Organized Crime: The World's Largest Social Network

Thousands of New Stars Emerge in Glowing Nebula

Thousands of young stars come to the fore in in this beautiful new image from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The previously unseen stars were born around 1,800 light-years from Earth in a region called the North American Nebula. In images that capture the same range of light that human eyes can see, the nebula looks like the eastern seaboard of the United States, down to the Gulf of Mexico. But most of that light is reflected off clouds of dust that hide infant stars. Only about 200 young stars were known before.

This image breaks through the clouds to find more than 2,000 new objects that may be young stars. (More data processing will determine their nature.) Because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared wavelengths that can sense heat, it can see the glow of the dusty, buried stars.

“One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible,” said Spitzer astronomer Luisa Rebull in a press release. “The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the dust and the young stars here.” A paper detailing the observations has been accepted in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

Stars are born inside collapsing balls of gas and dust, which flattens into a disk that spins together with the star like a record album. As the star ages, the disk is thought to congeal into planets. Most of the dust is expected to dissipate by the time the star is at the center of a mature solar system.

The new Spitzer image shows stars in all stages of development, from dust-blanketed infancy to early adulthood, when stars are new parents to a growing family of planets.

Despite the new views of its growing stellar family, the North American nebula is still shrouded in mystery. The group of massive stars that is thought to dominate the nebula is still unseen. The Spitzer image and images from other telescopes hint that the missing stars lurk behind the Gulf of Mexico portion of the nebula.

In this image, infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is colored blue; 8.0-micron light is green; and 24-micron light is red. Since taking this image, Spitzer ran out of the coolant needed to keep the two longest wavelength detectors working. Spitzer is still snapping photos in the two shorter wavelength bands.

Nanonets Give Rust a Boost as Agent in Water Splitting's Hydrogen Harvest

Coating a lattice of tiny wires called Nanonets with iron oxide (rust) creates an economical and efficient platform for the process of water splitting -- an emerging clean fuel method that harvests hydrogen from water, Boston College researchers report in the online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry Dunwei Wang and his clean energy lab pioneered the development of Nanonets in 2008 and have since shown them to be a viable new platform for a number of energy applications by virtue of the increased surface area and improved conductivity of the nano-scale netting made from titanium disilicide, a readily available semiconductor.

Wang and his team report that coating the Nanonets with hematite, the plentiful mineral form of iron oxide, showed the mineral could absorb light efficiently and without the added expense of enhancing the material with an oxygen evolving catalyst.

The results flow directly from the introduction of the Nanonet platform, Wang said. While constructed of wires 1/400th the size of a human hair, Nanonets are highly conductive and offer significant surface area. They serve dual roles as a structural support and an efficient charge collector, allowing for maximum photon-to-charge conversion, Wang said.

"Recent research has shown that the use of a catalyst can boost the performance of hematite," said Wang. "What we have shown is the potential performance of hematite at its fundamental level, without a catalyst. By using this unique Nanonet structure, we have shed new light on the fundamental performance capabilities of hematite in water splitting."

On its own, hematite faces natural limits in its ability to transport a charge. A photon can be absorbed, but has no place to go. By giving it structure and added conductivity, the charge transport abilities of hematite increase, said Wang. Water splitting, a chemical reaction that separates water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, can be initiated by passing an electric current through water. But that process is expensive, so gains in efficiency and conductivity are required to make large-scale water splitting an economically viable source for clean energy, Wang said.

"The result highlights the importance of charge transport in semiconductor-based water splitting, particularly for materials whose performance is limited by poor charge diffusion," the researchers report in the journal. "Our design introduces material components to provide a dedicated charge transport pathway, alleviates the reliance on the materials' intrinsic properties, and therefore has the potential to greatly broaden where and how various existing materials can be used in energy-related applications."

Los Angeles Basin Long Overdue for Major Earthquake: Lake-Effect Theory Sinks, but Quake Timing Questions Go on

A chronology of 1,000 years of earthquakes at the southern end of the San Andreas Fault nixes the idea that lake changes in the now-dry region caused past quakes. However, researchers say, the timeline pulled from sediment in three deep trenches confirms that this portion of the fault is long past the expected time for a major temblor that would strongly shake the Los Angeles Basin.
The new study, appearing in the February issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, doesn't change existing thinking about the threat of a major quake -- potentially measuring 7.0 to 8.0 on the Richter scale -- for southern California. It does, however, provide the first published documentation of much-discussed data that have emerged in the last three decades from an area that is now rapidly being built up and populated, just north of the Salton Sea.

Projections of such a quake in recent years led to the nation's largest-ever drill, the Great Southern California ShakeOut, last year. The 2011 ShakeOut is set for Oct. 20. There's even a video projection of the quake's probable route created by the Southern California Earthquake Center. The last earthquake to originate from the area occurred in about 1690.

The new study, said co-author Ray Weldon, professor and head of the department of geological sciences at the University of Oregon, documents that the south end of the San Andreas fault has gone perhaps 140 years longer than the average 180 years between quakes.

"We have dated the last five to seven prehistoric earthquakes of the southernmost 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) of the San Andreas Fault, which is the only piece of the fault that hasn't ruptured in historical times," Weldon said. "If you were there in about 1690, when the last earthquake occurred, the odds of getting to 2010 without an earthquake would have been 20 percent or less."

Weldon stopped short of concluding that a major earthquake is due or overdue, saying that data from this study and other recent work may just as well point to unknowns in current earthquake-modeling techniques.

