Lost City Discovered

 

 

 

 

 

Deep in the jungles of Honduras, an expedition of archaeologists recently discovered a remote city, thought to be lost for a thousand years. The city, believed to be what indigenous people call La Ciudad Blanca, Spanish for “The White City,” is thought to be the ruins of the legendary City of the Monkey God, that explorers have been searching for since Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés claimed to have heard reports of a lost civilization in Honduras that contained a vast wealth.

Deep in the jungles of Honduras, an expedition of archaeologists recently discovered a remote city, thought to be lost for a thousand years. The city, believed to be what indigenous people call La Ciudad Blanca, Spanish for “The White City,” is thought to be the ruins of the legendary City of the Monkey God, that explorers have been searching for since Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés claimed to have heard reports of a lost civilization in Honduras that contained a vast wealth.

The lost city, who’s discovery was so recent and unexpected that it doesn’t even have a name yet, has remained completely untouched since its inhabitants abandoned it. In order to keep it that way, and away from potential looters, it’s location isn’t being disclosed. As evidence of the remoteness of the lost city, the team reported that the animals in the surrounding jungle appeared to have never encountered humans before.

 

For hundreds of years, scientists, archaeologists, and explorers have tried to find the lost City of the Monkey God, and with all the rumors about it, it began to take on an almost Atlantis-like, mythical quality among the locals, who spoke of it as if it were a paradise, where Indians hid from Spanish Conquistadors, and from which “no one ever returned.” Many years after Cortés sought out the lost city, famed aviator, Charles Lindbergh claimed to have seen a white city while flying over Honduras in 1927. The name City of the Monkey God started gaining traction among explorers by the 1930’s, and in 1939, an adventurer by the name of Theodore Morde said he had discovered the lost city, but never revealed its whereabouts, and he committed suicide before he was ever able to return to it. In the 1950’s, Hungarian explorer Tibor Sekelj, financed by the Ministry of Culture of Honduras, launched a small, and ultimately fruitless, expedition to discover the lost city.

 

e end, all expeditions to find La Ciudad Blanca proved unsuccessful, until 2012, when documentary film maker Steve Elkins, using remote sensing technology known as LiDAR (which is believed to stand for Light Detection and Ranging, or alternatively is a portmanteau of ‘light’ and ‘radar’), mapped the ground of the area while flying over it through the thick jungle. When the pictures taken by the LiDAR were later processed, they revealed signs of civilization, such as earthworks and mounds, seemingly shaped by human hands, as well as canals. It was these images that eventually led Fisher and his team to make their amazing ground discovery last week.
It is incredibly rare in this day and age for a lost city to be discovered completely untouched, but sometimes, like the discovery of Mahendraparvata in Cambodia in 2013, explorers get lucky, thanks to the fact that ancient peoples often preferred the solitude and safety of remote locations on which to build their civilizations

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1894809/lost-city-discovered-could-it-be-the-legendary-city-of-the-monkey-god/#4bg3svASp3JJlk1q.99

 

Spider silk dethroned as nature’s toughest fiber

Spider silk is famous for its amazing toughness, and until recently a tensile strength of 1.3 gigapascals (GPa) was enough to earn it the title of strongest natural material. However, researchers report online today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface that the record books need to be updated to properly recognize the incredible strength of the limpet teeth. Marine snails known as limpets (Patella vulgata, pictured) spend most of their lives scraping a set of small teeth along rocks in shallow ocean waters, looking for food. The constant grinding would be enough to quickly reduce most natural materials to nubs, but the limpets’ teeth boast a tensile strength of between 3 and 6.5 GPa, researchers report. Scientists discovered that the teeth are made of a mixture of goethite (an iron-containing crystal) nanofibers encased in a protein matrix. In spite of their amazing strength, the teeth don’t quite best the strongest humanmade materials like graphene, but the new material’s upper range puts it far ahead of Kevlar and on par with the highest quality carbon fibers. Researchers speculate that the material’s durability may have practical applications in dentistry, but it’ll probably be a while before anyone is trading in their own teeth for some limpet chompers.

Stopping HIV with an artificial protein

 

For 30 years, researchers have struggled to determine which immune responses best foil HIV, information that has guided the design of AIDS vaccines and other prevention approaches. Now, a research team has shown that a lab-made molecule that mimics an antibody from our immune system may have more protective power than anything the body produces, keeping four monkeys free of HIV infection despite injection of large doses of the virus.

