Mojoceratops: New Dinosaur Species Named for Flamboyant Frill

When Nicholas Longrich discovered a new dinosaur species with a heart-shaped frill on its head, he wanted to come up with a name just as flamboyant as the dinosaur's appearance. Over a few beers with fellow paleontologists one night, he blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Mojoceratops.
"It was just a joke, but then everyone stopped and looked at each other and said, 'Wait -- that actually sounds cool,' " said Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. "I tried to come up with serious names after that, but Mojoceratops just sort of stuck."

With the publication of Longrich's paper describing his find in the Journal of Paleontology, the name is now official.

The dinosaur is one of more than a dozen species belonging to the chasmosaurine ceratopsid family, which are defined by elaborate frills on their skulls. A plant eater about the size of a hippopotamus, Mojoceratops appeared about 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous -- 10 million years earlier than its well-known cousin, the Triceratops. The species, which is related to another dinosaur in Texas, is found only in Canada's Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces and was short-lived, having survived for only about one million years.

It was only after coming up with the unusual name that Longrich looked into its etymology. Surprisingly, he found that it was a perfect fit for the species, which sported a flamboyant, heart-shaped frill on its head.

"I discovered that 'mojo' is an early 20th-century African-American term meaning a magic charm or talisman, often used to attract members of the opposite sex," he said. "This dinosaur probably used its frill to attract mates, so the name made sense." The full name is Mojoceratops perifania, with "perifania" meaning pride in Greek. (The other part of the name mojoceratops follows the convention of other related species, with "ceras" being Greek for horn and "ops" being Greek for face.)

While all ceratopsids have frills on the tops of their skulls, "Mojoceratops is the most ostentatious," Longrich said, adding that their frill is also the most heart-shaped of all the related species.

Longrich got his first clue that he might have found a new species at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was studying the dinosaur fossil collection in 2008. There, he found a distinctive frill that didn't match anything previously known. Later, while sketching the skull of another specimen on display, which was thought to be a species called Chasmosaurus, he noticed the skull was identical to the one on the specimen next to it.

"I realized the skull on the supposed Chasmosaurus must have been a reconstruction," he explained. When he studied the front of the skull, Longrich noticed some differences from the typical Chasmosaurus, including longer horns than usual. Trips to other museums in Western Canada turned up more examples that didn't fit with the rest of the known species. "The fossils didn't look like anything we'd seen before. They just looked wrong," he said.

Finding yet another previously unknown large dinosaur species that comes from Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada-which boasts the world's most diverse dinosaur fauna-was somewhat surprising, Longrich said, because the fossils have been studied for such a long time already. "So far, we really have no good explanation for why there are so many dinosaurs in the area and just how they managed to coexist," he said.

All in all, Longrich turned up eight partial skulls of the new species, which now boasts a name with just as much flair as its unusually shaped head.

"You're supposed to use Latin and Greek names, but this just seemed more fun," Longrich said. "You can do good science and still have some fun, too. So why not?"

Geoscientists Find Clues to Why First Sumatran Earthquake Was Deadlier Than Second

An international team of geoscientists has uncovered geological differences between two segments of an earthquake fault that may explain why the 2004 Sumatra Boxing Day Tsunami was so much more devastating than a second earthquake generated tsunami three months later. This could help solve what was a lingering mystery for earthquake researchers.
Nor in the first quake. Because tsunami waves are generated by the motion of the seafloor, a quake that moves more seafloor creates larger tsunamis.

Early in the morning of Dec. 26, 2004 a powerful undersea earthquake started off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia and extended about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) to the north. The resulting tsunami caused devastation along the coastlines bordering the Indian Ocean, with tsunami waves up to 30 meters (100 feet) high inundating coastal communities. With very little warning of impending disaster, more than 230,000 people died and millions were made homeless.

Three months later in 2005, another strong earthquake (although significantly smaller than in 2004) occurred immediately to the south, but triggered only a relatively small tsunami that claimed far fewer lives.

A team of researchers from The University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, The University of Texas at Austin, The Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology in Indonesia and The Indonesia Institute for Sciences has discovered one clue as to why the two earthquakes were so different. Working aboard the research vessel Sonne, the scientists used seismic instruments to probe layers of sediment beneath the seafloor with sound waves.

They discovered a number of unusual features at the rupture zone of the 2004 earthquake such as the seabed topography, how the sediments are deformed and the locations of small earthquakes (aftershocks) following the main earthquake.

They found the southern end of the 2004 rupture zone was unique in one other key way. To understand that requires a little background on how and why earthquakes happen there at all.

The largest undersea earthquakes occur at subduction zones, such as the one west of Indonesia, where one tectonic plate is forced (or subducts) under another. This subduction doesn't happen smoothly however, but sticks and then slips or ruptures with the release of vast amounts of stored energy as an earthquake. The plate boundary between the overriding Sumatran and Andaman islands and the subducting Indian Ocean sticks and slips in segments. This kind of plate boundary is called a décollement and is a very shallow fault running from beneath the trench to under the islands.

The researchers found that the décollement surface has different properties in the two earthquake rupture regions. In the 2004 area, the décollement was seismically imaged from the ship as a bright reflection whose specifics suggest lower density materials that would affect friction. In the 2005 area the décollement does not show these particular characteristics and thus would behave differently in an earthquake. This and several other differences resulted in the fault slipping over a much longer segment in 2004 and reaching much closer to the seafloor, potentially causing a larger tsunami.

The results of their study appear in the July 9 edition of the journal Science. The paper's lead author is Simon Dean, of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, which is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOC).

"Both earthquakes occurred on the same fault system, initiating 30-40 kilometers below the seabed," said Dean. "Our results will help us understand why different parts of the fault behave differently during earthquake slip which then influences tsunami generation. This is critical for adequate hazard assessment and mitigation."

By comparing these results with other subduction zones around the world, the research team believes the region of the 2004 Sumatra earthquake is very unusual, suggesting that tsunami hazards may be particularly high in this region.

"By understanding parameters that make a particular region more hazardous in terms of earthquakes and tsunami we can speak to potential hazards of other margins," said Sean Gulick, a research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. "We need to examine what limits the size of earthquakes and what properties contribute to tsunami formation."

