This is Chionodraco rastrospinosus, an ocellated deep sea ice fish that swims in the frigid waters off Antarctica. Unlike other vertebrates, its blood is completely devoid of hemoglobin — and is therefore translucent. Combine that with its scaleless features, and you have one of the more unique creatures on the planet.

This fish is a bit of a conundrum for marine biologists. Hemoglobin is crucial protein for vertebrates; it transports oxygen around the body and gives blood its vivid red color.

According to Satoshi Tada, a biologist tending to the only two specimens in captivity, the fish can live without hemoglobin on account of its oversized heart and the blood plasma that circulates through its body.

And interestingly, the skin — without any scales — may be able to absorb oxygen from the Antarctic waters, where it can be found a depths exceeding 3,300 feet (one kilometer).

As Tada told the AFP, the two C. rastrospinosus under observation have spawned, which should give the biologists further opportunities to study the fish and gain a better understanding of its unique features.

Source: France24; h/t LiveScience.

Scientists aren't exactly sure how life arose on primordial Earth, leading some to suggest that meteorites may have been responsible for delivering the key components required to spark and sustain life, like crucial minerals or dormant microbial life. Now, chemists from the U.K. are saying that meteorites may very well have played a role in the process, but by producing a life-giving chemical power source.

In the new paper, British chemist Terry Kee has proposed that a "chemical battery" was created by the meteorites when they delivered hot phosphorus minerals into hot, acidic pools of liquids around volcanoes. The resultant power sources would have been similar to the ones currently found in all living cells, which are important for generating the energy required to keep something alive. Specifically, Kee says it would have been a pyrophosphite molecule that contained phosphorus, oxygen, and hydrogen.

New Scientist explains more:

To see whether pyrophosphite could have formed when meteorites landed on early Earth, Kee's team studied a Siberian meteorite that contained a lot of phosphorus. They incubated fragments of the meteorite in acidic water collected from volcanic ponds in Iceland, thought to be chemically similar to the water on primordial Earth. After four days in the water, the meteorite samples had released large quantities of phosphite. When this was dried out, it transformed into pyrophosphite. "We have shown that it's very easy to form," Kee says.

His idea is bolstered by the discovery in 2009 that geothermal pools in California contain lots of phosphite. These pools resemble the primordial environment, suggesting that early Earth was also rich in the material.

By reacting with the acidic fluid around volcanoes, the resulting mixture of phosphorus could have formed a kind of precursor compound that eventually led to chemical life.

"Chemical life would have been the intermediary step between inorganic rock and the very first living biological cell," noted Kee through a statement. "You could think of chemical life as a machine — a robot, for example, is capable of moving and reacting to surroundings, but it is not alive. With the aid of these primitive batteries, chemicals became organised in such a way as to be capable of more complex behaviour and would have eventually developed into the living biological structures we see today."

Read the entire paper at Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Image: D. Aguilar.

A new study by Australian researchers shows that well-endowed guys are more attractive to women — but only to a point.

Like other physical characteristics, male genitalia are subject to sexual selection. And in fact, penises have been known to evolve quickly, owing to strong selectional preferences at play.

And indeed, human males are not immune to this, especially when considering our evolution prior to the introduction of clothing. Given our upright posture and a non-retractable penis, it would have been literally right out there in the open for prospective females to assess.

Subsequently, biologists have suspected that the human penis, which is longer and wider than that of other primates, achieved its current configuration on account of sexual selection.

Rating Sexual Attractiveness

To see if this was the case, an Australian team of researchers led by Brian Mautz conducted a study in which 105 heterosexual women ranging in age from 18 to 53 were shown a series of life-size cut-out computer-generated images of variously-sized men, all of whom were shown in a flaccid state. Over 340 different images — which were derived from studies of Italian men — were presented to the women on a movie screen, who were simply told that the study was about measuring “male attractiveness.”

Each participant was shown a random set of 53 figures and were told to rate their attractiveness as potential sexual mates on a scale of one to seven.

