Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

A helicopter looks as tiny as a toy in the face of Hubbard Glacier in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest of all national parks.
Photograph by Chris Johns

Location: Alaska
Established: December 2, 1980
Size: 13,188,000 acres (5,336,994 hectares)

Even in a state famous for its size, Wrangell-St. Elias stands out. It is by far the largest of our national parks—almost six times the size of Yellowstone. You fly over it and see mountains beyond mountains, glaciers after glaciers, rivers upon rivers. You float a river and watch the moods and mountains change by the minute. As you walk the tundra, you find Dall's sheep and mountain goats grazing.

Four major mountain ranges converge here: the volcanic Wrangells, the Alaska, the Chugach, and the St. Elias—tallest coastal mountains in the world. Together they contain 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the United States, 4 of them above 16,000 feet (4,877 meters). There are more than 150 glaciers; one, the Malaspina, is larger than Rhode Island. In 1980 Wrangell-St. Elias and adjoining Kluane National Park Reserve in Canada, along with Glacier Bay NP and Tatshenshini in British Columbia, were designated a United Nations World Heritage site.

Vast and rugged as it is, the park is not a fortress. Two roads lead into small communities, remnants of the gold- and copper-mining towns that thrived in the early days of the 20th century. Today not mining but the nearly limitless hiking, rafting, kayaking, and climbing opportunities beckon.

How to Get There

Drive, take a bus, or charter a plane. By car from Anchorage, take Alas. 1 (Glenn Hwy.) 189 miles (304 kilometers) northeast to Glennallen. Continue northeast 74 miles (119 kilometers) along the Copper River and the park's western boundary to Slana, where an unpaved road branches 42 miles (68 kilometers) into the park, ending at the town of Nabesna.

Or, head toward McCarthy on the Richardson Hwy. from Glennallen 32 miles (51 kilometers) southeast to the Edgerton cutoff (Alas. 10), then turning left and continuing 33 miles (53 kilometers) to Chitina. There the pavement ends but a road follows an old railroad bed about 60 miles (97 kilometers) into the park. Buses run regularly in summer from Anchorage to Valdez with stops in Glennallen.

Air charters into the park operate out of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Yakutat, Cordova, Glennallen, Gulkana, Tok, Chitina, McCarthy, Nabesna, and Northway. Commercial jets service Yakutat and Cordova. In summer, the Alaska State Ferry serves Valdez.

When to Go

Summer. Lodges and guide services operate in the park from mid-May to the end of September. June is best for wildflowers; July has the warmest days; berries ripen in August. Be prepared for cloudy skies, but September can be beautiful with clear skies, autumn colors, no mosquitoes, and a dusting of new snow on the mountain peaks. March and April offer excellent cross-country skiing for those of strong will.

How to Visit

Take one of the two unpaved roads into the park. The McCarthy Road is maintained and usually passable in summer, though a four-wheel drive may be needed in other seasons. Stop at park headquarters in Copper Center for latest road conditions. The Slana-Nabesna Road is also maintained, including some river crossings, but can require four-wheel drive in high water. Both roads end at trailheads for many backcountry hikes.

Or, charter a plane into a remote part of the park and hike or run a river. Several commercial companies offer guided rafting or kayaking trips on the rivers and in the spectacular coastal bays. You can get a full listing of them from the park.

Egypt Priest's Tomb Found Near Pyramids

A painting on the wall of a newfound Egyptian tomb shows the occupant, Rudj-Ka (right), and his wife. Rudj-Ka probably lived during the end of ancient Egypt's 5th dynasty, roughly 4,350 years ago, archaeologists say (ancient Egypt time line).

Artwork and artifacts found in his elaborate tomb, found in and along a cliff near the Great Pyramids at Giza (map), indicate Rudj-Ka was a priest in the mortuary cult of the 4th-dynasty pharaoh Khafra, who ruled from 2558 to 2532 B.C. Khafra is best known as the force behind the second of the three Great Pyramids and of the Great Sphinx.

Egyptian Offerings

Zahi Hawass surveys painted offerings of bread, goose, and beef in a wider view of the portrait of Rudj-Ka and his wife inside the newfound Egyptian tomb.

The ancient tomb, announced Monday, may be part of a larger cemetery complex yet to be unearthed around Giza, Hawass said.

"You have new tombs now for the priests who maintained the cult of Khafra," said Hawass, who is also a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. "This is the first time the cartouche of Khafra was found in this area."

In the Old Kingdom, "after the death of the king, there was a pyramid city," said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). "In this pyramid city lived priests and people who maintained the cult of the king, to make the cult of the king living."

Rudj-Ka appears to have been a priest charged with overseeing purification rituals performed in honor of the dead pharaoh.



Gone Fishing, Ancient Egyptian Style

Another painting in the newfound tomb shows Rudj-Ka fishing in the Nile River, with boaters in the background. Ancient Egyptian burials often depicted such scenes of daily life—activities the tombs' occupants hoped to enjoy in the afterlife.

"In dynasty five and six, the priests were not from high society," Hawass added. "They could be from the regular people. Even workmen could be promoted to be a priest." (Also see "Rare Middle-Class Tomb Found From Ancient Egypt.")

That's not to say Rudj-Ka ever fished for a living—archaeologists caution that none of the tomb paintings indicate exactly what Rudj-Ka did before he became a mortuary priest.



Portal to the Afterlife

The entrance to Rudj-Ka's tomb (pictured) leads to a maze of corridors constructed from limestone blocks. The inner burial complex was cut into a cliff and intended to accommodate the burials of all the priest's family members.

The lavish tomb would have been arduous and expensive to construct, the SCA's Hawass said: "Everything is difficult, but the quest for immortality led them to do this."
In any case, Rudj-Ka could afford it, in all likelihood—priests often became wealthy after receiving their titles. In exchange for their services, priests received a share of the goods given to the temples, part of a system known as "reversion of offerings."



Pyramid Builders' Cemetery


The cemetery of the pyramid workers, shown in 2001, sits to the north of Rudj-Ka's tomb. Discovered about a decade ago, the workers' cemetery helped reveal how construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza mobilized ancient Egyptian society and created an entire city around the monuments.