The seven earthquake events, including the two possible temblors, were placed between 905-961 AD, 959-1015 (possible), 1090-1152, 1275-1347, 1320-1489 (possible), 1588-1662 and 1657-1713, based on analyses of seismic structures preserved in the sediment in the three trenches and 82 radiocarbon dates drawn from 61 samples of organic material.

Weldon and co-authors -- former UO graduate student Belle Philibosian, now pursuing a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), and Thomas Fumal of the U.S. Geological Survey, who died in December -- concluded there is a high probability of rupture in the fault because of a likely buildup of tectonic stress.

The study area is in the dry bed of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla at Coachella, Calif. The lake has been dry since about 1715, according to timelines found in early travelers' descriptions of the area. Researchers found that the lakebed was full of water six times in the study period.

"We now have the best chronology of these lakes that has ever existed," said Weldon, who knows the area well from previous work.

As a doctoral student, he was part of a Cal Tech team led by Kerry Sieh that studied a nearby site in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Seismologists have cited the team's never-fully published findings often. Weldon's return to the region began when researchers were granted access to three 26-foot-deep trenches dug to determine Alquist-Priolo earthquake fault zones as required under California law to assure that human dwellings are not built on fault lines. The trenches, two of which exposed the fault, provide direct access to layers of lake sediments and alluvial deposits.

The Lake Cahuilla Basin, 132 miles from downtown Los Angeles, is separated from the Gulf of California to the south by the expansive, ever-changing delta of the Colorado River. The current body of water in the lake's southern basin, called the Salton Sea, was born in 1905, when heavy rain and snowmelt in the Colorado River drainage led to the collapse of an intake canal built for irrigation purposes just south of Yuma, Ariz. The river then poured into the sink.

The observation that the last lake and last quake were at about 1700 AD and that there have been seven earthquakes and seven lakes during the approximately past 1,000 years have led to the hypothesis that the filling or emptying of each lake triggered earthquake events by changing the pressure on the fault plane below. The new study, Weldon said, shoots down that idea.

The data show that earthquakes occurred in all scenarios: when the lake was filling, while it was full, when it was draining and even when it had long been dried up. In fact, researchers found, the last quake in about 1690 occurred when the lake was full, just before it drained. Calculations of how long the lake would take to dry, if shut off from its Colorado River source coupled with travelers' journals, cited in the study, actually provide witness to the lake's disappearance. "If anything, the earthquake made the lake go away," Weldon said.

"The most popular hypothesis has been that the filling of the lake causes an earthquake, or the draining of the lake causes a quake," he said. "Neither can be true based on where we've found. There's probably no relationship, but if you want to say there is a relationship, it could be that the quakes make or unmake the lakes."

That scenario, he added, could mean that earthquakes have at times shifted the Colorado River's pathway into or away from Lake Cahuilla's bed, perhaps by shaken driven lateral spreading and collapse of its riverbanks

Seismic activity has been common in the Imperial Valley south of the Salton Sea, which is the continuation of the plate boundary to the south but not part of the actual fault, Weldon noted.

"At some point, this area will get kicked by shaking from one of the many quakes that happen south of the San Andreas Fault," he said. "It will rupture northward along the fault. When it comes into the San Bernardino Valley, seismic energy will be directed by a series of basins, including the Los Angeles Basin, into the most highly populated part of Southern California."

The U.S. Geological Survey supported the research. A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship also supported Philibosian, who was the study's lead author.

Virus, Parasite May Combine to Increase Harm to Humans

A parasite and a virus may be teaming up in a way that increases the parasite's ability to harm humans, scientists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis recently reported in Science.
When the parasite Leishmania infects a human, immune system cells known as macrophages respond. However, some Leishmania strains are infected with a virus that can trigger a severe response in macrophages, allowing the parasite to do more harm in animal infections. In humans, the parasite's viral infection may be why some strains of Leishmania in Central and South America tend to cause a disfiguring form of disease that erodes the soft tissues around the nose and mouth.

"This is the first reported case of a viral infection in a pathogen of this type leading to increased rather than reduced pathogenicity," says Stephen Beverley, PhD, the Marvin M. Brennecke Professor and head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine. "It raises a number of important questions, including whether we can use antiviral strategies to reduce the damage caused by forms of Leishmania that carry viruses."

Leishmania infection, known as leishmaniasis, affects an estimated 12 million people worldwide. It is mainly spread by sand fly bites and is a major public health problem in the Mediterranean basin, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America and a potential hazard to travelers and military personnel. Symptoms include large skin lesions, fever, swelling of the spleen and liver, and, in more serious forms of the disease, disfigurement and death.

The study brought together two different lines of investigation in Europe and the Americas.

Nicolas Fasel, PhD, professor of biology and medicine at the University of Lausanne, and Nancy Saravia, PhD, of the International Center for Medical Training and Investigation in Cali, Columbia, have been studying the causes of mucocutaneous leishmaniasis, a particularly harmful form of the disease that destroys the soft tissues of the nose and mouth. This type of infection is frequently associated with Leishmania Viannia, a subgenus of Leishmania strains prevalent in Central and South America.

In tests in mice and hamsters using parasite strains taken from the wild, Fasel and Saravia showed that only some Viannia strains spread rapidly and cause high levels of inflammation and damage similar to that seen in mucocutaneous leishmaniasis.

A breakthrough came when researchers realized that the rapid, highly damaging form of infection relied on an immune system sensor protein called TLR3. This protein is found in intracellular vesicles, which are compartments inside macrophages also known to host the parasite.

"Those vesicles are where the rendezvous between host, parasite and virus takes place," Fasel says. "TLR3 normally helps the immune system fight infections, but when we deleted it in mice and repeated the experiment, infections with virus-infected Leishmania were less harmful."

