|  Darwin's 'Strangest Animals' Finally Placed on Family Tree  | The origins of two wacky beasts that Darwin dubbed the "strangest animals ever discovered" had remained a mystery for some 180 years. The new study reveals that these ungulates (hooved animals) native to South America descended from an ancient group of mammals called the condylarths — a sister group to the perissodactyls, which includes horses, tapirs and rhinos. Charles Darwin first collected the two species, in the genuses Macrauchenia and Toxodon, during his South American voyage on a ship called the Beagle. Famed for first postulating evolution, Darwin "soon recognized that these gigantic mammals might provide clues to his understanding of species formation," Porter told Live Science.
| Read More » Mystery of Darwin's strange South American mammals solved  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - To 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin, they were the strangest animals yet discovered, one looking like a hybrid of a hippo, rhino and rodent and another resembling a humpless camel with an elephant's trunk. Ever since Darwin first collected their fossils about 180 years ago, scientists had been baffled about where these odd South American beasts that went extinct just 10,000 years ago fit on the mammal family tree. Researchers said on Wednesday a sophisticated biochemical analysis of bone collagen extracted from fossils of the two mammals, Toxodon and Macrauchenia, demonstrated that they were related to the group that includes horses, tapirs and rhinos. Some scientists previously thought the two herbivorous mammals, the last of a successful group called South American ungulates, were related to mammals of African origin like elephants and aardvarks or other South American mammals like armadillos and sloths.
| Read More » Bug-Eyed Catfish Named for Greedo in 'Star Wars'  | A catfish with bulging eyes has been named after Greedo, the cute "Star Wars" character with similar bulbous eyes, a tapirlike snout and funky-green skin. Researchers discovered the armored catfish with a sucker mouth, now called Peckoltia greedoi, along Brazil's Gurupi River in 1998. Jonathan Armbruster, biological sciences professor and curator of fishes at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History, realized Greedo was a fitting name after he and colleagues were examining a specimen of the species that was collected in 2005. One of his colleagues in the department of biological sciences, Chris Hamilton, "looked at the specimen and said, 'that looks like that guy from "Star Wars,'" Armbruster said in a statement.
| Read More » How to Safely Observe the Total Solar Eclipse This Week  | A spectacular solar eclipse will be visible in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa on Friday (March 20), but if you live in those visibility areas, make sure you're prepared to practice safe eclipse viewing before you head outside. Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.
| Read More » Hidden Channels Beneath East Antarctica Could Cause Massive Melt  | A glacier the size of California in East Antarctica is in danger of melting away, which could lead to an extreme thaw increases sea levels by about 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) worldwide if the glacier vanishes, a new study finds. Researchers have found two seafloor channels underneath the floating ice shelf of Totten Glacier in East Antarctica. The channels may let the warmest waters near the glacier to enter beneath the floating ice shelf, causing the rapid thinning of the ice shelf observed to date, the scientists said. As the ice shelf thins, the point where the glacier starts to float will retreat, raising the sea level, and exposing more ice to the ocean, said the study's lead author, Jamin Greenbaum, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics.
| Read More » Could a Cyanide-Laced Letter Have Harmed Obama? A package that was sent to the White House and tested positive for traces of cyanide likely would not have harmed anyone, scientists say. Though cyanide is a deadly poison, this particular attack was unlikely to have sickened anyone, said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical-weapons expert with SecureBio, a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) security firm based in the United Kingdom. That's because the form the cyanide likely came in — a white, powdery substance called sodium cyanide — typically must be ingested to cause harm, de Bretton-Gordon said. People handling mail at the White House probably wear gloves and follow strict protocols when coming into contact with packages, so they would be unlikely to have the necessary exposure to cause harm, he added. Read More » Oddball 'Crystal' Survived Crash to Earth Inside Meteorite  | A bizarre crystal-like mineral recently found in a meteorite that crashed to Earth perhaps 15,000 years ago adds more support for the idea that the fragile structure can survive in nature. The newfound mineral is called a "quasicrystal" because it resembles a crystal, but the atoms are not arranged as regularly as they are in real crystals. The quasicrystal hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite that zipped from space through Earth's atmosphere and crashed to the ground. "The difference between crystals and quasicrystals can be visualized by imagining a tiled floor," said according to a statement by Princeton University in a press release.
| Read More » Rocket Launch Is a Blast for First-Timer  | On Thursday night, for the first time in my life, I got to watch a multi-ton rocket — literally a well-engineered bomb, to which some very smart people strapped a billion dollar science experiment — claw its way through the atmosphere with such force that it countered the pull of Earth's gravity and reached the region called outer space. The launch took place right on schedule at 10:44 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 12 (0244 March 13 GMT), from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, sending NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission on its way into space.
| Read More » Gem Engraved with Goddess' Image Found Near King Herod's Mausoleum A translucent orange gem engraved with an image of a goddess of hunting has been found near a mausoleum built by Herod the Great, the king of Judea who ruled not long before the time of Jesus. Researchers say the ring and gem were likely worn by a Roman soldier who was stationed at the site long after Herod's death. Herod, who lived from 73 B.C. to 4 B.C., ruled as king of Judea, with support from the Roman Empire. He constructed a palace complex known as the Herodium about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) south of Jerusalem. Read More » 9-Foot 'Butcher Crocodile' Likely Ruled Before Dinosaurs  | A 9-foot-tall beast with bladelike teeth once stalked the warm and wet environs of what is now North Carolina some 230 million years ago, before dinosaurs came onto the scene there, scientists have found. They named it Carnufex, meaning "butcher" in Latin, because of its long skull, which resembles a knife, and its bladelike teeth, which it likely used to slice flesh off the bones of prey, said lead study author Lindsay Zanno, of NC State University and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. The large creature reveals not only one of the earliest crocodylomorphs, a group that includes today's crocodiles and their close relatives, but also highlights the diversity of top predators of the time. Zanno and her colleagues discovered parts of the skull, spine and arm bone of the creature while digging in the Pekin Formation in Chatham County, North Carolina.
