Cassini has captured something NASA scientists have never seen before: A massive thunder-and-lightning storm that wrapped itself around Saturn creating a seamless ring around the planet. But when the lead portion of the storm finally caught up with itself, it began to lose its steam.

Located at 33 degrees in the northern latitude, NASA first first detected the unprecedented storm in December 2010 using Cassini's radio and plasma wave subsystem and imaging cameras. As the astronomers chronicled its evolution, they started to notice that the turbulent head started to make its way west. This kindled a clockwise-spinning vortex that slowed down. But after a few months, the storm made its way completely around the circumference of the planet, a distance of 190,000 miles (300,000 km).

To put that into perspective, that's roughly the length of 24 Earths placed side-by-side.

Interestingly, the storm, despite its extreme width, is not unlike hurricanes on Earth. Like our storms, it requires the energy provided by warmth; Earth's hurricanes are fed by warm water, whereas Saturn's storms are fed by warm air.

But that's where the differences end. On Earth, a hurricane typically loses its steam when it hits a terrestrial landmass. But on Saturn, where there is no land, it can just keep on going provided its energy needs are met.

That said, the scientists are not entirely sure why the storm sputtered-out when it caught up to itself.

"This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast," said astronomer Kunio Sayanagi through NASA's official statement. "The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth's atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles [12,000 kilometers] across."

Sayanagi is the study's lead lead researcher and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia.

As an aside, the vortex grew to a size comparable to Oval BA on Jupiter; but this storm, along with the Great Red Spot, does not exhibit the same kind of meteorological violence.

Images: NASA.

Scientists looking to set up research stations on Antarctic ice-sheets have a problem. The ice moves toward the ocean at a rate of a quarter mile each year. Not only that, ice and snow quickly accumulates on the surface of the frozen continent, burying any structure that dares to defy the elements. Combined, these factors basically mean that any permanent building has a maximum lifespan of about 10 years. Looking to overcome these problems, Hugh Broughton Architects have designed a research station that features extendable legs on giant skis.

You are looking at the Halley VI Antarctic research station, a research facility that's officially set to open on February 5. The station, established by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), will be home to over 50 scientists.

The structure is comprised of eight individual modules that are interconnected. And each of them is equipped with retractable hydraulic legs which will enable the structure to clear the rising ground each year. And when the station needs to be moved, a bulldozer can tow the entire base to a new location.

Writing in Architectural Record, Chris Foges explains how the modules work:

Linked by short, flexible corridors, the modules stand in line like a desert caravan, perpendicular to the direction of the prevailing wind, which drives snow from underneath. Living accommodations and laboratories, clad in blue glass-reinforced plastic, are positioned on either side of a larger unit clad in red.

This red module contains a social space that is crucial to the wellbeing of the small crew who live at Halley year-round. Brutal winter conditions of permanent darkness, -60-degree temperatures, and 100-miles-per-hour wind leave them vulnerable to depression and stress – "winter-over syndrome." Home comforts include a hydroponic salad garden and a climbing wall within a double-height central space lined with Lebanese cedar, selected for its scent. The architect also worked with a color psychologist to identify "refreshing and stimulating" shades, and developed a bedside lamp with a daylight bulb to simulate sunrise.

More here.

Images: Hugh Broughton Architects.

University of Leicester archaeologists announced today that it is "beyond reasonable doubt" that a skeleton found last year does indeed belong to King Richard III. To make the confirmation, scientists compared DNA found on the bone fragments with samples taken from a Canadian family that is directly descended from Anne of York, Richard's eldest sister. The king, whose battle-scarred skeleton was found underneath a parking lot in Leicester, died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

The confirmation ends a longstanding mystery that has been stumping British experts for centuries. The genetic analysis of the remains — remains which showed signs of Richard's spinal curvature and fatal battle wounds — led osteologist Jo Appleby to say that the team now has "a highly convincing case for identification of Richard III."

To prove it, the team extracted DNA from the bone samples and compared it to modern-day mitochondrial DNA from two descendants of Richard III's family, including Jeff IBsen, a Canadian-born cabinetmaker and 17th-generation descendant of Anne of York.

Previous radiocarbon analysis dated the bones to between 1455 and 1540.

More from the CBC:

Jeff Ibsen says he was warned long ago that his family might be called upon if the king's burying place was ever discovered. Archaeologists had long sought the monarch's grave, which has been the subject of speculation for centuries.

They, along with historians and local tourism officials, had all been hoping for confirmation that king's long-lost remains had been found.

And so had the monarch's fans in the Richard III Society, set up to re-evaluate the reputation of a reviled monarch.

The last English king to die in battle, Richard was immortalized in a play by William Shakespeare as a hunchbacked usurper who left a trail of bodies - including those of his two young nephews, murdered in the Tower of London - on his way to the throne.

Many historians say that villainous image is unfair

"It will be a whole new era for Richard III," the society's Lynda Pidgeon said. "It's certainly going to spark a lot more interest. Hopefully people will have a more open mind toward Richard."

More here and here.

Images: University of Leicester.

Canadian scientists have discovered a tiny alchemist in disguise, the bacterium Delftia acidovorans. When this microbe is infused within a toxic mixture of water-soluble gold, it excretes a molecule that both protects it from the elements while also transforming the poisonous ions into solid nanoscale gold particles. It's a discovery that could someday allow for the conversion of mine waste into gold, or the creation of gold structures with unique properties.

Details of this remarkable biochemical process were recently published the journal Nature Chemical Biology. The paper's authors, who work at McMaster University in Ontario, did not look specifically at the viability of using this particular stand of bacteria to grow gold from a liquid mixture, but noted that such processess are "distinctly possible."

In the paper itself, researchers Chad Johnston, Nathan Magarvey and colleagues noted that the "finding is the first demonstration that a secreted metabolite can protect against toxic gold and cause gold biomineralization."