The fact that the 2004 and 2005 source areas were different is good news. Had the two fault segments ruptured together, the resulting earthquake would have been about a magnitude 9.3 instead of 9.2. Because the earthquake magnitude scale is logarithmic, an increase in 0.1 translates to about a third more energy released. To put that in perspective, the first event had the explosive force of 1.8 trillion kilograms of TNT. Adding the second segment, the resulting earthquake would equal 2.4 trillion kilograms of TNT.

Funding for the research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

The researchers are Dean, Lisa McNeill, Timothy Henstock and Jonathan Bull (University of Southampton, NOC), Gulick, James Austin Jr. and Nathan Bangs (University of Texas at Austin), Yusuf Djajadihardja (Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology, Indonesia), and Haryadi Permana (Indonesia Institute for Sciences).

Antibodies Found That Prevent Most HIV Strains from Infecting Human Cells

Scientists have discovered two potent human antibodies that can stop more than 90 percent of known global HIV strains from infecting human cells in the laboratory, and have demonstrated how one of these disease-fighting proteins accomplishes this feat. According to the scientists, these antibodies could be used to design improved HIV vaccines, or could be further developed to prevent or treat HIV infection. Moreover, the method used to find these antibodies could be applied to isolate therapeutic antibodies for other infectious diseases as well.
"The discovery of these exceptionally broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV and the structural analysis that explains how they work are exciting advances that will accelerate our efforts to find a preventive HIV vaccine for global use," says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health. "In addition, the technique the teams used to find the new antibodies represents a novel strategy that could be applied to vaccine design for many other infectious diseases."

Led by a team from the NIAID Vaccine Research Center (VRC), the scientists found two naturally occurring, powerful antibodies called VRC01 and VRC02 in an HIV-infected individual's blood. They found the antibodies using a novel molecular device they developed that homes in on the specific cells that make antibodies against HIV. The device is an HIV protein that the scientists modified so it would react only with antibodies specific to the site where the virus binds to cells it infects.

The scientists found that VRC01 and VRC02 neutralize more HIV strains with greater overall strength than previously known antibodies to the virus.

The researchers also determined the atomic-level structure of VRC01 when it is attaching to HIV. This has enabled the team to define how the antibody works and to precisely locate where it attaches to the virus. With this knowledge, they have begun to design components of a candidate vaccine that could teach the human immune system to make antibodies similar to VRC01 that might prevent infection by the vast majority of HIV strains worldwide.

NIAID scientists Peter D. Kwong, Ph.D., John R. Mascola, M.D., and Gary J. Nabel, M.D., Ph.D., led the two research teams. A pair of articles about these findings appears in the online edition of Science.

"We have used our knowledge of the structure of a virus -- in this case, the outer surface of HIV -- to refine molecular tools that pinpoint the vulnerable spot on the virus and guide us to antibodies that attach to this spot, blocking the virus from infecting cells," explains Dr. Nabel, the VRC director.

Finding individual antibodies that can neutralize HIV strains anywhere in the world has been difficult because the virus continuously changes its surface proteins to evade recognition by the immune system. As a consequence of these changes, an enormous number of HIV variants exist worldwide. Even so, scientists have identified a few areas on HIV's surface that remain nearly constant across all variants. One such area, located on the surface spikes used by HIV to attach to immune system cells and infect them, is called the CD4 binding site. VRC01 and VRC02 block HIV infection by attaching to the CD4 binding site, preventing the virus from latching onto immune cells.

"The antibodies attach to a virtually unchanging part of the virus, and this explains why they can neutralize such an extraordinary range of HIV strains," says Dr. Mascola, the deputy director of the VRC.

With these antibodies in hand, a team led by Dr. Kwong, chief of the structural biology section at the VRC, determined the atomic-level molecular structure of VRC01 when attached to the CD4 binding site. They then examined this structure in light of natural antibody development to ascertain the steps that would be needed to elicit a VRC01-like antibody through vaccination.

Antibody development begins with the mixing of genes into new combinations within the immune cells that make antibodies. Examination of the structure of VRC01 attached to HIV suggested that, from a genetic standpoint, the immune system likely could produce VRC01 precursors readily. The researchers also confirmed that VRC01 does not bind to human cells -- a characteristic that might otherwise lead to its elimination during immune development, a natural mechanism the body employs to prevent autoimmune disease.

In the final stage of antibody development, antibody-producing B cells recognize specific parts of a pathogen and then mutate, or mature, so the antibody can bind to the pathogen more firmly. VRC01 precursors do not bind tightly to HIV, but rather mature extensively into more powerfully neutralizing forms. This extensive antibody maturation presents a challenge for vaccine design. In their paper, Dr. Kwong and colleagues explore how this challenge might be addressed by designing vaccine components that could guide the immune system through this stepwise maturation process and facilitate the generation of a VRC01-like antibody from its precursors. The scientists currently are performing research to identify these components.

The discoveries we have made may overcome the limitations that have long stymied antibody-based HIV vaccine design," says Dr. Kwong.

The two research teams included NIAID scientists from the VRC, the Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and the Division of Clinical Research, all in Bethesda, Md.; as well as researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; Columbia University in New York; Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston; The Rockefeller University in New York City; and University of Washington in Seattle.

Saturn System Moves Oxygen from Enceladus to Titan

Complex interactions between Saturn and its satellites have led scientists using NASA's Cassini spacecraft to a comprehensive model that could explain how oxygen may end up on the surface of Saturn's icy moon Titan. The presence of these oxygen atoms could potentially provide the basis for pre-biological chemistry.
The interactions are captured in two papers, one led by John Cooper and another led by Edward Sittler, published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in late 2009. Cooper and Sittler are Cassini plasma spectrometer team scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"Titan and Enceladus, another icy moon of Saturn, are chemically connected by the flow of material through the Saturn system," Cooper said.

In one paper, Cooper and colleagues provide an explanation for forces that could generate the Enceladus geysers that spew water vapor into space. In the other, published in the same issue, Sittler and colleagues describe a unique new process in which oxygen that circulates in the upper atmosphere of Titan can be carried all the way to the surface without further chemical contamination by being encased in carbon cages called fullerenes.

The work draws upon previous work by Sittler and others that model the dynamics of how particles, including water molecules, travel from Enceladus to Titan. At Enceladus the flow process begins with what they call the "Old Faithful" model, after the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. In this model, gas pressure slowly builds up inside Enceladus, then gets released occasionally in geyser-like eruptions.

