaps" in the stars.

Another problem with the Kardashev Scale is the assumption that advanced civilizations have an insatiable appetite for energy. No doubt, a K3 civ seems a bit excessive. It's not a stretch to suggest that a Type II civilization might be as far as these things go. Even a Type I for that matter. Ultimately, it all comes down to the consumptive needs of an "end stage" civilization — one that has successfully adapted to postbiological, post-SAI existence.

Alternately, civilizations may choose to avoid these trajectories, either to honor some kind of Prime Directive, or for self-preservational purposes.

Indeed, turning a galaxy into a massive supercomputer may be the last thing an advanced civilization wants to do. ETIs may have other desires and goals that preclude it from this kind of intergalactic imperialism.

But we don't know for sure. So in the meantime, let's be sure to keep listening and looking.

Images: David Darling, National News and Pictures, "Trantor from Space" by Slawek Wojtowicz.

This is the kind of statistic we would expect to see decrease over the coming years. But as the number of humans continues to climb, and as these populations increasingly concentrate themselves in tightly packed urban areas, earthquake fatalities could reach 3.5 million by the end of this century. This is the conclusion of Tom Holzer, a geologist working with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. And indeed, it's not because earthquakes are getting more frequent or worse, it's just that people are crowding into earthquake-prone regions.

To reach this conclusion, Holzer and his colleague James Savage analyzed the historic record of earthquakes dating back almost 1,200 years. Armed with this data, they got a sense of what we can expect in the coming decades. And in fact, the geologists concluded that we can anticipate at least 21 "catastrophic" earthquakes in the 21st Century.

Next, the team looked at these figures against the backdrop of human population and geographic distribution. Disturbingly, they discovered that 62% of the world's population currently lives in countries with significant risk — countries in which buildings aren't designed to withstand earthquakes.

Speaking to OurAmazing Planet, Holzer said,

There are places, like along the front of the Himalayas, that are just waiting for another disaster. China, the Middle East and many of the cities in these places just don't design to resist earthquakes. If we don't address this, we're going to see many more catastrophes than we've seen historically, and humanitarian aid efforts are going to be stressed even more over this century. We're going to see more Haiti-type situations.

But the geologists also noted that high-density, urban areas aren't the only danger zones. As the 2005 tsunami demonstrated, even sparsely populated areas can be subject to wide scale devastation and high rates of fatalities.

The entire study can be read at Earthquake Spectra.

Images: Tom Wang / Shutterstock; arindambanerjee / Shutterstock.com.

As hard as this is to believe, very little of The Avengers was shot in New York City, including the epic finale. To pull off the trick, the Industrial Light and Magic crew created an intricately detailed 20-block "digital playground" that was mapped against the real thing. Check out this video to see how they pulled it off.

Writing in fstoppers, Trevor Dayley breaks it down:

- While the movie plot takes place in New York, all but the aerial footage was filmed elsewhere.
- The shots of the actors down on the streets of New York City was actually captured in New Mexico on a green screen set and parts of it in streets of Cleveland.
- A CGI playground covering 20 blocks of the city had to be recreated.
- The team photographed 7 miles of streets, from cranes, on top of 35 different buildings, from every angle possible shooting a total of over 250,000 photos.
- From the photos they recreated over 2000 different reality spheres which were projected onto the geometry of the buildings in the computer and used to recreate New York City.
- The team had to then paint out all the trees, cars, and people from the photos to then recreate digitally so they could show movement.
- For the night shots, they used photos of their own office building rooms and used those to recreate offices lit up in the buildings at night.

Via fstoppers via engadget.

The problem with cells is that they have an expiry date. They can only replicate so many times before they hit a biologically predetermined limit and sputter out. But a recent study by neuroscientist Lorenzo Magrassi from the University of Pavia in Italy shows that mammalian neurons are not subject to this kind of replicative aging and, when introduced into a longer-lived organism, will keep on living long after the expected expiry date. The maximum lifespan of these brain cells is still not known, but Magrassi's discovery could have serious implications for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases — and possibly even life-extending therapies as well.

Working with Ketty Leto and Ferdinando Rossi (both from the University of Turin), Magrassi devised a rather creative experiment. The short version is that precursor brain cells were taken from mice and transplanted into rats (which is incredible unto itself), resulting in the doubling of the expected lifespan of the neurons.