Nature News explains more:

Using biochemical and genome analysis, the researchers discovered a set of genes and a chemical metabolite that were responsible for precipitating the gold. Bacteria engineered to lack the genes no longer formed dark haloes, and their growth was stunted in the presence of gold. The team also isolated a chemical produced by the unengineered bacteria that caused gold particles to precipitate out of a solution. The chemical was dubbed delftibactin.

The researchers suggest that the genes they identified are involved in producing delftibactin and shunting it outside the cell. By precipitating gold, D. acidovarans may keep the metal from entering its cells in solution. But Magarvey says that it is possible that D. acidovarans also uses other mechanisms to detoxify gold that breaches its cell walls.

Read the entire study here. More here.

Images: optimarc/Shutterstock, McMaster University.

The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover just how diverse all its planets, stars, nebulae and unexplained chunks of matter really are. So what is all this matter doing in our universe, other than just floating in space?

Well, it just so happens that there is a theory that gives a kind of raison d'etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible. To learn more, we spoke to the man who came up with the idea.

It's called the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection and it was conjured by Lee Smolin, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo.

In his book, The Life of the Cosmos, Smolin proposed that Darwinian processes still apply at the extreme macro-scale and to non-biological entities. Because the universe is a potentially replicative unit, he suggests that it's subject to selectional pressures. Consequently, nearly everything the universe does is geared toward replication.

"It's a scenario that explains how the laws of nature are chosen," Smolin told io9, "and if true, these parameters are geared to maximize the number of black holes made in the universe."

Of cosmological singularities and baby universes

Indeed, black holes — and the cosmological singularities they produce — are central to Smolin's theory. These are regions of space-time where the quantities used to measure gravitational fields or temperature become infinite. It's also where general relativity stops being useful, making any kind of prediction impossible. Classical general relativity says that a singularity exists inside each black hole. But both string theory and loop quantum gravity suggest that black hole singularities can be eliminated — and when this happens, it may be possible to describe the future evolution of the space-time region within it.

"Everything that falls into a black hole doesn't just hit the cosmological singularity and just stop evolving so that time simply comes to an end," he says, "Time continues and everything that fell into the black hole would have a future where the singularity was, and that region is what we call a baby universe."

Moreover, Smolin says these baby universes are immune to whatever happens in the parent universe, including eternal inflation and its ultimate heat death.

"Black holes are predicted to evaporate by making radiation — what's called the Hawking Process," he says, "but only until they get down to an equilibrium with the temperature of the cosmic microwave background." This process, says Smolin, has to do with the properties of the horizon — and it's only the horizon that evaporates.

"The baby universe may come into a kind of contact with the original universe in a way it didn't before, but whether this happens or not depends on the details of the quantum gravity theory," he says.

A Darwinian model

And like Darwin's theory of variation and selection, Smolin also surmises that baby universes are slightly different than the parent who spawned them. In turn, this cosmological "mutation" — in which the parameters of nature have been slightly modified — may result in a new universe that's either better or worse in terms of its replicative ability.

For example, if the cosmological constant and speed of light were slightly tweaked, or if the law of gravity became too weak or strong, the new universe could be suboptimal in its ability to make massive quantities of massive stars. In such a universe, matter might not be able to coalesce into stars, or galaxies might be unable to form.

In this model, a "fit" universe, therefore, is one that has evolved such that its ability to produce black holes has been optimized. And this may explain why we observe a universe that produces large swaths of giant stars — each one an attempt to make a baby.

The idea of cosmological variation, however, is one of pure conjecture. "It's an hypothesis," Smolin concedes.

But that said, Smolin points to string theory as a potential mechanism. "There could be a connection there," he told us, "it describes a landscape of different cosmological parameters — different phase transitions between them — and this is almost exactly the kind of example I had in mind when trying to explain the variation of the constants."

Smolin is also unsure how many baby universes each black hole is able to produce — though he suspects that it's one per black hole. "The answer," he says, "will ultimately depend on quantum gravity theory."

Life as epiphenomenon?

We asked Smolin if life in the universe is therefore an accident — that humans and all other organisms are mere epiphenomenon, a sideshow to a much larger process.

"If the hypothesis of Cosmological Natural Selection is true, then life — and the universe being biofriendly — is a consequence of the universe being finely-tuned to produce black holes by producing many, many massive stars."

But he added: "Those if statements are important."

Other scientists have conversely argued that the universe is freakishly biophilic — that the laws of nature appear to be geared towards making life. Some even suggest that this is the ultimate purpose of the universe — that it's fine-tuned to spawn biological organisms (the so-called biocosm hypothesis).

Similarly, philosophers like to talk about the Anthropic Principle — the notion that any analysis of the universe and what happens within it must must take into account the presence of observers (i.e. intelligent life). We're subject to an observational selection effect, they argue, which means we can only ever observe a universe that's friendly to life.

Smolin, on the other hand, brushes these lines of argumentation aside, saying that cosmologists should study and understand the properties of the universe in a way that doesn't connect it to life. The Anthropic Principle, he says, is simply incapable of making a falsifiable prediction for any kind of testable experiment.

At the same time, however, "Cosmological Natural Selection," he says, "is very capable of doing just that."

Moreover, the laws of the universe — and all the stuff that's within it — can all be explained without referencing it to life.

"It's not a coincidence," he says, "that we live in a world which has lots of carbon and oxygen in it, along with long list of suitable stars, and so on." The presence of these apparent life-friendly elements — like carbon and oxygen — has a perfectly good explanation outside of the biophilic paradigm. These elements, says Smolin, creates the conditions necessary for the efficient formation of sufficiently massive stars that form black holes.

The claims made as evidence by Anthropic Principle supporters, he says, can be explained in an alternative way.

The critics

Needless to say, Smolin's Big Idea has received its fair share of criticism. It's an extraordinary idea, after all, and extraordinary ideas often undergo extraordinary levels of scrutiny.

Cosmologist Joe Silk, for example, says the universe we observe is far from being an optimal producer of black holes. He speculates that other "versions" of the universe could do a much better job.