Rudj-Ka’s tomb might have been separate from the workers' tombs because of his title as priest, Hawass said, adding that he hopes the newfound tomb will turn out to be part of another, as yet unearthed necropolis dedicated to the priests of the royal court.



Discoveries Loom at Pyramids?

Workers brush sand from artifacts at the pyramid builders' cemetery in 2001.

Although Hawass thinks the workers' graves and the newfound tomb might be linked, another possibility is that the tomb of Rudj-Ka could be a western extension of the massive necropolis of Memphis, on the edge of modern-day Cairo, he said.

"The location is surprising," Hawass said. "We never expected to find a big, large tomb like this in the south of the pyramid builders' [cemetery] at all."

How 7-Inch Android Tablets Can Succeed

Seven-inch tablets may have drawn Steve Jobs’ contempt, but they could be a very good thing for consumers.

During Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Apple’s CEO argued forcefully that a 7-inch Android tablet could never compete with Apple’s nearly 10-inch iPad.

“Seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,” Jobs said, in an extended thrashing of Apple’s competitors. “These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.”

I don’t understand why 7-inch tablets being “tweeners” is necessarily a bad thing for Android or tablet-makers.

If Jobs is right that the smaller tablets won’t be able to beat Apple’s iPad on price, that could indeed be a deal-breaker. But the pricing we have seen on smaller Android tablets suggests that they’ll be at least $100 cheaper than the current entry-level iPad, even without a data plan. If they’re sold with data plans and carrier subsidies like smartphones, they could be even cheaper than that.

Lower cost isn’t the only appeal of going small. Seven-inch tablets are lighter than 10-inch devices. They’re infinitely easier to hold in one hand. They’re easier to type on with two hands (particularly if you have small hands). They fit into smaller bags. And you use them to do different things.

Really, a 7-inch tablet is closer to an e-reader, a personal media player or a handheld gaming device than the iPad is. It’s no coincidence that most e-readers, such as the Kindle and Sony Reader Daily Edition, have 6- or 7-inch screens: That’s about the size of a paperback book.

In turn, the iPad is closer to a mini-notebook than a small tablet is. Neither tablet size is exactly like these other devices, but those are roughly the ecosystems in which they find themselves.

The real mistake in Jobs’s logic is thinking that the 7-inch “tweeners” have to compete with the iPad. They don’t. Mini-tablets could be to the iPad what mini-notebooks are to the MacBook and MacBook Air: smaller, less-expensive form factors that appeal to people looking for different features. Tablets running a full desktop OS like Windows 7 are different still.

In fact, just for these reasons, 7-inch tablets arguably have a better chance of success than 10-inch tablets looking to go head-to-head with the iPad. They can create a distinct sphere where they compete with each other, rather than with the biggest guy in the room.

Ironically, this is actually a classic Apple move: Instead of competing in a space where you can’t win, create a space where you can do something new. Instead of trying to beat (or be) Apple, Android and RIM and all of the other tablet developers need to play to their strengths and be the best version of themselves.

Jobs is right that Apple doesn’t have a compelling reason to make a 7-inch tablet; it would only introduce a third iOS variant for developers and consumers when the iPad and iPhone/iPod touch have already been tremendously successful. But other hardware, mobile-OS and mobile-application companies don’t have to worry about compatibility with Apple’s other form factors. They have to find devices, screen sizes and UIs that work for them.

Jobs is also right that Android will fragment if it tries to support too many screen sizes, form factors and app marketplaces, and this could create confusion among users. But there’s no reason why this fragmentation needs to be either total or deadly.

In fact, Google has already tried to exert some soft control over the Android universe. It’s warned developers and users about using non-tablet software for tablet devices, asking them to wait for official support in Android 3.0. It’s also created hardware standards that devices need to meet to access the official Android Market.

Again, because Android is open source, people can create their own tablets and alternative app stores if they don’t want to play by Google’s rules. That’s fine. It creates a legal alternative that could even be healthier than Apple’s current quasi-underground jailbreak community.

But Google could use access to Android Market to set common standards for hardware makers and software developers. It wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be as strict as Apple’s rules for its App Store, or even Windows Phone 7’s hybrid approach, but it’s closer to the latter than the former. Through the Market, Google can articulate its own expectations for what the smartphone and tablet experience ought to be.

Google could even rally around the 7-inch tablet, trumpeting it as a clear alternative to Apple’s “oversized” iPad, where it’s easier for current Android developers to upscale their smartphone software and offering them a larger canvas to experiment with richer apps.

If Android tablet makers can get their devices into anywhere near as many users’ hands as Apple’s been able to get theirs, that’s a compelling proposition indeed.

One thing is clear: If the makers of Android tablets are going to catch up to Apple’s dominance in tablets, they’ll have to take a page out of Steve Jobs’ own book.

Astronomers Find Weird, Warm Spot on an Exoplanet

Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal a distant planet with a warm spot in the wrong place.
The gas-giant planet, named upsilon Andromedae b, orbits tightly around its star, with one face perpetually boiling under the star's heat. It belongs to a class of planets termed hot Jupiters, so called for their scorching temperatures and large, gaseous constitutions.

One might think the hottest part of these planets would be directly under the sun-facing side, but previous observations have shown that their hot spots may be shifted slightly away from this point. Astronomers thought that fierce winds might be pushing hot, gaseous material around.

But the new finding may throw this theory into question. Using Spitzer, an infrared observatory, astronomers found that upsilon Andromedae b's hot spot is offset by a whopping 80 degrees. Basically, the hot spot is over to the side of the planet instead of directly under the glare of the sun.

"We really didn't expect to find a hot spot with such a large offset," said Ian Crossfield, lead author of a new paper about the discovery appearing in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "It's clear that we understand even less about the atmospheric energetics of hot Jupiters than we thought we did."