Intensive hunts are under way for natural HIV antibodies that can stop—or “neutralize”—the many variants of the constantly mutating AIDS virus. Researchers have recently found several dozen broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) that are highly potent and work at low doses. But viral immunologist Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, and 33 co-workers have recently taken a different strategy, building a novel molecule based on our knowledge of how HIV infects cells. HIV infects white blood cells by sequentially attaching to two receptors on their surfaces. First, HIV’s own surface protein, gp120, docks on the cell’s CD4 receptor. This attachment twists gp120 such that it exposes a region on the virus that can attach to the second cellular receptor, CCR5. The new construct combines a piece of CD4 with a smidgen of CCR5 and attaches both receptors to a piece of an antibody. In essence, the AIDS virus locks onto the construct, dubbed eCD4-Ig, as though it were attaching to a cell and thus is neutralized.

In test-tube experiments, eCD4-Ig outperformed all known natural HIV antibodies at stopping the virus from infecting cells, Farzan’s team reports in this week’s issue of Nature. To test how it works in animals, they then put a gene for eCD4-Ig into a harmless virus and infected four monkeys; the virus forces the monkey’s cells to mass produce the construct. When they “challenged” these monkeys and four controls with successively higher doses of an AIDS virus for up to 34 weeks, none of the animals that received eCD4-Ig became infected, whereas all of the untreated ones did.

The new study ups the ante on a similar gene therapy approach with natural antibodies that 6 years ago showed promise in monkey experiments, says an accompanying Nature editorial by AIDS vaccine researcher Nancy Haigwood of Oregon Health & Science University in Beaverton. “I am a huge fan of this paper,” Haigwood says. “It’s really very creative and a breakthrough as far as I am concerned.” Pediatrician Philip Johnson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, whose lab in 2009 showed success with a gene therapy that delivers an HIV bNAb, adds that eCD4-Ig “is a beautiful thing.”

Building on work by Johnson’s group, Farzan’s team stitched the gene for eCD4-Ig into an adeno-associated virus (AAV) that is harmless to humans. Those viruses, injected into monkey muscles, continued to produce eCD4-Ig for the 40 weeks of the experiment. “Everyone expects with AAV that this can go on forever,” Farzan says. The animals had no detectable immune response against the eCD4-Ig, presumably because it is so similar to pieces of their own cells.

Not everyone is convinced that eCD4-Ig will ultimately work better than natural HIV antibodies. Virologist David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is working with a group developing its own AAV gene therapy that delivers an HIV bNAb. He describes the eCD4-Ig chimera and the paper as “impressive” and says he welcomes this new approach. But Baltimore, who like Johnson has already moved into early phase human trials with his gene therapy, notes that the new work offers only test-tube and animal data. “It’s perhaps a better construct than the antibodies we’ve been using, but it’s a matter of how it plays out in human trials,” Baltimore says. “I don’t think it’s easy to tell how that will happen.”

Johnson agrees that eCD4-Ig may not work as well as bNAbs in humans, but also says the natural antibodies, even if they have less potency and breadth, may be powerful enough to stop HIV. “How good is good enough?” Johnson asks. “Nobody has a clue about that. The only way you would know really is to do a bake-off in a human trial.”

Farzan says in theory at least, it will be harder for the virus to mutate its way around eCD4-Ig than a bNAb, because HIV needs to bind to CD4 and CCR5. Whether any of these gene therapies will prove safe and practical remains to be seen. Farzan, for his part, has more experiments planned before moving into humans. “We need to do a lot more monkey studies to see if there’s anything weird,” he says.

Posted in Biology, Health

How Your Blood Type Affects Your Brain Health

How Your Blood Type Affects Your Brain Health

We've long known that many factors, from genetics to lifestyle choices, play a role in brain health over the course of a lifetime. And according to new research, blood type may be another, previously unconsidered factor in age-related cognitive decline.

A large-scale study conducted by researchers at the University of Vermont found those with the rare blood type AB -- which is present in less than 10 percent of the population -- to be at an unusually high risk for cognitive impairment.

The researchers analyzed longitudinal data from over 30,000 adults over the age of 45, collected as part of a national study on geographical and racial differences in stroke risk, which has been shown to be particularly high in the South, especially among African-Americans.

The research team focused on a group of 495 survey respondents who showed significant declines on at least two biannually conducted evaluations of cognitive function. This group was then compared to a group of 587 participants who remained in good cognitive health over time. They found that members of the struggling group were 82 percent more likely to have type AB blood than Type A, B or O blood type -- even after taking other factors like sex and race into account.

While the researchers haven't yet established the exact mechanisms by which blood type increases the risk of cognitive impairment, it may have something to do with the increased risk of cardiovascular events like heart disease and stroke among those with non-O blood types, which may in some way affect the brain.

“Blood type is also related to other vascular conditions like stroke, so the findings highlight the connections between vascular issues and brain health," study author Dr. Mary Cushman of the University of Vermont College of Medicine said in a statement. "More research is needed to confirm these results.”