Similarly, Alexander Vilenkin argues that the rate of black hole formation can be improved by increasing the value of the cosmological constant. Smolin is wrong, he says, to hypothesize that the current values of all the constants of nature are perfectly adjusted to maximize black hole production.

Ruediger Vaas complains that Smolin's first mistake was to start making analogies to Darwinian processes. The fitness of Smolin's universes, he says, aren't constrained by their environments, but by the numbers of black holes. Moreover, although Smolin's universes have different replication rates, they aren't competing against each other — what he feels is a crucial component of any Darwinian process.

Writing in the Edge, Leonard Susskind — Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University — had this to say:

Smolin...believes that the constants of nature are determined by survival of the fittest: the fittest to reproduce that is. Those properties which lead to the largest rate of reproduction will dominate the population of universes and the overwhelming likelihood is that we live in such a universe. At least that's the argument.

But this logic can lead to ridiculous conclusions. In the case of eternal inflation it would lead to the prediction that our universe has the maximum possible cosmological constant, since the reproduction rate is nothing but the inflation rate.

When we asked Smolin about these objections, he said that many of these concerns were addressed in his book, The Life of the Cosmos, and that his upcoming book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, will also tackle many of these questions (the book also dispels the idea that time is a kind of illusion). And when possible, Smolin has addressed individual concerns (for example, the entire Smolin-Susskind debate can be read here; and his retort to Vilenkin can be seen here).

Ultimately, however, the objections leave him unfazed.

"My impression is the idea has not been refuted even though several people have tried," he told us. "It doesn't mean the idea is true, but the idea has stood up to attempts to falsify it."

Pausing for a moment, and speaking more quickly now, he continued:

"Look, for me, the important part of the claim is that it is a scientific argument. The idea itself is not the most important thing — it's a very interesting idea, sure — but it instantiates a general claim that — if you want to explain the universe — one of the things you're going to have to explain is why we see certain laws of nature and not others. And the claim I'm making is that this question can in fact be answered scientifically — one that will lead toward a way for us to make predictions to see if the laws of nature are not fixed for all time, but evolved. That is the key point for me."

As for the exact mechanism of cosmological evolution, he says that a certain model or scenario might be right, or it might be wrong. The important point, says Smolin, is that science can only be completed to the extent of our ability to explain why the laws of nature are they way they are if they evolved over time.

"As far as the scenario of Cosmological Natural Selection is concerned," he says, "it's just an hypothesis just as much as it was for Darwin and Mendel — two scientists who figured out how natural selection worked before knowing anything about DNA or the molecular instantiation of genes."

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Smolin pic: ideacityonline; galaxy/dna: physics.sfsu.edu.

Things are getting tense between sociobiologist Jared Diamond and the campaign group Survival International over recent claims made in Diamond's new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? The Pulitzer prize-winning author is putting forth the idea that tribal peoples across the world live in a state of near-constant warfare. Survival director Stephen Corry has condemned the book, saying that it's "completely wrong — both factually and morally — and extremely dangerous" for portraying tribal societies as more violent than modern ones. Now, Diamond has tossed back a volley of his own.

Diamond is no stranger to controversy. Ever since he published Guns, Germs, and Steel he has been accused of harbouring colonial biases and overstating science's ability to study the development of human societies. This latest controversy once again threatens to divide the anthropology community, with each side making divergent claims about the nature of ancient societies.

Writing in the Guardian, Edward Helmore reports:

Survival accuses Diamond of applying studies of 39 societies, of which 10 are in his realm of direct experience in New Guinea and neighbouring islands, to advance a thesis that tribal peoples across the world live in a state of near-constant warfare.

"It's a profoundly damaging argument that tribal peoples are more violent than us," said Survival's Jonathan Mazower. "It simply isn't true. If allowed to go unchallenged … it would do tremendous damage to the movement for tribal people's rights. Diamond has constructed his argument using a small minority of anthropologists and using statistics in a way that is misleading and manipulative."

In a lengthy and angry rebuttal on Saturday, Diamond confirmed his finding that "tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace". He accused Survival of falling into the thinking that views tribal people either as "primitive brutish barbarians" or as "noble savages, peaceful paragons of virtue living in harmony with their environment, and admirable compared to us, who are the real brutes".

He added: "An occupational hazard facing authors like me, who try to steer a middle course between these two extremes, is the likelihood of being criticised from either direction."

But Survival remains adamant. "The clear thrust of his argument is that there is a natural evolutionary path along which human society progresses and we are simply further along it," said Mazower. "That's extremely dangerous, because it is the notion that they're backward and need to be 'developed'. That thinking – and not that their way of living might be just as modern as any other way of living – is the same thinking that underpins governments that persecute tribal people."

Read the entire article.

Should all go according to plan, Iran will send its first astronaut into space by 2020 and put a man on the Moon by 2025. The country certainly appears to be serious; last week they launched a monkey into low orbit and successfully retrieved it (though some now suspect that it was an elaborate hoax — check out these before-and-after photos of the monkey). Now, in an (apparent) effort to move the program further along, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he's ready to be Iran's first human sent into orbit.

Speaking at an exhibition of Iranian space achievements in Tehran on Monday, he had this to say: "I'm ready to be the first Iranian to be sacrificed by the scientists of my country and go into space, even though I know there are a lot of candidates."

The statement prompted this rather snide tweet from U.S. Senator John McCain: "So Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iranian in space - wasn't he just there last week?" McCain's comment has spurred accusations of racism — but that may be taking his cynical remarks a bit too far.

Now, it's not clear if Ahmadinejad was being serious or not, as he's notorious for making provocative and hyperbolic public statements.

But when have we ever heard a head-of-state say he's "ready to be sacrificed by the scientists" of his country? His commitment to "science" in this regard is as (dubiously) admirable as it is disturbing.

And should it happen, let's be sure to check the before-and-after photos to make sure it was really him.

Source: Reuters.

Image: AFP.