The findings have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Diminishing Returns

What the researchers learned was that penis size does in fact matter to women when evaluating male attractiveness. But this attractiveness depended on other factors as well, including body shape and height.

And in fact, penis size is just as important to women as height; larger penis size and greater height had a nearly identical positive effect on male attractiveness. The researchers also measured a positive effect of penis size on the attractiveness of men with more masculine-shaped bodies, like broad shoulders.

Matt Soniak offers a good summary:

An increase in penis size was also a bigger benefit to attractiveness, and a smaller penis was less of a detriment, to the taller, fitter figures than it was to shorter or potato-shaped ones. For example, a model that was 185 cm tall (about 6 ft) with a 7-cm-long (about 3-in-long) penis got an average score for attractiveness. To get that same score, a model that was 170 cm (about 5'6") needed a penis of about 11 cm (about 4.5 in) in length. Boost the taller guy's penis by just about centimeter, and the shorter guy needs double that to keep up and get the same attractiveness score. After that, the shorter male pretty much can't continue to compete. To really reap the benefits of a big penis, a guy needs to be attractive in the first place, Mautz says. If he isn't, even the biggest penis in the world won't do him that much good.

But the researchers also discovered that big can be too big. Once penis length surpassed a certain point — about 3 inches (7.6 cm) — attractiveness began abating.

The researchers have presented their paper as further proof that female preference has in fact driven the evolution of larger penises in humans.

Moreover, the study shows that there may come a point for women when extreme features violate an aesthetic sense of normal physical proportionality. Overly exaggerated features — even ones that are important to attractiveness — cease to be appealing because they may indicate a problem from the standpoint of reproductive fitness. It would be interesting to see a follow-up study determining if and when broad shoulders and height cease to be attractive.

Room for Improvement

Though interesting, and perhaps a bit revealing, the study is not without its problems.

First, there's a risk of overstating these findings. Taken overall, body shape accounted for about 80% of the variation in attractiveness scores, penis size about 6%, and height about 5%.

And as the researchers themselves admit, it’s possible that the female participants were using their previous sexual experiences to infer a link between penis size and sexual pleasure. In other words, they weren’t necessarily physically attracted to the men, but were rather consciously or unconsciously biased towards the well-endowed men based on previous sexual experiences (which, interestingly, could still be said to be a form of attraction).

Also, the study did not look into sexual attractiveness as it relates to erect penises; the paper strictly looked at “precopulatory sexual selection” on the “role in the evolution of genital traits.” It’s not unreasonable to suggest that copulatory sexual selection also plays an important part in all of this.

Lastly, the study suffers from cultural biases. The research should have included women from other countries and cultures, especially indigenous cultures where full clothing isn’t typically worn.

Check out the entire study at PNAS: “Penis size interacts with body shape and height to influence male attractiveness.”

Images: Shutterstock/mast3r.

Definitely a good point to bring across. I'm actually going to update accordingly.

Someone seriously needs to do a remix. Add a cool 4/4 beat and some clever edits, and you've got something that wouldn't be out of place on the dance floor.

Epic.

definitely scaling back on that, though some still slip thru

By pulling the latest data from the ESA's Planck Mission project, a physics professor from the University of Washington has created an auditory representation of the Big Bang.

Physicist John Cramer produced the audio by mapping sound frequencies to the changes detected over time in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The project is similar to one he produced 10 years ago using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), but this one reflects the latest data.

He also created a broader frequency spectrum which goes into the higher frequencies, which Cramer says adds higher fidelity.

Cramer says the emission profile of the CMB radiation peaked at 379,000 years and dropped to 60% intensity at 110,000 years before and after the peak emission time.

"The universe was expanding and becoming more of a 'bass instrument' while the cosmic background radiation was being emitted," he writes. "To put it another way, the expanding universe 'stretches' the sound wavelengths and thereby lowers their frequencies."

