Jupiter + Fireball

Jupiter's had it tough lately: Almost a year after an asteroid impact had left a dark scar on the planet, another fireball was spotted smacking the planet's bottom. In the picture above, taken from Australia, the Earth-size fireball appears as a bright spot at right.

On June 3 backyard astronomers in both Australia and the Philippines saw the white flash—evidence of an as yet unidentified object slamming into Jupiter.

TRAPPIST Sees a Tarantula

The star-spangled swirls of the Tarantula Nebula feature in one of the first pictures, released June 8, from a new remote control telescope.

TRAPPIST, or the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, sits at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla site in northern Chile. But it's operated from a control room in Liège, Belgium—about 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) away.

The telescope will look for planets outside our solar system by watching for periodic dips in a star's brightness as a planet passes in front of its host. A low amount of dust between Earth and the Tarantula make the nearby nebula a promising target for planet hunting, according to the TRAPPIST team.

Falcon 9

In a picture taken by an onboard camera, an engine nozzle glows orange with heat as the Falcon 9 launch vehicle nears a circular orbit 155 miles (250 kilometers) above Earth.

On June 4 the Falcon 9—built by commercial spaceflight company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)—successfully completed a test launch into Earth orbit carrying a mock-up of the company's Dragon cargo capsule.

With the space shuttle fleet due to retire by the end of the year, NASA has contracted SpaceX to provide at least 12 flights using the Falcon 9-Dragon combo to ferry supplies to the International Space Station.

Some Like It Hot: Site of Human Evolution Was Scorching

If you think summer in your hometown is hot, consider it fortunate that you don't live in the Turkana Basin of Kenya, where the average daily temperature has reached the mid-90s or higher, year-round, for the past 4 million years.

The need to stay cool in that cradle of human evolution may relate, at least in part, to why pre-humans learned to walk upright, lost the fur that covered the bodies of their predecessors and became able to sweat more, Johns Hopkins University earth scientist Benjamin Passey said.

"The 'take home' message of our study," said Passey, whose report appears in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "is that this region, which is one of the key places where fossils have been found documenting human evolution, has been a really hot place for a really long time, even during the period between 3 million years ago and now when the ice ages began and the global climate became cooler."

Passey, an assistant professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the university's Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, says that conclusion lends support to the so-called "thermal hypothesis" of human evolution.

That hypothesis states that our pre-human ancestors gained an evolutionary advantage in walking upright because doing so was cooler (when it is sunny, the near-surface air is warmer than air a few feet above the ground) and exposed their body mass to less sunlight than did crawling on all fours. The loss of body hair (fur) and the ability to regulate body temperature through perspiration would have been other adaptations helpful for living in a warm climate, according to the hypothesis.

"In order to figure out if (the thermal hypothesis) is possibly true or not, we have to know whether it was actually hot when and where these beings were evolving," he said. "If it was hot, then that hypothesis is credible. If it was not, then we can throw out the hypothesis."

Evaluating whether the ancient Turkana Basin climate was, in fact, the same scorching place it is today has been difficult up until now because there are very few direct ways of determining ancient temperature. Efforts to get a handle on temperatures 4 million years ago through analysis of fossil pollen, wood and mammals were only somewhat successful, as they reveal more about plants and rainfall and less about temperature, Passey said.

Passey, however, previously was part of a team at the California Institute of Technology that developed a geochemical approach to the "temperature problem." The method involves determining the temperatures of carbonate minerals that form naturally in soil (including a sedimentary rock called "caliche" and hard pan, which is a dense layer of soil, usually found below the uppermost topsoil layer) by examining "clumps" of rare isotopes. (Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have different masses due to differences in the number of neutrons they contain.)

In the case of soil carbonates common in the Turkana Basin, the amount of rare carbon-13 bonded directly to rare oxygen-18 provides a record of the temperature during the initial formation of the mineral. It told the team that soil carbonates there formed at average soil temperatures between 86 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to the conclusion that average daytime air temperatures were even higher. In other words, it was hot way back then in what is now northeastern Kenya.

"We already have evidence that habitats in ancient East Africa were becoming more open, which is also hypothetically part of the scenario for the development of bipedalism and other human evolution, but now we have evidence that it was hot," Passey said. "Thus, we can say that the 'thermal hypothesis' is credible."

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

Artificial Aurora Created to Help Predict Space Weather

For more than 25 years, our understanding of terrestrial space weather has been partly based on incorrect assumptions about how nitrogen, the most abundant gas in our atmosphere, reacts when it collides with electrons produced by energetic ultraviolet sunlight and solar wind.
New research published June 8, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics describes how scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology have fired electrons of differing energies through a cloud of nitrogen gas to measure the ultraviolet light emitted by this collision.

The researchers have found that well-trusted measurements published in a 1985 journal paper by researchers Ajello and Shemansky contain a significant experimental error, putting decades of space weather findings dependent on this work on unstable ground.

The difference between these contemporary findings and the 1985 researchers' work stems from the 2010 team's improved ability to create and control the collisions and avoid the analytical pitfalls that plagued the 1985 findings.

The new results from the team at JPL suggest that the intensity of a broad band of ultraviolet light emitted from the collision changes significantly less with bombarding electron energies than previously thought.

As the ultraviolet light within the so called 'Lyman-Birge-Hopfield' (LBH) band is used by the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency to better understand the physical and chemical processes occurring in our upper atmosphere and in near-Earth space, the results will give some immediate cause to reflect.

With near-Earth space playing host to our ever-growing satellite communication systems, the new more accurate measurements might unleash a greater understanding of space weather and help us better protect our space-based assets.

