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Thursday, November 14, 2013

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Leech Toxins, Snake Venom: How Nature's 'Poisons' Help People

"Poisons can be bad for some things and good for others, including humans," said Michael Novacek, senior vice president of the American Museum of Natural History, at an opening of a new poison-themed exhibition Tuesday (Nov. 12).

3.5-Billion-Year-Old Fossil Microbial Community Found

Scientists have found fossil evidence of ancient microbial communities that lived 3.5 billion years ago. You've got a 3.5-billion-year-old ecosystem," said study co-author Robert Hazen, an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. The new find reveals that a scant 1 billion years after Earth's origin, complex microbial communities that clung to sediments along the windswept seashore had already begun harvesting energy from sunlight, rather than the rocks. Though chemical evidence of carbon-based life forms, such as isotopes (or different forms) of carbon, reveal that life existed on early Earth, scientists have discovered a few controversial traces of its existence.

Carl Sagan Archive Opens at U.S. Library of Congress

WASHINGTON — The legacy of the famed astrobiologist and science communicator Carl Sagan is now available to people around the world. The new Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive opened to the public Tuesday (Nov. 12) during a celebration of Sagan's life here at the Library of Congress. The archive is composed of 1,705 boxes of material that once belonged to Sagan and his widow, Ann Druyan. MacFarlane — the creator of the animated TV show "Family Guy" and producer of the new "Cosmos" (a series originally hosted by Sagan) — provided money, making it possible for the Library of Congress to complete the archive.

Comet ISON Observing Tips: Choosing the Right Binoculars or Telescope

With excitement about the upcoming solar flyby of Comet ISON now approaching a fever pitch, I recently thought about a similar scenario that took place back in 1985 with the approach of Halley's Comet. One Sunday in the magazine supplement of my local newspaper, an ad caught my eye for a department store telescope, complete with a king-size image of a comet hovering over the instrument. "So," the ad continued, "If you don't want to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, you are going to have to 'trap it.'" And what better way to do so than with the telescope pictured in the ad, offering up to 500 times magnification power and claiming to be a "wonderful scientific learning tool." [Photos of Halley's Comet through History] So if you're among those who are thinking about buying a telescope simply to get a view of Comet ISON — which is visible in binoculars now but could put on an even better show in December if it survives its Nov. 28 solar encounter, which will bring the icy wanderer within just 730,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — take a few deep breaths and read what I have to say:

Why the US Will Destroy, Not Sell, Its Ivory Stockpile

Today the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) called on other governments to follow the United States' lead and crush or burn their ivory stockpiles, too. "Right now, Africa is hemorrhaging elephants," Patrick Bergin, CEO of the African Wildlife Foundation, said in a statement. "The only way to staunch the movement of illegal ivory is to wipe out the demand, and that begins with destroying stockpiles and stopping trade." The AWF is also urging countries to go a step further and halt their domestic ivory trade until all elephant populations are no longer threatened.

Massive Antarctic Iceberg Sets Sail

After lingering in its birthing bay for nearly six months, an Antarctic iceberg the size of Singapore is finally heading out to sea. Strong winds blowing off the continent are pushing the giant floe away from its parent, the giant Pine Island Glacier, and the warming Southern Hemisphere's has melted the thick winter sea ice that held the block in place since July, said Grant Bigg, an ocean modeler at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The latest satellite images show several kilometers (a couple of miles) of open water between the iceberg and the glacier, Bigg told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. The enormous ice block took more than two years to calve (break off) from Pine Island Glacier.

What America's Forests Looked Like Before Europeans Arrived

The fossil site is a muddy layer packed with leaves from hardwood trees that lived more than 300 years ago along Conestoga Creek in Lancaster County, Pa. The muck was laid down before one of Pennsylvania's 10,000 mill dams, called Denlinger's Mill, was built nearby, damming the stream and burying the mud and leaves in sediment. The same spot is now home to mostly box elder and sugar maple trees, said Sara Elliott, the study's lead author and a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology. "This is a very unusual opportunity to compare modern and fossil forest assemblages," Elliott told LiveScience. Other kinds of trees found in the fossil layer that have since vanished from North America include the American chestnut, which was attacked by an imported fungal disease called the chestnut blight.