| Read More » Rare Copy of Old Testament Reunited with 'Twin' in Israel  | After its publication in 1677, the book bounced among scholars, landed in Egypt and finally fell into the hands of Micha Shagrir, an Israeli film producer and director. Shagrir died in February, but his family recently donated the text to the University of Haifa in northern Israel, which already has a near-duplicate copy of the rare text in its collection, according to a statement from the university. The Old Testament is also known as the Tanakh, an acronym that includes the Torah (the five books of Moses), Nevi'im (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings) — or TaNaKh. However, the newfound Tanakh wouldn't have graced synagogues, said Yossi Ziegler, academic director of the University of Haifa's Younes and Soraya Nazarian Library.
| Read More » Total Solar Eclipse on Friday: How to Watch It Live Online  | Even though most people around the world won't be able to see Friday's total solar eclipse in person, anyone with an Internet connection can watch it live online thanks to two webcasts featuring the cosmic event. The March 20 total solar eclipse — the first since November 2013 — will make the daytime sky go dark for people in the Faroe Islands and parts of the North Atlantic. You can watch the 2.5-hour-long solar eclipse webcast through the Slooh website starting at 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT) on March 20. "Nothing — and I mean absolutely nothing in nature — is as powerful and spectacular as the totality of a solar eclipse," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement.
| Read More » Energy Drinks Raise Blood Pressure, Study Finds Energy drinks might give you some pep — but they might also be priming you for heart problems, a new study finds. The effect was far more prominent in young adults who did not consume caffeine regularly, according to the study, presented March 14 at an American College of Cardiology meeting in San Diego. In this study, the research team — led by Dr. Anna Svatikova, a cardiovascular-diseases fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — gave a can of a commercially available energy drink to 25 healthy volunteers, whose ages ranged from 19 to 40. The researchers measured the participants' heart rate and blood pressure before and after the drinks. Read More » Hear That? Orangutans Use Hands to Amplify Calls  | When danger nears, orangutans warn their group with alarm calls, and new research shows that the animals sometimes cup their hands around their muzzles, making these calls louder and deeper. "Orangutans are the only known primate besides humans to modify and enhance sound production through external manipulation," said one of the study's researchers, Adriano Lameira, a postdoctoral fellow of evolutionary anthropology at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Researchers are used to hearing such alarm calls — sometimes called a "kiss-squeak call" — as they walk through the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo to study orangutans. The calls could be the orangutans' way of telling predators, "Don't try to sneak up on me because I've already caught you," said the study's lead researcher, Bart de Boer, a professor of language evolution at Vrije Universiteit Brussels.
| Read More » This Winter Was Warmest on Record  | This winter may have brought a deep freeze to much of the northeastern United States — including record-breaking snowfall in Boston — but it was the planet's warmest winter on record, climate scientists announced yesterday (March 18).
| Read More » Moon Crater from Giant Lunar Crash in 2013 Finally Found (Video)  | A moon-orbiting NASA spacecraft has spotted the crater produced by one of the most powerful explosions ever observed on the lunar surface. Researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, caught the flash on camera at the time. They asked the team working with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) instrument, which flies aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe (LRO), to hunt down the new hole in the ground. "They predicted how big [the crater] was going to be based on the energy, but this was all a model," LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson, of Arizona State University, said in the NASA video about the newfound moon crater.
| Read More » Dude, why is my mushroom glowing? Scientists have the answer By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If you think you see a glowing mushroom, you might not be having a psychedelic hallucination. Some mushrooms indeed are bioluminescent, including one that sprouts among decaying leaves at the base of young palm trees in Brazilian coconut forests. Researchers said on Thursday that experiments in Brazil involving the big, yellow mushroom called "flor de coco," meaning coconut flower, showed its nighttime bioluminescence attracted insects and other creatures that could later spread its spores around the forest. "The answer appears to be that fungi make light so they are noticed by insects who can help the fungus colonize new habitats." Geneticist and molecular biologist Jay Dunlap of Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine said bioluminescence had independently evolved many times in such diverse life forms as bacteria, fungi, insects and fish. Read More » Dude, why is my mushroom glowing? Scientists have the answer  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If you think you see a glowing mushroom, you might not be having a psychedelic hallucination. Some mushrooms indeed are bioluminescent, including one that sprouts among decaying leaves at the base of young palm trees in Brazilian coconut forests. Researchers said on Thursday that experiments in Brazil involving the big, yellow mushroom called "flor de coco," meaning coconut flower, showed its nighttime bioluminescence attracted insects and other creatures that could later spread its spores around the forest. "The answer appears to be that fungi make light so they are noticed by insects who can help the fungus colonize new habitats." Geneticist and molecular biologist Jay Dunlap of Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine said bioluminescence had independently evolved many times in such diverse life forms as bacteria, fungi, insects and fish.
| Read More » Supernovas Spawned Space Dust for Ancient Galaxies, Study Finds  | Giant dust clouds seen in the early universe may have been created by exploding stars, a discovery that suggests supernovas were prolific space dust factories for ancient galaxies, scientists say. "One of the most surprising things is that we were not expecting to see this at all," Lau said.
| Read More » Mystery of the 'Vampire Crabs' Solved The crabs come from the island of Java in Indonesia, according to the scientists who officially describe the species in a new report. People in the aquarium trade have known of the two crab species described in the report for at least a decade, said Peter Ng, a biology professor at the National University of Singapore and an author of the report. Read More » | |