Cramer analyzed the temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background into angular frequency components, or multipoles. The Planck multipole spectrum looks like this:

The entire 100 second clip represents the first 760,000 years of the evolution of the universe.

Yes!

Same. I had it cranked the first time, too.

True dat.

New evidence from the University of Alberta suggests that some terrestrial dinosaurs, including carnivorous theropods, were very capable swimmers.

Canadian paleontologist Scott Persons recently examined fossilized claw marks he found on a river bottom in China's Szechuan Province. The scratches, which were left by two-legged dinosaurs, extended for distances of nearly 50 feet (15 meters), indicating a co-ordinated left-right, left-right progressive motion.

Due to the shallow cuts in the river bottom, the dinosaurs were likely walking on the tips of their toes as they waded through 3 feet (1 meter) of water at the hip.

The Edmonton Journal reports:

Working with fellow U of A grad student Lida Xing and a team of international researchers, Persons found paddling marks left by what he suspects was an early tyrannosaur, or feathered Sinocalliopteryx, a carnivorous predator that existed in that part of China more than 100 million years ago. The claw marks were found beside the fossilized footprints of giant herbivorous long-neck sauropods and ornithopods, all from the Cretaceous era.

“We found evidence of six or eight individual animals, all headed in the same direction, moving together as if they were part of a herd,” said Persons, a PhD candidate from North Carolina whose research is being supervised by Phil Currie, the noted paleontologist. “It looks as if they used the river bank as a superhighway.”

Dinosaurs likely navigated across the river in periods when the water was high, rather than taking a leisurely dip. Their bodies contained air sacks, equipping them with built-in flotation devices.

“They were actually quite buoyant,” Persons said.

What was surprising to the scientists was not that some dinosaurs could swim, but that they could swim for such long distances.

The study was published in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.

Image: Nathan E. Rogers via University of Alberta.

Scientists from Oxford University have developed a tissue-like printed material consisting of thousands of water droplets encased in a liquid film. They've essentially created printable artificial tissue — and it could someday be used to replace or supplement cells found inside our bodies.

Indeed, the potential for this technology is considerable. These 'droplet networks' could eventually be used to deliver drugs to previously inaccessible locations inside the body and replace damaged tissue. They could be made to interact and interface with real tissue, or be used as tissue engineering substrates. And interestingly, because they can take on unorthodox shapes, entirely new nanoscale biological functions could be created altogether.

Moreover, because these networks are synthetic, they lack a genome and cannot replicate, thus avoiding many of the problems associated with other approaches, like when using pluripotent stem cells.

Each droplet is about 50 microns in diameter, but lead researcher Gabriel Villar suspects that they can eventually be made smaller. Currently, the team's custom-build 3D printer can create networks of up to 35,000 droplets.

Looking to the future, the researchers are confident that they'll be able to create significantly larger networks and experiments with over 50 different kinds of configurations. Their current experiment, which now appears in Science, only looked into two.

Depending on the configuration of the droplets, the network can orient and fold itself into different shapes — like the petals of a flower or a hollow ball. The folding is powered by instigating water transfer between droplets.

Read the entire study at Science: "A Tissue-Like Printed Material."

Image: University of Oxford/G. Villar.

Could this be a cosmic-scale amoeba like the one encountered by the Enterprise crew in “Immunity Syndrome?” More likely, it’s the planetary nebula IC 1295 — a glowing green bubble made from gas that’s being blown out by a dying star.

Nebula IC 1295 is located 3,300 light-years away and it sits in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield).

The planetary nebula appears as a giant, glowing gaseous bubble, and it surrounds a dim and dying star that’s transitioning into a white dwarf. The aging star is blowing its atmosphere into space, the result of unstable fusion reactions.

The outwardly emanating gas is bathed in strong, ultraviolet radiation from the star, which is what makes it glow. The green shade comes from ionized oxygen.