In terms of the details, the researchers transplanted cerebellar precursors that were pulled from embryonic mice into the brains of young — but longer-living — rats. The scientists did so by inserting a glass microneedle through the abdomens of anesthetized pregnant mice. And to track the neurons, the team injected green fluorescent protein (GFP) into the precursors (thereby allowing them to differentiate mice and rat cells at the end of the experiment).

As the young rats matured, these donor cells differentiated into their various neuronal types and integrated themselves quite nicely within the rat's cerebellum. Interestingly, these cells retained the unique physical characteristics indicative of their mice origin (they were smaller) — but it didn't prove to be a problem for the rats.

Magrassi paid particular attention to Purkinje cells (PCs), of which 40% tend to die off in mice long before they die of old age. The Wistar rats, on the other hand, only lose about 10% at the same stage.

And here's where the experiment got interesting. Normally, all of these brain cells would die once a mouse reaches the 18-month mark (which is the average lifespan of this type of mouse); as their bodies start to senesce and fail, so too do the neurons (the conditions in the microenvironment are no longer conducive to neuronal health). Subsequently, Magrassi and his team were curious to see what was going to happen after this critical 18-month mark.

And indeed, these mice neurons — now firmly embedded in the cerebellum of a midlife rat (a "longer-living host") — continued to function normally. In fact, they remained healthy for the entire 36-month lifespan of the rat.

This led Magrassi to state in the ensuing paper that, "in the absence of pathologic conditions, [neuronal] lifespan is limited only by the maximum lifespan of the organism." There is no "predetermined genetic clock," he concluded.

The ensuing question is an obvious one: Given a healthy body (i.e. a fully healthy microenvironment), just how long can these neurons keep on living? Magrassi and his colleagues don't have an answer to this question, but it would certainly make for an interesting follow-up study (for example, transplantation to even longer-lived rats or other mammals).

The experiment also shows that neurons are a special class of cells — cells that aren't subject to the same replicative limits imposed on other types of cells. Consequently, as long as the microenvironment is healthy (which could be maintained by other external interventions), the neurons could conceivably remain healthy for an extended period as well. This bodes well for the development of therapies treating Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and for life-extending interventions in general.

The entire study can be read at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Images: Lorenzo Magrassi.

Francis Crick, the guy who co-discovered the molecular structure of DNA back in 1953, died nine years ago. Along with James Watson, he won a Nobel Prize for the groundbreaking scientific discovery — but his family now wants to get rid of it. According to Heritage Auctions, bidding for the gold medal and diploma will start at, ahem, $250,000.

Nobody has tried to sell a Nobel medal in 70 years, so the final price will establish a new and interesting precedent as far as these things go.

ABC News reports on the motivations behind the sale:

Crick's family said a portion of the proceeds would go to the Francis Crick Institute, scheduled to open in London in 2015. The family said the new facility will be used in the search for cures for some of the world's most devastating diseases.

"This year marks the 60th anniversary of the historic discovery of the structure of DNA and 50 years have passed since Francis Crick was awarded the Nobel Prize," said Kindra Crick, a granddaughter of the scientist, in a statement from the auction house.

"For most of that time, the Nobel Prize and the unique personal diploma have been locked up. By auctioning his Nobel it will finally be made available for public display and be well looked after. Our hope is that, by having it available for display, it can be an inspiration to the next generation of scientists."

The auction is scheduled for April 10 in New York City. Also for sale is an endorsed check Dr. Crick received for 85,739.88 Swedish Krona, and his old lab coat (which would be kinda cool to own).

Image: Heritage Auctions, Daniel Mordzinski AFP/Getty Images.

The Chelyabinsk meteor may have snuck up on us by surprise, but it didn't take long for a crack team of astronomers from Colombia to figure out where the damned thing came from and the path it took to get here. By sifting through the copious amounts of video footage available, and after performing some clever trigonometry, the team successfully traced the meteor back to the Apollo class of asteroids — an indication that the meteor likely originated from our solar system's asteroid belt.

The Apollo asteroids are a well-known group of near-Earth objects (NEOs) that regularly cross our orbit. They're part of a broader classification of NEOs that include the Atira, Aten, and Amor groupings. All of these NEOs are asteroids with a perihelion distance less than 1.3 AU (a perihelion point is the closest distance an orbiting object has to the Sun). Apollos, which are named after asteroid 1862 Apollo, have a perihelion distance around 1.017 AU, and a semi-major axis larger than Earth's. Of the 9,700 NEOs discovered so far, about 54% of them are Apollos.