The findings will also help further our understanding of phenomena like Aurora Borealis (the Northern Lights) and similarly the Aurora Australis (Southern Lights), which are caused by collisional processes involving solar wind particles exciting terrestrial oxygen and nitrogen particles at the North and South Pole.

The researchers are hopeful that their findings will also assist the Cassini project understand happenings on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, as LBH emissions have been detected by the orbiting robotic spacecraft.

Author Dr Charles Patrick Malone from JPL said, "Our measurement of LBH energy-dependence differs significantly from widely accepted results published 25 years ago. Aeronomers can now turn the experiment around and apply it to atmospheric studies and determine what kind of collisions produce the observed light."

X-Ray Diffraction Microscope Reveals 3-D Internal Structure of Whole Cell

Three-dimensional imaging is dramatically expanding the ability of researchers to examine biological specimens, enabling a peek into their internal structures. And recent advances in X-ray diffraction methods have helped extend the limit of this approach.
While significant progress has been made in optical microscopy to break the diffraction barrier, such techniques rely on fluorescent labeling technologies, which prohibit the quantitative 3-D imaging of the entire contents of cells. Cryo-electron microscopy can image structures at a resolution of 3 to 5 nanometers, but this only works with thin or sectioned specimens.

And although X-ray protein crystallography is currently the primary method used for determining the 3-D structure of protein molecules, many biological specimens -- such as whole cells, cellular organelles, some viruses and many important protein molecules -- are difficult or impossible to crystallize, making their structures inaccessible. Overcoming these limitations requires the employment of different techniques.

Now, in a paper published May 31 in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, UCLA researchers and their collaborators demonstrate the use of a unique X-ray diffraction microscope that enabled them to reveal the internal structure of yeast spores. The team reports the quantitative 3-D imaging of a whole, unstained cell at a resolution of 50 to 60 nanometers using X-ray diffraction microscopy, also known as lensless imaging.

Researchers identified the 3-D morphology and structure of cellular organelles, including the cell wall, vacuole, endoplasmic reticulum, mitrochondria, granules and nucleolus. The work may open a door to identifying the individual protein molecules inside whole cells using labeling technologies.

The lead authors on the paper are Huaidong Jiang, a UCLA assistant researcher in physics and astronomy, and John Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. The work is a culmination of a collaboration started three years ago with Fuyu Tamanoi, UCLA professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics. Miao and Tamanoi are both researchers at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute. Other collaborators include teams at Riken Spring 8 in Japan and the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.

"This is the first time that people have been able to peek into the 3-D internal structure of a biological specimen, without cutting it into sections, using X-ray diffraction microscopy," Miao said.

"By avoiding use of X-ray lenses, the resolution of X-ray diffraction microscopy is ultimately limited by radiation damage to biological specimens. Using cryogenic technologies, 3-D imaging of whole biological cells at a resolution of 5 to 10 nanometers should be achievable," Miao said. "Our work hence paves a way for quantitative 3-D imaging of a wide range of biological specimens at nanometer-scale resolutions that are too thick for electron microscopy."

Tamanoi prepared the yeast spore samples analyzed in this study. Spores are specialized cells that are formed when they are placed under nutrient-starved conditions. Cells use this survival strategy to cope with harsh conditions.

"Biologists wanted to examine internal structures of the spore, but previous microscopic studies provided information on only the surface features. We are very excited to be able to view the spore in 3-D," Tamanoi said. "We can now look into the structure of other spores, such as Anthrax spores and many other fungal spores. It is also important to point out that yeast spores are of similar size to many intracellular organelles in human cells. These can be examined in the future."

Since its first experimental demonstration by Miao and collaborators in 1999, coherent diffraction microscopy has been applied to imaging a wide range of materials science and biological specimens, such as nanoparticles, nanocrystals, biomaterials, cells, cellular organelles, viruses and carbon nanotubes using X-ray, electron and laser facilities worldwide. Until now, however, the radiation-damage problem and the difficulty of acquiring high-quality 3-D diffraction patterns from individual whole cells have prevented the successful high-resolution 3-D imaging of biological cells by X-ray diffraction.

Life on Titan? New Clues to What's Consuming Hydrogen, Acetylene on Saturn's Moon

Two new papers based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft scrutinize the complex chemical activity on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. While non-biological chemistry offers one possible explanation, some scientists believe these chemical signatures bolster the argument for a primitive, exotic form of life or precursor to life on Titan's surface. According to one theory put forth by astrobiologists, the signatures fulfill two important conditions necessary for a hypothesized "methane-based life."
One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene.

This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan, said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who proposed a set of conditions necessary for this kind of methane-based life on Titan in 2005. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. But McKay said the flow of hydrogen is even more critical because all of their proposed mechanisms involved the consumption of hydrogen.

"We suggested hydrogen consumption because it's the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth," McKay said. "If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth."

To date, methane-based life forms are only hypothetical. Scientists have not yet detected this form of life anywhere, though there are liquid-water-based microbes on Earth that thrive on methane or produce it as a waste product. On Titan, where temperatures are around 90 Kelvin (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), a methane-based organism would have to use a substance that is liquid as its medium for living processes, but not water itself. Water is frozen solid on Titan's surface and much too cold to support life as we know it.

The list of liquid candidates is very short: liquid methane and related molecules like ethane. While liquid water is widely regarded as necessary for life, there has been extensive speculation published in the scientific literature that this is not a strict requirement.