Unlike terrestrial geysers, or even geyser-like forces on Jupiter's moon Io, the model proposed by Cooper shows that charged particle radiation raining down from Saturn's magnetosphere can create the forces from below the surface that are required to eject gaseous jets.

Energetic particles raining down from Saturn's magnetosphere -- at Enceladus, mostly electrons from Saturn's radiation belts -- can break up molecules within the surface. This process is called radiolysis. Like a process called photolysis, in which sunlight can break apart molecules in the atmosphere, energetic radiation from charged particles that hit an icy surface, like that of Enceladus, can cause damage to molecules within the ice. These damaged molecules can get buried deeper and deeper under the surface by the perpetual churning forces that can repave the icy surface. Meteorites constantly crashing into the surface and splashing out material might also be burying the molecules.

When chemically altered icy grains come into contact beneath the surface with icy contaminants such as ammonia, methane and other hydrocarbons, they can produce volatile gases that can explode outward. Such gases can create plumes of the size seen by Cassini. Cooper and colleagues call such icy volatile mechanics "cryovolcanism."

What's unique about the "Old Faithful" model is that it "is a model for cryovolcanism that is based on not only liquid water, but also requires the production of gases by the radiolytic chemistry observed at Enceladus," said Sittler.

The plumes that emanate from Enceladus' south polar region consist of water, ammonia and other compounds. Scientists have known since the 1980s that Saturn's magnetosphere is inexplicably filled with neutral particles. In the intervening decades, particularly since the discovery of plumes jetting out from the south pole of Enceladus, work has shown how some of the water molecules that escape from Enceladus get split up into neutral and charged particles and are transported throughout Saturn's magnetosphere.

Sittler's new model indicates that as these broken water molecules enter Titan's atmosphere, they may be captured by fullerenes -- hollow, soccer-ball shaped shells made of carbon atoms. Although the heavy molecules Cassini has detected in the upper atmosphere of Titan may be other molecules, Sittler suggests they are likely fullerenes.

In Sittler's model, the fullerenes then condense into larger clusters that can attach to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- chemical compounds also found on Earth in oil, coal and tar deposits, and as the byproducts of burning fossil fuels. The fullerene clusters form even larger aerosols that travel down to Titan's surface.

This process protects the trapped oxygen from Titan's atmosphere, which is saturated with hydrogen atoms and compounds that are capable of breaking down other molecules. Otherwise, the oxygen would combine with methane in Titan's atmosphere and form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Until now, scientists have not been able to explain how oxygen fits into the picture of the dynamics and chemistry of Saturn and its moons.

As the oxygen-rich aerosols fall to Titan's surface, they are further bombarded by products of galactic cosmic ray interactions with Titan's atmosphere. Cosmic rays bombarding the oxygen-stuffed fullerenes could produce more complex organic materials, such as amino acids, in the carbon-rich and oxygen-loaded fullerenes. Amino acids are considered important for pre-biological chemistry.

Scientists have been able to couple the new models that describe the generation of plumes at Enceladus and oxygen ion capture in fullerenes near the top of Titan's atmosphere to existing theories of the transport of oxygen across the magnetosphere. Taken together, Sittler and Cooper suggest a chemical pathway that allows the oxygen to be introduced to Titan's surface chemistry.

"Cooper and Sittler's work helps us understand more about the potential for chemical interactions among Saturn's moons," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"The Saturn system is indeed a dynamic place, with the Enceladus plumes creating the E ring and loading the magnetosphere with water which interacts with Titan and the other moons," Spilker said.

The Cassini mission is a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian space agency Agenzia Spaziale Italiana. The mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology. Partners include the U.S. Air Force, Department of Energy, and academic and industrial participants from 19 countries.

Nano-Sized Light Mill Drives Micro-Sized Disk

While those wonderful light sabers in the Star Wars films remain the figment of George Lucas' fertile imagination, light mills -- rotary motors driven by light -- that can power objects thousands of times greater in size are now fact.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created the first nano-sized light mill motor whose rotational speed and direction can be controlled by tuning the frequency of the incident light waves. It may not help conquer the Dark Side, but this new light mill does open the door to a broad range of valuable applications, including a new generation of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), nanoscale solar light harvesters, and bots that can perform in vivo manipulations of DNA and other biological molecules.

"We have demonstrated a plasmonic motor only 100 nanometers in size that when illuminated with linearly polarized light can generate a torque sufficient to drive a micrometre-sized silica disk 4,000 times larger in volume," says Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley's Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (SINAM), who led this research. "In addition to easily being able to control the rotational speed and direction of this motor, we can create coherent arrays of such motors, which results in greater torque and faster rotation of the microdisk."

The success of this new light mill stems from the fact that the force exerted on matter by light can be enhanced in a metallic nanostructure when the frequencies of the incident light waves are resonant with the metal's plasmons -- surface waves that roll through a metal's conduction electrons. Zhang and his colleagues fashioned a gammadion-shaped light mill type of nanomotor out of gold that was structurally designed to maximize the interactions between light and matter. The metamaterial-style structure also induced orbital angular momentum on the light that in turn imposed a torque on the nanomotor.

"The planar gammadion gold structures can be viewed as a combination of four small LC-circuits for which the resonant frequencies are determined by the geometry and dielectric properties of the metal," says Zhang. "The imposed torque results solely from the gammadion structure's symmetry and interaction with all incident light, including light which doesn't carry angular momentum. Essentially we use design to encode angular momentum in the structure itself. Since the angular momentum of the light need not be pre-determined, the illuminating source can be a simple linearly polarized plane-wave or Gaussian beam."

The results of this research are reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in a paper titled, " Light-driven nanoscale plasmonic motors." Co-authoring the paper with Zhang were Ming Liu, Thomas Zentgraf, Yongmin Liu and Guy Bartal.

It has long been known that the photons in a beam of light carry both linear and angular momentum that can be transferred to a material object. Optical tweezers and traps, for example, are based on the direct transfer of linear momentum. In 1936, Princeton physicist Richard Beth demonstrated that angular momentum -- in either its spin or orbital form -- when altered by the scattering or absorption of light can produce a mechanical torque on an object. Previous attempts to harness this transfer of angular momentum for a rotary motor have been hampered by the weakness of the interaction between photons and matter.