The astronomers reached this conclusion after calculating the Chelyabinsk meteor's trajectory, which showed an elliptical, low inclination orbit. This would suggest that it came from within our solar system, most likely from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

To make their calculation, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin, from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, isolated six different variables offered by the video footage. After analyzing the videos, the team settled on what they believed were the two most reliable views, a camera positioned at Revolution Square in Chelyabinsk, and a video recorded in the nearby city of Korkino. They also took the location of the hole in the ice in Lake Chebarkul into account.

The astronomers were most interested at observing the point when the meteor became bright enough to cast a noticeable shadow on the ground — an important clue to help with triangulation.

The resulting values — things like speed, height, and position — were then keyed into astronomy software developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory. And to make up for potential uncertainties about the meteor's movement through the atmosphere, they calculated the most probable orbital parameters. The astronomers admit that their findings are preliminary, but that their analysis will continue as new data becomes available.

The paper, which has yet to be published in a peer reviewed journal, is available on arXiv.

Supplementary sources: NASA, BBC, and Universe Today.

Early last week, baseball legend Jose Canseco explained gravity to the Internet. He tweeted that "ancient gravity was much weaker" during the time of the dinosaurs, which allowed for their massive and nimble size. Needless to say, Canseco was ridiculed for his comments, but very few people actually took the time to explain why he was wrong. Even Bill Nye failed in this regard. Thankfully, some writers have come to the rescue.

First, a review of Canseco's tweets:

Animal tissue of muscles and ligaments could not support huge dinosaurs even standing up or pump blood up 60 foot necks

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 19, 2013

Gravity had to be weaker to make dinosaurs nimble

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 19, 2013

My theory is the core of the planet shifted when single continent formed to keep us in a balanced spin

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 19, 2013

The land was farther away from the core and had much less gravity so bigness could develop and dominate

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 19, 2013

I may not be 100% right but think about it.How else could 30 foot leather birds fly?

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 19, 2013

Which prompted this response from Bill Nye:

His nickname in Major League Baseball was "The Chemist," because he was so knowledgeable in the chemistry of performance enhancing drugs and making musculature go big. Reading his recent tweets about the remarkable size of the ancient dinosaurs ... it doesn't sound (read) as though he's especially fluent in physics. This fills me with either joy or dismay depending on what social media messages he provides us with next. Either he's in on the joke and is just throwing us all a curve ball with plenty of break, or we as a society have failed him completely with regard to the fundamentals of planetary science.

The ad hominem attack on Canseco was unbecoming of a scientist, as was his laziness at addressing the issue head on.

But writing in National Geographic, dinosaur expert Brian Switek entered into the fray by explaining how dinosaur evolution — not ancient gravity — allowed super-sized sauropods to evolve:

As part of their respiratory system, sauropods had a complex network of air sacs that gave them two advantages. Not only did the air sacs allow the dinosaurs to breathe more efficiently – more like birds than mammals – but the soft tissues invaded bone to make the skeletons of these dinosaurs lighter without sacrificing strength. Indeed, even at around 100 feet long, Supersaurus has been estimated to weigh in between 35 and 40 tons. That's quite hefty in absolute terms, but consider that the largest African elephant on record weighed about 12 tons, and the extinction rhino Paraceratherium – about 26 feet long and 16 feet tall at the shoulder – weighed about 18 tons. You'd like a dinosaur about four times as long as Paraceratherium would be much heavier – 72 tons or more – but Supersaurus and similar dinosaurs were relatively light. Air sacs allowed sauropods to escape some of the physical constraints that have limited the evolution of mammal body size over the past 66 million years...

...By externalizing birth and development, sauropods and other dinosaurs were able to sidestep the costs and risks that constrain mammal size. For dinosaurs, mechanical and other biological constraints might have prevented them from becoming even larger – the amount of time it would take for nerve impulses to travel to a 100-foot-long dinosaur's brain for example. The fact that all the genera that are contenders for the "largest dinosaur of all time" title – including Argentinosaurus, Supersaurus, and Diplodocus – top out around 100 to 110 feet in length might indicate that these dinosaurs were reaching the anatomical ceiling of how large it was possible for them to get.

But let's be clear about sauropod size. Biological quirks such as air sacs and laying lots of little eggs allowed sauropods to grow to large size, but these features did not drive dinosaur inflation. There were titanic dinosaurs as well as tiny ones. Dinosaurs did not experience the same barriers as mammals, and therefore evolved a greater range of body sizes. The evolutionary driving forces behind the evolution of truly huge body size are not clear, and likely differed from one group of dinosaurs to the next. Paleontologists have determined the features that made it possible for a creature as spectacular as Supersaurus to exist, but the reason why the dinosaur's lineage ended up pushing biological boundaries of body size are still unknown.