The new hydrogen findings are consistent with conditions that could produce an exotic, methane-based life form, but do not definitively prove its existence, said Darrell Strobel, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who authored the paper on hydrogen.

Strobel, who studies the upper atmospheres of Saturn and Titan, analyzed data from Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer and ion and neutral mass spectrometer in his new paper. The paper describes densities of hydrogen in different parts of the atmosphere and the surface. Previous models had predicted that hydrogen molecules, a byproduct of ultraviolet sunlight breaking apart acetylene and methane molecules in the upper atmosphere, should be distributed fairly evenly throughout the atmospheric layers.

Strobel found a disparity in the hydrogen densities that lead to a flow down to the surface at a rate of about 10,000 trillion trillion hydrogen molecules per second. This is about the same rate at which the molecules escape out of the upper atmosphere.

"It's as if you have a hose and you're squirting hydrogen onto the ground, but it's disappearing," Strobel said. "I didn't expect this result, because molecular hydrogen is extremely chemically inert in the atmosphere, very light and buoyant. It should 'float' to the top of the atmosphere and escape."

Strobel said it is not likely that hydrogen is being stored in a cave or underground space on Titan. The Titan surface is also so cold that a chemical process that involved a catalyst would be needed to convert hydrogen molecules and acetylene back to methane, even though overall there would be a net release of energy. The energy barrier could be overcome if there were an unknown mineral acting as the catalyst on Titan's surface.

The hydrocarbon mapping research, led by Roger Clark, a Cassini team scientist based at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, examines data from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. Scientists had expected the sun's interactions with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene that falls down to coat the Titan surface. But Cassini detected no acetylene on the surface.

In addition Cassini's spectrometer detected an absence of water ice on the Titan surface, but loads of benzene and another material, which appears to be an organic compound that scientists have not yet been able to identify. The findings lead scientists to believe that the organic compounds are shellacking over the water ice that makes up Titan's bedrock with a film of hydrocarbons at least a few millimeters to centimeters thick, but possibly much deeper in some places. The ice remains covered up even as liquid methane and ethane flow all over Titan's surface and fill up lakes and seas much as liquid water does on Earth.

"Titan's atmospheric chemistry is cranking out organic compounds that rain down on the surface so fast that even as streams of liquid methane and ethane at the surface wash the organics off, the ice gets quickly covered again," Clark said. "All that implies Titan is a dynamic place where organic chemistry is happening now."

The absence of detectable acetylene on the Titan surface can very well have a non-biological explanation, said Mark Allen, principal investigator with the NASA Astrobiology Institute Titan team. Allen is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Allen said one possibility is that sunlight or cosmic rays are transforming the acetylene in icy aerosols in the atmosphere into more complex molecules that would fall to the ground with no acetylene signature.

"Scientific conservatism suggests that a biological explanation should be the last choice after all non-biological explanations are addressed," Allen said. "We have a lot of work to do to rule out possible non-biological explanations. It is more likely that a chemical process, without biology, can explain these results -- for example, reactions involving mineral catalysts."

"These new results are surprising and exciting," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL. "Cassini has many more flybys of Titan that might help us sort out just what is happening at the surface."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

NASA Rover Finds Clue to Mars' Past and Environment for Life

Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists.
An outcrop that Spirit examined in late 2005 revealed high concentrations of carbonate, which originates in wet, near-neutral conditions, but dissolves in acid. The ancient water indicated by this find was not acidic.

NASA's rovers have found other evidence of formerly wet Martian environments. However the data for those environments indicate conditions that may have been acidic. In other cases, the conditions were definitely acidic, and therefore less favorable as habitats for life.

Laboratory tests helped confirm the carbonate identification. The findings were published June 3 by the journal Science.

"This is one of the most significant findings by the rovers," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the Mars twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and a co-author of the new report. "A substantial carbonate deposit in a Mars outcrop tells us that conditions that could have been quite favorable for life were present at one time in that place. "

Spirit inspected rock outcrops, including one scientists called Comanche, along the rover's route from the top of Husband Hill to the vicinity of the Home Plate plateau which Spirit has studied since 2006. Magnesium iron carbonate makes up about one-fourth of the measured volume in Comanche. That is a tenfold higher concentration than any previously identified for carbonate in a Martian rock.

"We used detective work combining results from three spectrometers to lock this down," said Dick Morris, lead author of the report and a member of a rover science team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston."The instruments gave us multiple, interlocking ways of confirming the magnesium iron carbonate, with a good handle on how much there is."

Massive carbonate deposits on Mars have been sought for years without much success. Numerous channels apparently carved by flows of liquid water on ancient Mars suggest the planet was formerly warmer, thanks to greenhouse warming from a thicker atmosphere than exists now. The ancient, dense Martian atmosphere was probably rich in carbon dioxide, because that gas makes up nearly all the modern, very thin atmosphere.

It is important to determine where most of the carbon dioxide went. Some theorize it departed to space. Others hypothesize that it left the atmosphere by the mixing of carbon dioxide with water under conditions that led to forming carbonate minerals. That possibility, plus finding small amounts of carbonate in meteorites that originated from Mars, led to expectations in the 1990s that carbonate would be abundant on Mars. However, mineral-mapping spectrometers on orbiters since then have found evidence of localized carbonate deposits in only one area, plus small amounts distributed globally in Martian dust.

Morris suspected iron-bearing carbonate at Comanche years ago from inspection of the rock with Spirit's Moessbauerpectrometer, which provides information about iron-containing minerals. Confirming evidence from other instruments emerged slowly. The instrument with the best capability for detecting carbonates, the Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer, had its mirror contaminated with dust earlier in 2005, during a wind event that also cleaned Spirit's solar panels.