This is not the first study to look at blood type and overall brain health: Previous research found that people with Type A blood are more prone to obsessive-compulsive disorder, while those with Type O blood may be at a higher risk of depression and anxiety, Scientific American reported.
And a large study suggested a correlation between blood type and longevity. People with type A, B and AB are at a higher risk for heart disease and shorter lifespan compared to O types. Non-O types were nine percent more likely to die over the course of the seven-year study period than O types.

Evidence South American monkeys came from Africa

Fossils from heart of Amazon provide evidence that South American monkeys came from Africa

For millions of years, South America was an island continent. Geographically isolated from Africa as a result of plate tectonics more than 65 million years ago, this continent witnessed the evolution of many unfamiliar groups of animals and plants. From time to time, animals more familiar to us today -- monkeys and rodents among others -- managed to arrive to this island landmass, their remains appearing abruptly in the fossil record. Yet, the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of monkeys in South America have remained cloaked in mystery. Long thought to have managed a long transatlantic journey from Africa, evidence for this hypothesis was difficult to support without fossil data

A new discovery from the heart of the Peruvian Amazon now unveils a key chapter of the evolutionary saga of these animals. In a paper published February 4, 2015 in the scientific journal Nature, the discovery of three new extinct monkeys from eastern Peru hints strongly that South American monkeys have an African ancestry.

Co-author Dr. Ken Campbell, curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), discovered the first of these fossils in 2010, but because it was so strange to South America, it took an additional two years to realize that it was from a primitive monkey.

Mounting evidence came as a result of further efforts to identify tiny fossils associated with the first find. For many years, Campbell has surveyed remote regions of the Amazon Basin of South America in search for clues to its ancient biological past. "Fossils are scarce and limited to only a few exposed banks along rivers during the dry seasons," said Campbell. "For much of the year high water levels make paleontological exploration impossible." In recent years, Campbell has focused his efforts on eastern Peru, working with a team of Argentinian paleontologists expert in the fossils of South America. His goal is to decipher the evolutionary origin of one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world.

The oldest fossil records of New World monkeys (monkeys found in South America and Central America) date back 26 million years. The new fossils indicate that monkeys first arrived in South America at least 36 million years ago. The discovery thus pushes back the colonization of South America by monkeys by approximately 10 million years, and the characteristics of the teeth of these early monkeys provide the first evidence that monkeys actually managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Africa

Power Naps are Good for You

Napping reverses health effects of poor sleep, study finds

A short nap can help relieve stress and bolster the immune systems of men who slept only two hours the previous night, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

Lack of sleep is recognized as a public health problem. Insufficient sleep can contribute to reduced productivity as well as vehicle and industrial accidents, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, people who sleep too little are more likely to develop chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and depression.
Nearly three in 10 adults reported they slept an average of six hours or less a night, according to the National Health Interview Survey.

"Our data suggests a 30-minute nap can reverse the hormonal impact of a night of poor sleep," said one of the JCEM study's authors, Brice Faraut, PhD, of the Université Paris Descartes-Sorbonne Paris Cité in Paris, France. "This is the first study that found napping could restore biomarkers of neuroendocrine and immune health to normal levels."

The researchers used a cross-over, randomized study design to examine the relationship between hormones and sleep in a group of 11 healthy men between the ages of 25 and 32. The men underwent two sessions of sleep testing in a laboratory, where meals and lighting were strictly controlled.
During one session, the men were limited to two hours of sleep for one night. For the other session, subjects were able to take two, 30-minute naps the day after their sleep was restricted to two hours. Each of the three-day sessions began with a night where subjects spent eight hours in bed and concluded with a recovery night of unlimited sleep.

Researchers analyzed the participants' urine and saliva to determine how restricted sleep and napping altered hormone levels. After a night of limited sleep, the men had a 2.5-fold increase in levels of norepinephrine, a hormone and neurotransmitter involved in the body's fight-or-flight response to stress. Norepinephrine increases the body's heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar. Researchers found no change in norepinephrine levels when the men had napped following a night of limited sleep.

Lack of sleep also affected the levels of interleukin-6, a protein with antiviral properties, found in the subjects' saliva. The levels dropped after a night of restricted sleep, but remained normal when the subjects were allowed to nap. The changes suggest naps can be beneficial for the immune system.
"Napping may offer a way to counter the damaging effects of sleep restriction by helping the immune and neuroendocrine systems to recover," Faraut said. "The findings support the development of practical strategies for addressing chronically sleep-deprived populations, such as night and shift workers

World's largest solar plant opens in California

World's largest solar plant opens in California desert

The 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight Solar Farm on Bureau of Land Management land in the Sonoran Desert near Desert Center on Monday.(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

 

Conservative lawmakers have derided the loan guarantee program, arguing that it's wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Critics have pointed to the program's $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, a Fremont-based solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011.