Among the 860 exoplanets documented so far, a good portion of them are so-called super-Earths — planets that feature a mass greater than Earth's, but lower than our solar system's smaller gas giants, namely Uranus and Neptune (both of which are about 15 Earth masses). And as the name implies, some of these super-Earths have a high proportion of rock — a characteristic that makes them intriguing candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Or not. As a new paper published in the Royal Astronomical Society suggests, these large terrestrial planets may have atmospheres so deep that we'd be better off calling them mini-Neptunes.

The new study, which was led by Helmut Lammer of the Space Research Institute (IWF) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, suggests that low density super-Earths are clinging to an extended hydrogen-rich atmospheric layer. These planets, therefore, are unlikely to ever become Earth-like.

Lammer and his team reached this conclusion after analyzing the effects of radiation on the upper atmospheres of super-Earths orbiting the stars Kepler-11, Gliese 1214, and 55 Cancri. All these planets are in relatively close orbits with their parent stars, and they're all suspected of containing solid cores surrounded by an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, water, and methane. The astronomers theorize that these primordial gasses were captured from nebulae during planet formation but have not had a chance to escape — nor will they ever.

Their subsequent analysis showed that the short wavelength extreme ultraviolet light coming in from the planets' respective stars are heating up the atmospheres. As a result, the envelopes are bloating up to a massive size — over several times the radius of each planet. Some of these gasses have escaped into space (in a complex process called "hydrodynamic blow-off"), but most of the protoatmosphere remains intact.

"The atmospheric mass loss of the studied super-Earths is one to two orders of magnitude lower compared to that of hot Jupiters," they write," so one can expect that these exoplanets cannot lose their hydrogen envelopes during their remaining lifetimes."

This is potentially bad news as far as habitability is concerned. It's an open question as to how life-friendly planets like these can become — even if it's situated within a solar system's habitable zone. And worse, the further away the mini-Neptune is from the habitable zone, the larger its atmospheric layer.

The entire study can be seen at the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC), Helmut Lammer.

Yesterday's big news was the announcement from Leicester University researchers saying they successfully identified the bones of King Richard III — a conclusion they proclaimed was "beyond a reasonable doubt." Less than a day later, a swarm of people are now crying foul, saying that the paper has yet to be peer reviewed, and that the methodology used may not stand the scrutiny from DNA experts.

Indeed, the critical contention is the claim being made by the Leicester researchers that they successfully matched Richard's DNA to a living ancestor, the Canadian Michael Ibsen. It's an open-and-shut case, they say. But some experts have a bone to pick with the researchers.

Stephanie Pappas writes in LiveScience:

"The DNA results presented today are too weak, as they stand, to support the claim that DNA is actually from Richard III," said Maria Avila, a computational biologist at the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. "Perhaps more in-depth DNA analysis summed to the archaeological and osteological [bone analysis] results would make a round story."

As Pappas notes, ancient DNA is very susceptible to contamination. She continues quoting Avila:

"Before being convinced of ANY aDNA study, it should be explicit that all possible cautions were taken to avoid potential contamination," Avila wrote in an email to LiveScience. "It is just part of the protocol." (aDNA refers to ancient DNA.)

Avila also warned that people could share mitochondrial DNA even if they didn't share a family tree. To be confident that Ibsen is related to the owner of the disinterred skeleton, the researchers must present statistics showing how common the DNA profile is in the United Kingdom, she said. Otherwise, the similarities between Ibsen's mitochondrial DNA and the skeleton's could be coincidental.

Of course, what Pappas meant to say was how common the DNA profile is in the United Kingdom and Canada (where Ibsen lives).

New Scientist's Douglas Heaven reports on similar concerns:

Mitochondrial DNA is passed down the maternal line and has 16,000 base pairs in total. Typically, you might expect to get 50 to 150 fragments from a 500-year-old skeleton, says Ian Barnes at Royal Holloway, University of London, who was not involved in the research. "You'd want to get sequences from lots of those fragments," he says. "There's a possibility of mitochondrial mutations arising in the line from Richard III."

"It's intriguing to be sure," says Mark Thomas at University College London. It is right that they used mitochondrial DNA based on the maternal line, he says, since genealogical evidence for the paternal lineage cannot be trusted.

But mitochondrial DNA is not especially good for pinpointing identity. "I could have the same mitochondrial DNA as Richard III and not be related to him," says Thomas.

The researchers used the two living descendents to "triangulate" the DNA results. The evidence will rest on whether Ibsen and his cousin have sufficiently rare mtDNA to make it unlikely that they both match the dead king by chance.

They must also not be too closely related. If Richard III's living descendants shared a common female ancestor even 150 years ago, their DNA could still be too close for the pair to count as distinct samples, says Thomas.

The Guardian's Alok Jha also chimes in:

Ross Barnett of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen also questioned the depth of the mtDNA match between the skeleton and Ibsen.

"The [diagrams] they showed were only about 30 base pairs or so … you need to have quite a lot more than 30 base pairs to get a deep match." The more common a mtDNA type is in the population, the more base pairs of DNA are required to get a reliable match.

These criticisms are all valid, no doubt, and it will be interesting to see how the paper fares in peer review. But it's also important to remember that other clues were used as well, including radiocarbon dating and historical accounts.

Images: University of Leicester.

An updated radiocarbon dating technique has thrown our conceptions of when Neanderthals died out into question. A new paper in PNAS is suggesting that Neanderthals disappeared considerably earlier than previously thought — a resetting of the anthropological clock that calls into question whether our human ancestors interacted and interbred with the now-extinct species. But as the limited nature of the study suggests, we might want to hold off for bit before we re-write the history books.

For the past 20 years, anthropologists have assumed that the Neanderthals made their final stand in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula (the west coast of Spain) — a time when humans occupied the same space.

But now, an international study involving researchers from the Spanish National Distance Education University (UNED), Oxford University, Australia National University, and many other institutions, is claiming that this is highly improbable — that there's a slim chance Neanderthals were still alive in this region 30,000 years ago.