"The typical motors had to be at least micrometres or even millimeters in size in order to generate a sufficient amount of torque," says lead author Ming Liu, a PhD student in Zhang's group. "We've shown that in a nanostructure like our gammadion gold light mill, torque is greatly enhanced by the coupling of the incident light to plasmonic waves. The power density of our motors is very high. As a bonus, the rotational direction is controllable, a counterintuitive fact based on what we learn from wind mills."

The directional change, Liu explains, is made possible by the support of the four-armed gammadion structure for two major resonance modes -- a wavelength of 810 nanometers, and a wavelength of 1,700 nanometers. When illuminated with a linearly polarized Gaussian beam of laser light at the shorter wavelength, the plasmonic motor rotated counterclockwise at a rate of 0.3 Hertz. When illuminated with a similar laser beam but at the larger wavelength, the nanomotor rotated at the same rate of speed but in a clockwise direction.

"When multiple motors are integrated into one silica microdisk, the torques applied on the disk from the individual motors accumulate and the overall torque is increased," Liu says. "For example, a silica disk embedded with four plasmonic nanomotors attains the same rotation speed with only half of the laser power applied as a disk embedded with a single motor."

The nanoscale size of this new light mill makes it ideal for powering NEMS, where the premium is on size rather than efficiency. Generating relatively powerful torque in a nanosized light mill also has numerous potential biological applications, including the controlled unwinding and rewinding of the DNA double helix. When these light mill motors are structurally optimized for efficiency, they could be useful for harvesting solar energy in nanoscopic systems.

"By designing multiple motors to work at different resonance frequencies and in a single direction, we could acquire torque from the broad range of wavelengths available in sunlight," Liu says.

This research was supported by DOE's Office of Science.

Thousands of Undiscovered Plant Species Face Extinction Worldwide

Faced with threats such as habitat loss and climate change, thousands of rare flowering plant species worldwide may become extinct before scientists can even discover them, according to a paper published today by a trio of American and British researchers in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
"Scientists have estimated that, overall, there could be between 5 million and 50 million species, but fewer than 2 million of these species have been discovered to date," says lead author Lucas Joppa of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U.K., who received his doctorate from Duke University earlier this year. "Using novel methods, we were able to refine the estimate of total species for flowering plants, and calculate how many of those remain undiscovered."

Based on data from the online World Checklist of Selected Plant Families at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the scientists calculated that there are between 10 and 20 percent more undiscovered flowering plant species than previously estimated. This finding has "enormous conservation implications, as any as-yet-unknown species are likely to be overwhelmingly rare and threatened," Joppa says.

The new, more accurate estimate can be used to infer the proportion of all threatened species, says coauthor David Roberts of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent. "If we take the number of species that are currently known to be threatened, and add to that those that are yet to be discovered, we can estimate that between 27 percent and 33 percent of all flowering plants will be threatened with extinction," he says.

"That percentage reflects the global impact of factors such as habitat loss. It may increase if you factor in other threats such as climate change," Joppa adds.

"The timing couldn't be more perfect," says co-author Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "The year 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. We wrote the paper to help answer the obvious questions: How much biodiversity is out there, and how many species will we lose before they are even discovered?"

Newborn Stars Discovered in Dark Cosmic Cloud

A wave of massive star formation appears poised to begin within a mysterious, dark cloud in the Milky Way. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a secluded birthplace for stars within a wispy, dark cloud named named M17 SWex. The dark cloud is part of the larger, parent nebula known as M17, a vast region of our galaxy with a bright, central star cluster. "We believe we've managed to observe this dark cloud in a very early phase of star formation before its most massive stars have ignited," said Penn State astronomer Matthew Povich, a postdoctoral fellow and the lead author of a study published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The new research could shed light on the question of how and when massive stars form.
Though astronomers first discovered the dark cloud in the Sagittarius constellation more than 30 years ago, it took the keenness of the Spitzer telescope's instruments to spot the hidden stellar nursery within. Spitzer's infrared vision has shown that M17 SWex is among the closest to Earth and also among the Milky Way's busiest star-making factories, with 488 newly forming stars. More than 200 will become blue-white class B stars, larger and hotter than our Sun. "Most of the stars we've detected are relatively bright," said Povich. "So we predict the actual number of stars forming in M17 SWex is over 10,000, since the fainter stars cannot be detected with the current observations."

Conspicuously absent from M17 SWex are the bluest, hottest, and biggest of new stars -- the class O stars. Though relatively rare in the cosmos, O stars are what light up neighboring regions within the colossal M17 nebula.

One possible answer to this riddle is that developing O stars -- wild, windy, and spewing radiation -- rapidly destroy their dusty envelopes, which Spitzer otherwise would sniff out. But a more likely explanation is that such gigantic stars form later, perhaps needing an extra "nudge" into existence. A shock wave from a burst of star births in the region could set off a chain of massive star formation -- a cosmic "domino effect." In support of this idea, Povich and his colleagues point to a giant "bubble" blown by blue O stars aged some two to five million years in the far left of the Spitzer image. Part of this great smoke ring appears to shape the left, curving border of the M17 nebula, whose interior is lit up by a star cluster about one-million years old. Farther to the right, the shrouded, budding stars in the dark M17 SWex cloud have not yet celebrated their one millionth birthdays -- truly infants in the stellar sense.

The architecture of our galaxy likely plays a role in this chronology. In its orbit around the Milky Way's center, the M17 region is now passing though the Sagittarius spiral arm, one of the giant bands of stars and gas pinwheeling out from our galaxy's hub. The greater concentration of gas and dust in the arm is mashing material together in the M17 region, triggering a round of massive star formation that moves through this cloud, causing a chain reaction.

"The time-sequence of star formation proceeds in the same direction that a spiral arm crosses the M17 cloud complex," Povich says. "The M17 region brings to mind images of other spiral galaxies where the leading edges of the arms appear blue, with young O stars, but the trailing edges are still dark, with obscuring dust like in M17 SWex." The time required, for the M17 region to pass through the edge of the Sagittarius spiral arm is about a million years.

Further investigation of the M17 SWex flying dragon and other clouds may reveal whether massive stars need this added oomph of an expanding shock wave to come to luminous life.

"We hope that astronomers will use M17 SWex as a new laboratory for studying the mystery of how massive star formation really happens," says Povich. "Most very young clouds being studied don't have as much going on as this one does."