Who Killed JFK? TV Show Looks at New Evidence

Nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, debate and conspiracy theories linger over how he was killed, and who exactly was behind it. In a new television special on PBS' science documentary show "NOVA," a team of experts look at the assassination in a new light, in some cases casting doubt on the "official story" of the president's murder by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. One of these, the so-called "magic bullet," also allegedly caused serious injuries to Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting in the front seat of the president's convertible.

New 'H6N1' Bird Flu Reported in Taiwan

A 20-year-old woman in Taiwan is the first person known to be infected with a strain of bird flu called H6N1, according to a new report of the case. Of the 125 cases of flu reported in Taiwan since the woman became ill, none were caused by H6N1. H6N1 is the latest bird flu virus to hop over to humans. The new finding "shows the unpredictability of influenza viruses in human populations," the researchers, from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, wrote in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

Asthma May Lengthen Time to Get Pregnant

Getting pregnant may take longer for women with asthma, a new study from Denmark suggests. Researchers analyzed information from more than 15,000 women in Denmark, including 950 who had asthma. When asked whether they had ever spent more than a year trying to become pregnant, 27 percent of women with asthma said yes, compared to 21 percent of women without asthma. Women were particularly likely to experience a delay in pregnancy if they had untreated asthma, or if they had asthma and were over age 30.

See Two Comets and Planet Mercury in Pre-Dawn Sky This Week

This week in the hour before sunrise early morning stargazers will get a double treat: the planet Mercury and two special comets. The best time to spot Mercury is about half an hour before sunrise. ISON is not currently visible to the naked eye, but some observers report that it is brightening well. This week, skywatching experts reported that Comet ISON is now visible through binoculars, as well as telescopes.

Fast Food: Meals Have More Calories Than You Think

BOSTON – People eating at fast food restaurants aren't very good at estimating how many calories are in their meals, particularly if they're eating at Subway, a new study suggests. For the study, researchers queried more than 3,000 customers, including adults, teenagers and parents with young children, at such fast food chains in New England, such as McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Wendy's, KFC and Dunkin' Donuts. Customers were asked how many calories they thought were in their meal (or, if they were parents, in their children's meals), and researchers viewed receipts to verify what was purchased. About two-thirds of customers thought there were fewer calories in their meal than there actually were, according to the study presented here at the American Public Health Association.

Music Could Track Human Migrations

Music could be used to track human migration patterns over history, new research suggests. That conclusion, described Tuesday (Nov. 12) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, came from examining a genetic analysis of indigenous populations in Taiwan along with the people's folk music. Populations with more similar folk music also tended to be more closely related, the researchers found. Scientists propose that the Austronesian-speaking people who populate the Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to the Philippines to Hawaii, originally set sail from Taiwan between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.

Bone and Bracelets Found in Roman Child's Coffin

Last month, treasure hunters equipped with metal detectors led archaeologists to the rare lead coffin buried in a field in Warwickshire. The funerary box was child-sized, and researchers think it is likely more than 1,600 years old, dating back to the Roman occupation of Britain. A crew with a group called Archaeology Warwickshire opened the coffin on Monday (Nov. 11) and found fragmentary skeletal remains and two bracelets made of jet, a dark black gemstone. "Finding the two jet bangles was a surprise," Stuart Palmer, the business manager for Archaeology Warwickshire said in a statement.

How NASA Will Use 3D Printers in Space (Video)

Instead, they can use a newly arrived 3D printer to fabricate the tools and materials they need. "The 3D printer that we're going to fly on space station will actually be the first-ever 3D printer in space," Niki Werkheiser, 3D Print project manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said in a video about the space station 3D printer that posted online Oct. 30. "It is the first step toward [the 'Star Trek' replicator]," Werkheiser added, referring to the machine in the science-fiction franchise capable of creating meals and spare parts. The 3D printer headed to the space station in August 2014 — a joint project between NASA Marshall and the California-based company Made in Space — would be limited to parts only, rather than edible objects.

Typhoon Haiyan Aftermath: How Technology Can Help

In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, aid workers are stymied by overwhelming obstacles: lack of fuel for relief vehicles, near-total absence of food, water and shelter, and social chaos on an apocalyptic scale. While technology can't prevent storms like Haiyan, there are some clever devices that could alleviate the suffering of survivors and provide lifesaving access to clean drinking water and hot food. The German Solar Energy Foundation (Stiftung Solarenergie) has launched a program to provide solar lamps to Tacloban, Ormoc and other hard-hit areas of the Philippines. Watts of Love, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization, is committed to sending 10,000 solar lamps to the Philippines by Christmas.