But the Department of Energy reported last year that it expects to make a profit of $5 billion to $6 billion from the program. The department funded five traditional, large-scale solar farms, and Desert Sunlight marks the last of those projects to go online.
"They're all rock-solid, money is good, living up to every kind of condition we put in the loan documents in terms of performance, in terms of commercial operation," Peter Davidson, executive director of the Department of Energy's loan programs office, said in an interview last week.

The loan guarantee program did more than fund five solar photovoltaic projects, Davidson added: It helped launch the large-scale solar industry. In 2009, there were no traditional solar farms in the United States larger than 100 megawatts. Now, 17 such projects have been financed, according to a Department of Energy report released Monday.
Solar panels "existed before as a technology, but that technology hadn't been deployed at a large scale," Davidson said. "Once we've done that, the government steps aside to let the private markets take over."

Desert Sunlight employed an average of 440 people during more than three years of construction, and it now has about 15 full-time employees. Money provided by the project's owners — as part of an agreement negotiated with Riverside County — is also being used to fund $400,000 in improvements to the community center in nearby Desert Center.

"The debate's over — we're going to be moving to more renewable energy," Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit said.
Power from the plant will go to Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

Desert Sunlight is the world's largest solar power plant, although only by a hair.
The Topaz solar project in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. — which, like Desert Sunlight, was built by Arizona-based First Solar — also has a capacity of 550 megawatts. But the desert has more abundant sunlight than San Luis Obispo County, so Desert Sunlight will actually generate more electricity than Topaz, said Georges Antoun, First Solar's chief operating officer.
"It's a beautiful sun here, year-round," he said.

California as a whole has installed more renewable energy than any other state, noted David Hochschild, a member of the California Energy Commission.
"There were a lot of skeptics who actually didn't believe that renewables could scale, that this cost reduction could happen, that we could introduce it to the grid," Hochschild said. "They've been proven wrong."

 

Americans OK with police drones

Americans OK with police drones - private ownership, not so much: Poll

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New rules on privately owned drones can't come fast enough for most Americans.

Some 73 percent of respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Thursday said they want regulations for the lightweight, remote-control planes that reportedly have been involved in an increasing number of close calls with aircraft and crowds. People are also uneasy about potential invasions of privacy by drones carrying cameras or other devices.

Forty-two percent went as far as to oppose private ownership of drones, suggesting they prefer restricting them to officials or experts trained in safe operation.

Another 30 percent said private drone ownership was fine, and 28 percent were not sure, according to the survey of more than 2,000 respondents, conducted Jan. 21-27.

Many respondents were surveyed before a small quad copter breeched the White House security perimeter and crash-landed on the grounds on Jan. 26.

The poll results show widespread unease about the devices, many of which can fly as high as 6,000 feet carrying video cameras or other payloads.

"In regular peoples' hands, it's easy for them to get misused," said poll respondent Sandy Gifford, a 58-year-old daycare worker in Portland, Oregon. She equated drone dangers with those posed by guns and drugs.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is months late in developing small drone regulations. A draft FAA rule, under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget, is expected to be published soon, kicking off a year or two of comment and revisions before it takes effect.

The FAA rule will cover commercial drone uses, such as photography, surveying and crop inspection, which are now mostly banned. It will not apply to hobbyists operating model aircraft under a safety code of a community-based organization. Congress granted these users an exemption from rules in 2012.

It was unclear how the rule will deal with people who buy drones online or at a big box store, rather than joining the sport through a club or hobby shop.

These non-traditional users, "don't have the same safety mindset that a modeler does," said Rich Hanson, government affairs director at the Academy of Model Aeronautics, world's largest community-based model aircraft group, with nearly 80 years of safe flying.

The AMA safety code says devices should stay below 400 feet near airports, not be flown carelessly or recklessly, and avoid all other aircraft, among other things.

Drones also have sparked fears of snooping by neighbors or law enforcement. The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed strong attitudes on both questions. Seventy-one percent said drones should not be allowed to operate over someone else's property, and 64 percent said they would not want their neighbor to have a drone.

But respondents widely supported drone use in law enforcement. Sixty-eight percent of respondents support police flying drones to solve crimes, and 62 percent support using them to deter crime.

"Where there's suspicious activity, it would help the police," said Phillip Gimino, 75, a retired engineer in Edmond, Oklahoma, who flew gas-powered radio-controlled aircraft as a kid. "But it should be limited." 

Gimino, a former gun dealer, opposes gun control laws, but said drones should be off limits to private owners until rules are in place.

The survey showed a split on other uses: 46 percent don't want news organizations using drones to gather news, while 41 percent support that use. And 49 percent think parents should be able to use drones to monitor their children, while 38 percent oppose that use.