Researchers sorted the Leishmania into viral-infected and non-infected strains and found that the more serious infections in laboratory animals were much more likely to be caused by viral-infected Leishmania.

Beverley's group has been exploring the role of viral infections of Leishmania in the evolution of the RNA interference pathway, which can help fight viruses.

"Surprisingly many Leishmania species have lost the RNAi interference pathway, and one force contributing to this loss could be the successful infection of the parasite by viruses," he says. "This hints at the possibility of an evolutionary trade-off, suggesting that the loss of RNAi could be balanced if the parasite gained some type of advantage when infected by a virus."

To ensure that genetic differences in the wild strains weren't interfering with the results, Lon-Fye Lye, PhD, staff scientist, and Suzanne Hickerson, senior research technician, both of Beverley's lab, supplied lines of genetically identical Leishmania with and without the virus. As in the prior comparisons, virally-infected Leishmania caused more disease and provoked a stronger response from macrophages.

According to Beverley, the results suggest that some viral infections in Leishmania may be improving the parasite's chances to infect the mammalian host's immune cells. He speculates that this increased pathogenicity may be one evolutionary trade-off that makes losing the RNAi pathway worthwhile for Leishmania and other microbes.

"How the virally increased pathogenicity arises is now a fascinating question in its own right," Beverley says. "It could teach us a great deal about how Leishmania causes a severe form of the disease and potentially offer new opportunities for its cure."

Funding from Swiss National Science Foundation, Foundation Pierre Mercier and the National Institutes of Health supported this research.

Stone Age Fertility Ritual Object Found

* A Paleolithic elk antler, carved with zigzag lines and a human figure, has been unearthed in Poland.
* Analysis of the figure indicates an image on it depicts a woman with spread legs.
* Carved zigzags on the object may symbolize water and life.

A close-up of etchings found on a 11,000-year-old elk antler. Scientists believe the figure is a woman with spread legs. Click to enlarge this image.

A Stone Age-era artifact carved with multiple zigzags and what is likely a woman with spread legs suggests that fertility rituals may have been important to early Europeans, according to new research.

The object, which will be documented in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, is made out of a large elk antler and has been radiocarbon dated to about 10,900 years ago.

"The ornament is composed of groups of zigzag lines and a human representation, probably a woman with spread legs with a short zigzag nearby," lead author Tomasz Płonka told Discovery News. "The woman may be nude, but the geometrical style of representation does not allow us to answer (this question)."

Płonka, a University of Wroclaw archaeologist, and his colleagues analyzed the object, unearthed by a farmer at Swidwin, Poland.

At first the scientists believed the geometrical figure carved onto the antler could have been either the mentioned woman, or a nude man raising his arms. Measurements to determine the ratio of the stick figure limbs, in addition to comparisons with other early human representations, lead the researchers to support the woman interpretation.

Zigzags are very popular motifs on artifacts from many cultures throughout the world, with many possible meanings, but Płonka said, "I think our zigzag lines are connected with water and life symbolism."

The lines also appear to have been carved by different individuals, suggesting that some group effort was involved in the creation of the object.

A geological study of the Polish site found that thawing of ice blocks occurred, increasing the number of water bodies in the region.

"Consequently, the role of aquatic environment as the source of food (fish, mammals) and perhaps transport thoroughfare gained importance," the scientists concluded.

Giant elks were the most imposing animals of the European Plain, perhaps symbolizing "the power of life," according to Płonka. The structure of the carved antler indicates its growth stage was spring or summer. The scientists believe the elk was selected and killed on purpose to make the object, which may have served a role in rituals for many years.

"Some strokes of zigzag lines, which are near the edge of the ornamented surfaces are worn," Płonka explained.

Co-author Krzysztof Kowalski of the National Museum in Szczecin told Discovery News that he and his colleagues are not certain what culture produced the piece, but they've narrowed it down to two probable candidates: the Federmesser or the Ahrensburg cultures.

The Federmesser culture is known for its distinctive flint blade tools, while the Ahrensburg people were famous for their animal-hunting prowess. Intact Ahrensburgian reindeer skeletons with arrowheads in their chests suggest some animals were sacrificed during rituals.

Other European objects, such as an amber figurine found in Weitsche, Germany, provide "evidence there were richly ornamented ritual artifacts at the end of the Paleolithic in Central Europe," Płonka said.

The researchers aren't yet certain if the images on the carved antler are associated with Venus figurines, statuettes of women with exaggerated sexual features that date to as early as 35,000 years ago. Some Venus figurines have been excavated in Poland not too far from the Swidwin site.

Headless Egyptian Mummy Mystery Thickens

* Egyptologists still don't know the identities of the two mummies whose heads were ripped off during a break-in at Cairo's Egyptian Museum.

* Initial reports that they could be King Tut's great-grandparents turned out to be unfounded.

* Based on evidence available so far, it's fairly clear that the mummies are non-royals.

One of the heads from a mummy damaged during the break-in at Cairo's Egyptian Museum appears in the photo above. Click to enlarge this image.
The mummies, who lost their heads as yet another casualty of Egypt's political chaos, are unknown ancient Egyptians, officials told Discovery News. Prior to the uprisings that spread across the Arab nation, they had been used to test the CT scan machine in the museum.

Vandalized a week ago at Cairo's Egyptian Museum, where thieves looking for antiquities broke 70 objects, the mummies have become the symbol of the world's concern for ancient Egyptian cultural heritage.