All stars that are roughly the size of our own will go through this process; the bubble-effect will last for thousands of years. The bright blue-white spot at the heart of the nebula is the burnt-out remnant of the star’s core. It’s misappropriately called a planetary nebula on account of the time when Neptune and Uranus were thought to be similar phenomenon.

This picture, the most detailed yet of nebula IC 1295, was taken by ESO’s Very Large Telescope, located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, using the FORS instrument (FOcal Reducer Spectrograph).

Source: ESO.

The past several weeks have seen the discovery of a surprising number of remnants left over from the Second World War. The latest finds include a sunken Nazi sub off the coast of Norway, the re-discovered remains of a Bristol Beaufighter Mk X in Italy — and an unexploded 200 lb bomb in Germany.

Indeed, after a conflict that killed nearly 70 million people, it hardly comes as a surprise that there’s still so much junk left over. But like the recent incident in Germany has shown, the lingering threats from the war are still very real.

The bomb was discovered less than 20 feet from a train track near Berlin’s main station. Some 840 people had to be evacuated from central Berlin and nearby schools and hotels shut down. German authorities had to put planes into a holding pattern above the city as a bomb squad worked to defuse the Soviet-made device.

As National Geographic reports, it’s a fairly routine event that’s nowhere close to coming to an end. And fact, things could start to get even worse as the unexploded bombs decay and get harder to defuse:

Unlike the Munich explosion, Wednesday's incident was "a totally normal defusing," Berlin bomb squad head Dietmar Puepke told reporters at the scene.

Puepke has had a lot of practice, and experts predict he and other bomb disposal experts will get a lot more in the years to come. In the German capital, 2,000 bombs have been recovered since the end of the war. And experts say between 2,000 and 4,000 tons of explosive material—including unexploded hand grenades used during the fierce battle for the capital in 1945—still litter Berlin.

"They find and defuse 10 or 15 bombs each year," said Wolfgang Spyra, former head of the Berlin Police Department's Forensic Science and Engineering Department and a retired professor at Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus. "At that rate, you can imagine how much longer the problem will be with us."

The number of bombs still to be found is staggering. British, American, and Russian bombing raids dumped upward of 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany during the war, each weighing anywhere from 100 to 4,000 pounds (45 to 1,814 kilos). Spyra estimates between 7 and 15 percent of those were duds, bombs that hit the ground but failed to explode. For decades, they've remained live, waiting quietly for an errant backhoe or bulldozer to set them off.

That is insane. Could you imagine being killed by a bomb from World War II? I wonder if the death would technically qualify as a war casualty...

As an aside, the Pentagon has created a database of every bomb they’ve dropped since World War I.

Meanwhile in Italy, a group of amateur archaeologists recently rediscovered the remains of a British aircraft dubbed “Whispering Death” by the Japanese. It was renowned for the speed at which it could suddenly appear and strike. The two-engine plane crashed on September 6, 1944, killing Flight Sergeant John Horsford and Warrant Officer John Watson.

Discovery News reports:

Consisting of parts of the fuselage and the propeller, the remains were actually found years ago in the small village of Gusano, in the Apennines mountains south of Piacenza, by aviation war enthusiast Francesco Lazzarelli. Nearly forgotten, they were recently rediscovered by another amateur researcher, Cristiano Maggi.

“Such remains are quite rare. Usually we find only small pieces of war planes as the wreckages were often recycled by the population to make tools,” Maggi told Discovery News.

With the help of another group, the Air Crash Po wreck hunters from Cremona, Maggi and his team were able to identify the remains as belonging to a British night fighter plane, a Bristol Beaufighter Mk X.

On a related note, the attempt to find buried Spitfires in Burma appears to be a lost cause.

And lastly, the wreck of Nazi U-486 submarine was recently discovered off Norway’s coast during work on an oil pipe. The U-boat was torpedoed and broken into two by a British submarine in April 1945, killing all 48 people on board. The U-486, which now rests at a depth of 250 meters (820 feet), had just left the western Norwegian town of Bergen when it was hit.