Ultrafiltration protocol

According to co-author Jesús F. Jordá, a researcher at the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology of the UNED, the Neanderthals disappeared from Iberia no earlier than 45,000 years ago. And in fact, 50,000 years ago is the most plausible date. If the researchers are right, it means that humans and Neanderthals never interacted in this part of Europe, or if they did, it would have been for a short period of time (about 3,000 to 4,000 years).

The team reached this conclusion by applying a new radiocarbon dating method — one that utilizes an ultrafiltration protocol. It's a new technique that purifies the collagen of the bone samples, including the removal of unwanted contaminent molecules like amino acids.

"The problem with radiocarbon dating alone is that it does not provide reliable dates older than 50,000 years" explained Jordá through a statement. Contamination is another problem; older samples collect more residues, leading to incorrect analysis.

And with the new technique came new date ranges — changes that are altering our conceptions of the Neanderthal story.

Limited data

But before the history books get re-written, it's important to note that the team's samples were quite limited. The research team analyzed 215 fossil bones from 11 Iberian sites. But in the end, they were only able to identify 27 specimens, with only six of them producing a useable date. The problem was that the other samples contained insufficient collagen.

In addition to small sample size, the new technique may have resulted in a selection effect in which only older samples were isolated and dated.

Moreover, this research will have to be reconciled against other evidence in support of the idea that Neanderthals and humans crossed paths and interbred. While it's now clear that Neanderthals and humans may not have made contact in Iberia, anthropologists are still fairly certain that the two species did interact at other locations, and at other times.

A study from 2011, for example, suggested that modern humans were living in Italy and the UK as far back as 41,000 to 45,000 years ago. Other studies suggest that the Neanderthals hung on until 28,000 years ago — thus prolonging the potential "overlap" time with humans.

And not only that, there's the genetics to consider. There's enough evidence from DNA studies to suggest that interbreeding occurred between humans and Neanderthals (some 1 to 4 percent of Neanderthal DNA is present in modern humans). That said, it's quite possible that this mixing happened much longer ago, as much as 80,000 to 90,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions (what's referred to as the Levant Region).

The entire study can be read at PNAS.

Supplementary sources: BBC, Discovery News.

Subway construction workers in Thessaloniki, Greece, have uncovered a golden olive branch that dates back approximately 2,300 years. Located at what will someday be the Republic Station stop, the wreath was found inside a large, box-like Macedonian tomb — and it was still on the head of a buried female body. The beautifully preserved wreath dates back to the Early Hellenistic Period, at the end of the Fourth to early Third Century B.C.E.

Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece and was founded back in 315 B.C.E by King Cassander of Macedon and named after his wife Thessalonike — the half-sister of Alexander the Great.

The discovery was confirmed by K.B. Misailidou, Director of 16th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities. And amazingly, it's now the ninth wreath to be uncovered during these subway excavations (which started back in 2008).

Source: Archaeology News Network and Greek Reporter with a h/t to A Blog About History.

A pair of researchers from 2AI Labs have developed a wearable eyeglass device that effectively cures red-green color blindness. Called O2Amps, the technology works by leveraging our capacity to see the amount of oxygen in another person's blood by simply looking at the hue of their skin. Developer Mark Changizi came up with the unorthodox idea after considering the evolutionary underpinnings of color vision. His unique theory eventually led to the development of eyeglasses that enable wearers to perceive emotions and social cues more clearly — and, by unintended consequence, to solve the colorblindness problem. We contacted Changizi to learn more.

One of the more fascinating aspects to this breakthrough is how it came about. Changizi, author of Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man, has a long history of investigating the various ways humans think, feel, and see. He has posited original insights as to why letters are shaped they way they are, how language emerged, and recently, why humans and other primates have color vision.

The ‘Color Vision Is for Sensing Emotions and States' Theory

"Most mammals — your dog, horse, bunny — have two dimensions of color," he told io9, "a yellow-blue dimension, and a grayscale (or brightness) dimension. Some of us primates, however, have an extra dimension of color vision: The red-green dimension."

The going theory, says Changizi, is that color vision evolved to help primates find fruits in the forests. The trouble with this idea, however, is that primate diets are widely variable among those who have the same kind of three-dimensional color vision that we have — and yet we all have the same variety of color vision.

"I wondered whether, instead, our color vision was for sensing others of our own primate kind, to sense the blushes and other signals we display on our faces, rumps and genitalia," he told us. If this is the case, says Changizi, then it should be that the primates with color vision have naked spots.

And sure enough, this is precisely the case: Primates with color vision are the ones who feature bare faces, bare rumps, and sometimes bare spots elsewhere, like on the chest. Most other primates have the typical, mammal-like, furry, non-naked faces and bodies.

"Also, if my color-is-for-sensing-emotions-and-states theory is true, then the mechanism behind our kind of color vision should be peculiarly sensitive to the blood signals in the skin that underlie our skin's ability to signal."

Indeed, one of the principal ways in which our blood changes in order to signal is that it varies in its level of oxygenation. And for us to be sensitive to this within the visible spectrum, it turns out that we need to possess the peculiar cone sensitivities found in our M and L cones.

"They're peculiar," says Changizi, "because they have very similar wavelength sensitivities, which is at first glance a terrible design. Like your camera's three uniformly-spaced color filters, R, G and B, you'd expect our cone sensitivities to be uniformly spaced over the spectrum. Yet, we primates have our M and L cones abutting up against one another. That's only a bad idea, however, until you realize it needs to be like that in order to ably sense the blood's variations in oxygenation."

From Theory to Practice

Working with theoretical computer scientist Tim Barber, Changizi took his theory on color vision and applied it to the eyewear device. Specifically, the duo created a filter technology that further amplified the eyes' ability to see blood under the skin. It essentially works by removing "visual noise" from the blood signal.

Initially, they intended to use the device for practical general use. "After all, seeing these signals is what our everyday color vision is for," he told us.

"But it occurred to us that our technology may also provide benefits for the colorblind — and it's even mentioned in our patent — but that wasn't our main driving thought at the time. But, as we demoed the filters more and more, we received feedback from users who were colorblind claiming that one of our technologies blew them away in its ability to 'cure' their colorblindness."