The shocking image of their heads lying on the floor of the Egyptian Museum with broken bones scattered all around have been haunting Egyptologists and mummy experts for a week.

Despite close examinations of the released pictures, extensive archival research and opinion exchange on social networks, no expert has been able to identify them.

"It's starting to take on the hallmarks of a TV drama like 'Bones' or 'CSI.' Just who were the two mummies?" Kate Phizackerley, who runs "Egyptological Looting Database 2011," asked in her blog.

Fear that royal mummies could have been damaged arose with the first news reports of the break-in, which mentioned looters ripping off the heads of two Pharaonic mummies.

Indeed, a gilded, open-work cartonnage case belonging to Tjuya, shown on the museum floor in dramatic footage from Al Jazeera, prompted speculation that the damaged mummies were Yuya and Tjuya, which recent DNA tests identified as King Tut's great-grandparents.

"We all feared they could be Yuya and Thuya, but the pictures proved they weren't," Phizackerley said.

Further information from Zahi Hawass, newly appointed minister of antiquities, did not help solve the mystery.

In an interview with the New York Times on Tuesday, Hawass said that the thieves took two skulls from a research lab before being stopped as they tried to leave the museum.

Wafaa El Saddik, former director of the Egyptian Museum, confirmed to Discovery News that the mummies had been in a research lab.

"These mummies were kept in a special room at the west side of the museum and they were in the university clinic for some research. They are unknown persons," El Saddik, who led the museum until a month ago, told Discovery News.

The new information makes it even harder to guess who the mummies might be.

"They might never have been in display," Phizackerley said.

Researchers were particularly intrigued by one mummy, whose ripped-off head was photographed amid bones scattered across the floor.

"The bones in the picture apparently do not belong to the heads. Quite certainly we are talking of non-royal mummies," Swiss anatomist and paleopathologist Frank Rühli, told Discovery News.

Egyptologist and anthropologist Jasmine Day from Perth, Australia, agrees: "Many of the royal mummies have distinct facial features and even intact hair. The damaged mummies and bones appear to have been knocked accidentally -- or tossed vindictively -- off a table or shelf in the darkened storeroom."
Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, confirmed that the mummies were stored in a lab.

"These were Late Period fragmentary mummies that were used to test the CT machine and were stored near the machine. When the people who attacked the museum went in, in the area of the giftshop, they also breached the room in which the test mummy fragments were kept," Ikram, a leading expert on animal mummies, told Discovery News.

Speculation that at least one head had been torn from a complete and well- preserved body came from a picture found online by Mercedes González, director of the Instituto de Estudios Científicos en Momias in Madrid.

The photo completely matched the image of the damaged mummy.

According to the Chilean journal Conozca Más, which published the picture of the complete mummy in 1993, the mummified body was displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and then withdrawn.

"By the shape of the forehead and jaw, I believe this is the mummy of a teenage woman. It is interesting that the body has no abdominal incision for evisceration," González told Discovery News.

She agrees with Rühli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich, that the bones scattered around the mummified head do not belong to the individual.

"They appear to correspond to an adult. There is no soft tissue on them, while the mummy featured bones which were covered by skin in very good condition," González said.

Regarding the other head, shown on Hawass' website, González believes it belongs to an adult male.

"The nostrils are dilated, due to plugs of linen employed during the embalming, while the white spots may be fungi. This might indicate that the mummy was stored somewhere out of sight," González said.

According to the researcher, the well cut neck might indicate that the head was already loose, torn from its body long ago. Indeed, that was a typical practice of the 19th century.

"It is tragic to see Egyptian mummies treated once more in the cavalier and cruel fashion in which tens of thousands of their fellows were once treated by ancient Egyptian tomb robbers and Victorian souvenir hunters," Day, the author of "The Mummy's Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World," said.

"I never thought I would witness such things in my lifetime," Day said.

Company Books Ride to the Moon

* A company building a lunar rover and lander have booked a flight to the moon.
* The contract is the first moon mission for the privately owned SpaceX.
* The mission could launch as early as December 2013.

SpaceX, the rocket company headed by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, sold its first launch to the moon, a mission that gives Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off, an early lead in a $32 million race to land a privately owned rover on the lunar surface.

The contract, announced Sunday, reserves a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to fly Astrobotic Technology's lander and rover to the moon as early as December 2013.

"For every hundred technology developments there is one that has a ride booked. It's a real distinguishing factor," David Gump, president of Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, told Discovery News.

There's room aboard the Falcon 9 for another 240 pounds of additional cargo, space Astrobotic Technology is selling for $700,000 per pound, plus a $250,000-per-payoad fee for integration, communications and other support services.

SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has made two successful flights, is the same rocket NASA is buying to fly cargo -- and perhaps eventually astronauts -- to the International Space Station after the shuttles are retired in about six months.

Aside from adjusting navigation software, Falcon 9 doesn't need any modifications to reach lunar orbit, Musk wrote in an email to Discovery News.

"Falcon 9 is capable of launching missions to the moon, Mars or beyond. Payload to the moon is about three tons and to Mars about two tons, meaning Falcon 9 could have launched the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers on a single flight," wrote Musk.

The rovers were launched separately aboard two Delta 2 rockets.

Astrobotic Technology is one of 21 teams competing for $32 million in prize funds put up by Google and Space Florida, a state-backed economic development agency.

The Google Lunar X Prize is a follow-on contest to the $10-million Ansari X Prize for private manned suborbital flight, clinched by Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne in 2004.