How Many Friends Can Your Brain Handle?

SAN DIEGO — Being a social butterfly just might change your brain: In people with a large network of friends and excellent social skills, certain brain regions are bigger and better connected than in people with fewer friends, a new study finds. The research, presented here Tuesday (Nov. 12) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggests a connection between social interactions and brain structure. "We're interested in how your brain is able to allow you to navigate in complex social environments," study researcher MaryAnn Noonan, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, in England, said at a news conference.

1st-Century Roots of 'Little Red Riding Hood' Found

One researcher in the United Kingdom tested this analogy quite literally, using analytical models that are typically used to study the relationships between species to create an evolutionary tree for "Little Red Riding Hood" and its cousins. "This is rather like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into distinct species," Durham University anthropologist Jamie Tehrani explained in a statement. Tehrani found that "Little Red Riding Hood" likely branched off 1,000 years ago from an ancestral story that has its roots in the first century A.D. [5 Real-Life Examples of Fairy Tales Coming True] "Little Red Riding Hood" is well known to Westerners thanks to the Brothers Grimm.

E-cigarettes and Hookahs Rise in Teen Popularity

Unconventional tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes and hookahs are becoming more popular among U.S. teens, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2012, 1.1 percent of middle school students reported using e-cigarettes, up from 0.6 percent in 2011. Among high school students, e-cigarette use rose from 1.5 percent to 2.8 percent, and hookah use increased from 4.1 percent to 5.4 percent over the same period. The reason for the rise is not known, but it could be due to an increase in marketing and availability of electronic cigarettes and hookahs, as well as the perception that the products are "safer" than cigarettes, the CDC said.

Hydrogen phone chargers to keep Africans connected when power runs short

By Wendell Roelf CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - African smartphone users will soon have an alternative means to get round the power shortages afflicting much of the world's poorest continent - a portable charger that relies on hydrogen fuel cells. British company Intelligent Energy plans to roll out 1 million of the new chargers in mid-December, mainly in Nigeria and South Africa, after successfully testing them in Nigeria over the last five months, its consumer electronics managing director, Amar Samra, said. "In emerging markets where the grids are not reliable and people are using (mobile phones) as a primary device, it is mission critical; The chargers are designed to back up the spread of smartphones and tablets across countries where cellphones have already helped to transform lives and businesses.

Ocean Glow Stick: Sea Worm Emits Strange Blue Glow

One common sea worm has a rather uncommon trick: Chaeteopterus variopedatus – also known as the parchment tube worm for the paperlike tubes it builds for itself and lives within throughout its life — secretes a bioluminescent mucus that makes it glow blue. Its glow sets it apart from other tube worms, most of whichdon't glow, and other shallow water organisms, which typically emit green light, not blue. "Shallow water is much more complex than deep water from a physical standpoint, and green is what organisms see best," Dimitri Deheyn, a biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography involved in the research, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

NASA Maps to Aid Super Typhoon Haiyan Disaster Relief

NASA scientists have used satellite images to create detailed maps of the devastation in the Philippines from Super Typhoon Haiyan in order to help disaster relief efforts by recovery crews. Super Typhoon Haiyan — which struck the island nation on Nov. 8 — was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. produced the damage maps in order to depict the hardest hit regions of the country, NASA officials wrote in a news release. JPL's ARIA (Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis) team created the 24.9 by 31 mile (40 by 50 kilometers) map using data from the Italian Space Agency's COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation. NASA scientists created the damage map by using "a prototype algorithm to rapidly detect surface changes caused by natural or human-produced damage," space agency officials wrote in a release.

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Wednesday, November 13, 2013

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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Deadly, Rare Tropical Cyclone Hits Somalia

A slow-moving tropical storm pounded the Somalia coast this weekend, a rare hit for the war-torn country that killed more than 100 people and devastated coastal communities. The unnamed tropical storm made landfall on Sunday (Nov. 10) north of Eyl in the Puntland state, a semiautonomous region that typically receives less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain every year. Weak storms such as Cyclone 3A can wreak havoc along the arid African coast because they trigger flash floods, said Amato Evan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. "Even a very weak storm can cause huge damage and loss of life in this area," Evan told LiveScience.