The results are part of a growing field of exoplanet atmospheric science, pioneered by Spitzer in 2005, when it became the first telescope to directly detect photons from an exoplanet, or a planet orbiting a star other than our sun. Since then, Spitzer, along with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, has studied the atmospheres of several hot Jupiters, finding water, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

In the new study, astronomers report observations of upsilon Andromedae b taken across five days in February of 2009. This planet whips around its star every 4.6 days, as measured using the "wobble," or radial velocity technique, with telescopes on the ground. It does not transit, or cross in front of, its star as many other hot Jupiters studied by Spitzer do.

Spitzer measured the total combined light from the star and planet, as the planet orbited around. The telescope can't see the planet directly, but it can detect variations in the total infrared light from the system that arise as the hot side of the planet comes into Earth's field of view. The hottest part of the planet will give off the most infrared light.

One might think the system would appear brightest when the planet was directly behind the star, thus showing its full sun-facing side. Likewise, one might think the system would appear darkest when the planet swings around toward Earth, showing its backside. But the system was the brightest when the planet was to the side of the star, with its side facing Earth. This means that the hottest part of the planet is not under its star. It's sort of like going to the beach at sunset to feel the most heat. The researchers aren't sure how this could be.

They've guessed at some possibilities, including supersonic winds triggering shock waves that heat material up, and star-planet magnetic interactions. But these are just speculation. As more hot Jupiters are examined, astronomers will test new theories.

"This is a very unexpected result," said Michael Werner, the Spitzer project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who was not a part of the study. "Spitzer is showing us that we are a long way from understanding these alien worlds."

The Spitzer observations were made before it ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009, officially beginning its warm mission.

Other authors of the study are Brad Hansen of UCLA; Joseph Harrington at the University of Central Florida, Orlando; James Y-K. Cho of Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom; Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; Kristen Menou of Columbia University, New York, N.Y.; and Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

One-Way Martian Colonization Missions: Proposal Would Cut Costs Dramatically, Ensure Long-Term Commitment

For the chance to watch the sun rise over Olympus Mons, or maybe take a stroll across the vast plains of the Vastitas Borealis, would you sign on for a one-way flight to Mars?
It's a question that gives pause to even Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University associate professor, who, with colleague Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist from Arizona State University, argues for precisely such a one-way manned mission to Mars in an article published this month in the Journal of Cosmology.

In the article, "To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars," the authors write that while technically feasible, a manned mission to Mars and back is unlikely to lift off anytime soon -- largely because it is a hugely expensive proposition, both in terms of financial resources and political will. And because the greatest portion of the expense is tied up in safely returning the crew and spacecraft to earth, they reason that a manned one-way mission would not only cut the costs by several fold, but also mark the beginning of long-term human colonization of the planet.

Mars is by far the most promising for sustained colonization and development, the authors conclude, because it is similar in many respects to Earth and, crucially, possesses a moderate surface gravity, an atmosphere, abundant water and carbon dioxide, together with a range of essential minerals. It is the Earth's second closest planetary neighbor (after Venus) and a trip to Mars takes about six months using the most favorable launch option and current chemical rocket technology.

"We envision that Mars exploration would begin and proceed for a long time on the basis of outbound journeys only," said Schulze-Makuch. "One approach could be to send four astronauts initially, two on each of two space craft, each with a lander and sufficient supplies, to stake a single outpost on Mars. A one-way human mission to Mars would be the first step in establishing a permanent human presence on the planet."

While acknowledging that the mission would necessarily be crewed by volunteers, Schulze-Makuch and Davies stress that they aren't suggesting that astronauts simply be abandoned on the Red Planet for the sake of science. Unlike the Apollo moon missions, they propose a series of missions over time, sufficient to support long-term colonization.

"It would really be little different from the first white settlers of the North American continent, who left Europe with little expectation of return," Davies said of the proposed one-way Martian mission. "Explorers such as Columbus, Frobisher, Scott and Amundsen, while not embarking on their voyages with the intention of staying at their destination, nevertheless took huge personal risks to explore new lands, in the knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that they would perish in the attempt."

The authors propose the astronauts would be re-supplied on a periodic basis from Earth with basic necessities, but otherwise would be expected to become increasingly proficient at harvesting and utilizing resources available on Mars. Eventually they envision that outpost would reach self-sufficiency, and then it could serve as a hub for a greatly expanded colonization program.

The proposed project would begin with the selection of an appropriate site for the colony, preferentially associated with a cave or some other natural shelter, as well as other nearby resources, such as water, minerals and nutrients.

"Mars has natural and quite large lava caves, and some of them are located at a low elevation in close proximity to the former northern ocean, which means that they could harbor ice deposits inside similar to many ice-containing caves on Earth," said Schulze-Makuch."Ice caves would go a long way to solving the needs of a settlement for water and oxygen. Mars has no ozone shield and no magnetospheric shielding, and ice caves would also provide shelter from ionizing and ultraviolet radiation."

The article suggests that, in addition to offering humanity a "lifeboat" in the event of a mega-catastrophe on Earth, a Mars colony would provide a platform for further scientific research. Astrobiologists agree that there is a fair probability that Mars hosts, or once hosted, microbial life, perhaps deep beneath the surface and Davies and Schulze-Makuch suggest a scientific facility on Mars might therefore be a unique opportunity to study an alien life form and a second evolutionary record.

"Mars also conceals a wealth of geological and astronomical data that is almost impossible to access from Earth using robotic probes," the authors write. "A permanent human presence on Mars would open the way to comparative planetology on a scale unimagined by any former generation… A Mars base would offer a springboard for human/robotic exploration of the outer solar system and the asteroid belt. And establishing a permanent multicultural and multinational human presence on another world would have major beneficial political and social implications for Earth, and serve as a strong unifying and uplifting theme for all humanity."

Although they believe the strategy of colonizing Mars with one-way missions brings the goal of colonizing another planet technologically and financially within our reach, Schulze-Makuch and Davies acknowledge that such a project would require not only major international cooperation, but a return to the exploration spirit and risk-taking ethos of the great period of the Earth's exploration.

They write that when they raise the idea of a one-way Mars colonization mission among their scientific colleagues, a number express an interest in making the trip.