The new space race offers a $20 million grand prize for the first team to land a rover on the moon before Dec. 31, 2015, travel one-third of a mile on the surface of the moon, and transmit high-definition pictures and video back to Earth. The prize drops to $15 million if a government agency gets there first.

Another $4 million in bonus funds are available for other achievements, such as operating at night, traveling more than three miles over the lunar surface, detecting water, and/or and making a precision landing near an Apollo site or other location where spacecraft have landed or crashed.

An extra $1 million is available for the team that "demonstrates the greatest attempts to promote diversity in the field of space exploration," the X Prize website states.

A team that reaches the moon second can win $5 million. Spacecraft launching from Florida are eligible an additional $2 million in state funds.

Astrobotic already has a $10 million contract to share engineering data about its lunar landing technologies with NASA, a $500,000 contract to conduct a demonstration test and a $600,000 research grant to design and build a prototype lunar mining robot that could collect frozen volatiles at the poles for use as rocket fuel.

Terms of the SpaceX contract were not released, but SpaceX's listed fees on its website for Falcon 9 rockets start at $49.9 million and go up to $56 million, depending on the mass of the cargo and the desired location. The company offers Google Lunar X Prize contenders a 10 percent discount.

"Extinct" Salmon Discovered in Japanese Lake

A Japanese salmon thought to have been extinct for 70 years has been discovered in a lake near Mount Fuji.

The kunimasu salmon, also called the black kokanee, is a subspecies of sockeye salmon that's found only in Japan. Unlike true sockeye, which migrate between freshwater and the oceans, the many types of kokanee salmon live and reproduce entirely in lakes.

The kunimasu was believed to have been wiped out in the 1940s after a hydroelectric dam raised acidity levels in the fish's only home, Lake Tazawako (map) in northern Japan's Akita Prefecture. Salmon are sensitive to water's acidity, and drastic changes in pH can affect young salmon's survival.

A seemingly unsuccessful 1935 program to release kunimasu eggs in Lake Saiko, in the foothills of Mount Fuji (map), had been forgotten—until recently, when the head of a local fishing association sent an odd sample to a Japanese television personality who is obsessed with fish.

Sakana-kun—a nickname meaning Mr. Fish—is best known for appearing on TV in his trademark white laboratory coat and blowfish-shaped hat. His self-taught expertise earned him the title of visiting associate professor at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology.

"The kunimasu salmon is very close in appearance to the common himemasu salmon, a species of landlocked sockeye salmon, except that one that was sent to me was green and black instead of the more common silver color" of the himemasu, Sakana-kun told NG News.

Aware that the specimen was unusual, Sakana-kun sent the fish to Tetusji Nakabo, a professor of ichthyology at Kyoto University, where 17 samples of the extinct salmon had been preserved.

"When I first looked at it, I realized it might be a kunimasu," Nakabo said. "But it took me one month to confirm beyond a doubt my initial suspicions. At that moment, I felt it was incredible, unbelievable.

"Kunimasu is still alive!"

"Extinct" Salmon Not That Tasty

Further studies at Lake Saiko revealed four distinct characteristics that marked the kunimasu salmon apart from other close relatives in the fish world, Nakabo said.

The first indicator was that the kunimasu spawns in March, while the himemasu spawns in the fall. The newly rediscovered species also spawns at a depth of between 98 and 131 feet (30 and 40 meters), a behavior not seen in other species in Lake Saiko.

The final clues came from the number of gill rakers—bony, finger-like projections on the gill arches of filter feeders—and the structure of the pyloric caeca, finger-shaped stomach pouches that secrete digestive enzymes, Nakabo said.

The experts now think that some ten thousand kunimasu salmon inhabit Lake Saiko, which is fed by underground water from Mount Fuji, keeping its deepest reaches at the constantly cold temperatures the salmon prefer.

People living near Lake Saiko had long caught the "extinct" fish, but the himemasu tasted better than the kunimasu, which was often thrown back, Sakana-kun said. The TV host added that he had wanted to taste the kunimasu that was sent to him, but he opted not to because it was the only one he had.


The Japanese government is now in the process of removing the kunimasu from its list of extinct species and drawing up plans to protect the fish's last known habitat.

"The ecosystem of Lake Saiko—including both the local people and the fish—should be preserved," Nakabo said.

Missing Google Exec Wael Ghonim Apparently Released

Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who has been missing in Egypt for over a week, now looks to be free, after Egyptian authorities broke their silence on his whereabouts over the weekend, telling his family members and friends the activist would be released Monday..

[Update, 10:50 a.m. PST 2/7] The government seems to have made good on that promise, as Ghonim seems to be released from secret imprisonment. At least that’s what seems to be the case, according to his Twitter account, which has now been updated via a Blackberry with the message: “Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it. #Jan25″

In addition to being the top Google marketing executive in the Middle East, Ghonim is an internet activist who had been critical of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in the days leading up to the violence that has paralyzed Egypt.

On Sunday night Ghonim’s brother told The Wall Street Journal in a telephone interview from Cairo that the Google executive would be released at about 9 am ET.

“Wael is going to be released tomorrow at 4 p.m., several people from the authorities … called us to tell us,” Hazem Ghonim said.

Ghonim hasn’t been heard from since January 27th, the night before protesters held what they called a “Day of Rage” filled with violent clashes between police and protesters.

Since his disappearance, Ghonim has become a symbol to internet activists who have struggled to overcome internet and cell-phone blackouts, which have accompanied widespread media repression, including violent attacks against journalists that have left at least one reporter dead.

Ghonim, described by The Journal as a father of two who is in his 30s, is thought to be the anonymous activist who created the Facebook page that first called for the Jan. 25 protest that sparked the uprising, according to The New York Times.