The survey of 2,405 American adults has a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.3 percentage point

 

Ötzi the 5,300-Year-Old Iceman has 61 Tattoos

 

 

Photo credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Eurac/Samadelli/Staschitz

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Researchers have mapped all 61 tattoos of Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old glacier mummy discovered by hikers in the Ötztal Alps near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991.
Previous studies have already detected fifty or so tattoos, but because they’re difficult to spot—since his skin has darkened over time—researchers haven’t agreed on the final count. Now, an Italian team led by Marco Samadelli of EURAC Research has turned to a non-invasive imaging technique, borrowed from the art world, that can capture light at different wavelengths, ranging from infrared to the ultraviolet. Their technique revealed never-before-seen tattoos.
The 45-year-old male’s 61 tattoos, some of the world’s most ancient examples, take on the form of crosses (or plus signs) and groupings of parallel lines that look like tallies of two to four. They’re all black, and some were as long as four centimeters. Unlike modern tattooing methods that use needles, these were made by rubbing charcoal into fine incisions.
The tattoos were divided into 19 groups across his body, including groups of lines to the left and right of the spinal column, the left calf, the right instep, on the inner and outer ankle joint, and on the chest at the height of the lowermost right rib. (This last one is the newest one discovered.) Two lines lie across his left wrist, and a cross appears on the back of his right knee and next to the left Achilles tendon.
Furthermore, many of his tattoos are located on parts (such as the lower back and joints) that may have caused him pain due to degeneration or disease—suggesting how the tattoos may have been therapeutic, and not symbolic.
“Many people think that it was a kind of treatment because most of the tattoos are very close to areas where he probably suffered from pain," study co-author Albert Zink of EURAC Research tells Live Science. And many of these inked spots even seem to correspond to skin acupuncture lines, the consequence of a form of healing that originated in Asia thousands of years after Ötzi’s time.
A few years ago, researchers sequenced Ötzi’s genome and found that he had O-type blood and was lactose intolerant. Then, last summer, a team analyzing the non-human sequences on the remains found evidence of an oral pathogen involved in gum disease. Additionally, his arteries were hardened, he had healed rib fractures, a cyst-like growth on his toe, and based on his fingernails, his immune system had been subjected to multiple attacks of severe stress. He’s believed to have died from an arrowhead wound in his left shoulder.
Ötzi is housed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy. The findings were published in Journal of Cultural Heritage last week.

White House Requests $30 Million For Europa Mission

 

 

Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk

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NASA Administrator Charles Bolden held a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday to discuss the details of President Barack Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2016, which begins on October 1st. Obama is requesting $18.5 billion for NASA, up from $18 billion for FY 2015. The budget includes $30 million to develop a mission to Europa; one of Jupiter’s largest moons and one the best prospects for life in the solar system outside of Earth. The budget assumes the mission would launch in the early to mid-2020s.
“Looking to the future, we’re planning a mission to explore Jupiter’s fascinating moon Europa, selecting instruments this spring and moving toward the next phase of our work,” Administrator Bolden said at the conference.
Europa is the sixth largest moon in the solar system, with a mean radius roughly 90% of Earth’s moon. There are tectonic plates on the moon, just like on Earth. It is believed to have a vast ocean beneath its icy surface, which could contain the chemical compounds essential for life. Europa was once thought to have geysers shooting out from the ice, which would make it much easier to analyze the water, though they haven’t been located in months.
The Europa Clipper is an orbital spacecraft first conceptualized over 15 years ago. The proposed mission would image the moon’s surface, take measurements to help determine its atmospheric composition and potential habitability, and possibly even reveal what happened to those geysers. This information would be invaluable for planning future missions to the moon, especially a potential lander.
Though Obama has requested $30 million for the Europa mission, there’s no telling what the figure will look like after the budget has been approved by Congress. For FY 2015, the White House requested $15 million for a Europa mission, but Congress ultimately approved $100 million. However, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness is now chaired by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has a history of voting to reduce funding to the agency and even threw the hissy fit that caused a government shutdown in 2013. This ultimately furloughed 97% of NASA’s employees and compromised decades of data.

Space

White House Requests $30 Million For Europa Mission

February 3, 2015 | by Lisa Winter

Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk

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NASA Administrator Charles Bolden held a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday to discuss the details of President Barack Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2016, which begins on October 1st. Obama is requesting $18.5 billion for NASA, up from $18 billion for FY 2015. The budget includes $30 million to develop a mission to Europa; one of Jupiter’s largest moons and one the best prospects for life in the solar system outside of Earth. The budget assumes the mission would launch in the early to mid-2020s.
“Looking to the future, we’re planning a mission to explore Jupiter’s fascinating moon Europa, selecting instruments this spring and moving toward the next phase of our work,” Administrator Bolden said at the conference.
Europa is the sixth largest moon in the solar system, with a mean radius roughly 90% of Earth’s moon. There are tectonic plates on the moon, just like on Earth. It is believed to have a vast ocean beneath its icy surface, which could contain the chemical compounds essential for life. Europa was once thought to have geysers shooting out from the ice, which would make it much easier to analyze the water, though they haven’t been located in months.
The Europa Clipper is an orbital spacecraft first conceptualized over 15 years ago. The proposed mission would image the moon’s surface, take measurements to help determine its atmospheric composition and potential habitability, and possibly even reveal what happened to those geysers. This information would be invaluable for planning future missions to the moon, especially a potential lander.
Though Obama has requested $30 million for the Europa mission, there’s no telling what the figure will look like after the budget has been approved by Congress. For FY 2015, the White House requested $15 million for a Europa mission, but Congress ultimately approved $100 million. However, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness is now chaired by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has a history of voting to reduce funding to the agency and even threw the hissy fit that caused a government shutdown in 2013. This ultimately furloughed 97% of NASA’s employees and compromised decades of data.