"Informal surveys conducted after lectures and conference presentations on our proposal, have repeatedly shown that many people are willing to volunteer for a one-way mission, both for reasons of scientific curiosity and in a spirit of adventure and human destiny," they write.

And yes, Schulze-Makuch offered that he too would be prepared to "boldly go" on a one-way mission to the Red Planet. But he hedges just a bit, holding out the single caveat that he would want the launch to wait until his young children have all grown into adults.

See No Shape, Touch No Shape, Hear a Shape? New Way of 'Seeing' the World

Scientists at The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro, McGill University have discovered that our brains have the ability to determine the shape of an object simply by processing specially-coded sounds, without any visual or tactile input. Not only does this new research tell us about the plasticity of the brain and how it perceives the world around us, it also provides important new possibilities for aiding those who are blind or with impaired vision.
Shape is an inherent property of objects existing in both vision and touch but not sound. Researchers at The Neuro posed the question 'can shape be represented by sound artificially?' "The fact that a property of sound such as frequency can be used to convey shape information suggests that as long as the spatial relation is coded in a systematic way, shape can be preserved and made accessible -- even if the medium via which space is coded is not spatial in its physical nature," says Jung-Kyong Kim, PhD student in Dr. Robert Zatorre's lab at The Neuro and lead investigator in the study.

In other words, similar to our ocean-dwelling dolphin cousins who use echolocation to explore their surroundings, our brains can be trained to recognize shapes represented by sound and the hope is that those with impaired vision could be trained to use this as a tool. In the study, blindfolded sighted participants were trained to recognize tactile spatial information using sounds mapped from abstract shapes. Following training, the individuals were able to match auditory input to tactually discerned shapes and showed generalization to new auditory-tactile or sound-touch pairings.

"We live in a world where we perceive objects using information available from multiple sensory inputs," says Dr. Zatorre, neuroscientist at The Neuro and co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain Music and Sound Research. "On one hand, this organization leads to unique sense-specific percepts, such as colour in vision or pitch in hearing. On the other hand our perceptual system can integrate information present across different senses and generate a unified representation of an object. We can perceive a multisensory object as a single entity because we can detect equivalent attributes or patterns across different senses." Neuroimaging studies have identified brain areas that integrate information coming from different senses -- combining input from across the senses to create a complete and comprehensive picture.

The results from The Neuro study strengthen the hypothesis that our perception of a coherent object or event ultimately occurs at an abstract level beyond the sensory input modes in which it is presented. This research provides important new insight into how our brains process the world as well as new possibilities for those with impaired senses.

The study was published in the journal Experimental Brain Research. The research was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Possible Geoglyphs Spotted in Peru

* A researcher used Google maps to spot what she claims are geoglyphs around Titicaca Lake in Peru.
* The area was heavily landscaped by Andean communities to improve agriculture.
* Some argue the shapes are just agricultural projects, not earthworks.

An Italian researcher may have discovered a huge network of earthworks representing birds, snakes and other animals in Peru, according to a study published on the Cornell University physics website arXiv.

Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, assistant professor at the department of physics of Turin's Polytechnic University, used Google satellite maps and AstroFracTool, an astronomical image-processing program which she developed, to investigate over 463 square miles of land around Peru's Titicaca Lake .

She says she has identified shapes that were built by Andean communities centuries ago.

Geoglyphs..or just agriculture? See the photos, judge for yourself.

"This region is covered by terraced walls and raised fields, which are large elevated planting platforms with canals in between. The earthworks represent an almost unimaginable agricultural effort to improve soil, temperature and moisture conditions for the crops," Sparavigna told Discovery News.

According to the researcher, enhanced satellite imagery revealed that some of the land forms are not only the remains of an extensive ancient agricultural system, but also those of formations designed to represent birds, snakes and other animals.

"They seem to be geoglyphs," Sparavigna said.

Geometric lines and images of animals that are best viewed from the air, geoglyphs are well-known in South America. Among the more famous geoglyphs are the Nasca Lines on the south coast of Peru and ring ditch sites in the Bolivian Amazon and Acre, Brazil. They feature impressive circular, oval, rectangular, square and D-shaped patterns.

"Past Andean and Amazonian societies imposed order, structure and aesthetics on nature through intentional design, engineering, and activities of everyday life," anthropologist Clark Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania told Discovery News.

"They created a complex environment of fields, paths, roads, canals, shrines, ceremonial centers, and settlements. One expression of this landscape transformation was the creation of geoglyphs or patterns made in earthworks," Erickson said.

The author of "Landscapes of Movement: The Anthropology of Trails, Paths, and Roads," Erickson conducted extensive research in the 1980s on the raised fields investigated by Sparavigna.

The landforms, "waru waru" or "suka kollus" as the farmers called them, were appropriate for agriculture. The canals in between the cultivated platforms provided a local micro-environment able to reduce frost risks for crops, while water in the canals and in ponds was probably used to cultivate aquatic plants and fish, as well as attract lake birds.

"These earthworks provide evidence for the impressive engineering abilities of the people who lived there in pre-Columbian times," Sparavigna said.

Built by excavating parallel canals and piling the Earth to form long and low mounds, the raised fields featured different forms and sizes. They were about 4 to 10 meters (13 to 32.8 feet) wide, 10 to 100 meters (32.8 to 328 feet) long, and 1 meter (3.2 feet) high.

Sparavigna believes that these elaborate earthworks were planned following the natural slope of the terrain while incorporating symbolic meaning.

According to the researcher, who recently discovered an impact crater in the Bayuda Desert in Sudan using Google Maps, several images seem to depict birds, with ponds representing their eyes.

Others appear to depict snakes, tortoises, fish, armadillos but also "abstract drawings," with patterns of stripes and other objects less easy to identify.

"The patterns are complex and some of this structure certainly reflects Andean concepts of cosmology, deep structure, social organization, measurement systems and art," said Erickson.

But he questioned Sparavigna's interpretation of the earthworks.