Ghonim has also been a volunteer for the pro-democracy campaign of Mohammed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Angency, who has returned to Egypt to oppose Mubarak.

Separately, Reuters reported that Egyptian telecom mogul Naguib Sawiris said Sunday that Egyptian authorities had told him that Ghonim would be released Monday. Sawiris told Orascom Telecom, a television satellite channel he owns, that he had lobbied for Ghonim’s release during a meeting between Vice President Omar Suleiman and opposition groups, the wire service reported.

And CNN International anchor Hala Gorani tweeted that Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq had told Egyptian State TV that “Ghonim will be released tomorrow Monday at 4pm.” Taking an appropriately circumspect stance, Gorani added the hashtag #waitandsee.

Last week, Google asked for the public’s help in locating Wael Ghonim. “The safety of our employees is very important to Google,” the company said, “so if anyone has any information please call the following U.K. number: +44 20 7031 3008. ”

Ghonim — who tweets @ghonim — posted the following ominous message on Twitter before he disappeared: “Pray for Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Images Show Cloud Exploding from Sun Ripples Like Clouds on Earth

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2011) — Physicists, led by a researcher at the University of Warwick, studying new images of clouds of material exploding from the Sun have spotted instabilities forming in that exploding cloud that are similar to those seen in clouds in Earth's atmosphere.
These results could greatly assist physicists trying to understand and predict our Solar System's "weather."

The researchers, led by Dr Claire Foullon of the Centre for Fusion Space and Astrophysics, at the University of Warwick's Department of Physics, made their discovery when examining new images of clouds of material exploding from the Sun known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These images were provided by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) experiment on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). SDO was been launched last year and provides unprecedented views of the Sun in multiple temperatures.

The new SDO/AIA observations provided images of coronal mass ejections in the extreme ultra violet at a temperature that was not possible to observe in previous instruments -- 11 million Kelvin. On examining these images the Warwick researchers spotted a familiar pattern of instability on one flank of an exploding cloud of solar material that closely paralleled instabilities seen in Earth's clouds and waves on the surfaces of seas.

When observed these Kelvin-Helmholtz (or KH) instabilities appear to roll up into growing whirls at boundaries between things moving at different speeds, for instance the transition between air and water or cloud. The difference in speeds produces the boundary instabilities.

Similar conditions can occur when one looks at the magnetic environment of the path of these coronal mass ejections as they travel through the solar corona. The difference in speed and energies between the two creates the very similar KH instabilities that we can observe in clouds.

While KH instabilities have been predicted or inferred from observations as happening within the solar system's weather this is the very first time they have been directly observed in the corona. What makes this observation even more interesting is that the instabilities appear to form and build on one flank of the CME. This may explain why CMEs appear to bend and twist as these instabilities build, and cause drag, on one side of the cloud. This effect will be the next focus for the University of Warwick led research team.

University of Warwick researcher Dr Claire Foullon said: "The fact that we now know that these KH instabilities in CMEs are so far only observable in the extreme ultra violet , at a temperature of 11 million Kelvin, will also help us in modelling CME behaviour"

"This new observation may give us a novel insight into why these CMEs appear to both rotate, and be deflected away from following a simple straight path from the surface of the Sun. If the instabilities form on just one flank they will may increase drag one side of the CME causing it to move slower than the rest of the CME."

Dr Foullon and her co-researchers have outlined their observations and detailed modelling of how they believe this phenomenon occurs in a paper just published in Astrophysical Journal Letters entitled Magnetic Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability at the Sun by Dr Claire Foullon, Erwin Verwichte, Valery M. Nakariakov Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Warwick; Katariina Nykyri, Department of Physical Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida; and Charles J. Farrugia, Space Science Center and Department of Physics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire

Part of New Zealand's Submerged 'Pink Terraces' Found

They were called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Until the late 19th century, New Zealand's Pink and White Terraces along Lake Rotomahana on the North Island, attracted tourists from around the world, interested in seeing the beautiful natural formations created by a large geothermal system. But the eruption of Mt. Tarawera on June 10, 1886, buried the terraces in sediment and caused the lake basin to enlarge, engulfing the land where the terraces stood. For more than a century, people have speculated whether any part of the Pink and White Terraces survived the eruption.
This week, scientists from New Zealand's GNS Science, one of several government laboratories, in collaboration with engineers and scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and NOAA-PMEL, located portions of the long-lost Pink Terraces.

The research team, using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to map the bottom of Lake Rotomahana, are certain they have found the lower portions of the Pink Terraces on the lake floor. Project leader Cornel de Ronde, of GNS Science, said the team was elated by the discovery.

"The first sidescan sonar image gave a hint of a terraced structure so we scanned the area twice more and we are now 95 percent certain we are seeing the bottom two tiers of the Pink Terraces," de Ronde said.

Side-scan sonar and bathymetric data collected by two REMUS 100 AUVs clearly show crescent-shaped terraced structures in about 60 meters of water where the Pink Terraces were located prior to 1886. They are covered by a brownish lake sediment.

The free-swimming REMUS vehicles were developed by WHOI with funding from the US Navy and were operated by Amy Kukulya and Robin Littlefield of the WHOI Oceanographic Systems Laboratory (OSL) who travelled to New Zealand for the expedition. Dan Fornari, a scientist with the WHOI Geology & Geophysics department, helped lead the expedition and, along with Marshall Swartz of the WHOI Physical Oceanography department, developed the underwater camera system used in the lake.

After detecting areas of interest with the AUV's sonar systems, the team used the underwater camera system, developed with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, to capture images of the lake floor where they were able to photograph some of the stepped terrace edges.