In addition to Povich, another member of the research team is Barbara Whitney of the Space Science Institute of Boulder, Colorado.

Secret Tunnel Explored in Pharaoh's Tomb

Standing on wooden steps that protect a 3,300-year-old stone staircase, Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass poses in 2009 in a mysterious tunnel that links the ancient tomb of Pharaoh Seti I to ... nothing.

After three years of hauling out rubble and artifacts via a railway-car system (rails visible at left), the excavators have hit a wall, the team announced last week. It seems the ancient workers who created the steep tunnel under Egypt's Valley of the Kings near Luxor (map) abruptly stopped after cutting 572 feet (174 meters) into rock.

Hawass, also a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, believes work on the tunnel began during the pharaoh's 15-year reign (1294-1279 B.C.), but after the tomb above it was already complete. Work may have stopped when Seti I died.

Archaeologist Mustafa Waziri, regional director for the Egyptian antiquities council, said: "I think they were planning to make another burial chamber down there. Suddenly they stopped. But the condition of the stairs is amazing."



Snakes await at the foot of a steep tunnel in a scene painted on the walls of Pharaoh Seti I's tomb, above the real-life tunnel (file photo).

The image adds to evidence that the tunnel may have been planned from the beginning, according to Egyptian archaeologist Mustafa Waziri. The scene may refer to the ancient Egyptian Book of Hours, in which a snake guides good people into the afterlife, Waziri said.

While the rest of the tomb is covered with ornate reliefs, the tunnel is almost entirely blank. Archaeologists, however, did find red graffiti on the steps and what appear to be instructions from the architect: "Move the doorjamb up, and make the passage wider."



Kingly Cutaway

Illustration by Christopher Klein, National Geographic

Ancient Egyptian workers carve out and embellish the tomb of Seti I in a cutaway illustration.

Painstakingly chipped into high limestone cliffs above the Valley of the Kings, also home to the tomb of King Tut, Seti I's tomb is among the hardest to reach but most rewarding. The tomb is the most ornate and largest in the valley—and it's growing.

The newly excavated stairway beneath the tomb isn't the only tunnel to surprise archaeologists and expand the tomb's square footage in recent years. In 2008 experts announced they'd found a new tunnel in the tomb proper, which expanded the crypt's length from 328 feet (100 meters) to 446 feet (136 meters)


Pharaoh's Little Helper

Photograph courtesy Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities

Shabti, or ushabti, figurines—such as this one rescued from rubble in the newly excavated tunnel—became popular in the tombs of pharaohs starting in the 18th dynasty (1550-1069 B.C.). Seti I was the second pharaoh of the 19th dynasty (1295-1069 B.C.).

Ancient Egyptians believed shabtis, usually found in groups of several hundred, were embodiments of farmers and other laborers meant to aid the pharaoh in the afterlife.

Dated to the 19th dynasty, the shabtis in Seti I's tunnel were found alongside pottery from the same period and cartouches bearing Seti I's name (translate your name into hieroglyphs).

Gulf Spill Pictures: Toxic Oil Found Just Under Beaches

University of South Florida coastal geologists (left to right) Stoddard Pickrel, Katie Brutsché, and Jun Cheng dig into a beach near Pensacola Beach, Florida (map), on Thursday. It didn't take long for the scientists to strike black gold.

During a series of digs, oil patties and tarballs were found just beneath beaches dirtied by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The discoveries suggest that toxic oil lies hidden under even "clean" patches of beaches along the U.S. Gulf Coast—and that oil-spill cleanup crews are only scratching the surface.

Because the buried oil is both harder to clean and slower to break down, it could be a long-lasting threat to beachgoers, both animal and human, experts say.


—Adapted from a story by Christine Dell'Amore in Pensacola Beach, Florida, and Gulf Islands National Seashore

Fish Robot As An Alternative Marine Propulsion System Of The Future

The team of Darmstadt researchers analyzed videos of fish’s motions and then developed a prototype fish robot that duplicated them, and are now testing it using the locomotional patterns of various species of fish in order to refine it and improve its efficiency.

Their fish robot, dubbed “Smoky,” consists of a “skeleton” composed of ten segments enshrouded in an elastic skin that are free to move relative to one another and caused to undergo snaking motions similar to those of fish by waterproof actuators. Including its tail fin, the fish robot, which is a 5:1 scale model of a gilt-head sea bream, is 1.50 meters long.

The researchers hope that use of their fish robot for ship propulsion will help prevent shoreline erosion and the underminings of submarine installations caused by ships’ screws. The fish robot’s “soft” drive action should also prevent the churning up of seabeds and riverbeds and its effects on marine plants and aquatic-animal populations.

Thermal-Powered, Insect-Like Robot Crawls Into Microrobot Contenders' Ring

Robotic cars attracted attention last decade with a 100-mile driverless race across the desert competing for a $1 million prize put up by the U.S. government.
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The past few years have given rise to a growing number of microrobots, miniaturized mobile machines designed to perform specific tasks. And though spectators might need magnifying glasses to see the action, some think the time has come for a microrobotics challenge.

"I'd like to see a similar competition at the small scale, where we dump these microrobots from a plane and have them go off and run for days and just do what they've been told," said Karl Böhringer, a University of Washington professor of electrical engineering. "That would require quite an effort at this point, but I think it would be a great thing."

Researchers at the UW and Stanford University have developed what might one day be a pint-sized contender. Böhringer is lead author of a paper in the June issue of the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems introducing an insectlike robot with hundreds of tiny legs.

Compared to other such robots, the UW model excels in its ability to carry heavy loads -- more than seven times its own weight -- and move in any direction.

Someday, tiny mobile devices could crawl through cracks to explore collapsed structures, collect environmental samples or do other tasks where small size is a benefit. The UW's robot weighs half a gram (roughly one-hundredth of an ounce), measures about 1 inch long by a third of an inch wide, and is about the thickness of a fingernail.

Technically it is a centipede, with 512 feet arranged in 128 sets of four. Each foot consists of an electrical wire sandwiched between two different materials, one of which expands under heat more than the other. A current traveling through the wire heats the two materials and one side expands, making the foot curl. Rows of feet shuffle along in this way at 20 to 30 times each second.