"It was like looking through dirty glasses," said Steve Ruff of Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., another co-author of the report. "We could tell there was something very different about Comanche compared with other outcrops we had seen, but we couldn't tell what it was until we developed a correction method to account for the dust on the mirror."

Spirit's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer instrument detected a high concentration of light elements, a group including carbon and oxygen, that helped quantify the carbonate content.

The rovers landed on Mars in January 2004 for missions originally planned to last three months. Spirit has been out of communication since March 22 and is in a low-power hibernation status during Martian winter. Opportunity is making steady progress toward a large crater, Endeavour, which is about seven miles away.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rovers for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about the rovers, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

King Tut's Leftover Bandages Yield New Clues

King Tutankhamun's mummy was wrapped in custom-made bandages similar to modern first aid gauzes, an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals.

Running in length from 4.70 meters to 39 cm (15.4 feet to 15.3 inches), the narrow bandages consist of 50 linen pieces especially woven for the boy king.

For a century, the narrow linen bandages were contained in a rather overlooked cache of large ceramic jars at the museum's Department of Egyptian Art. The collection was recovered from the Valley of the Kings between 1907-08, more than a decade before Howard Carter discovered King Tut's treasure-packed tomb.Now on permanent display in the museum's Egyptian galleries and highlighted in the exhibit "Tutankhamun's Funeral," the objects provide important insights into King Tut's mummification.

"The linens on the actual mummy were so much decayed by excessive use of resins that the bandages on display at the museum are actually the best-preserved lot of Tutankhamun wrappings," Dorothea Arnold, curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan museum, told Discovery News.

"When the floor was swept after wrapping the body of a king, naturally, there were quantities of pieces of linen, some of them bandages and some wider bits, gathered up," wrote Herbert E. Winlock (1884-1950), the Metropolitan's curator, in a 1941 account of the embalming material.

Bearing inscriptions with dates -- the Egyptians used to write the date the linen was woven so that they knew how old it was -- the sheets provided Winlock with precise evidence for dating the cache's material.



One linen featured an inscription with "Year 8 of the Lord of Two Lands, Nebkheperure [Tutankhamun's throne name.]" Indeed, "Year 8" was the final year of Tutankhamun's life (1341 B.C. - 1323 B.C.).

"Usually bandages to be wound on a body were rolled up to make the wrapping easier," Winlock said. He identified the ends of some six bandages, still tightly rolled.

But the most "curious things among the bandages" were 50 pieces of modern-looking gauze -- narrow linen tape with finished edges on each side.

"I do not recall ever having seen any ready-made, 18th-Dynasty bandages like them before," Winlock said. "According to known later custom, they were used to fix the larger sheets around the body," Arnold said.

Especially woven for King Tut, some of these expensive linens still evoke the presence of the embalmers, as they show fingerprints indicating that someone had wiped his hands on them.

The large jars containing the linens were first discovered buried in a pit (subsequently called KV 54) just 110 meters (360.8 feet) away from the tomb of King Tut, which had yet to be discovered.

The jars also held what appeared to be an unexciting array of broken pieces of pottery, animal remains, collars of dried flowers, kerchiefs and embalming material.

Rather disappointed, its discoverer, the New York lawyer Theodore M. Davis, donated the materials to the Metropolitan museum.

"Mr. Davis seems to have felt that he had discovered a poor man's tomb," wrote Herbert E. Winlock ( 1884-1950), the Metropolitan's curator.

Indeed, Davis was used to much more impressive findings.

His archaeological team, which included well known Egyptologists such as Howard Carter, photographer Harry Burton and archaeologist Edward R. Ayrton, had uncovered about 30 tombs in the valley during excavations between 1902 and 1914.

Among Davis' most important findings are KV46, the tomb of Yuya and Tuya, King Tut's great-grandparents, and KV55, the burial equipment of the Amarna royal family, such as that of Queen Tiye. Tiye was probably Tutankhamun's grandmother.

The unassuming cache entered the Metropolitan museum as a mystery. Only several years later, after further studies and analysis, did Winlock identify the items as remains from King Tut's funeral.

"It was a perfectly undisturbed cache which Mr. Davis found ... a cache of materials which, according to Egyptian beliefs, were too impure to be buried in the tomb with the dead man, but which had to be safely put not far away from his body," Winlock wrote in a 1941 detailed account of the material found in the pit.

According to Frank Rühli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich and a member of the team who carried the CT scan analysis of Tutankhamun in 2005, modern analysis of the Met's embalming material could offer interesting new clues.

"The bandages on display are very important because they provide another insight on Tutankhamun's mummification," Rühli told Discovery News.

New Species Found in "Lost World": Pinocchio Frog, More

This Pinocchio-like tree frog species was discovered by fortunate accident when it ventured into a Foja Mountains camp kitchen and perched on a bag of rice, where herpetologist Paul Oliver of Australia's University of Adelaide spotted it. Oliver was unable to find another of these frogs, and suspects that they stay mostly in the treetops.

The male frog's nose, the scientists were surprised to discover, points upward when the animal's calling and hangs flaccid when it's not. "Exactly what it is for, no one really knows for sure," Oliver said.



A pass of the flashlight revealed this new species of bent-toed gecko by its orange eyeshine.

Many of these geckos were seen in the trees, but a few were also grabbed on the ground for study.

"Interestingly the local guides, who were forest people and afraid of very little, refused to touch the geckos and would not catch them," added the University of Adelaide's Oliver. "I could not work out why they feared them."