Dr. de Ronde said the rest of the Pink Terraces were either destroyed during the eruption, or are still concealed under thick sediment not able to be penetrated by high-frequency AUV sonars.

The scientists found no sign of the larger White Terraces in the part of the lake that matched their location prior to 1886. The two terraces, part of a very large on-land geothermal system, were separated by several hundred meters prior to the eruption.

There are very few examples of large land-based geothermal systems that have been torn apart by an eruption and become inundated in this way. Scientists hope the data collected during this expedition will help them better understand how geothermal systems respond to disruptions of this kind.

"It was very gratifying to take the tools and knowledge we've developed for ocean research and apply them to work in the lake, especially for a scientific project with so much Maori cultural significance."

In 2009, WHOI signed a memorandum of understanding with GNS and New Zealand's National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to expand research and technology development collaborations across the scientific disciplines in the southwest Pacific and within New Zealand territorial waters. In addition to the work in Lake Rotomahana, the organizations are also collaborating on deep ocean research on the Kermadec Seamounts north of New Zealand's North Island using the Sentry AUV and TowCam deep-sea imaging system.

"We hope the success in Lake Rotomahana is the first of many scientific collaborations in this part of the world where there are many interesting research problems to investigate."

The project was a collaboration involving GNS Science, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, and the University of Waikato.

After this week's discovery, de Ronde paid tribute to colleagues from WHOI, saying "This result would not have been possible without the team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and their American colleagues. Their contribution has been huge."

Heads or Tails: Cells' Electricity Decides What to Regenerate

For the first time, scientists have shown that specific changes in cell membrane voltage and ion flow are a key determinant in whether an organism regenerates a head or a tail. Biologists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences were able to control the shape of tissue regenerated by amputated planarian (flatworm) segments by manipulating the natural electrical signals that determine head-tail identity in the worms.
The research, led by Tufts Professor of Biology Michael Levin, Ph.D., is reported in the Jan. 28, 2011, issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, appearing online Jan. 27.

"This study has uncovered a previously unknown role for bioelectric signals in patterning tissues in flatworms, an important model system for understanding the basic mechanisms of regeneration," said Susan Haynes, Ph.D., who manages Levin's and other developmental biology grants at the National Institutes of Health. "The findings suggest that control of ion channels by pharmacological agents could be a useful approach in developing regenerative therapies for tissues and organs lost to injury or disease."

The Tufts study provides critical insights into how an injured organism determines that it has deviated from normal patterning and how it then restores the missing parts--providing precisely the amount and type of tissue necessary and avoiding overgrowth or cancer.

"Our and others' previous research indicated that it is possible to trigger the process of regeneration by bioelectric means, but no one had yet shown that it is possible to actually determine what part regenerates by targeted changes in the function of ion channel and pump proteins that control transmembrane voltage potential," said Levin. "Once we understand this more fully, we hope to be able to induce human bodies to do the same."

Co-authors with Levin on the paper were three members of his laboratory: Wendy Scott Beane, Ph.D., post doctoral associate; Junji Morokuma, Ph.D., research associate; and Dany Spencer Adams, Ph.D., research associate professor.

Chemical Genetics Importantly, the work demonstrates a technique for manipulating membrane voltage during regeneration that does not rely on gene therapy.

Such a drug-based "chemical genetics" approach avoids the need to regulate each signaling pathway and epigenetic mechanism individually and circumvents the difficulties of transgenes.

Flatworms have a complex central nervous system, a true brain and a well-defined adult stem cell population. They share a significant number of genes with vertebrates. The adult worms have remarkable powers of regeneration: any piece that is cut off will regrow, including the brain.

Two Heads Better than One?

The Tufts biologists had previously identified a possible role for the enzyme H,K-ATPase and cell-cell junctions in planarian regeneration. In the recent Chemistry and Biology paper, they report that H,K,-ATPase mediates ion transport to depolarize wounded tissue and enable planaria to regenerate heads.

Further, when the biologists used ivermectin independently of H,K,-ATPase to effect depolarization, the planarian fragments also regenerated new heads. This was true even for posterior wounds, which would normally regrow tails. The induction of the same tissue pattern by completely different means that have in common only their control of membrane voltage underscores the crucial nature of voltage gradient as a physiological parameter controlling regeneration.

The biologists also reported that treatment of wounded tissue with the H,K-ATPase inhibitor SCH 28080 for 72 hours hyperpolarized the tissue and stopped head regeneration.

The researchers concluded that pharmacologically induced changes in membrane voltage are enough to trigger an entire morphogenetic program -- head regeneration -- downstream of stem cell proliferation, and serve as a master regulator of a complex patterning cascade.

Unique Research Focus

Developmental biologists commonly study biochemical signals that cells exchange during the orchestration of the tissue regeneration process. The Levin lab is unique in focusing on an important and different kind of signal: a bioelectrical language that integrates the new cells' activity with the host to enable them to establish pattern during embryogenesis, fill in missing pieces during regeneration, and avoid the shape derangement observed in cancer throughout the lifespan.

Research funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

"A Chemical Genetics Approach Reveals H,K-ATPase-Mediated Membrane Voltage is Required for Planarian Head Regeneration," Chemistry & Biology, Jan. 28, 2011, Wendy Scott Beane; Junji Morokuma; Dany Spencer Adams; Michael Levin.

First Stars in Universe Were Not Alone

The first stars in the universe were not as solitary as previously thought. In fact, they could have formed alongside numerous companions when the gas disks that surrounded them broke up during formation, giving birth to sibling stars in the fragments.