Northern Lights Dance Over Sweden in Stunning Time-Lapse (Video)

From the frigid northern edge of Sweden, videographer Chad Blakley has captured amazing footage this fall of the northern lights, which have been stimulated by a recent uptick in solar activity. Blakley shot his latest time-lapse northern lights video on Nov. 9 from Abisko National Park, which is well inside the Arctic Circle in Lapland, the northernmost province in Sweden. "The auroras started almost immediately after the sun went down and danced overhead all night long," Blakley told SPACE.com in an email. Solar storms can send high-speed charged particles crashing into Earth's magnetic field, which sparks the geomagnetic storms responsible for the northern lights, also called the aurora borealis.

Saturn, Earth Shine in Amazing New Photo by NASA Probe

A NASA spacecraft has revealed an unprecedented view of Saturn from space, showing the entire gas giant backlit by the sun with several of its moons and all but one of its rings, as Earth, Venus and Mars all appear as pinpricks light in the background. The spectacular image, unveiled Tuesday (Nov. 12), is actually a mosaic of 141 wide-angle images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft taken in natural color, which mimics how human eyes might see the ringed planet. The pictures that make up the mosaic were snapped on July 19, 2013 — the same day that Cassini took advantage of a rare opportunity to photograph Earth without interference from the sun, which was totally eclipsed by Saturn at the time. "In this one magnificent view, Cassini has delivered to us a universe of marvels," Carolyn Porco, who leads Cassini's imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said of the new image in a statement from NASA. "And it did so on a day people all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being alive on a pale blue dot."

Mars Rover Curiosity Recovers from Software Glitch

NASA's Curiosity rover has bounced back from a glitch that put the 1-ton robot into a protective "safe mode" for three days over the weekend. The car-size Curiosity rover went into safe mode Thursday (Nov. 7), a few hours after receiving a software update from its handlers on Earth. But mission engineers have identified and fixed the problem, allowing Curiosity to resume normal operations on Sunday (Nov. 10), NASA officials said. "We returned to normal engineering operations," Rajeev Joshi, a mission software and systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Tuesday (Nov. 12).

Too Aware? The Downside of Mindfulness Revealed

"Mindfulness" is the watchword of gurus and lifestyle coaches everywhere. Automatic processes lead to the formation of habits — both good and bad, said study researcher Chelsea Stillman, a doctoral student in psychology at the Georgetown University Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. Next, each participant completed one of two implicit learning tasks. If they automatically caught on to this hidden warning, their reaction times would be faster, indicating implicit learning.

Scientists: Oldest big cat fossil found in Tibet

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Scientists have unearthed the oldest big cat fossil yet, suggesting the predator — similar to a snow leopard — evolved in Asia and spread out.

No, Stuxnet Did Not Infect the International Space Station

Did the Stuxnet cyberweapon infect the International Space Station? "The American-made Stuxnet virus has infected the International Space Station," said ExtremeTech. "Stuxnet, America's Nuclear Plant-Attacking Virus, Has Apparently Infected the International Space Station," trumpeted Vice. "Stuxnet, gone rogue, hit Russian nuke plant, space station," asserted the Times of Israel.

Ouch! Hermaphrodite Sea Slug Stabs Mate in Head During Sex

Cats may bite, and geese may have barbed penises, but one newly described hermaphroditic sea slug has taken violent animal sex to a new level by stabbing its mates in the head. 1, is a small sea slug found off the northeast coast of Australia. A simultaneous hermaphrodite, it has both male and female reproductive organs that it uses simultaneously during sex. This stabbing behavior, known as traumatic secretion transfer, is fairly common amongst hermaphroditic sea slugs, and does not actually traumatize the slug — the term trauma refers to the Greek translation as "wound." The behavior is well documented, but still not very well understood.

Oldest Big Cat Fossils Discovered in Tibet

The fossils, which were discovered on the Tibetan plateau, belong to a sister species of the snow leopard that prowls the Himalayan region today, said study co-author Zhijie Jack Tseng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In addition, the cat skull came from a region where other fossils of mega-creatures have been found, suggesting perhaps this is the region where Pleistocene megafauna, including "big furry guys" such as wooly mammoths and rhinos, evolved, Meachen said.