As for the gecko, it was likely a bit perplexed by the appearance of an artificial light.

"People have lived in New Guinea for probably 50,000 years, and they live almost everywhere across the island," the natural history museum's Helgen said. "But these mountains are unique. There are no roads, no tracks, no people—and almost no human impact."



Very few people have set foot in these precipitous mountains, where knife-edge ridges and vertical cliffs rise to 7,200 feet (2,200 meters).

The Foja Mountains' topography and almost impenetrable forest cover make travel so difficult that even after the second, 2008 expedition, the Lost World remains largely unexplored—with potentially many more new species awaiting discovery.

Conservation International (CI) expedition leaders say they hope the current round of new species discoveries will encourage Indonesia to boost protection of the region—currently a national wildlife refuge—while it's still pristine.

"“Places like these," said CI senior research scientist and expedition member Bruce Beehler in a statement, "represent a healthy future for all of us and show that it is not too late to stop the current species extinction crisis."

Pyramid Tomb Found: Sign of a Civilization's Birth?

Oldest known Central American pyramid tomb holds royal burials, jewels

After sheltering jeweled royals for centuries, the oldest known tomb in Mesoamerica—ancient Central America and Mexico, roughly speaking—has been uncovered, archaeologists announced Tuesday.

Apparently caught between two cultures, the 2,700-year-old pyramid in Chiapa de Corzo (map), Mexico, may help settle a debate as to when and how the mysterious Zoque civilization arose, according to excavation leader Bruce Bachand.

At the time of the pyramid tomb's dedication, hundreds of artisans, vendors, and farmers would have known Chiapa de Corzo as a muggy town, redolent with wood smoke and incense.

Above them towered the three-story-tall pyramid, a "visually permanent and physically imposing reminder" of their past rulers and emerging cultural identity, said Bachand, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University.

The two rulers found with the pyramid-top tomb had been coated head-to-toe in sacred red pigment. At the center of the tomb, Bachand's team found a male in a pearl-beaded loincloth. To his side lay a companion, likely a female.

On their waists were jade beads shaped like howler monkeys, crocodiles, and gourds. Seashells inlaid with obsidian formed tiny masks for their mouths, which in turn held jade and pyrite ornaments.

Arrayed around the royal corpses were offerings to the gods: ceramic pots, ritual axes perhaps associated with fertility, iron-pyrite mirrors, and a red-painted stucco mask.

"These people were at the top of society, there is no doubt about it," said Bachand, whose work was partly funded by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

Slightly lower on society's ladder were two apparent human sacrifices, an adult and child, who looked as if they'd been tossed into the tomb. The adult was slumped against the side of the crypt, an arm craned awkwardly over his or her head, Bachand said.

Pyramid an Emblem of an Emerging Culture?

The pyramid tomb is a window into how and when unique cultures emerged from the Olmec, one of the oldest civilizations in the New World, Bachand said.

The Olmec began fanning out from their Gulf of Mexico homeland around 1200 B.C. and influenced many Mesoamerican civilizations to come—to what extent, though, is a longstanding debate among archaeologists.

The Chiapa de Corzo site, in what was a borderland between the Olmec and Maya civilizations, may eventually help settle the debate (interactive map of the Maya Empire).

"We are trying to distill from the archaeology how the Zoque emerged out of an Olmec ancestral base, and it seems like it happened right around the time this tomb appeared," Bachand said.

In the centuries prior to the construction of this tomb, archaeologists believe, Chiapa de Corzo was a large village along a major trade route, likely operated by the Olmec from their capital city, La Venta, on the Gulf Coast.

As Chiapa de Corzo gained wealth and power it began to assert its own identity, Bachand said. The newly discovered tomb, which includes Olmec and Zoque traits, suggests this transition was well underway by 700 B.C.

Some of the tomb's ceramic pots, for example, are identical to pots from La Venta.

On the other hand, the human remains lack the large jade earspools and breastplates commonly found on Olmec remains. What's more, the tomb's stone and clay walls and wooden ceiling represent a unique Zoque style that persisted at Chiapa de Corzo for centuries, Bachand said.

"We think that this is a parting moment" for the Zoque, Bachand said. "Yes, there are Olmec elements lingering around and being incorporated into their culture, but at the same time they are starting to move out and move on."

Prototype of Maya Architecture?

Emerging from the influence of the Olmec, the nascent Zoque culture at Chiapa de Corzo may have been influencing other cultures, in turn—not least the Maya Empire, Bachand suggested.

For one thing, the pyramid, with its long, terraced platform, presages the classic Maya "E group" layout, named after the Group E at the Uaxactún site in Guatemala. Aligned with the sunrise on solstices and equinoxes, E groups appear to have astrological significance.

"So this isn't just any old pyramid," Bachand said. "It appears to be one of the earliest E groups in all of Mesoamerica. That's why we are investigating it.

"And now that we've discovered this early tomb—well heck, no one has discovered a tomb this early in any pyramid, never mind an E group pyramid," he added.

The new findings, he said, suggest that the E group—so strongly associated with the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures—could actually be a Zoque invention. (Pictures: what the Maya Empire looked like.)

Theory "Perfectly Reasonable"

Bachand's conception of Chiapa de Corzo as an emerging capital sits well with Mesoamerican-civilization expert Robert Rosenswig.

"To have a powerful ruling dynasty established at Chiapa de Corzo beginning sometime around 700 B.C. sounds perfectly reasonable," said Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the University of Albany in New York State.

By then the Olmec had been around for 400 to 500 years and had established other centers that were building their own monumental architecture.