Interestingly, the U-486 had a special synthetic rubber coating on the hull designed to significantly reduce its radar signal. Which in this case didn’t really seem to help (unless it was visually spotted).

Subs have also been found close to the United States and Canada. Just last July, a sunken Nazi U-550 was found just off the coast of Nantucket.

Images: AFP, Imperial War Museums via Discovery News, NOS.nl; top Beaufort via.

Thank you.

The classic form of the Doomsday Argument says it’s more likely that we’re closer to the end of our civilization than the beginning. In other words, apocalyptic destruction awaits us in the not-too-distant future. But a recent re-interpretation of this argument has slightly improved our prospects for survival.

The Doomsday Argument (DA) has been around for 30 years. It was first proposed by the astrophysicist and philosopher Brandon Carter in an unpublished paper. Though many subsequent papers have tried to defeat it, it has — quite infuriatingly — stood the test of time; if there was ever an argument we’d like to disprove, this would be the one.

Since Carter’s first formulation of the argument, several other philosophers have taken it further. Back in 1996, philosopher John Leslie published his book, The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, in which he presented it in more detail. It’s for this reason that the idea is often called the Carter-Leslie Doomsday Argument. Interestingly, the DA has been independently discovered by others, including J. Richard Gott and Holger Bech Nielsen.

But regardless of the thinker, each one came to the same disturbing conclusion: Doom is soon.

Birth Order Matters

It’s rare for philosophers to make predictions, and even rarer still to make predictions based on actual data. But while the DA attempts to predict our prospects for survival, it does so based on probabilistic reasoning, a healthy application of Bayes Rule, the Copernican Principle (i.e. we don’t occupy a special place in the universe), and the self-sampling assumption (i.e. you should reason as if you were randomly selected from a group of individuals).

As a philosophical exercise, the DA cannot predict how human civilization might come to end — say by nuclear war or an asteroid impact — but it can predict the likelihood of such an event given our current place in the roll-call of all potential humans.

The DA asks us to look at our birth order. No, not in your own immediate family — but the family of all humans who have ever been born — and who are still yet to come. According to the Population Reference Bureau, more than 107 billion people have lived on Earth since the advent of our species. You need to reference your precise place in that total roll-call against all humans still to be born.

Indeed, what the DA asks us to do is evaluate — or rather predict — our number in the roll-call relative to the whole. And this is where things get interesting — and disturbing.

To better explain this, I’m going to use a much smaller sample size.

Let’s say I’ve put you into one of two groups: a group consisting of 10 members and a group consisting of 100 members. You have no idea which of the two groups you belong to — but I’ve assigned a number to each member of each group. Members of the small group get numbered 1 to 10, and the second group 1 to 100. Now, at random, I pick out a number, and that number is 72. Clearly, you belong to the larger group. But suppose I pick out the number seven. What are you to believe now? A simple assessment of probability says it’s considerably more likely that you’re in the small group. It’s not a certainty, just much more probable.

We can use this similar logic to explain the DA. Let’s place the number of all humans who will ever live into two similar groupings, one that gets destroyed soon (Doom Early), and one that gets destroyed a long, long time from now (Doom Late). The population difference between the DE group and the DL group will be off by an order of magnitude. Thus, given your place in the roll-call, it’s more likely that you’re in the smaller subset than the larger.

Using this line of reasoning and Bayes’ formula, John Leslie concluded that we can be 95% certain that we are among the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born. Specifically, by using the figure of 70 billion humans born so far, he estimated that there is a 95% chance no more than 1.4 trillion humans will ever live. By looking at the rate of population growth, Leslie figured that we’d reach this point in about 10,000 years.

Other philosophers have taken a more severe approach to the DA, effectively arguing that humanity has a near-zero chance of being a Doom Late civilization.

Nonsense!

Needless to say, the DA attracts a lot of heat. According to Oxford professor Nick Bostrom, there are as many papers published in support of the argument as there are in opposition to it.