Incoming comet ISON heading for close encounter with sun

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A comet is heading for a close encounter with the sun later this month, and if it is not vaporized or torn apart, it should be visible to the naked eye in December. Comet ISON is expected to pass just about 621,000 miles (1 million km) from the sun's surface on November 28. Scientists are not sure how ISON will hold up. As it blasts around the sun, traveling at 234 miles per second (377 km per second) the comet will be heated to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees C), hot enough to vaporize not just ice in the comet's body, but also rock and metal.

Home HPV Test May Help Detect Early Cervical Cancer

BOSTON — Home tests for the human papillomavirus (HPV) may help detect cervical cancer in women who would not otherwise be screened by a doctor, a new study suggests. In the study, researchers mailed home HPV test kits to 155 women ages 30 to 64 in North Carolina. (Pap smears are recommended every three years as a way to screen for cervical cancer, which can be caused by HPV.) About 12 percent of women were infected with high-risk HPV types that increase the risk of cervical cancer, said study researcher Andrea Des Marais, of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, who presented the findings this week here at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

Area 51 Declassified: Documents Reveal Cold War 'Hide-and-Seek'

Newly declassified documents reveal more detail about past use of the mysterious Nevada test site known as Area 51 and the concern for maintaining secrecy about the work done at the facility. The area was photographed with American reconnaissance assets to better assess what the Soviet Union's spy satellites might be able to discern. The documents also detail the debate over the possible release of a photograph "inadvertently" taken of the secret facility by NASA astronauts aboard the Skylab space station in 1974. More than 60 declassified documents in an Area 51 file were posted on the Internet by the National Security Archive late last month, compiled and edited by archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson.

Estrogen May Shield Memories from Stress After Menopause

SAN DIEGO — Menopause comes with its share of unpleasant side effects, which may include memory loss. The hormone estrogen appears to protect against the effects of stress and associated memory loss in aging women. Now, it seems that estrogen replacement therapy in postmenopausal women could prevent memory loss associated with stress, according to findings presented here Sunday (Nov. 10) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. "Women who are going through menopause report feeling their memory is getting worse, though the reports are anecdotal," said study researcher Alexandra Ycaza of the University of Southern California.

Missing Piece of Long-Neck Dinosaur Finally Discovered

DENVER — A small roadside quarry west of Denver, site of some of the infamous "Bone Wars" of the 19th century, has revealed a new treasure: the snout of the long-necked dinosaur Apatosaurus ajax. The specimen, nicknamed Kevin, is the first Apatosaurus ajax muzzle ever found, and the discovery is likely to help paleontologists understand how A. ajax is related to other Apatosaurus kin, said Matthew Mossbrucker, the director of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Morrison, Colo., and the paleontologist who first identified the bones. "It's the finest Apatosaurus snout on the planet," Mossbrucker told LiveScience at his office, tucked away in a corner next door to the room where he and volunteers have been painstakingly carving Kevin's bones out of sandstone for two years. The dinosaur species was discovered first by naturalist Arthur Lakes in the foothills of Colorado, along a ridgeline now visible from Mossbrucker's office.

5 Ways Our Cavemen Instincts Get the Best of Us

"Like it or not, we evolved to be sweaty, fat bipeds that are furless and big brained," Harvard evolutionary biologist Jason Lieberman said during a public lecture on Nov. 6 here at the American Museum of Natural History. We evolved to be physically active, but we also evolved to be lazy," said Lieberman, who discussed the consequences of living with a Stone Age body in a Space Age world. During the talk, Lieberman described some of the ways that instincts humans inherited from the Stone Age — also known as the Paleolithic Period, stretching from between 2.6 million to about 10,000 years ago — now conflict with modern life and contribute to increasingly common lifestyle-induced diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

One World Trade Center: A Look at the World's Tallest Things

In a hotly anticipated decision, a blue-ribbon panel of experts Tuesday (Nov. 12) declared that One World Trade Center in New York City is the tallest building in the United States. The Height Committee of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ruled that the new structure is taller than Chicago's Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower). The spat was initiated when some skyscraper fans complained that One World Trade Center does not rise to the expected height of 1,776 feet (541 meters), but cheats by using a rooftop needle to elevate its profile above the Willis Tower, which stands at 1,451 feet (442 m).