"The identifications of particular symbols such as birds, snakes, etc. are not convincing. For example, what appears to be 'a bird wing' in one image, is a modern plowed field with stacks of drying barley or wheat," he said.

According to Sparavigna, Ericskon's observation indicates that superimposed modern cultivations pose a threat to the geoglyphs.

"Modern agriculture can easily destroy them," said Sparavigna.

Gary Francisco Mariscal Herrera, the regional director of the National Cultural Institute of Puno, told the local radio station Onda Azul that the area might be soon declared a cultural heritage site in order to preserve the ancient structures.

Earth's Early Cannibals Caught in the Act

* One of the most cuddly early animals might have been a pack-hunting cannibal.
* Signs of violence on agnostid trilobites found in Cambrian rocks suggest they were attacking each other.
* Other possible interpretations of the fossils include these were sexual behaviors.

Some of the cutest little critters of the early Earth may have been roving packs of cannibals, according to new evidence on trilobites.

Teeth marks, attack positions, shredded relatives and other signs of cannibalism have been found in the fossilized remains of tiny agnostid trilobites, affectionately called "bugs" by paleontologists and fossil hunters.

"I was always very puzzled by these tiny trilobites," said paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. "It was never very clear what their role in the Cambrian ecosystem was."

Then last summer a donor gave McMenamin's school 44 slabs of what's called the Wheeler shale -- rocks full of Cambrian era agnostid trilobites.

"I had them spread out all over my laboratory," said McMenamin. "The pattern really starts to emerge from these rocks."

That pattern includes larger trilobites atop smaller ones, bite marks and even a case where it looks like one trilobite has torn another in half.

"This is not scavenging but predation," McMenamin told Discovery News. And not just predation, but cannibalism.

"It's possible that they may have attacked other organisms and may have done it in roving packs," he added.

The discovery is bound to stir up debate when it is presented on Nov. 1 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

"It'll be a ping-pong match," said paleontologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University.

Among the other possible interpretations of the slabs is that the trilobites are mating. There are precedents of scarring and violent behaviors while mating in crabs and even in cats, she said.

If, however, there is agreement that the trilobites are predators and cannibals, it has important implications for the evolution of animals with hard parts and other defenses, since it shows how predators got more sophisticated in the early days of animal life, Whiteside said.

The evolution of hard exoskeletons, as in these trilobites, is generally interpreted as a defensive adaptation against predators. That then caused predators to evolve pincers or other means of cracking the exoskeletons. Next the prey started burrowing and hiding in the ground, and so on and so forth, Whiteside explained.

"It's an arms race, if you will," said Whiteside. And the result is pressure to evolve all kinds of new lifestyles and species, which is exactly what happened.

For now, however, anyone with a fossil of one of these very common kinds of agnostid trilobite should give them another look and perhaps a little more respect.

"They seem like such innocuous little guys," said McMenamin. "There may be a dark side of these little creatures."

Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor Wat

Giant strangler fig tree roots embrace the crumbling Ta Prohm temple at Angkor. Although the forest has overrun this sacred site, it has largely escaped the looting that decimated many of its fellow Cambodian temples.

Cold, Dead Stars Could Help Limit Dark Matter

Hunting for cold stellar corpses near the center of the galaxy or in star clusters could put new limits on the properties of dark matter.

“You can exclude a big class of theories that the experiments cannot exclude just by observing the temperature of a neutron star,” said physicist Chris Kouvaris of the University of Southern Denmark, lead author of a paper in the Sept. 28 Physical Review D. “Maybe by observations, which come cheaper than expensive experiments, we might get some clues about dark matter.”

Dark matter is the irritatingly invisible stuff that makes up some 23 percent of the universe, but makes itself known only through its gravitational tug on ordinary matter.

There are several competing theories about what dark matter actually is, but one of the most widely pursued is a hypothetical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). Physicists in search of WIMPs have placed experimental detectors deep underground in mines and mountains, and are waiting for a dark matter particle to hit them.

Others have proposed looking for the buildup of dark matter in stars like the sun or white dwarfs. But both subterranean and stellar-detection strategies will light up only for WIMPs larger than a certain size. That size is miniscule — about a trillionth of a quadrillionth of a square centimeter — but dark matter particles could be smaller still.

One way to rule out such diminutive particles is to look to neutron stars, suggest Kouvaris and co-author Peter Tinyakov of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

Neutron stars are the cold, dense remnants of massive stars that died in fiery supernova explosions. They tend to have masses similar to the sun, but in diameter they would barely stretch from one end of Manhattan to the other. This extreme density makes neutron stars exceptionally good nets for dark matter.

“For their size and their temperature, they have the best efficiency in capturing WIMPs,” Kouvaris said. Particles up to 100 times smaller than the ones underground experiments are sensitive to could still make a noticeable difference to neutron stars.

After the fires of their birth, neutron stars slowly cool over millions of years as they radiate photons. But if WIMPs annihilate each other whenever they meet — like a particle of matter meeting a particle of antimatter — as some models suggest they should, dark matter could reheat these cold stars from the inside.

Kouvaris calculated the minimum temperature for a WIMP-burning neutron star, and found it to be about 100,000 kelvins [about 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit]. That’s more than 10 times hotter than the surface of the sun, but more than 100 times cooler than the sun’s fuel-burning interior. It’s also much cooler than any neutron star yet observed.

Dark matter and ordinary matter are thought to clump up in some of the same places, like the center of the galaxy or globular clusters of stars. So Kouvaris and Tinyakov suggest that astronomers try to find a neutron star colder than the minimum temperature in a region with a lot of dark matter floating around.

“If you observe a neutron star with a temp below the one we predict, that excludes a whole class of dark-matter candidates,” Kouvaris said. It could mean the WIMPs are extra-small, or that they don’t annihilate when they meet each other — a property of WIMPs that experiments can’t get at.

“It’s an intriguing idea,” said observational astronomer David Kaplan University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “But I’m a little skeptical that it can be done immediately, or even in the near future.”