"Things were becoming considerably more complex, and it is fairly evident that these groups were all in contact with each other," he said.

Late-Breaking Discovery at Pyramid

In hopes of solidifying his theory, Bachand and his team are digging deeper into the pyramid, hoping to find evidence of more direct contact with the Olmec capital.

Just this past Saturday, they may have found just that—a bluish green jade ceremonial axe, perhaps of Olmec origin, at the base of the pyramid.

"It doesn't have any incised design or anything on it, but it is right on the axis of the building, and we think it is associated with something special," Bachand said.

In 2008 the team had found a pit full of similar axes—including one with an Olmec design on it—in the plaza next to the pyramid as well as a nearby pit where the axes were manufactured.

The discovery of another axe deep inside the tomb, Bachand added, "is definitely associated with an axe offering of Olmec inspiration."

12 Events That Will Change Everything

The best science transforms our conception of the universe and our place in it and helps us to understand and cope with changes beyond our control. Relativity, natural selection, germ theory, heliocentrism and other explanations of natural phenomena have remade our intellectual and cultural landscapes. The same holds true for inventions as diverse as the Internet, formal logic, agriculture and the wheel.

What dramatic new events are in store for humanity? Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050. Some will no doubt bring to mind long-standing dystopian visions: extinction-causing asteroid collisions, war-waging intelligent machines, Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the best thinking today suggests that many events will not unfold as expected. In fact, a scenario could be seen as sobering and disappointing to one person and curious and uplifting to another. One thing is certain: they all have the power to forever reshape how we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.

Taking Laser Science To the Extreme

Europe wants to leap to the next generation of laser facilities with a 200-petawatt laser that will create new areas of research, and could rip open the vacuum.

In a flash. Researchers prepare attosecond laser experiments at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics.

CREDIT: THORSTEN NAESER/LABORATORY OF ATTOSECOND PHYSICS AT MPQ

The first half-century of the laser's history has seen a constant push for higher power. Today, the Vulcan laser at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Didcot, U.K., fires pulses that have 10,000 times the power of all of Britain's electricity-generating stations added together. One of the world's most powerful lasers, Vulcan doesn't black out the entire country because its pulses are very short, less than a picosecond (10–12 seconds) in duration, so the energy of each pulse is a moderate 0.5 kilojoules.

Vulcan is a large machine, but over the next few years a group of European countries wants to take lasers into the realm of international big science with a facility built around a device that can produce 200-petawatt (2 x 1017 watts) pulses, 200 times the power of today's best lasers. The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) isn't yet a done deal, but there is considerable political and scientific momentum behind it. That's in part because the three countries leading the project are the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania—all recently joined members of the European Union. "There is political pressure from the new states and the E.U. to build [research facilities] in the new states," says Wolfgang Sandner, director of the Max Born Institute in Berlin.

If ELI goes ahead, it will be the most prominent science project in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Initially split into outposts in the three countries, leading up to one mammoth laser to be built by 2017, ELI will ultimately be the Swiss army knife of laser centers. Its superfast, high-power pulses will probe the atomic nucleus and watch electrons inside atoms and molecules. By colliding pulses with various targets, researchers plan to create other sorts of radiation—electrons, protons, ions, x-rays, and gamma rays—for use in everything from cancer therapy to nuclear physics.

The ultrahigh power and intensity of pulses of ELI's final laser will produce electric fields so strong that they may alter and sense the texture of the vacuum itself, opening up new research areas for astrophysicists and particle physicists. According to quantum electrodynamics (QED), the vacuum teems with pairs of electrons and positrons that pop fleetingly into existence, briefly separate, and then recombine and disappear. The electric fields of ELI's pulses may be strong enough to pull these pairs apart before they can recombine, or at least feel the texture of this sea of virtual particles and test QED in a very direct way. We want to "drill a hole in the vacuum," says ELI project coordinator Gérard Mourou, director of the Laboratory of Applied Optics (LAO) at Palaiseau, France.

The power of three

About 5 years ago, the E.U. called for ideas for international infrastructures to boost European research. Dozens of labs around the world already boast terawatt (1012 watts) lasers, and a handful, including Vulcan, can now reach petawatts (1015 watts). Mourou and others wanted to go even bigger. They put together a plan for a laser that would push current technology to its limits, into the hundreds of petawatts. Laser science "is ready to go to the next step, to a truly international laser infrastructure beyond the capability of a single nation," says Sandner.

Several European countries expressed interest in hosting ELI, but securing funding proved difficult until the three eastern countries realized they could apply for E.U. structural funds. These are grants given to less developed E.U. member states to build infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and hospitals, but they can equally well be spent on research facilities.

Last year, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania came up with a novel plan: They would become equal partners in the project and split it in three so that each would have a facility geared to a different branch of laser science. (Institutions in another 10 E.U. nations are also involved.) The three centers would have lasers with a range of powers between 1 and a few tens of petawatts; and the decision on where to put the final 200-petawatt laser would be put off for 2 years to give researchers more time to choose the best technology.

Although laser scientists acknowledge that this makes the project more complicated, there are benefits, too. "There will be a slight increase in cost but a huge boost to local scientists [in each country]," says Sandner. If the structural funds are approved by early next year as expected, the three countries could begin pouring concrete in 2011, with a total price tag of about {euro}750 million. "This is very, very significant. It's the first time a European infrastructure project has been built on the east side of the [former] Iron Curtain," says physicist Marius Enachescu, who is deputy secretary of state in Romania's research ministry.