And over at Galileo's Pendulum, Matthew Francis debunks the ancient gravity myth:

...while the 65 million years since the last dinosaur is a long time by human standards, Earth has been around 4.5 billion years. The cooling-down period ended long before the colonization of land by animals, which itself happened long before the first dinosaur. The second problem is that, to double Earth's gravity between Supersaurus and today, Earth would have had 1.4 times the diameter in the Jurassic. While that doesn't sound like much, it translates to twice the surface area and nearly three times the volume of modern Earth. That's a much bigger planet!...

...The truth is that Earth's tectonic plates, on which the continents rest, are always in motion, rearranging themselves very slowly over tens of millions of years. Yet the Moon reliably orbits, which wouldn't be true if plate tectonics made a huge difference to Earth's gravity. In fact, there's another sign Earth's gravity hasn't changed much in the last 100 million years: the Moon is actually moving away from Earth, albeit very slowly. If Earth's gravity had doubled since the time of the sauropods, we would expect the opposite effect.

Be sure to read both Switek's and Francis's articles, as they contain plenty more detail and links to relevant studies.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's what Canseco had to say about the Chelyabinsk meteor:

No way was that a meteor in russia today

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) February 15, 2013

Now you know.

Top image: Killdevil.

Put your doomsday caps on, everyone. Starting tonight at 9pm EST (6pm PST) to 10pm EST (7pm PST), I'll be on Huffington Post Live talking about existential risks to the future of humanity. I'll be joined by Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute, James Hughes from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and Ray Villard from Discovery.

You can tune in live here.

Image: Top via Bethesda Game Studios.

Whoa, check this thing out. It's almost impossible to believe that such a creature ever existed, but after years of speculation and puzzling over the fossil evidence, researchers from Idaho State University finally figured out how to piece it all together. The end result is this: Helicoprion, an ancient carnivorous fish that featured saw-like spiral teeth called "whorls."

Though it looks like a shark, Helicoprions were more closely related to modern chimaeras and ratfish (both cartilaginous fish). But back in the Late Palaeozoic era, about 270 million years ago, this 25 foot long (7.6 meters) "predatory chondrichthyan" occupied a similar ecological niche claimed by sharks today. And like them, Helicoprions boasted a mouth full of teeth — but theirs were considerably different from what we're used to seeing in aquatic animals today.

And indeed, the spiral-tooth fossils had confounded paleontologists who couldn't figure out how the jagged structure, with its 117 teeth, was supposed to work. Some suggested that Helicoprion used it for self-defense and that it was part of its upper or lower jaw — or even located on the dorsal fin.

So to solve the mystery, Leif Tapanila and colleagues analyzed the whorl with a CT scan and 3D computer imaging.

BBC Nature reports:

"When we got the images back, we could easily see that we had the upper and lower jaw of the animals, as well as the spiral of teeth," said Dr Tapanila.

"For the first time we were able to very clearly image how that spiral of teeth relates to the jaw."

The scientists found that the spiral was connected to the fish's lower jaw, in the back of the mouth.

"Imagine that... instead of having a tongue, you have this large spiral of teeth," Dr Tapanila explained.

"Only maybe a dozen teeth are poking up out of your lower jaw so you can bite."

"The rest of those teeth are stored inside and are not being used, those are your baby teeth - the teeth you had when you were younger."

Dr Tapanila said this discovery supports the argument that unlike sharks, which constantly replace their teeth, Helicoprion retained its teeth permanently.

Using the computer images, the team could build a 3D model of the jaw, to reveal how the tooth spiral worked.

"As the mouth closes, the teeth spin backwards... so they slash through the meat that they are biting into," Dr Tapanila told BBC Nature.

"The teeth themselves are very narrow: nice long, pointy, triangular teeth with serrations like a steak knife.

"As the jaw is closing and the teeth are spinning past whatever it's eating, it's making a very nice clean cut."

The researchers theorize that Helicoprions used their whorls to eat ancient squid.

You can read the study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Images: Ray Troll.

There was a time when science could be broken down into neat-and-tidy disciplines — straightforward things like biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. But as science advances, these fields are becoming increasingly specialized and interdisciplinary, leading to entirely new avenues of inquiry. Here are 11 emerging scientific fields you should know about.