"The response time is an interesting point about these tiny devices," Böhringer said. "On your stove, it might take minutes or even tens of minutes to heat something up. But on the small scale it happens much, much faster."

The legs' surface area is so large compared to their volume that they can heat up or cool down in just 20 milliseconds.

"It's one of the strongest actuators that you can get at the small scale, and it has one of the largest ranges of motion," Böhringer said. "That's difficult to achieve at the small scale."

The microchip, the robot's body and feet, was first built in the mid 1990s at Stanford University as a prototype part for a paper-thin scanner or printer. A few years later the researchers modified it as a docking system for space satellites. Now they have flipped it over so the structures that acted like moving cilia are on the bottom, turning the chip into an insectlike robot.

"There were questions about the strength of the actuators. Will they be able to support the weight of the device?" Böhringer said. "We were surprised how strong they were. For these things that look fragile, it's quite amazing."

The tiny legs can move more than just the device. Researchers were able to pile paper clips onto the robot's back until it was carrying more than seven times its own weight. This means that the robot could carry a battery and a circuit board, which would make it fully independent. (It now attaches to nine threadlike wires that transmit power and instructions.)

Limbs pointing in four directions allow the robot flexibility of movement.

"If you drive a car and you want to be able to park it in a tight spot, you think, 'Wouldn't it be nice if I could drive in sideways,'" Böhringer said. "Our robot can do that -- there's no preferred direction."

Maneuverability is important for a robot intended to go into tight spaces.

The chip was not designed to be a microrobot, so little effort was made to minimize its weight or energy consumption. Modifications could probably take off 90 percent of the robot's weight, Böhringer said, and eliminate a significant fraction of its power needs.

As with other devices of this type, he added, a major challenge is the power supply. A battery would only let the robot run for 10 minutes, while researchers would like it to go for days.

Another is speed. Right now the UW robot moves at about 3 feet per hour -- and it's far from the slowest in the microrobot pack.

Co-authors are former UW graduate students Yegan Erdem, Yu-Ming Chen and Matthew Mohebbi; UW electrical engineering professor Robert Darling; John Suh at General Motors; and Gregory Kovacs at Stanford.

Research funding was provided by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and General Motors Co.

Rare Creatures from the Deep: Findings May Revolutionize Thinking About Deep-Sea Life in Atlantic Ocean

Scientists have just returned from a voyage with samples of rare animals and more than 10 possible new species in a trip which they say has revolutionised their thinking about deep-sea life in the Atlantic Ocean.
One group of creatures they observed -- and captured -- during their six weeks in the Atlantic aboard the RRS James Cook is believed to be close to the missing evolutionary link between backboned and invertebrate animals.

Using the latest technology they also saw species in abundance that until now had been considered rare.

Researchers were also surprised to discover such diversity in habitat and marine life in locations just a few miles apart.

Scientists were completing the last leg of MAR-ECO -- an international research programme, part of the Census of Marine Life, which is enhancing our understanding of the occurrence, distribution and ecology of animals along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Iceland and the Azores.

The University of Aberdeen is leading the UK contribution to the project which involves scientists from 16 nations. Key collaborators in the UK include Newcastle University and the National Oceanography Centre.

During more than 300 hours of diving -- using Isis the UK's deepest diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to depths of between 700m right down to 3,600m -- researchers surveyed flat plains, cliff faces and slopes of the giant mountain range that divides the Atlantic Ocean into two halves, east and west.

The research was focused in two areas -- beneath the cold waters north of the Gulf Stream and the warmer waters to the south.

Professor Monty Priede, Director of the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, said: "We were surprised at how different the animals were on either side of the ridge which is just tens of miles apart.

"In the west the cliffs faced east and in the east the cliffs faced west. The terrain looked the same, mirror images of each other, but that is where the similarity ended. It seemed like we were in a scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass.

"In the north-east, sea urchins were dominant on the flat plains and the cliffs were colourful and rich with sponges, corals and other life.

"In the north-west, the cliffs were dull grey bare rock with much less life. The north-west plains were the home of deep-sea enteropneust acorn worms. Only a few specimens, from the Pacific Ocean, were previously known to science.

"These worms are members of a little-known group of animals close to the missing link in evolution between backboned and invertebrate animals.

"The creatures were observed feeding and leaving characteristic spiral traces on the sea floor.

"They have no eyes, no obvious sense organs or brain but there is a head end, tail end and the primitive body plan of back-boned animals is established. One was observed showing rudimentary swimming behaviour.

"By the end of the expedition three different species were discovered each with a different colour, pink, purple and white with distinctly different shapes."

Using the remotely operated vehicle, high quality complete specimens of all three different-coloured species were captured and will be sent to specialists for further investigations.

Sea cucumbers, or holothurians, normally seen crawling incredibly slowly over the flat abyssal plains of the ocean floor, were found on steep slopes, small ledges and rock faces of the underwater mountain range.

Researchers were also surprised to see that they were very able and fast moving swimmers and unique video sequences were recorded of swimming holothurians.

Professor Priede said: "This expedition has revolutionised our thinking about deep-sea life in the Atlantic Ocean. It shows that we cannot just study what lives around the edges of the ocean and ignore the vast array of animals living on the slopes and valleys in the middle of the Ocean.

"Using new technology and precise navigation we can access these regions and discover things we never suspected existed."

Dr Andrey Gebruk, Shirshov Institute, Moscow, said: "We were surprised how species, elsewhere considered rare, were found in abundance on the Mid Atlantic Ridge and we were finding new species up to the last minute of the last dive in the voyage."

Dr Dan Jones, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, surveyed over 50,000 square metres of sea floor in high definition detail and said: "We successfully completed one of the most detailed video surveys of the deep sea ever attempted. The Isis ROV with its cutting-edge technology gives us the potential to understand more and more of the mysterious deep sea environment."

Newcastle University's Dr Ben Wigham has been working on the project for the past four years studying the biology of animals living on the ridge. "We are interested in how these animals are feeding in areas of the deep-sea where food is often scarce" he said. "The differences we see in the diversity of species and numbers of individuals may well be related to how they are able to process and share out a rather common but meagre food supply, we certainly see indications that there are differences between the north and south regions of the ridge."