The center of the galaxy is dusty and difficult to observe, and most globular clusters are so far away that a cold, tiny neutron star hiding inside them would be beyond today’s telescopes. The next generation of ultraviolet telescopes could be up to the task, Kaplan suggests. “But that’s not to say that it will be easy.”

Astronomer Bob Rutledge of McGill University suggests an alternative approach: Rather than squinting for neutron stars’ dim light, astronomers could find them through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. When two neutron stars merge, they are expected to throw off massive amounts of these waves, and Earth-based detectors like LIGO are already in place to catch them — although no waves have actually shown up yet.

“It would be technically hard, but a sound approach,” Rutledge said. “This sort of thing could become possible in the more distant future.”

Image: Artist’s impression of a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field, called a magnetar. Credit: NASA

Inside the Soviets’ Secret Failed Moon Program

The Soviet lunar program was covered up, forgotten after failing to put a man on the moon. These rare photos from a lab inside the Moscow Aviation Institute show a junkyard of rarely-seen spacecraft, including a never-to-be-used Soviet lunar lander.

Soviet scientists were well ahead of their American counterparts in moon exploration before President John F. Kennedy pronounced the U.S. would put a man there first. The Soviets had already landed the probe Luna 2 on the surface of the moon in 1959 and had an orbiting satellite in 1966.

The Soviets developed a similar multi-step approach to NASA, involving a module used to orbit the moon and one for landing. Their version was decidedly less complex and lighter to account for inferior rockets. These photos show the LK “Lunar Craft” lander, which has a similar pod-over-landing gear structure but numerous key differences.

All the activities done by two astronauts is done by one. To make the craft lighter, the LK only fits the one cosmonaut, who was supposed to peer through a tiny window on the side of the craft to land it. After landing the vehicle the pod separates from the landing gear, as with the Apollo Lunar Module, but uses the same engine for landing as it does for take off as another weight savings.

The L2 Lunar Orbit Module designed to transport the LK into orbit around the moon was similarly stripped down. There’s no internal connection between the two craft so the cosmonaut had to space walk outside to get into the LK and head towards the surface. When the LK rejoined the L2 for the return trip home, the now likely exhausted would then climb back out into the abyss of space. The LK would then be thrown away.

There were numerous political, scientific and financial reasons why the Soviets didn’t make it to the moon first, including a space agency with split priorities and therefore not single-mindedly dedicated to this goal. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon first on July 20, 1969, besting the Russians, who were still planning to visit the moon in the upcoming years.

They had the equipment, but they didn’t have the rockets.

Getting to the moon requires launching a command module and a lander. Both are heavy objects and require massive amounts of thrust to get into orbit. The Soviet’s planned to use their N-1 rocket, but two failed launches in 1971 and 1972 destroyed dummy landing and control modules, as well as the rockets themselves, and led to the program being shelved for lack of a proper launch vehicle.

The LK was sent into space for numerous test missions. The first two unmanned flights were successful tests of the vehicle through a simulated orbit. The third flight ended when the N-1 rocket crashed. The fourth test in 1971 was a success, but years later the decaying test module started to return to Earth with a trajectory that would put it over the skies of Australia.

NASA explains in a report on the Soviet space program how they had to convince the Australians it wasn’t a nuclear satellite:

To allay fears of a nuclear catastrophe, representatives of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Australia admitted that Cosmos 434 was an “experiment unit of a lunar cabin,” or lunar lander

Eventually, the program was deemed too expensive and unnecessary in light of the NASA success. The Soviets moved onto building space labs, successfully, and the remaining parts of the lunar program were destroyed or dispersed, including this amazing collection of parts hidden in the back of the Moscow Aviation Institute.

Apparently, students at the Moscow Aviation Institute are allowed access to this equipment, a Russian Livejournaler managed to get photos inside the lab that holds a lander, much of the docking equipment, and diagrams. The poster couldn’t show everything and describes the vibe around the many parts as secretive. Not all of the other pieces are easily identifiable as more than “satellite” or “Soyuz spacecraft” or “awesome and Soviet.”

What Did Tyrannosaurus Rex Eat? Each Other

It turns out that the undisputed king of the dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, didn't just eat other dinosaurs but also each other. Paleontologists from the United States and Canada have found bite marks on the giants' bones that were made by other T. rex, according to a new study published online Oct. 15 in the journal PLoS ONE.

While searching through dinosaur fossil collections for another study on dinosaur bones with mammal tooth marks, Yale researcher Nick Longrich discovered a bone with especially large gouges in them. Given the age and location of the fossil, the marks had to be made by T. rex, Longrich said. "They're the kind of marks that any big carnivore could have made, but T. rex was the only big carnivore in western North America 65 million years ago."

It was only after discovering the bite marks were from a T. rex that Longrich realized the bone itself also belonged to the behemoth. After searching through a few dozen T. rex bones from several different museum fossil collections, he discovered a total of three foot bones (including two toes) and one arm bone that showed evidence of T. rex cannibalism, representing a significant percentage.

"It's surprising how frequent it appears to have been," Longrich said. "We're not exactly sure what that means."

The marks are definitely the result of feeding, although scientists aren't sure whether they are the result of scavengers or the end result of fighting, Longrich said, adding that if two T. rex fought to the death, the victor might have made a meal out of his adversary. "Modern big carnivores do this all the time," he said. "It's a convenient way to take out the competition and get a bit of food at the same time."

However, the marks appear to have been made some time after death, Longrich said, meaning that if one dinosaur killed another, it might have eaten most of the meat off the more accessible parts of the carcass before returning to pick at the smaller foot and arm bones.

While only one other dinosaur species, Majungatholus, is known to have been a cannibal, Longrich said the practice was likely more common than we think and that closer examination of fossil bones could turn up more evidence that other species also preyed on one another.

The finding is a big clue into the obscure eating habits of these enormous predators. While today's large carnivores often hunt together in packs, T. rex likely acted on their own, Longrich said. "These animals were some of the largest terrestrial carnivores of all time, and the way they approached eating was fundamentally different from modern species," he said. "There's a big mystery around what and how they ate, and this research helps to uncover one piece of the puzzle."