Top image: An artistic impression of HD 189733b, an exoplanet whose atmosphere is being blown off by its sun's solar flares. It's a discovery that was made possible by the emerging field of exo-meteorology. Source: Hubble Space Telescope.

1. Neuroparasitology

If you know about Toxoplasma gondii — the cat-spawned parasite that alters both rodent and human behavior — then you know about the work of neuroparasitologists. The fact that these eerie parasites now have their very own scientific discipline devoted to them shows just how prevalent they are in nature.

These parasites typically alter host behavior as a part of their reproductive strategy (often by being consumed and excreted by a third party). A good example is Euhaplorchis californiensis, which causes fish to shimmy and jump so wading birds will grab and eat them. Hairworms, which live inside grasshoppers, eventually need to leave their hosts to continue their life cycle. Rather than leave peacefully, however, they release a cocktail of chemicals that makes the grasshoppers commit suicide by leaping into water. The hairworms then swim away from their drowning hosts. Image: Fox.

2. Quantum Biology

This is a freaky one — but then again, anything with the word "quantum" in it is bound to be weird. Physicists have known about quantum effects for well over a hundred years, where particles defy our sensibilities by disappearing from one place and reappearing in other, or by being in two places at once. But these effects are not relegated to arcane lab experiments. As scientists are increasingly suspecting, quantum mechanics may also apply to biological processes.

Perhaps the best example is photosynthesis — a remarkably efficient system in which plants (and some bacteria) build the molecules they need by using energy from sunlight. It turns out that photosynthesis may in fact rely on the "superposition" phenomenon, where little packets of energy explore all possible paths, and then settle on the most efficient one. It's also possible that avian navigation, DNA mutations (via quantum tunnelling), and even our sense of smell, relies on quantum effects. Though it's a highly speculative and controversial field, its practitioners look to the day when insights gleaned may result in new drugs and biomimetic systems (with biomemetics being another emergent scientific field, where biological systems and structures are used to create new materials and machines). Image: qubit-ulm.com.

3. Exo-meteorology

Like exo-oceanographers and exo-geologists, exo-meteorologists are interested in studying natural processes which occur on planets other than Earth. Now that astronomers are able to peer more closely into the inner-workings of nearby planets and moons, they're increasingly able to track atmospheric conditions and weather patterns. Jupiter and Saturn, with their impossibly large weather systems, are prime candidates for study. So is Mars, with it's regularly occurring dust storms. Even planets outside our solar system are being studied by exo-meteorologists. And interestingly, exo-meteorologists may eventually find signs of extraterrestrial life on an exoplanet by detecting organic signatures in atmospheres, or elevated carbon dioxide levels — a possible sign of an industrial-age civilization.

4. Nutrigenomics

Also known as nutritional genomics, this is the study of the complex interplay between food and genetic expression. Scientists working in this field seek to understand the role of genetic variation, dietary response, and the ways in which nutrients affect our genes. And indeed, food has a profound effect on our health — and it starts quite literally at the molecular level. Nutrigenomics works both ways; our genes influence our dietary preferences, and vice-versa. A key goal of nutrigeneticists is to establish personalized nutrition — matching what we eat with our own unique genetic constitutions. More here.

5. Cliodynamics

Coined by the University of Connecticut's Peter Turchin, cliodynamics is an interdisciplinary area of research that combines historical macrosociology, economic history (cliometrics), the mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the building and analysis of historical databases. It's basically Asimov's psychohistory come to life.

The name is a portmanteau of Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of changes over time. Simply put, it's an effort to quantify and describe the broad social forces of history, both to study the past, and as a potential way to predict the future. An example of cliodynamics was Turchin's recent paper forecasting social unrest.

6. Synthetic Biology

This is the big one, and it's the emerging world-changing scientific discipline that many of us are already familiar with.

Synthetic biology is the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems. It also involves the redesign of existing biological systems for any number of useful purposes. Craig Venter, a leader in this field, shook the biology community in 2008 by announcing that he had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by piecing together its chemical components. Two years later his team created "synthetic life" — DNA created digitally, and then printed and inserted into a living bacterium. And last year, synbio scientists created the first complete computational model of an actual organism.

Looking ahead, synthetic biologists will sequence and analyze genomes to create custom-designed bootable organisms and biological robots that can produce chemicals from scratch, like biofuels. There's also the potential for pollution devouring cyborg bacteria, and the downloading and printing of recently updated vaccines during a pandemic. The possibilities are almost endless.