Bridge to the Quantum World: Darwinian Concept of Natural Selection Figures Into Theory About Core of Physical Reality

Science fiction has nothing over quantum physics when it comes to presenting us with a labyrinthine world that can twist your mind into knots when you try to make sense of it.
A team of Arizona State University researchers, however, believes they've opened a door to a clearer view of how the common, everyday world we experience through our senses emerges from the ethereal quantum world.

Physicists call our familiar everyday environment the classical world. That's the world in which we and the things around us appear to have measurable characteristics such as mass, height, color, weight, texture and shape.

The quantum world is the world of the elemental building block of matter -- atoms. Atoms are combinations of neutrons and protons and electrons bound to a nucleus by electrical attraction.

But most of an atom -- more than 99 percent of it -- is empty space filled with invisible energy.

So from a quantum-world view, we and the things around us are mostly empty space. The way we experience ourselves and other things in the classical world is really just "a figment of our imaginations shaped by our senses," explains ASU Regents' Professor David Ferry.

For more than a century, scientists and engineers have struggled to come to a satisfactory conclusion about the missing link that bridges the classical and quantum worlds and enables a transition from that world of mostly empty space to the familiar environment we experience through our senses.

One proposed scenario based on these questions was investigated in a dissertation written by Adam Burke to earn his doctorate in electrical engineering in 2009 from ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

To try working out an answer to some of the questions, Burke teamed with Ferry, a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Tim Day, who recently earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from the school, physicist Richard Akis, an associate research professor in the school, Gil Speyer, an assistant research scientist for the engineering schools' High Performance Computing Initiative, and Brian Bennett, a materials scientist with the Naval Research Laboratory.

The result is an article published recently in the research journal Physical Review Letters. It describes the transition from quantum to classical world as a "decoherence" process that involves a kind of evolutionary progression somewhat analogous to Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection.

The authors built on two theories called decoherence and quantum Darwinism, both proposed by Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Wojciech Zurek.

The decoherence concept holds that many quantum states "collapse" into a "broad diaspora," or dispersion, while interacting with the environment. Through a selection process, other quantum states arrive at a final stable state, called a pointer state, which is "fit enough" (think "survival of the fittest" in Darwinian terms) to be transmitted through the environment without collapsing.

These single states with the lowest energy can then make high-energy copies of themselves that can be described by the Darwinian process and observed on the macroscopic scale in the classical world.

The experiments arose from using advanced scanning gate microscopy to obtain images of what are called quantum dots.

Burke, now doing research in a post-doctoral program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, explains it like this:

Imagine the quantum dot as a billiard table in which the quantum point contacts are the two openings through which a ball could enter or leave the dot, and the interior walls of the dot act as bumpers.

If there were no friction on the table, a billiard ball with an initial trajectory would bounce off of these walls until eventually finding an exit and leaving the dot (this is the decoherence part).

Or it might find a trajectory that does not couple to the openings and would therefore be a surviving pointer state, what is called a diamond state.

One difference between the classical physics of billiard balls and the quantum physics of electrons is that an electron can tunnel through "forbidden phase space" to enter this diamond state, whereas a billiard ball entering from outside the dot would not find itself able to reach this diamond trajectory.

It is this isolated classical trajectory, and the buildup of an electron wave functions' amplitude along that trajectory, that is referred to as a scarred wave function.

To experimentally measure these scars, imagine that we can't see inside the walls of our billiard table, but we can count the billiard balls exiting the table. This is what is normally measured with the conductance of the quantum dot and its environment.

"We measure the current through the dot, the numbers of 'billiard balls' passing through it per second, to try to see how this changes when we move our probe around the 'billiard table,' " Ferry says.

Furthermore, there is the probe of the scanning gate microscope, which applies a small electric field. This can be pictured as a small circular bumper on the billiard table that can be moved around within the dot.

This small "bumper" is rastered left to right, top to bottom over the area of interest. If a ball is traveling along this diamond pattern it is perturbed by the bumper when it rasters into the trajectory.

Think of rastering like the way a television image works, with a pattern of scanning lines that cover the area on which the image is projected, or a set or horizontal lines composed of individual pixels that are used to form an image on a computer screen.

When this happens, the ball bounces off the perturbation, and takes a new course within the dot until finally coupling out one of the openings to be measured. The change in the ball's motion appears as a change in the conductance -- the number of balls going through the openings in a given time.

Ferry explains: "With scanning gate microscopy, we monitor where these changes occur within the scans, and hopefully this gives us a map of the scarred wave functions corresponding to the pointer states."

Quantum mechanically, he says, a new electron will tunnel right into the diamond state, so the measurement can continue until the whole area is mapped.

The data that came from the team's experiment supports Zurek's theories of decoherence and quantum Darwinism, Burke says.

Ferry says these findings are just one step in a process that is open to conjecture, but they point toward a "smoking gun" for the existence of this quantum Darwinism and a new view in the search for evidence of how the quantum-to-classical world transition actually occurs.

If you can wrap your mind around all this, he says, "You open the door to a deeper understanding of what is really going on" at the core of physical reality.

Researchers Measure Single-Molecule Machines in Action

In the development of future molecular devices, new display technologies, and "artificial muscles" in nanoelectromechanical devices, functional molecules are likely to play a primary role.
Rotaxanes, one family of such molecules, are tiny, mechanically interlocked structures that consist of a dumbell-shaped molecule whose rod section is encircled by a ring. These structures behave as molecular "machines," with the ring moving along the rod from one station to another when stimulated by a chemical reaction, light or acidity.

To realize the potential of these molecular machines, however, it is necessary to understand and to measure their function at the nanoscale. Previous methods for observing their operation have involved chemical measurements in solution and studying collections of them attached to surfaces, but neither has provided an accurate picture of their function in environments that are relevant to molecular-device operation.

Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from UCLA, Northwestern University, UC Merced, Pennsylvania State University and Japan has succeeded in observing single-molecule interactions of bistable rotaxanes functioning in their native environment.

The team's findings are published in the current edition of the journal ACS Nano.

Led by Paul Weiss from UCLA and Fraser Stoddart from Northwestern University, the team developed a molecular design that firmly attached rotaxanes to a surface, enabling them to be individually examined in their native environment by a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Using this technology, the researchers were able to record station changes by the rotaxanes' rings along their rods in response to electrochemical signals.