Other authors of the paper include John Horner (Montana State University), Gregory Erickson (Florida State University) and Philip Currie (University of Alberta).

Scientists Discover New Species in One of World’s Deepest Ocean Trenches

Scientists investigating in one of the world's deepest ocean trenches -- previously thought to be void of fish -- have discovered an entirely new species.
The findings by a team of marine biologists from Aberdeen, Tokyo and New Zealand, have shed new light on life in the deepest places on Earth and the global distribution of fish in our oceans.

The expedition to the Peru-Chile trench in the South East Pacific Ocean revealed a new species of snailfish living at 7000m, never before caught or captured on camera.

Mass groupings of cusk-eels and large crustacean scavengers were also discovered living at these depths for the first time.

During the three-week expedition on the research vessel Sonne, the team of scientists employed state-of-the-art deep-sea imaging technology, including an ultra-deep free-falling baited camera system, to take a total of 6000 images between 4500 and 8000 metres deep within the trench.

The expedition is the seventh to take place as part of HADEEP -- a collaborative research project between the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab and the University of Tokyo's Ocean Research Institute, with support from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research institute (NIWA).

The HADEEP team has been investigating extreme depths across the globe for 3 years. Their findings to date have included capturing the world's deepest fish on camera for the first time.

These latest discoveries provide a new insight into the depths at which fish survive and the diversity of populations which could exist in the deepest points of oceans across the globe.

Dr Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, who led the expedition said: "Our findings, which revealed diverse and abundant species at depths previously thought to be void of fish, will prompt a rethink into marine populations at extreme depths.

"This expedition was prompted by our findings in 2008 and 2009 off Japan and New Zealand where we discovered new species of snailfish known as Liparids -- inhabiting trenches off Japan and New Zealand at depths of approximately 7000m -- with each trench hosting its own unique species of the fish.

"To test whether these species would be found in all trenches, we repeated our experiments on the other side of the Pacific Ocean off Peru and Chile, some 6000 miles from our last observations. "What we found was that indeed there was another unique species of snailfish living at 7000m -- entirely new to science, which had never been caught or seen before.

"A species of cusk-eel -- known as Ophidiids -- also gathered at our camera and began a feeding frenzy that lasted 22 hours -- the entire duration of the deployment.

"Further research needs to be conducted to decipher whether this is also an entirely new species of cusk-eel that we have discovered.

"Our investigations also revealed a species of crustacean scavengers -- known as amphipods -- which we previously did not know existed at these depths in such great numbers.

"These are large shrimp-like creatures of which one particular group, called Eurythenes, were generally far larger and occurred much deeper in this trench than has ever been found before."

Dr Niamh Kilgallen, an amphipod expert from NIWA said:"The sheer abundance of these big amphipods was overwhelming, particularly at 7000 and 8000m, which is much deeper than they have been found in any other trench. It begs the question of why and how they can live so deep in this trench but not in any other."

Dr Toyonobu Fujii, a deep-sea fish expert from the University of Aberdeen said "How deep fish can live has long been an intriguing question and the results from this expedition has provided deeper insight into our understanding of the global distribution of fish in the oceans."

Dr Jamieson added: "These findings prompt a re-evaluation of the diversity and abundance of life at extreme depths. Furthermore, it is now apparent that each of the deep trenches across the globe hosts a unique assembly of animals which can differ greatly from trench to trench. The immense isolation of each trench draws parallels with island evolution theory popularised by Darwin's finches." The HADEEP project is funded by the Nippon Foundation, Japan, and NERC, UK.

Planet Hunters No Longer Blinded by the Light: New Way to See Faint Planets Previously Hidden in Their Star's Glare

Using new optics technology developed at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, an international team of astronomers has obtained images of a planet on a much closer orbit around its parent star than any other extrasolar planet previously found.
The discovery, published online in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is a result of an international collaboration among the Steward Observatory, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the European Southern Observatory, Leiden University in the Netherlands and Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy.

Installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, or VLT, atop Paranal Mountain in Chile, the new technology enabled an international team of astronomers to confirm the existence and orbital movement of Beta Pictoris b, a planet about seven to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, around its parent star, Beta Pictoris, 63 light years away.

At the core of the system is a small piece of glass with a highly complex pattern inscribed into its surface. Called an Apodizing Phase Plate, or APP, the device blocks out the starlight in a very defined way, allowing planets to show up in the image whose signals were previously drowned out by the star's glare.

"This technique opens new doors in planet discovery," said Phil Hinz, director of the UA's Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at Steward Observatory. "Until now, we only were able to look at the outer planets in a solar system, in the range of Neptune's orbit and beyond. Now we can see planets on orbits much closer to their parent star."

In other words, if alien astronomers in another solar system were studying our solar system using the technology previously available for direct imaging detection, all they would see would be Uranus and Neptune. The inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Saturn, simply wouldn't show up in their telescope images.

To put the power of the new optics system in perspective: Neptune's mean distance from the sun is about 2.8 billion million miles, or 30 Astronomical Units, or AUs. One AU is defined as the mean distance between the sun and the Earth.

The newly imaged planet, Beta Pictoris b, orbits its star at about seven AUs, a distance where things get especially interesting, according to Hinz, "because that's where we believe the bulk of the planetary mass to be in most solar systems. Between five and 10 AUs."

While planet hunters have used a variety of indirect methods to detect the "footprints" of extrasolar planets -- planets outside our solar system -- for example the slight gravitational wobble an orbiting planet induces in its parent star, very few of them have been directly observed.

According to Hinz, the growing zoo of extrasolar planets discovered to date -- mostly super-massive gas giants on wide orbits -- represents a biased sample because their size and distance to their parent star makes them easier to detect.

"You could say we started out by looking at oddball solar systems out there. The technique we developed allows us to search for lower-mass gas giants about the size of Jupiter, which are more representative of what is out there."

He added: "For the first time, we can search around bright, nearby stars such as Alpha Centauri, to see if they have gas giants."

The breakthrough, which may allow observers to even block out starlight completely with further refinements, was made possible through highly complex mathematical modeling.