White House Requests $30 Million For Europa Mission - See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/#sthash.eDHJCvOQ.dpuf

White House Requests $30 Million For Europa Mission - See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/#sthash.eDHJCvOQ.dpuf

White House Requests $30 Million For Europa Mission - See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/#sthash.eDHJCvOQ.dpuf

Ancient Solar System Sparks New Search For Alien Life

Super-Ancient Solar System Sparks New Thinking About Search For Alien Life

 

Since it was launched in 2009, NASA's planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has identified more than 1,000 exoplanets and almost 4,200 exoplanet "candidates." It's even found entire solar systems--but never one like the system it just identified some 117 light-years from Earth.
The newfound solar system consists of five rocky,  Earth-sized planets circling a star called Kepler-444, which--at 11.2 billion years of age--is more than twice as old as the Sun.
Astronomers say the Kepler-444 system may help scientists pinpoint when Earth-like planets first started forming, and may have important implications for the possibility of alien life.
"There are far-reaching implications for this discovery," Dr. Tiago Campante, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham and one of the astronomers who helped discover the new system, said in a written statement. "We now know that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the Universe's 13.8-billion-year history, which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the Galaxy."

Campante and his colleagues detected the ancient star system system by looking at data collected by Kepler over a four-year period. They used a technique called asteroseismology, in which small changes in a star's brightness indicate its mass, age, and diameter. They detected the five planets using what's called transit photometry, which involves observing a star dim slightly when planets cross its face (see an animation here).
The five planets are in tight orbits around Kepler-444, which means they're too close to fall within the so-called "Goldilocks zone," the region of space around a star that is warm enough but not too warm for a planet to have liquid water and, possibly, life.
Though Kepler-444 can't support life, Campante says it's possible there are other ancient solar systems out there that might.
"Other similarly old planets could indeed harbor life," he said in an email to The Huffington Post. "Think about a technologically advanced civilization that has a few billion years head start relative to us!"
Other scientists, who were not involved in the new research, have their doubts.
"It is not clear that planets much older than the Earth have a higher expectation of having life than the more recently formed planets," William Borucki, a space scientist at the NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif told HuffPost in an email. "The discovery of Kepler-444 is important, but whether it implies advanced life or no life will remain a mystery until our technology advances to the point that we can get a definitive answer."
Regardless of whether the discovery makes alien life more or less likely, Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research in Mountain View, Calif., hopes the discovery will help E.T. hunters home in on where to look.
"The implication of this is that worlds of all ages are out there, and the average planet is going to be billions of years older than our own," he told HuffPost in an email. "Complex, thinking beings required 4 billion years of evolution on Earth. If clever creatures always take a long time to appear, then older planets might be preferred hunting grounds for signals that could tell us someone’s out there.”
A paper describing the discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

SpaceX and Google form joint partnership

SpaceX and Google form joint partnership to bring Internet access to the world

 