Previously, rotaxanes had to be grouped for study because of their mobility and flexibility when attached to surfaces. And because STM instruments utilize an atomically thin tip to feel out nanoscale surfaces ― in much the same way a blind person reads Braille ― the rotaxanes' flexible nature made it difficult to study them individually. The research team's molecular design, however, helped significantly reduce this flexibility.

The STM developed by the team enables much more detailed studies of molecular machines, leading to greater understanding of how they interact with their neighbors and how they might work together in nanoelectromechanical devices.

Paul Weiss, distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences and is director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. Fraser Stoddart is the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems (CCIS) at Northwestern University.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Kavli Foundation.

Where Would Space Aliens Come From?

A reader reminded me that today is the 63rd anniversary of the so-called Roswell UFO Incident. Even if you know nothing else about the UFO phenomenon, you certainly have heard about what supposedly happened in Roswell, New Mexico in July, 1947: a crashed flying saucer, autopsies on alien bodies, Government cover-ups. It ushered in the 1950’s kitsch of bubble-headed little green space jockeys inside silvery saucers flitting across our skies.

This space-age mythology, embellished over the years, tells of an alien interstellar vehicle simply falling out of the sky near a desert town. The only tangible evidence is scraps of wood and metal foil and other mundane debris that suspiciously look like they came from a crashed U.S. military balloon. That is, unless you believe the Government has been hiding all the goodies -- including alien corpses -- inside an Indiana Jones style warehouse all these decades.

Roswell_pieces This leads me to wonder that if flying saucers are supposedly real, why haven't we learned where the visitors come from among the stars? Didn't the Roswell aliens leave a driving map in their glovebox?

If someone who claimed to be in contact with space aliens could give us just a few simple numbers they’d unequivocally prove their case to skeptics. Simply send me (1) the celestial coordinates of the home star, (2) the number of planets orbiting it, (3) their distances from the parent star, (4) and their relative masses. Then all we’d have to do is look at the star and see if the planets were there. Viola!

This has never happened in UFO history. Well, almost never.

A search on the Internet comes up with one particularly legendary place, the double star system Zeta Reticuli. It's nearby, only 39 light-years away in the southern sky.

The naked-eye double star burst into UFO culture in the mid -1970s. An Ohio school teacher, Marjorie Fish, claimed to have decoded a star map from a 1961 UFO abduction case. It pointed to Zeta Reticuli as the aliens' place of origin.

The alleged extraterrestrial kidnapping, described in journalist John Fuller’s book “Incident at Exeter: The Interrupted Journey,” tells how a New England couple was taken aboard a flying saucer and medically examined. Under hypnotic regression the wife, Betty Hill, sketched a star map she said she saw while inside the spaceship.

In the pre-home computer days of the early 1970s, Fish actually constructed a wireframe cube and positioned beads on strings for the nearby stellar neighborhood. She viewed the model from different angles until a match was found with the Hill map. It pinpointed Zeta Reticuli.

Hill_sketch

This map is legendary but meaningless. First, the Hill drawing contains 25 dots for stars. If you flew around a computer database of the local stellar neighborhood you’d come up with more than one match that roughly “looked” similar to her sketch.

Secondly, Hill described the map as showing alien exploration and trade routes to other stars. The notion of trade between extraterrestrial civilizations is patently absurd. There is nothing worth trading that would justify the transportation costs (at least nothing short of Star Trek’s Green Orion Slave Women). And, clearly the Zeta Reticulans aren’t trading with us, unless they’re getting modeling fees and a cut from Roswell UFO souvenir stands.

Finally, in the Fuller book Hill described the map as a flat pull-down chart (later she changed her account and described it vaguely to me, in a hesitant voice, as some sort of 3D display). BTW the UFO also carried paperbound books with “Chinese looking printing” according to Hill. This is as nonsensical as Neil Armstrong carrying stone tablets to the moon. Didn't the aliens at least have something like an iPad?

Today, the Hill map even has a link to the Roswell incident. According to one website the Roswell aliens supposedly set up a secret exchange program with the U.S. military. Apparently 12 humans were sent to the home planet, named Serpio, in the Zeta Reticuli system. The write-up describes a “10-month journey” with poor food (what do you expect from an interstellar airliner?)

Zrec_DSS The reality is that the Zeta Reticuli system is a fascinating place where I’d expect to find advanced life. The two stars are similar to our sun and separated by 800 billion miles. This would leave plenty of elbowroom for inhabited planets to exist around both stars.

The stars are estimated to be as much as 3 billion years older than our Sun. Any intelligent life that originated there would be far too advanced for the shenanigans reported in Roswell. What's more, you could not place a sentient entity a billion years more evolved than us onto a dissection table. And, it definitely would not be humanoid, or perhaps even biological.

Therefore, it's simply ludicrous to imagine that there really was such a wayward craft over Roswell with pilots of flesh and blood. Over the past 50 years our newbie space civilization has reconnoitered the entire solar system with a pretty nimble and savvy armada of robots. They self-navigate into stable orbits and landings on hostile worlds. At least when one of them crashes, nobody gets killed.

Similarly, a native technological intelligent species certainly would be enticed to explore any inhabited planets orbiting the companion star in the Zeta Reticuli system. They would rapidly become and “extra-terrestrial” space-faring civilization. They would be motivated to develop far-advanced propulsion systems needed to hop over to the companion star. Such a trip would take close to 2,000 years with our present generation space vehicles.


In this star system UFOs could become reality. That’s because a less advanced civilization on the companion star might be able to see manifestations of a visiting advanced intelligence from the neighboring binary companion. Eventually they could decide to send a living emissary for a face-to-face contact between civilizations, assuming a similar astrobiology. It could be a scene straight out of the sci-fi classic film “Avatar.”

To date, no planets have been found around either star. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope did find the telltale glow of a dusty disk that would indicate planets are present.

As our survey techniques improve it’s probably only a matter of time before we discover a family of worlds in the Zeta Reticuli system. And, follow-up observations will seek out the biosignatures of life on any planets in habitable zones. This is a far more enthralling future narrative than the unimaginative fantasy of some space hot rodders totaling their vehicle in the middle of nowhere.

Now, Roswell UFO believers can save us a lot of time and effort by simply telling us exactly what the planetary system looks like . . .

Image/graphics Credits: Associated Press, Betty Hill, Marjorie Fish, & Jeffrey Kretsch, Digitized Sky Surve