"Basically, we are canceling out the starlight halo that otherwise would drown out the light signal of the planet," said Johanan (John) Codona, a senior research scientist at the UA's Steward Observatory who developed the theory behind the technique, which he calls phase-apodization coronagraphy.

"If you're trying to find something that is thousands or a million times fainter than the star, dealing with the halo is a big challenge."

To detect the faint light signals from extrasolar planets, astronomers rely on coronagraphs to block out the bright disk of a star, much like the moon shielding the sun during an eclipse, allowing fainter, nearby objects to show up.

Using his own unconventional mathematical approach, Codona found a complex pattern of wavefront ripples, which, if present in the starlight entering the telescope, would cause the halo part to cancel out but leave the star image itself intact. The Steward Observatory team used a machined piece of infrared optical glass about the size and shape of a cough drop to introduce the ripples. Placed in the optical path of the telescope, the APP device steals a small portion of the starlight and diffracts it into the star's halo, canceling it out.

"It's a similar effect to what you would see if you were diving in the ocean and looked at the sun from below the surface," explained Sascha Quanz from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Institute for Astonomy, the lead author of the study. "The waves on the surface bend the light rays and cause the sky and clouds to appear quite different. Our optic works in a similar way."

In order to block out glare from a star, conventional coronagraphs have to be precisely lined up and are highly susceptible to disturbance. A soft night breeze vibrating the telescope might be all it takes to ruin the image. The APP, on the other hand, requires no aiming and works equally well on any stars or locations in the image.

"Our system doesn't care about those kinds of disturbances," Codona said. "It makes observing dramatically easier and much more efficient."

In the development of APP, Codona was joined by Matt Kenworthy (now at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands). Hinz, who is a member of the instrument upgrade team for the VLT, played a key role in the technique's implementation on the 6.5 Meter Telescope on Mount Hopkins in Southeastern Arizona.

Former UA astronomy professor Michael Meyer, now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, where he led the group implementing the technology on the VLT, pointed out that APP is likely to advance areas of research in addition to the hunt for extrasolar planets.

"It will be exciting to see how astronomers will use the new technology on the VLT, since it lends itself to other faint structures around young stars and quasars, too."

Physicists Pave the Way for Graphene-Based Spin Computer; First to Achieve 'Tunneling Spin Injection'

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside have taken an important step forward in developing a "spin computer" by successfully achieving "tunneling spin injection" into graphene.

An electron can be polarized to have a directional orientation, called "spin." This spin comes in two forms -- electrons are said to be either "spin up" or "spin down" -- and allows for more data storage than is possible with current electronics.

Spin computers, when developed, would utilize the electron's spin state to store and process vast amounts of information while using less energy, generating less heat and performing much faster than conventional computers in use today.

Tunneling spin injection is a term used to describe conductivity through an insulator. Graphene, brought into the limelight by this year's Nobel Prize in physics, is a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arrayed in a honeycomb pattern. Extremely strong and flexible, it is a good conductor of electricity and capable of resisting heat.

"Graphene has among the best spin transport characteristics of any material at room temperature," explained Roland Kawakami, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, who led the research team, "which makes it a promising candidate for use in spin computers. But electrical spin injection from a ferromagnetic electrode into graphene is inefficient. An even greater concern is that the observed spin lifetimes are thousands of times shorter than expected theoretically. We would like longer spin lifetimes because the longer the lifetime, the more computational operations you can do."

To address these problems, in the lab Kawakami and colleagues inserted a nanometer-thick insulating layer, known as a "tunnel barrier," in between the ferromagnetic electrode and the graphene layer. They found that the spin injection efficiency increased dramatically.

"We found a 30-fold increase in the efficiency of how spins were being injected by quantum tunneling across the insulator and into graphene," Kawakami said. "Equally interesting is that the insulator was operating like a one-way valve, allowing electron flow in one direction -- from the electrode to graphene -- but not the other. The insulator helps to keep the injected spin inside the graphene, which is what leads to high spin injection efficiency. This counterintuitive result is the first demonstration of tunneling spin injection into graphene. We now have world record values for spin injection efficiency into graphene."

Study results appear in Physical Review Letters.

In their experiments, the Kawakami lab also made an unexpected discovery that explains short spin lifetimes of electrons in graphene that have been reported by other experimental researchers.

Kawakami explained that spin lifetimes are typically investigated through an experiment, known as a Hanle measurement, which uses a ferromagnetic spin detector to monitor the electron spins in graphene as they change direction in an external magnetic field. When his team placed a tunnel barrier in between the ferromagnetic spin detector and the graphene, the spin lifetime from the Hanle measurement jumped up to about 500 picoseconds (compared to typical values of 100 picoseconds) even though the researchers did nothing different to the graphene itself.

"People usually assume that the Hanle measurement accurately measures the spin lifetime, but this result shows that it severely underestimates the spin lifetime when the ferromagnet is touching the graphene," said Wei Han, the first author of the research paper and a graduate student in Kawakami's lab. "This is good news because it means the true spin lifetime in graphene must be longer than reported previously -- potentially a lot longer."

Kawakami explained that, theoretically, graphene has the potential for extremely long spin lifetimes.

"This lifetime could be microseconds long," he said. "A long lifetime is a special property of graphene, making it a very attractive material for a spin computer."

Growing insulating barriers on graphene is neither a simple nor easy process. The insulator tends to form clumps on the graphene sheet, due in part to graphene's reluctance to form strong bonds with materials. To circumvent the problem of clumping, in their experiments the Kawakami team layered the graphene sheet with titanium (about half an atom thick) using a method called molecular beam epitaxy. The titanium layer, the researchers found, prevented the insulator from clumping on graphene or sliding off it.

Next in the research, the Kawakami lab plans to demonstrate a working spin logic device

Han, a recipient of the Leo Falicov Award from the American Vacuum Society, and Kawakami were joined in the study by Kyle Pi, Kathy McCreary, Yan Li, Jared Wong, and Adrian Swartz of UCR. Grants to Kawakami from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research supported the study.