The ELI facility in Hungary will focus on science using ultrashort laser pulses, just attoseconds (10–18 seconds) in length. Researchers began making attosecond pulses about a decade ago when they found that if they fired a femtosecond (10–15 seconds) laser pulse into a gas such as neon, they created higher order harmonics of the original frequency. By superposing these harmonics, they could create attosecond-scale pulses, which is just the time scale needed to discern the movement of electrons in an atom.

Researchers hope Hungary's ELI facility will enable them to carry out "pump-probe" type experiments, in which one pulse sets an atomic process in motion, then a second snaps the action a moment later like a hyperfast camera. They say they will be able for the first time to image the position in time and space of both nuclei and electrons at the subatomic scale.

The Czech branch of ELI will be a laser-based beamline facility. Many areas of science rely on beams of particles and high-energy photons from accelerators, synchrotrons, x-ray tubes, and radioactive sources. In 2000, researchers discovered that they could also generate many of these beams by firing high-intensity laser pulses into gas jets, thin foils, and other targets. This laser strategy can produce x-rays and gamma rays, as well as pulses of electrons, protons, and ions, with a brightness and pulse length that open up new experimental possibilities. "When a laser interacts with a target, all sorts of impressive things are created. The products often cannot be produced in any other way," says John Collier, RAL's head of high-power lasers.

One possible application this ELI branch plans to explore is cancer therapy with proton or ion beams. Such beams are extremely effective for treating deep-seated tumors, but to perform such therapy a hospital now needs a particle accelerator costing tens of millions of dollars—something few can afford. Laser physicists think they can accelerate particles in a much cheaper and more compact way. When they fire a high-intensity laser pulse into a plasma, the photons' magnetic field kicks electrons in the plasma forward and these then strike a foil target. As they emerge from the other side, they drag positive ions in the pulse's wake. Such acceleration works "much faster over a shorter distance" than traditional accelerators do, says Sandner. "It's in its very early infancy, but it points a way to the next step."

The third planned ELI facility, in Romania, aims to open up a new area of laser science by probing the atomic nucleus with beams that are ultraintense—focused so that they have the maximum power per unit area. "The laser power that exists now cannot be compared with the strength of the nuclear field," says Enachescu. But he hopes that his nation's ELI outpost can change that.

It's not clear yet whether ELI's laser beams alone will be able to excite a nucleus into higher energy levels, but physicists are developing other tricks that utilize those beams to accomplish the feat. One such scheme involves colliding a laser pulse head-on with an electron beam to produce an intense burst of gamma rays. "Then we will use that to disturb nuclei," says Mourou.

Probing the vacuum

The fourth, and at the moment least-defined, part of ELI is the final 200-petawatt laser. The uncertainty is because planners are still weighing two rival methods to stretch current technology to this new power level. All high-power research lasers rely on amplifiers: pieces of an active lasing medium, such as glass doped with neodymium, that resemble a laser without the end mirrors. Just before a pulse is fired, the amplifier is pumped with light from another source to create a large number of excited atoms. When the pulse comes through, those atoms emit light in step with the pulse, amplifying it with extra photons. But at about a gigawatt, each pulse has so much power that it begins to damage the glass. Researchers got around this problem in the mid-1980s after Mourou and colleague Donna Strickland developed a technique called chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which reduces the peak power of a short, high-power pulse by stretching the pulse out in time, before amplifying it and compressing it again.

ELI may need additional strategies to increase laser power. "We're getting to the limit of CPA," says ELI Deputy Coordinator Georg Korn of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. The ELI team may consider an adaptation of CPA involving a special nonlinear crystal to transfer power from one stretched beam to another. This will be tested in a planned upgrade of Vulcan to 10 petawatts. Meanwhile, Mourou's LAO and other French labs are testing a different amplifier material, titanium-doped sapphire, by building a 10-petawatt laser.

The ELI team must eventually decide which approach to back and whether to push for even higher power or simply build 20 10-petawatt lasers and combine the beams to make one of 200 petawatts. "We have to wait for this new technology to develop. Two-hundred petawatts is so advanced that there is a need for a demonstrator," says Collier.

Even if researchers achieve that power, they will still need high-intensity beams before they can explore the vacuum. Theorists calculate that an intensity of 2029 watts/square centimeter (W/cm2) will be needed to rend apart electron-positron pairs. ELI will likely be able to reach intensities of only about 1024 W/cm2, but "there are some clever ideas around, some of them not yet published," says Korn. These include using laser pulses to create intense gamma rays and probing the vacuum with them.

With enough funding, says laser scientist Donald Umstadter of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, ELI should overcome any technical difficulties. "They've set ambitious goals to reach ideal conditions. If they do, it will be very exciting. Whenever you are going to the limits, you can expect interesting physics to emerge."

Black Holes: Gas Blowers of the Universe

Supermassive black holes with the mass of many millions of stars have been detected at the centre of many large galaxies. A super-massive black hole acts like a lurking "monster" at the centre of the galaxy which swallows the surrounding material through the intensity of its gravitational pull. X-ray observations indicate that a large amount of energy is produced by the in-fall of matter into a black hole, and ejected in powerful jets. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have now shown that these jets eject matter not only from their host galaxies but even the gas between the galaxy group members.

The research is published May 1, 2010 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have long been trying to understand how black holes interact with the environment (the so-called feedback), but to date the process is poorly understood. Observations and simulations have shown that active galaxies transport huge amounts of material with their jets, which are particularly luminous at radio wavelengths, into the intra-cluster gas. Signatures of this "radio-mode feedback" are observed both in radio and in X-rays.