7. Recombinant Memetics

This one's quite speculative, and it's technically speaking still in the proto-science phase. But it'll only be a matter of time before scientists get a better handle on the human noosphere (the collective body of all human information) and how the proliferation of information within it impacts upon virtually all aspects of human life.

Similar to recombinant DNA (in which different genetic sequences are brought together to create something new), recombinant memetics is the study of how memes (ideas that spread from person to person) can be adjusted and merged with other memes and memeplexes (a cohesive collection of memes, like a religion) for beneficial or ‘socially therapeutic' purposes (such as combating the spread of radical and violent ideologies). This is similar to the idea of 'memetic engineering' — which philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested could be used to maintain cultural health. Or what DARPA is currently doing via their ‘narrative control' program.

8. Computational Social Science

Similar to cliodynamics, computational social science is the rigorous investigation of social phenomenon and trends over time. The use of computers and related information processing technologies is central to this discipline. Quite obviously, this field has only really been possible since the advent of computing, and most especially since the rise of the internet. Computational social scientists study the copious amounts of information left behind from emails, mobile phone calls, tweets, credit card purchases, Google searches, and on and on. It's a field of study that's attracting not just social scientists, but mathematicians and computer scientists as well. Examples of their work include studies into the structure of social networks and how information spreads across them, or how intimate relationships form on the Web. Image: Nature.

9. Cognitive Economics

Economics isn't typically associated with science, but that could change as the field integrates with traditional scientific disciplines. Not to be confused with behavioral economics (the study of our behaviors — what we do — in the context of economic decision making), cognitive economics is about how we think. Leigh Caldwell, who runs a blog dedicated to the field, puts it this way:

Cognitive economics (or finance)...looks at what is actually going on within the individual's mind when they make that choice. What is the internal structure of their decision-making, what are the influences on it, how does information enter the mind and how is it processed, what form do preferences take internally, and then ultimately how are all those processes expressed in our behaviour?

Looking at it another way, cognitive economics is to physics what behavioral economics is to engineering. To that end, cognitive economists begin their analysis at a lower, more reductionist level, and form microfounded models of how people make decisions to devise a model of large-scale economic behaviors. To help them with this, cognitive economists consider the related fields of cognitive science and computational economics, along with theories about rationality and decision making.

10. Organic Electronics

Normally, electronics are associated with inert and inorganic conductors and semiconductors, like copper and silicon. But a new branch of electronics is emerging that uses conductive polymers and conductive small molecules — both of which are carbon-based. It's a highly interdisciplinary field that involves the design, synthesis, and processing of functional organic and inorganic materials, along with the development of advanced micro- and nanofabrication techniques and circuit design. To be fair, it's not an entirely new field, as preliminary concepts and devices were first developed in the early 1970s. But it has only been recently that things have picked up, particularly on account of the nanotechnology revolution. Organic electronics introduces the potential for organic solar cells, self-assembling monolayers in functional electronic devices, and chemical circuits that could replace computer chips for human implantation (the cyborg of the future may very well be more organic than synthetic!). Image: AlphaGalileo Foundation.

11. Quantitative Biology

If you like both math and biology, this one's for you. Quantitative biology, as its name implies, is an effort to understand biological processes through the language of mathematics. But it also applies other quantitative methods, like physics and computer science. The University of Ottawa explains how it came about:

With the advances in biological instrumentation and techniques, and easy access to computing power, biology is generating large amounts of data at an increasing speed. Acquiring the data and making sense of it increasingly requires quantitative approaches. At the same time, coming from a physicist's or mathematician's point of view, biology has reached a state of maturity where theoretical models of biological mechanisms can be tested experimentally. This has led to the development of the broad field of quantitative biology.

Scientists working in this field analyze and measure everything from the molecular scale right through to the organismal and ecosystem level. Image: AAAS.

Please add any ones I missed to comments!

Get your geek on folks, this new music video by Symphony of Science tackles a fairly challenging subject: Einstein's theory of mass-energy equivalence, or what's more commonly known as E=MC². The video, called "Secret of the Stars," features such notables as Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene and Lisa Randall.

Here are the lyrics:

Say, do you like mystery stories?
Well we have one for you.
The concept: relativity. That strange fantastic relationship between time, distance, and mass.
Before we're finished, I think you'll agree that truth is stranger than the strangest fiction.

Why do the stars shine?
Why does the galaxy light up?