Intrigued, Changizi and Barber reached out to more colorblind patients hoping to get more feedback and information about their experience. Once they made the connection between the cones and the spectral modulations that blood undergoes, they realized they could do even better.

"Our Oxy-Amp is the centerpiece of our technology — there are two others, Oxy-Iso and Hemo-Iso — and it blocks narrow bands of light which amount to noise in regard to oxygenation signals. By doing so, the Oxy-Amp further amplifies our ability to sense variations in oxygenation in the skin of others, just what our red-green perception evolved to sense. And there's little or no cost, because the blocked bands are so narrow," he says.

How It Works

In addition to Oxy-Amp, Changizi and Barber developed two specialized technologies that correspond to two dimensions of blood changes that our eyes can sense.

One of the variations is in the concentration of blood — what you see when you look at your palm, squeeze tightly, and let go. These are largely variations along the yellow-blue dimension. The Hemo-Iso filter isolates and amplifies this signal so that it's extremely exaggerated, but at the expense of seeing variations in oxygenation.

The other way in which blood changes in color is on account of variations in oxygenation — which we see, for example, in our veins. These are red-green variations. The Oxy-Iso filter isolates and amplifies this signal so that it's also exaggerated, but now at the expense of seeing the variations in the concentration of blood.

"It's this last one — the Oxy-Iso — that provides the benefits to colorblind people," Changizi told io9. "We weren't too surprised, because it ‘brute-force amplifies' the oxygenation signal — and does so at the expense of the other dimension — exactly the dimension that red-green deficient colorblind folk can't see."

The Oxy-Amp, on the other hand, is an amplifier of oxygenation, but a ‘less brutish' one, he says.

It's important to note that Oxy-Iso can only work on red-green colorblind people who have some of each of their M and L cones. If someone is entirely devoid of one of these cones, then there's nothing to amplify.

And when the Oxy-Iso does work at helping color-blind persons see red-green differences, it also simultaneously handicaps them in their existing yellow-blue perception. "In a sense, it distributes their handicap more uniformly around the spectrum," says Changizi.

A Medical Imaging Technology

Outside of the application to colorblindness, the two "Iso" filters — Oxy-Iso and Hemo-Iso — are principally intended for medical applications.

In fact, they can be seen as a medical imaging technology — but one in which the "camera" is the patient's own eye, thus allowing them to directly see properties of the blood and vasculature under the skin and into the tissue. The devices can be used in the form of eyewear, or in the form of filters in front of illuminants, bathing the room in the blood-amplifying light.

The Oxy-Amp — the unit which blocks narrow bands of noise coming from hemoglobin — has many wider uses beyond (but still including) medicine. It amplifies exactly those things that our primate color vision evolved for — leading Changizi to argue that it's not just for specialists, but for anyone.

"We're moving to put the technology into prescription eyewear, as well as into sunwear, and into general-purpose lighting," he says. "For example, when you put on sunglasses to reduce glare on a sunny day, you simultaneously hinder your ability to see people. But sunglasses equipped with our Oxy-Amp technology provide the shade one wants, while also amplifying our ability to see other people."

They're also considering its application in cosmetic lighting. "It's not at first glance obvious, but one of the reasons youthful skin looks youthful is because the skin is more transparent, and so one can see the vasculature below it more easily," says Changizi.

"Well, what our Oxy-Amp does is make the vasculature below the skin more salient, and that's just to say that skin appears more transparent — more youthful."

Images: 2AI Labs.

The Smithsonian has put together a fascinating and almost unbelievable account of a Russian family of six who managed to avoid all human contact for four decades — a period of self-imposed exile that left them unaware of World War II and the Moon landings. Fleeing religious persecution during the 1930s, the family managed to survive the extremely harsh Siberian conditions, though at times coming perilously close to starvation.

Fleeing for their lives, the family ventured deep into Siberia a few hundred miles from the Mongolian border near an unnamed tributary of the Abakan. The mountain near which they settled was more than 150 miles (240 km) from any human settlement.

And indeed, the father, Karp Lykov, had much to be afraid of. His family was part of the fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect known as the Old Believers — a group that faced persecution since the times of Peter the Great in 17th Century Russia. Back then, in an effort to modernize the backward country, Peter forcibly cut off the beards of Christians. A few centuries later, with the onset of the atheist Bolshevik regime, the Old Believers once again faced serious assault. During the 1930s, a Communist patrol shot Lykov's brother. In reaction, he gathered up his family and headed straight into the forest, never to return.

Writing in Smithsonian, Mike Dash explains what happened next:

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then — Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild — Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943 — and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents' stories. The family's principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, "was for everyone to recount their dreams."

During the course of their 40 years of isolation, the family adapted to the forest, living perpetually on the verge of famine. Hunting proved exceedingly difficult, forcing the family to subsist primarily on roots, grass, mushrooms, potato tops — and even bark.

"We were hungry all the time," said Agafia, "Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up or leave some for seed." And in fact, in 1961, rather than see her children go hungry, Akulina died of starvation. But it was also the year that a single grain of rye sprouted from their pea patch — a "miracle" that helped them produce subsequent yields.

After contact was made with the geologists in 1978, the family — with great trepidation — allowed the scientists into their home. Dash writes:

As the Soviet geologists got to know the Lykov family, they realized that they had underestimated their abilities and intelligence. Each family member had a distinct personality; Old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when "the stars began to go quickly across the sky," and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: "People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars."

"What amazed him most of all," Peskov recorded, "was a transparent cellophane package. 'Lord, what have they thought up-it is glass, but it crumples!'"

Sadly, the Lykovs did not fare well after contact was made. By 1981, three of the four children had passed away, suffering from kidney failure (likely on account of their harsh diet). Dmitry eventually died of pneumonia, which might which might have begun as an infection he acquired from the geologists. Karp and his daugher, despite the requests of the geologists, insisted on staying in the forest.

This is just a small sampling of Hall's story. Be sure to read the entire account at Smithsonian.

All images via Smithsonian.