Recent studies have shown that the amount of gas in galaxy groups, objects consisting of several galaxies bound together such as the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, does not add up to the amount predicted by cosmology -- unlike in galaxy clusters with up to thousands of individual members. Large amounts of mechanical energy injected into the gas from the central black hole may have removed part of it. However to date this was only a hypothesis. Previous group samples were limited to a handful of nearby objects populated by low luminosity radio black holes.

Using one of the largest samples of X-ray detected groups and clusters of galaxies identified by XMM-Newton together with radio observations, a team of astronomers led by Stefania Giodini at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has studied the energetics of radio galaxy feedback in galaxy groups. In the COSMOS field, where almost 300 X-ray galaxy groups have been detected, the team has been able to show that the black hole activity in the centre of galaxy groups must have a dramatic effect on the surroundings: they eject sufficient energy to blow the intergalactic gas out of the gravitational well of the galaxy group. The mystery of the missing gas in galaxy groups is solved -- and the large impact of black holes in galaxy groups demonstrated for the first time.

"In galaxy groups the gas is contained by gravity. But the black holes produce so much energy that this outweighs the capacity of the group to hold its gas," explained Stefania Giodini, the lead author of the paper. "A significant part of the gas is removed. No similar effect is observed in more massive galaxy clusters, where the huge gravitational pull restrains the gas from being removed."

"It is impressive what a significant influence radio outflows from galaxies can have on their surroundings," said Vernesa Smolčić from the California Institute of Technology, co-author of the paper. "This likely happens not only on the scales of the host galaxies of these outflows, but also on scales as large as the distance from our Milky Way to Andromeda. Radio galaxies seem to be the "trouble makers" in the Universe that can heat the gas around their host galaxies to unexpected temperatures, as well as expel a fraction of matter from galaxy groups."

Hans Böhringer, head of the Research Group for Clusters of Galaxies and Cosmology at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, also participated to this study: "In nearby clusters we can see the short term effect of the energy outbursts occasionally in the form of radio-luminous, relativistic plasma bubbles. Direct evidence for periodic outburst behaviour can only be found by looking at their effect in a large number of groups."

The enormous effect of individual galaxy nuclei is surprising even for astronomers. "I could never imagine to what a degree the black holes can displace the gas in galaxy groups," says Alexis Finoguenov from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "they are the glass-blowers of the Universe."

Fossil Find Fills in Picture of Ancient Marine Life

Paleontologists have discovered a rich array of exceptionally preserved fossils of marine animals that lived between 480 million and 472 million years ago, during the early part of a period known as the Ordovician. The specimens are the oldest yet discovered soft-bodied fossils from the Ordovician, a period marked by intense biodiversification.

The findings, which appear in the May 13 issue of the journal Nature, greatly expand our understanding of the sea creatures and ecosystems that existed at a crucial point in evolutionary history, when most of the animal life on the planet was found in the oceans.

The team -- led by Peter Van Roy, a Yale postdoctoral associate, and Derek Briggs, the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Geology & Geophysics and director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History -- uncovered more than 1,500 fossils of soft-bodied marine animals in newly discovered sites in southeastern Morocco during a field expedition last year. Many are complete fossils, and include sponges, annelid worms, mollusks and horseshoe crabs -- in particular, a species similar to today's horseshoe crab, which appeared some 30 million years earlier than previously known.

The Cambrian period, known for the "Cambrian Explosion" that saw the sudden appearance of all the major animal groups and the establishment of complex ecosystems, was followed by the "Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event," when the number of marine animal genera increased exponentially over a period of 25 million years.

Because hard shells fossilize and are preserved more readily than soft tissue, scientists had an incomplete and biased view of the marine life that existed during the Ordovician period until now.

"The early Ordovician was a critical moment when massive diversification takes off, but we were only seeing a small piece of the picture that was based almost exclusively on the shelly fossil record," Briggs said. "Normal faunas are dominated by the soft-bodied organisms we knew were missing, so these exceptionally well-preserved fossils have filled in much of the missing picture."

The site in Morocco where the fossils were discovered was conducive to preserving even the soft tissues of the creatures that lived in its waters so long ago, thanks to generally calm waters, occasional rapid burial that protected the animals from scavengers, and favorable chemical conditions within the sediment that allowed for the rapid mineralization of soft tissue as it decayed.

In addition to providing a more complete understanding of marine life at that time, the team's discovery upends a long-held belief that so-called Burgess Shale-type faunas, which are typical for the Early to Middle Cambrian, disappeared at the end of the Middle Cambrian epoch, some 499 million years ago.

"There was an anomaly in the fossil record. Most of these animals just seemed to disappear at the end of the Middle Cambrian," said Van Roy, first author of the paper.

The team found that these Burgess Shale-type species survived well into the Ordovician period, which would have had a major impact on those ecosystems and their evolution, Van Roy said.

The team expects to find even more fossils representing other species during future planned expeditions in Morocco. "We're only scratching the surface," Van Roy said. "I'm certain there will be more spectacular fossils coming out of this site in the near future."

Other authors of the paper include Patrick J. Orr (University College Dublin), Joseph P. Botting (Leeds Museum Discovery Centre), Lucy A. Muir, Jakob Vinther (Yale University), Bertrand Lefebvre (Université Lyon), and Khadija el Hariri (Université Cadi Ayyad). The fossil sites were originally discovered by a local Moroccan collector, Mohammed Ou Said Ben Moulla.

This research was funded by an Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) doctoral fellowship, an Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) postdoctoral fellowship, and a National Geographic Society Research and Exploration grant