E equals MC squared
That is the engine that lights up the stars
Energy turns into mass
E equals MC squared -
That is the secret of the stars

Now listen carefully:
The faster you move
THe heavier you get
The energy of motion turns into M, your mass
Energy of motion

Energy equals Mass times the speed of light squared
An awful lot of energy
For a tiny amount of mass

Light travels at the same speed
No matter how you look at it
No matter how I move, relative to you,
Light travels at the same speed

No matter who is doing the measurement
And no matter what direction you are moving
The speed of light is the same
No matter what direction, or how fast

As you travel faster
Time slows down
Everything slows down

Time slows down when you move
Time passes at a different rate
Clocks run slow
It's a monumental shift in how we see the world

The beauty, the majesty,
The power of the universe
Into a single equation

(refrain)

It's a beautiful piece of science
It's a beautifuly elegant theory
It's a beautiful piece of science

A planet like the Earth is kept in orbit
Because it follows curves
In the spatial fabric caused
By the sun's presence

Space and time are bent by stars and planets
As things move through this curved space, they bend

Now all of this is illustration of the fact
that time and space are linked together.

As you're moving through bent and curved space and time,
You feel like you feel a force (x2)
That force is gravity

(refrain)

That is the secret of the stars

And the sources:

Through the Wormhole
Einstein's Big Idea (NOVA)
The Elegant Universe (NOVA)
Wonders of the Solar System (BBC)
Einstein's Equation of Life and Death (BBC)
What Time Is It (BBC)
Einstein (History)
The Universe in a Nutshell
Relativity and the Twin Paradox
What Lies Beyond Our Own Space-Time Continuum
The Universe - Brian Cox lecture

Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist revolutionary, died from an apparent stroke at the age of 53. His untimely death has been the subject of much controversy and speculation — but new theory from UCLA may finally hold the answer.

By the time of his death in 1924, Lenin had already suffered three strokes. His rapid cognitive decline was characteristic of someone considerably older, leading historians to speculate about other factors, such as poisoning or syphilis.

But a new theory suggests that Lenin suffered from a rare genetic disorder that caused fatal stone-like calcifications to form in his brain.

This news comes to us from Discover Magazine's Neuroskeptic, who writes:

During his autopsy, it was found that the blood vessels around Lenin's brain were heavily calcified – essentially, they had hardened, and narrowed, due to a build-up of minerals and fats. This is known as atherosclerosis and, although it happens to all of us as we age, Lenin suffered from an unusually severe, and early, case. It was noted during the postmortem that tapping the vessels with a pair of metal tweezers produced a sound as if they were made of stone...

...A team of neurologists led by UCLA's Harry Vinters have suggested a possible answer in a new paper: Vessels of Stone: Lenin's "Circulatory Disturbance of the Brain". They point to a recently-discovered disorder that causes selective atherosclerosis of the blood vessels in the legs, caused by a mutation in the gene NT5E.

Vinters and his colleagues suggest that Lenin might have had a similar genetic problem, but one that affected primarily the brain. Lenin's father and siblings (seemingly) suffered circulatory diseases as well; indeed his father died at almost exactly the same age, in a similar fashion. Still, they admit that such a genetic disorder remains speculative at present.

Read more at Discovery Magazine.

Image.

We know the Universe is big. But just how big is it really? And how could we ever measure something as ephemeral as the cosmos? This new video by the ever-popular Minute Physics takes a stab at these issues — and not surprisingly, the answers are not as straightforward as we might hope.

As Minute Physics correctly points out, we first need to figure out what it is, exactly, that we're measuring. Given that we're hopelessly stuck in our Hubble Bubble, we can only see as far as the light reaching us allows. This gives us the impression that we're at the center of the Universe, but that can't possibly be right. So does anything lie beyond the observable Universe? And if so, for how long? Infinity?

Watch the video to see how Minute Physics handles the conundrum.

The idea of creating autonomous robotic swarms is nothing new, a concept that's been demonstrated by GRASP Lab's quadrotors. What needs to happen now is for developers to push the technology forward and come up with practical applications for these cooperative bots. A good example is the new Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform — a fleet of programmable robots that could someday come to your rescue.

In conjunction with DARPA, TEMP was developed by the University of Pennsylvania's Vijay Kumar and Mark Yim. They recently put together a scale model of their aquatic system and tested it in a swimming pool. Eventually, the swarming boats will each occupy a space similar in size to a standard shipping container.

The modular boats are designed to work together to hook-up and form a desired shape, such as a floating platform. The TEMP system will also utilize rapidly deployable sealift, airlift, logistics, and medical care capabilities (some of which will also be robotic).