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Google forge a partnership to bring Internet connectivity to the most remote places on Earth (and Mars) using satellites.
Elon Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has raised a billion dollars in a financing round with two new investors, Google and Fidelity (who will now collectively own just less than 10 percent of the company). The deal, which SpaceX confirmed on its website, will bolster SpaceX’s emerging satellite business and could help Google expand Internet access across the globe.
The funding will be used to support continued innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite manufacturing.
In its blog post, SpaceX wrote that the funding would “support continued innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite manufacturing.” However, Google’s involvement has led many to believe that the funding will primarily back SpaceX’s new satellite venture, which its founder and CEO Elon Musk announced late last week.
Musk and Google aim to connect people on Earth and Mars to the Internet!
At the time, Musk gave some indication as to the epic scope of the project that lies ahead. He seeks to create a network of hundreds of satellites that could not only connect people on Earth to the web, but also people on Mars - if and when people reach the planet. The total cost of such an audacious project has been estimated at a whopping $10 billion.
“Our focus is on creating a global communications system that would be larger than anything that has been talked about to date,” Musk told Businessweek.
That, of course, is something Google - and indeed many tech giants such as Facebook - would very much like to be part of. Over the last few years, companies like Google and Facebook have turned their attention toward connecting the unconnected to the Internet. Both companies have looked to technologies such as drones, satellites, and balloons that could bring connectivity to people living in the most remote places. While benefitting rural peoples and emerging economies this would greatly expand the companies’ already enormous reach.
But recently, Google hit a major roadblock in its efforts to connect the world when Greg Wyler, who was leading its satellite efforts, left Google to launch his own venture, OneWeb. Wyler took with him expertise in the field, but also the rights to some spectrum Google would need for the project. According to sources, Wyler even tried partnering with SpaceX himself, but the deal went sour when he refused to give up a significant portion of OneWeb to Musk.
It stands to reason that Google would be on the lookout for another, well-funded partner to help realize its vision for an expanded Internet.
Of course, just because Google and SpaceX are have delivered on moonshot projects in the past doesn’t guarantee that this endeavor will be successful. Richard Branson - an investor in Wyler’s OneWeb - has publicly doubted whether Musk can pull this off.
“Greg [Wyler] has the rights, and there isn’t space for another network - like there physically is not enough space,” he told Businessweek. “If Elon wants to get into this area, the logical thing for him would be to tie up with us, and if I were a betting man, I would say the chances of us working together rather than separately would be much higher.”

 

 

Rare 'living dinosaur' shark

Rare 'living dinosaur' shark pulled from water by Australian fishermen  

An extremely rare shark species, considered a 'living dinosaur', has been caught off the coast of Victoria to the shock and amazement of local fisherman. 

The species, known as a goblin shark, are rarely seen as they typically reside in waters near the ocean floor at around 1200 metres deep. 

As they dislike sunlight and prefer the darkness of the ocean floor, they are also known as the 'vampire shark'.

However this small specimen was captured in a net by fishermen, Lochlainn Kelly and his father Mike, just 609 metres below the water's surface.

The critter was found south east of Green Cape off the coast of Victoria, and was excitedly brought to shore at Merimbula on the far South Coast of New South Wales. 

The creepy-looking creature has a bloated pink belly, grey fins, a pointy nose and row of short, sharp teeth. 

'I wasn't freaked out, if anything I was pretty excited. I've seen photos of them before but I've never seen one before,' 22-year-old Lochlainn told SMH.

n Merimbula, the Wharf Aquarium curator Michael McMaster and Alan Scrymgeour from the Sapphire Coast Marine Discovery Centre studied the creature and were stunned by the discovery.

The goblin shark is the last known species of Mitsukurinidae, a family of sharks from 125 million years ago.

They ruled that the specimen was two to three years old as it is relatively small at just 1.2 metres in length. 

A fully grown goblin shark is between three and four metres long. 

'Their teeth are often found in underwater electrical cables,' Mr McMaster told SMH.

'A lot of fishermen have been saying that the currents are very different this year,' he added, which might have something to do with how this shark found its way into the net.

The shark is set to be sent from Wharf Aquarium to the Australian Museum in Sydney for display. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2936401/Incredible-photos-extremely-rare-shark-known-living-dinosaur-pulled-water-stunned-fishermen.html#ixzz3QcBoL6Mz
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Space Walk of Fame Museum launching new program

The Titusville-based U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum is using a $100,000 donation to help launch a new science education program.

Benefactor Joseph Williams worked as a contractor on early manned space programs and hopes his donation will raise the museum's profile and further its education goals.

Williams, who owned Titusville-area bars and restaurants after his space-industry career, has also offered to match up to $100,000 in additional donations.

Museum President Charlie Mars said Williams' generosity will benefit children throughout the area by allowing the museum to expand its education programs.
The museum is run by the U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation, which the city of Titusville created in 1992.

Organ donors gave more than 2 million years of life to sick patients

 

Hearts, kidneys and other donated organs have added more than 2 million years to the lives of the American patients who received them, according to a new analysis.

That tally, published this week by the journal JAMA Surgery, covers 25 years of organ donation in the U.S. Researchers started with 1987, the year when the United Network for Organ Sharing began keeping track of all organ transplants in the U.S.

Between Sept. 1, 1987, and Dec. 31, 2012, 533,329 patients received a donated organ (or perhaps two). Another 579,506 patients were put on the UNOS waiting list but didn’t get an organ. By comparing the outcomes for patients in both groups, the researchers were able to calculate how much longer the transplant recipients lived as a result of their new organs.

So far, that number adds up to 2,270,859 years – a “stellar accomplishment,” according to the study authors. And that number will keep on getting bigger as long as any of the transplant recipients are still alive.

More than half of those extra years – 1,372,969 of them – have been lived by people who had kidney transplants, the researchers calculated. Another 465,296 extra years have been lived by recipients of new livers, and 269,715 years have been lived by people who got new hearts. The other beneficiaries included people who received new lungs (64,575 extra years), a new pancreas (14,903 extra years), a pancreas and a kidney (79,198 extra years) and intestines (4,402 extra years).