Hydrogen phone chargers to keep Africans connected when power runs short

SES suffers launch delay to satellite ASTRA 5B

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - SES, one of the world's largest commercial satellite operators, said on Wednesday that the planned launch of one of its satellites had been delayed until January. SES aimed to launch its ASTRA 5B satellite on board the Ariane 5 booster from Kourou in French Guiana on December 6. The satellite is to serve the European market. The delay was due to adjustments required for a different satellite to be launched on the same rocket for Spain's HISPASAT. Previous satellite launch delays have led SES to trim its guidance for 2013. ...

EasyJet, Airbus team create world's first man-made ash cloud

The world's first man-made ash cloud has been created by a team led by airline easyJet and planemaker Airbus to test how passenger aircraft cope with volcanic blasts such as the 2010 Icelandic eruption. The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano shut down much of Europe's airspace for six days, affecting more than 10 million people and costing $1.7 billion. An Airbus A400M test plane on Wednesday dispersed one tonne of ash over the Bay of Biscay, off western France, creating conditions similar to that of the 2010 eruption, said the team, which also included Norwegian sensor maker Nicarnica Aviation. The ash used in the test was from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, collected and stored by scientists in Reykjavik.

Rarely Seen 'Asian Unicorn' Caught on Camera

One of the most secretive creatures on Earth — the saola — has been photographed in Vietnam for the first time in 15 years. Scientists first discovered the saola in 1992 in Vietnam near the country's border with Laos. A lone saola was documented this past September by a camera trap set up in the Central Annamite Mountains by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Vietnamese wildlife officials. "When our team first looked at the photos we couldn't believe our eyes," Van Ngoc Thinh, head of the WWF in Vietnam, said in a statement.

Crazy Cretaceous Find: Intersex Crabs

DENVER — It's a crustacean conundrum: Why did some Cretaceous crabs sport both male and female characteristics? The answer is unknown, but new fossil discoveries reveal that intersex crabs were a small but persistent part of the population in South Dakota during the Cretaceous Period — and a parasitic barnacle may have been to blame. Gale Bishop, an emeritus professor at Georgia Southern University, excavated these specimens throughout the 1970s; the crabby collection now belongs to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Guts of Superfast Black Hole Jets Revealed

Astronomers have taken an unprecedented look at the superenergetic jets blasted out by black holes, and thus have answered a key question about the composition of these mysterious beams. "We've known for a long time that jets contain electrons but haven't got an overall negative charge, so there must be something positively charged in them, too," study co-author James Miller-Jones, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, said in a statement. "Since our results found nickel and iron in these jets, we now know ordinary matter must be providing the positive charge." The researchers took the measure of 4U1630-47, a black-hole candidate just a few times more massive than the sun.

Ancient Atlantic Seawater Twice As Salty As Today's Oceans

When scientists drilled deep into the center of a huge crater beneath the Chesapeake Bay, they discovered ancient seawater that had been locked up in sediments since the early Cretaceous Period. Researchers examined the saltiness, or salinity, of water retrieved from drilled cores deep under Chesapeake Bay— a sprawling estuary bordered by Maryland and Virginia — and determined that the briny samples dated back to when the North Atlantic was transitioning from being a closed basin to the wide, open ocean we see today. The findings offer a glimpse into the evolution of the North Atlantic Ocean, which formed approximately 130 million years ago, when the ancient supercontinent Pangaea began drifting apart, said study lead author Ward Sanford, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Reston, Va. [The World's Biggest Oceans and Seas] "This is really the first solid look at the North Atlantic at the time it was opening, to see how that salinity was changing over time," Sanford told LiveScience.

Philippines Relief: The Emerging Science of Why We Give

In a recent study led by scientists at Stanford University, participants were more likely to donate all or part of $15 they were provided in the study when they saw head shots of orphans or refugees rather than silhouettes.

'Rare' Atom Finding May Advance Quantum Computers

Quantum computers could crack codes and run more complex simulations than current machines, but actually building one is hard to do. The bits that store this complex data don't last long, because they are made of single atoms that get knocked around by stray electrons and photons in the environment. They found a way to get the bits to last long enough to do computations with, using the magnetic properties of a rare earth element called holmium and the symmetry of platinum. The experiment, detailed in tomorrow's (Nov. 14) issue of the journal Nature, is an important step in creating quantum computers and making quantum memory useful.

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