Check out this gorgeous photograph of a Red Eye Tree Frog taken by Trevor Owen. The photo earned him a top 50 spot in consideration of Sony's upcoming World Photography Awards for 2013 — a contest that will see the overall winner announced on March 19. Owen's photo beat over 54,000 images to make it into the final judging stage.

Other shortlisted photos can be seen here.

Via ePHOTOzine.

As part of its 'Prehistoric Creatures' series, the Royal Canadian Mint is releasing a super neat new quarter featuring the awkwardly majestic Quetzalcoatlus — a pterosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous of North America about 65 million years ago. A particularly cool feature of the coin is that it glows in the dark; when the lights are out, the intricate skeletal outline of the winged beast can be seen.

With a design approved by the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, the coin will be limited to 30,000 units, but they'll be issued worldwide. Each coin costs $30 (that's a rather expensive quarter), and there's a three-coin-limit per household. According to the mint, the coin should be placed under a light for about a minute, and then brought into the dark (pretty standard stuff for glow-in-the-dark).

This is the second coin of the series, with the first one featuring a Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai.

Technically speaking, the Quetzalcoatlus is not a dinosaur, but it is considered one the largest flying animals to ever appear on this planet. Specimens have been found with wingspans extending 52.2 feet (15.9 meters) in length.

H/t x929.

When we look up into the starry sky at night, we only see a small portion of what's really up there. Red dwarfs comprise nearly 75% of all the stars in the Milky Way, yet they remain invisible to the naked eye. Given their predominance, astronomers and astrobiologists are keen to learn more about these small, cool stars, and their potential to host habitable planets. Now, new research from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has offered some clues, suggesting that as many as 6% of all red dwarfs host Earth-sized planets within their habitable zones — a calculation that brings the total number of red dwarf alien Earths across the galaxy to 4.5 billion.

Top image: Artist's impression of a sunset from the super-Earth Gliese 667Cc courtesy ESO/L.Calçada. The large sun is the red dwarf, 667C.

To complete their study, "Small Planets Around Small Stars," astronomers Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau took data from NASA's Kepler space telescope and parsed through the catalog of 158,000 target stars (hey, no one said astronomy wasn't hard work). The researchers were looking to isolate as many red dwarfs as possible, an analysis that ultimately led to the short-listing of 3,897 candidates, all of which featured temperatures below 4,000K (3,726 degrees Celsius, 6,740 degrees Fahrenheit). By comparison, our sun is nearly 5,800K (5,526 degrees Celsius, 9,980 degrees Fahrenheit).

Interestingly, the analysis showed that most red dwarfs were smaller and cooler than previously assumed.

From these 3,897, the researchers identified 64 red dwarfs that hosted 95 planets, a sample that included three Earth-sized planets situated within a habitable zone.

Now, it's important to remember that a red dwarf's ‘habitable zone' is far removed from what we see in our solar system. Red dwarfs are smaller (about one-third the size of our sun) and fainter (about one-thousandth the brightness of our sun), so they have a Goldilocks Zone that's much closer in. Consequently, any planet — Earth-like or not — would be subject to increased rates of solar flares, along with an increased vulnerability to celestial impacts.

Dressing and Charbonneau discovered that 60% of red dwarfs have planets smaller than Neptune, the majority of which are super-Earths (planets bigger than Earth, so not considered "Earth-like"). As a recent study noted, these super-Earths are more accurately described as mini-Neptunes — terrestrial planets surrounded by a suffocatingly thick and deep layer of hydrogen.

But of interest to the researchers was the discovery that 6% of all red dwarfs feature an Earth-like planet within its habitable zone. And by "Earth-like," they mean a rocky planet roughly the same size as earth and with a potentially temperate climate (a trait that would allow for liquid water, among other things).

As it so happens, our solar system is surrounded by red dwarfs. In fact, the astronomers suspect that an Earth-like planet with a moderate temperature may be as close as 13 light-years away (which is mere speculation at this point).

"We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy," noted Charbonneau in a statement. "That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought."

Charbonneau is clearly overstating the data, here. He cannot be certain that the planets described in the study are truly "habitable." A better choice of wording would have been potentially habitable. Moreover, he cannot make any special claims about the potential for life on Earth-like planets in red dwarf systems, given the reasons already described.

Looking at the three Earth-like planets analyzed, KOI-1422.02 is 90%the size of Earth in a 20-day orbit, KOI-2626.01 is 1.4 times the size of Earth in a 38-day orbit, and KOI-854.0 is 1.7 times the size of Earth and in a 56-day orbit. These three red dwarfs are located between 300 and 600 light-years away.

The entire study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Inside image: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Tracked by scientists since 1956, a Laysan albatross dubbed "Widsom" has hatched a healthy chick at the tender age of 62. The (apparently) elderly bird has now successfully given birth for the sixth consecutive year and is assumed to have parented at least 35 chicks over the course of her preternaturally long lifetime. And what might be even more impressive is the fact that Wisdom has flown an awe inspiring three million miles (4.8 million kilometers) since she was first branded.

The hatching was documented by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Pete Leary who is working at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. Over the course of her life, Wisdom has worn out five bird bands since being tagged by the U.S. Geological Survey's Chandler Robbins in 1956.

Wildlife Extra reports:

Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the North American Bird Banding Program at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, MD, said Wisdom has likely raised at least 30 to 35 chicks during her breeding life, though the number may well be higher because experienced parents tend to be better parents than younger breeders. Albatross lay only one egg a year, but it takes much of a year to incubate and raise the chick. After consecutive years in which they have successfully raised and fledged a chick, the parents may take the occasional next year off from parenting. Wisdom is known to have nested in 2006 and then every year since 2008.

"As Wisdom rewrites the record books, she provides new insights into the remarkable biology of seabirds," Peterjohn said. "It is beyond words to describe the amazing accomplishments of this wonderful bird and how she demonstrates the value of bird banding to better understand the world around us. If she were human, she would be eligible for Medicare in a couple years yet she is still regularly raising young and annually circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean. Simply incredible."