The analysis does not include patients who had rare kinds of transplants, such as heart-pancreas transplants and liver-lung transplants, because there were too few of these procedures to be able to make good comparisons with patients who needed such transplants but didn’t get them.

The researchers also calculated the number of years gained per patient, based on the type of transplant they received. By this measure, heart transplants were the most successful, giving patients an extra 4.9 years, on average. Patients who had a combined pancreas-kidney transplant (to treat kidney failure due to type 1 diabetes) lived an average of 4.6 years longer than their counterparts who went on the wait list but didn’t get new organs. Kidney recipients averaged 4.4 extra years, liver recipients averaged 4.3 extra years, intestine recipients averaged 2.8 extra years and pancreas recipients averaged 2.6 extra years, according to the study.

These results may cause some people to rethink the benefits of organ transplants, the researchers wrote. For instance, a kidney transplant is often viewed as “merely a life-enhancing” surgery, since someone who doesn’t get a new kidney can make do on dialysis. But with a typical kidney transplant patient benefiting more than a typical liver transplant patient, the operation should be considered “a lifesaving procedure,” they wrote.

The same argument can be made for transplants involving a pancreas, which are sometimes viewed as “simply a convenient insulin replacement therapy,” they added.

All of this good news was tempered by one statistic, however: only 48% of patients sick enough to be put on the UNOS waiting list are able to get new organs, according to the study. That means more people need to be willing to donate their organs.

“The critical shortage of donors continues to hamper this field,” the researchers wrote. If more donors come forward and more transplants are performed, Americans can make good on the “tremendous potential to do even more good for humankind in the future.”

For more medical news, follow me on Twitter @LATkarenkaplan and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

 

 

50-Foot-long dinosaur discovered

50-foot-long  dinosaur species discovered in China

 

Sauropods, a category of dinosaurs that includes the Diplodocus, typically had necks that comprised up to a third of their body size. A new species of dinosaur described in a recent Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology had a neck that could stretch up to 25 feet long, which is half its body length.
The dino has been named Qijianglong (pronounced "CHI-jyang-lon"), which means "dragon of Qijiang." Its bones were discovered near China's Qijiang City by construction workers in 2006. It belongs to a family of sauropods known as mamenchisaurids. Miraculously, when the beast was unearthed, its head was still attached to its vertebrae, something extremely unusual in the paleontology world.
"It is rare to find a head and neck of a long-necked dinosaur together because the head is so small and easily detached after the animal dies," explains Tetsuto Miyashita, a University of Alberta paleontologist who, along with former master's student Lida Xing and professor Philip Currie, discovered the new species.

Also of note is that the dinosaur's vertebrae were filled with air, much like the skeletons of birds. This made their necks fairly lightweight for their massive size (and no doubt, kept them from face-planting when they were being chased by other big baddies). The vertebrae were also found to be interlocking in such a way that would have allowed the dinosaur to lift its head up and down like a construction crane, but not move it very easily from side to side.
The dragon of Qijiang is thought to have lived about 160 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period, when dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus also roamed Earth. Its unusually long neck hints at the breadth of evolutionary adaptations, says Miyashita.
"Qijianglong is a cool animal. If you imagine a big animal that is half neck, you can see that evolution can do quite extraordinary things," he said in a statement.
The paleontologist also wonders if ancient residents of China -- the only place where mamenchisaurids are found -- once stumbled upon the remains of a Qijianglong, which could have contributed to legends of dragons in the region.
"China is home to the ancient myths of dragons," said Miyashita. "I wonder if the ancient Chinese stumbled upon a skeleton of a long-necked dinosaur like Qijianglong and pictured that mythical creature."

No drones in the end zone

No drones in the end zone

 

 

A 60-mile wide 'no drone zone' will be set up around the Super Bowl on Sunday as part of the stringent security operation. 

The Federal Aviation Authority is setting up flight restrictions in several circles around Phoenix, Arizona, for the big game and have threatened to prosecute those who ignore the ban.

It follows a video campaign from the government agency to make sure no drones hover anywhere near the action at the University of Phoenix stadium.

The Department of Homeland Security has also announced it will be scanning social media in a bid to uncover any potential threats which may arise.

Within 10 miles of the stadium no aircraft - including media banners and blimps - will be allowed. 

According to the FAA a second outer ring will encompass the airspace between 10 and 30 miles from the stadium. 

General aviation aircraft will be able to operate there provided they have filed flight plans, are using transponders that broadcast specific information about their aircraft

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2933618/No-drones-end-zone-FAA-imposes-60-mile-wide-ban-unmanned-aircraft-Super-Bowl.html#ixzz3QPhKTya2