These are the findings of studies performed with the aid of computer simulations by researchers at Heidelberg University's Centre for Astronomy together with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching and the University of Texas at Austin (USA). The group's findings, just published the journal Science, cast an entirely new light on the formation of the first stars after the Big Bang.

Stars evolve from cosmic gas clouds in a fierce and complex battle between gravity and internal gas pressure. The density of the gas increases due to its own gravitational pull. This causes the gas to heat up, as a consequence the pressure rises, and the compression process comes to a halt. If the gas manages to get rid of the thermal energy, compression can continue and a new star is born. This cooling process works especially well if the gas contains chemical elements like carbon or oxygen. Stars forming in this way are normally low in mass, like our Sun. But in the early universe these elements had yet to emerge, so the primordial cosmic gas could not cool down very well. Accordingly, most theoretical models predict the masses of primordial stars to be about a hundred times greater than that of the Sun.

Heidelberg astrophysicist Dr. Paul Clark and his colleagues investigated these processes with the help of very high resolution computer simulations. Their findings indicate that this simple picture needs to be revised and that the early universe was not only populated by huge, solitary stars. The reason is the underlying physics of the so called accretion disks accompanying the birth of the very first stars. The gas from which a new star forms rotates, and so the gas is unable to fall directly onto the star, but first builds up a disk-like structure. Only as a result of internal friction can the gas continue to flow onto the star. If more mass falls onto this disk than it can transport inwards, it becomes unstable and breaks into several fragments. So instead of forming just one star at the centre, a group of several stars is formed. The distances between some of the stars can be as small as that between Earth and the Sun.

According to Dr. Clark, this realisation opens up exciting new avenues for detecting the first stars in the universe. In the final stages of their lives, binaries or multiple stellar systems can produce intense bursts of X-rays or gamma rays. Future space missions are being planned specifically to investigate such bursts from the early universe. It is also conceivable that some of the first stars may have been catapulted out of their birth group through collisions with their neighbours before they were able to accumulate a great deal of mass. Unlike short-lived high-mass stars, low-mass stars may survive for billions of years. "Intriguingly," says Dr. Clark, "some low-mass primordial stars may even have survived to the present day, allowing us to probe the earliest stages of star and galaxy formation right in our own cosmic backyard."

Together with Dr. Simon Glover and Dr. Rowan Smith, Dr. Paul Clark is a member of the star-formation research group headed by Prof. Dr. Ralf Klessen at Heidelberg University's Centre for Astronomy. Also involved in the research were Dr. Thomas Greif of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Garching) and Prof. Dr. Volker Bromm of the University of Texas. This research was funded by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation as part of the International Top-Level Research II programme. Additional support came from the FRONTIER innovation fund of Heidelberg University as well as the German Research Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, and NASA.

Jumping Genes Caught in the Act: New Evidence That the Genome Contains Many Mobile Elements

An ambitious hunt by Johns Hopkins scientists for actively "jumping genes" in humans has yielded compelling new evidence that the genome, anything but static, contains numerous pesky mobile elements that may help to explain why people have such a variety of physical traits and disease risks.

Using bioinformatics to compare the standard assembly of genetic elements as outlined in the reference human genome to raw whole-genome data from 310 individuals recently made available by the 1000 Genomes Project, the team revealed 1,016 new insertions of RIPs, or retrotransposon insertion polymorphisms, thereby expanding the catalog of insertions that are present in some individuals and absent in others. Their results appeared online October 27 in Genome Research.

Retrotransposons are travelling bits of DNA that replicate by copying and pasting themselves at new locations in the genome. Having duplicated themselves and accumulated over evolutionary history, transposable elements now make up about half of the human genome. However, only a tiny subfamily of these insertions known as LINE-1 (L1) is still active in humans. Line 1 insertions are able to mobilize not only themselves but also other pieces of DNA.

"In any individual, only between 80 to 100 retrotransposons are actively copying and inserting into new sites," says Haig Kazazian, M.D., professor of human genetics, McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "We're not only discovering where they are and who has which ones, but also finding out that they insert with a remarkable frequency: On the order of one in every 50 individuals has a brand-new insertion that wasn't in their parents."

The researchers recognized L1 retrotransposons -- distinguishing them from the vast amount of fixed "fossil" transposable elements that litter the genome -- because these actively jumping genes are human specific and almost exactly the same in sequence from one person to another.

"Our genome contains around half a million interspersed L1 sequences that have accumulated over evolutionary history, along with over a million more repeats, most of which were mobilized by L1 elements," explains Adam D. Ewing, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Kazazian's lab. "Since the vast majority of these are ancestral and therefore common to all humans and even some of our primate relatives, we can ignore them and focus on L1s that contain human-specific characters in their sequences. Those are the actively mobilized elements responsible for considerable genomic diversity among human individuals."

The high frequency of these L1 insertions gives us a better idea about the extent of human diversity, according to Kazazian, whose 22-year focus on retrotransposons seeks to reveal how they alter the expression of human genes.

Just as the structural variants known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (or SNPs, pronounced "snips") serve as markers for various diseases, the hope is that RIPs -- which are up to 6,000 times bigger than SNPs, and therefore may have a stronger effect on gene expression -- will correlate with disease phenotypes.

"In that same way that someone had to go out and find the SNPs, this study was about finding RIPs that remain active and continue to produce new insertions," Kazazian says. "Now we have the background necessary to begin studies that may correlate these L1 insertions with everything from autism to cancer."

Support for this research came from the National Institutes of Health.