Incredible, indeed. Wisdom has logged an average of 50,000 miles per year since becoming an adult — which adds up to at least two to three million miles. Or, as Wildlife Extra calculates, "that's 4 to 6 trips from the Earth to the Moon and back again with plenty of miles to spare."

Whoa.

Image: John Klavitter.

Back in September the Dalai Lama told his Facebook friends that "grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate," and that religion alone cannot foster values such as integrity and compassion. Since that time, the Tibetan Buddhist leader has taken his somewhat surprising message on the road, and is now calling for a global system of secular ethics.

Speaking at the recently concluded Mind & Life Conference in India, the Dalai Lama told attendees that a new global ethical code would be of benefit to everyone, including people who don't follow any particular religion. He said that the new ethics should incorporate the diverse set of values that people of various beliefs hold in common.

Reporting on the conference, Radio Free Asia's Kalden Lodoe tells us more:

"The reason for this is that there are those who have faith in religions and there are many who don't," the Dalai Lama said, adding that even among religious leaders, "there are some who are responsible for injustice, deception, hypocrisy, and exploitation."

Current education, he said, is almost always geared towards economic development, which "neither helps solve individual mental problems nor society-level problems."

"Regardless of whether or not one believes in any religion, the practice of ethical conduct is an urgent, direct need in today's world," the Dalai Lama said.

He noted that based on dialogues with scientists, "it has been proven that being compassionate and kind-hearted is not [exclusively] connected to religion."

Encouraged by the significant number of scientists attending the conference, a group consisting primarily of psychologists and neuroscientists, the Dalai Lama said, "This has turned out to be very productive in promoting mutual understanding of each other's positions, and I am confident of further progress if we continue in this way."

Lodoe also spoke to psychologist Wilson Hurley, a translator of Tibetan texts, who said the Dalai Lama's proposal ultimately boils down to psychological principles." He elaborated:

"The core principle is that everyone is completely equal in wanting to be happy, not wanting to suffer, wanting to be respected, not wanting to be put down."

"If that's honored, then people thrive and move forward," Hurley said, adding that "His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] says that there's nobody who doesn't appreciate being valued and loved."

"And for people who are able to live that way and raise their kids that way, and for societies that are able to cultivate that in their people, there's a power there. It's a very powerful force."

Speaking to Pico Iyer in a recent interview, the Dalai Lama elaborated on his association with modern science, saying, "My engagement with science is in these four fields: cosmo-biology, microbiology, quantum physics and psychology," adding that, "Peace of mind is really important for the health of [the] body."

He also told Iyer about the importance of the separation of church and state, highlighting India's long tradition of secularism:

"India's constitution is based on secularism. Our forefathers like Mahatma Gandhi, Rajendra Prasad, who participated in making of the constitution, did very wisely, making it based on secularism. About India's' understanding of secularism is to respect all traditions, [all] religion[s] and there is no preference."

Further he was asked to put some light on a person's [belief in] religion and he says, "Respect all religions, respect even non-believers. Ethics are based on secular faith in a religion and is very wonderful but if not that's okay. Whenever I go for talks in different countries I talk about the importance of inner peace, self- confidence, and positive physical and verbal action which should never be harming others, no negative action to others, no fear because it leads to distress...with respect comes more trust that brings peace of mind." He says, "You have to investigate the 'fear' in you, know the reason for it."

While Tibetan Buddhism is hardly the be-all and end-all of Buddhist thought around the world, the Dalai Lama's personal take is still a far cry from most religions of the world, which tend to make special claims about religion's ability to inform our moral and ethical sensibilities. Moreover, given that the Dalai Lama lives in exile — the result of religious persecution from China — his advocacy for a secular state and global code of ethics is all the more remarkable.

More coverage from the Mind and Life Conference here.

Images: Tenzin Choejor/Ohhdl, the Dalai Lama's office, AP

A special effects artist and woodworker living hundreds of miles apart have pieced together a prosthetic hand for a 5-year-old South African boy who was born without fingers on his right hand. Using a 3D printer, along with bits of cable, bungee cord returns, and rubber thimbles, the two men collaborated over the internet to make it happen. And not only have they changed the life of young Liam, they now hope to do the same for others looking for low-cost prosthetic alternatives. To that end, they have made their assistive technology open source and launched a fund raising campaign.

The project came together when Liam's mom stumbled upon a blog being run by Ivan Owen and Rich Van As.

Owen is a part-time mechanical special effects artist in Washington, and Van As is a woodworker from South Africa. The two had been working on a "Robohand," but they hadn't considered the wider implications of their work (Van As lost his fingers in a woodworking accident a few years ago). But after talking to Liam's mom, they put a custom hand together — a device that now allows Liam to pick up coins (like a boss!), push a shopping cart, and throw a basketball.

Afterward, they made the Robohand available on Thingiverse and set up a fundraising page. Since making it available, they have received requests for help in creating the devices, and for people looking to use the technology.

And indeed, the open source nature of the Robohand has already resulted in several improvements. Over the course of the last several days, the device has been upgraded to include an improvement to the cable guide for the thumb mount, as well as the addition of a bungee anchor and extra mounting holes on the thumb mount. They also made some adjustments to the hand's aesthetics.

Normally, a prosthetic hand would run upwards of $10,000, if not substantially more. The Robohand, on the other hand (ahem), only costs a few hundred dollars.

Images: ComingUpShortHanded.

A few weeks ago we predicted that the day is fast approaching when a machine will be able to write a scifi novel or a short story. Well, despite the short film presented here, we're still sticking to that prognostication — though it's now painfully clear that we're going to have to wait a while before an AI can produce something that's actually watchable. Check out the video to see what we mean.

Called "Do You Love Me," this unintentionally surreal romantic comedy was created by director Chris R. Wilson. He pieced the script together by engaging Cleverbot in a conversation — clearly his first mistake. The resulting dialogue was incorporated into the short film, resulting in a story that makes about as much sense as most Hollywood scripts these days.