For it to work, Kumar and Yim had to figure out a way to get each robot to work smartly and autonomously — and without getting in the way of each other. For their experiment, they created a fleet of 100 individual robot boats, each one measuring about a foot-and-a-half in length.

Along with a set of algorithms, the team equipped each bot with a unique visual identifier that can be read by a camera (kind of like a QR code). With this system, each robot knows where it stands in relation to all the others. Once scaled up to real size, the boats will use a GPS to determine their precise location.

Each boat "knows" its physical proportions, along with its overarching goal — such as instructions for building a bridge. Once they get the greenlight, the collective bands together to finish the task. When they've shimmied themselves to the right place and orientation, they use a hook-and-tether system to connect themselves to each other. The technology to do this was developed by QinetQ NA (who will eventually make the full-sized boats).

"We give them a structure, and then each boat figures out where to go and in what sequence to go to make that structure," said Yim through a UPenn statement.

The ultimate point of the project, says DARPA, "is to enable humanitarian assistance and disaster relief over broad coastal areas without dependence on local infrastructure, using unmodified commercial containerships, thus freeing military ships to carry out other military missions."

Moving forward, the developers will have to anticipate non-ideal real-world conditions, such as storms and choppy waters. Eventually, DARPA hopes to see the system applied to disaster recovery and delivering humanitarian aid.

It's not clear, however, if it'll ever be built. According to DARPA, "Due to cost constraints, an integrated demonstration of the complete TEMP system is not planned, but the core amphibious and air vehicle technologies are being considered for continued development to support a variety of military missions."

Image: UPenn.

Viruses and their hosts are in a perpetual state of evolutionary war. Host organisms try to find ways to get rid of their parasitic interlopers, while viruses develop countermeasures to evade rejection. It's a biological arms race that often results in some pretty strange innovations. But Tufts University researchers recently uncovered an adaptation they could only describe as "remarkable": a virus that captures its host's immune system, which it then uses for an ensuing attack.

The study, which now appears in Nature, is the first to ever show that a virus, in this case a bacteriophage (or just "phage"), can acquire a fully functional and adaptive immune system. It's a discovery that threatens to complicate the debate over whether viruses are a form of life or simply complex streams of DNA or RNA.

The discovery was made by Andrew Camilli, Kimberley Seed, and colleagues while analyzing DNA sequences of phages — ICP1 in particular — taken from stool samples from patients with cholera (Vibrio cholerae). To their surprise, they found a set of genes called CRISPR/Cas within the phage that codes for a fully functional immune system — the kind only found in some bacteria (and most Archaea).

They decided to verify the discovery by taking a phage that didn't have the adaptive immune system and setting it loose against a new strain of cholera bacteria that's naturally resistant to it. The phage failed. Next, they took the CRISPR/Cas-enhanced phage and set it against the same cholera — but this time it adapted and gained the ability to infect — and kill — the cholera bacteria.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. We are talking about the bacteria which gives rise to cholera, after all.

Essentially, CRISPR/Cas is being used by the phage to adapt to and overcome the defense systems of the cholera bacteria. Normally, CRISPR/Cas provides sequence-specific protection from invading nucleic acids, including phages. But as far as ICP1 is concerned, this was a twisted turn of events.

Armed with its host's immune system, the phage can kill the cholera bacteria and multiply to produce more phage offspring — which then go on to kill more cholera bacteria. It does this by targeting and destroying specific inhibitory genes of the host cell by cutting the target genes into pieces. It's by disarming these genes that the phase can also disarm the host cells, allowing it to infect and kill them. Essentially, the phage is using the CRISPR immune system to attack its host's virus-attacking genes.

Prior to this study, scientists assumed that viruses were too basic or primitive to have their own immune system.

It's worth noting, however, that the phage is not actually producing its own immune system; it doesn't have the genetics for it. Instead, it has to capture one, effectively parasitizing another organism's genome. As to whether or not this constitutes a genuine lifeform remains an open (and possibly unanswerable) question.

But the discovery is also interesting in that it could lead to phage therapy — the use of phages to treat bacterial diseases. Given the rise of so-called superbugs and the ever-decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics, an advanced genetically designed phage therapy could prove to be the intervention we're all waiting for.

But as far as the bacteriophage is concerned, that would mean war.

Check out the entire study at Nature.

Images: ktsdesign/Shutterstock, Biomedcentral.