“Yet despite being subjected to intense scrutiny by a growing number of philosophers,” he says, “no simple flaw in the argument has been identified.

One of the more potent criticisms came in 1998 by K.B. Korb and J.J. Oliver who essentially argued that the DA is a gross oversimplification and that it violates reasonableness. They also argued that a sample size of one (i.e. oneself) is too small to make a serious difference to one’s rational beliefs, and that the DA could also be applied to one’s own life span. (Bostrom offers rebuttals to each of these objections in his paper, “The Doomsday Argument is Alive and Kicking”)

There are many other objections, including the idea that being born within the first 5% of all humans is not purely a coincidence; Ken Olum’s self-indication assumption (the possibility of not existing at all and that your very existence should give you reason to think that there are many observers); and the notion that the sample group, namely all possible humans, is far too limited (e.g. the DA doesn’t take posthumans or other human-spawned intelligences (like uploads) into account).

Universal Doomsday

And indeed, it’s these last two points that the new paper by Austin Gerig, Ken Olum, and Alexander Vilenkin is predicated upon. Regrettably, their new interpretation of the argument still suggests that our odds of survival are low, but that an adjustment in the way we think about the DA should give us cause for optimism.

Intriguingly, their argument is a kind of philosophical mash-up of the DA and the Great Filter hypothesis, the idea that advanced space-faring extraterrestrial civilizations are rare, or even non-existent. They argue that many civs exist in the universe, but that they can be broken down into two categories: those that are short-lived (civs that die out before developing the capacity to colonize space and thus explode in population), and those that are long-lived (interstellar civs).

They admit that this model is not realistic in detail, but that “it may well capture the bimodal character of the realistic size distribution.” Space-faring civs could be huge in terms of population.

According to the authors, if long-lived interstellar civs were common — those with a million times more people than short-lived ones — it would be more likely than not that we should find ourselves in one of those civs. But because we don’t find ourselves in such a civ, we should probabilistically conclude that (1) advanced space-faring civs are rare and (2) we are more likely in a short-lived civilization. Consequently, as the authors point out, this means that we’re probably doomed in the near term.

But, their new argument contains a kind of caveat that starts with this interesting point:

The specific issue [that concerns] us here is the possibility that our universe might contain many civilizations. In that case, we should consider ourselves to be randomly chosen from all individuals in that universe or multiverse.

In other words, we shouldn’t consider our random roll-call in the space of all possible humans, but in the space of all possible individuals living across the entire universe. Consequently, our chance to be in any given long-lived civilization is higher than our chance to be in any given short-lived civilization. But this can only work if there are lots and lots of civilizations — something we’re not certain of (and as already noted above may be unlikely).

So, if there are many civilizations, the Doomsday Argument is defeated.

Consequently, the strength of the DA’s predictive abilities lies in the number of civs that can survive existential risks and go interstellar — a figure that sits anywhere from zero to 100%. Unlike other DA thinkers — who essentially place these figures at or close to zero — Gerig and colleagues have upped it to between 1 to 10%.

The authors conclude:

If there is a message here for our own civilization, it is that it would be wise to devote considerable resources (i) for developing methods of diverting known existential threats and (ii) for space exploration and colonization. Civilizations that adopt this policy are more likely to be among the lucky few that beat the odds. Somewhat encouragingly, our results indicate that the odds are not as overwhelmingly low as suggested by earlier work.

The message of the Doomsday Argument, therefore, is that we need to become that fortunate 1 to 10%.

Images: Zastolskiy Victor via Shutterstock; Shutterstock/Yuri Arcurs; NASA-JPL; OCJ.

Oh, the 107 billion is the current best estimate of humans born so far; the 70 billion humans was Leslie's estimate. Sorry for the confusion.

Actually, I think you're on to something. A similar approach has indeed been applied to the Simulation Hypothesis, and by Bostrom himself.