Science News
Animal origins shift to comb jellies
Genetic data confirm the marine predators have more ancient origin than simpler sponges
by Amy Maxmen
Complex marine creatures called comb jellies should replace brainless, gutless, simple sponges at the base of the evolutionary animal tree of life, a new report asserts.
Scientists have long assumed that the ancestor of all living animals vaguely resembled sponges. Now, biologists must reformulate hypotheses on the evolution of the first animals more than 550 million years ago. “This finding makes people very uncomfortable,” says Joseph Ryan, an evolutionary biologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., and lead author of the study in the Dec. 13 Science.
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The Thousand-Year Graveyard
Scientists uncover a tortured history of disease and death from the Middle Ages onward
By Ann Gibbons
Badia Pozzeveri Churchyard, Altipascio, Italy—On a hot afternoon in July 2012, Giuseppe Vercellotti was digging up bones near the wall of an abandoned medieval church here, thinking about getting a cold drink, when he heard his students call his name. Faces glistening with sweat, they told him that they had found something strange buried half a meter down. Vercellotti took a look and saw a layer of lime, used in ancient times to squelch the stench of rotting corpses. When he tapped the hard layer with his trowel, it sounded hollow.
“We immediately thought it was a mass grave,” says Vercellotti, a biological anthropologist at Ohio State University, Columbus, who co-leads a field school here. “We instructors were all excited and hopeful.”
But the students were apprehensive: “They all started talking about possible contagion,” Vercellotti says. Unconcerned, he leaned deep into the trench, where he got a whiff of a pungent odor and spotted an elbow bone poking out of the lime that had sealed it like a cast. The layer spoke of bodies tossed into a pit and hastily covered with lime. Could this trench hold victims of the Black Death, the plague that killed half of Europe in the Middle Ages?
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Technology News
Steve Jobs document fetches $40K at auction
A signed legal agreement documenting a business venture between the Apple co-founder and his college friend Robert Friedland proves to be a hot item.
by Dara Kerr
It's not every day that someone throws down more than $40,000 for a short document, but that is exactly what Tristar Productions CEO Jeff Rosenberg did Thursday.
This was no ordinary document, however. It was a signed legal agreement between Steve Jobs and businessman Robert Friedland from August 17, 1978. The 8-page document was up for auction at RR Auction house and sold for $40,045.
"In 30 years of business we have only offered one other Jobs item -- a signature; this document, incredibly substantial and significant in its connection to a major figure in his life, is of the utmost rarity," RR Auction Vice President Bobby Livingston said in a statement.
Apparently, Jobs and Friedland were buddies during college -- where they both attended Reed College, took spiritual trips to India, and worked on Friedland's communal farm and apple orchard.
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With the New Gmail, People Will Know When You Open That Message
By Ryan Tate
Beware: Google just made it easier for people to know if you’re opening their email messages.
Today, the web giant announced a change to its popular Gmail service: Images embedded in emails will now be automatically displayed, saving users from clicking on a “display images” link and, Google claims, making “your messages more safe and secure.” But buried in the fine print, a different picture emerges.
The new setup also means that people and companies who send you email will be able to find out when you’ve opened and read their messages, because loading these images requires a call back to the sender’s server. That said, the sender still has to know how to rig their emails to take advantage of this, and that means that sophisticated corporations are far more likely to take advantage of this privacy hole than your friends and relatives. They’ll have to evade Google’s filters for “suspicious” content, and you’ll have to check your Gmail over the web — not via a local client — for this change to impact you. But it’s an important development.
Other email clients automatically load images, but Google’s change brings this to what is now the world’s largest service. The good news is that you can turn off the new change. But most people won’t know any better.
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Environmental News
FDA Moves to Reduce Antibiotics in Livestock
Erik Stokstad
There are many culprits in the growing problem of microbial resistance to antibiotics—which renders these valuable drugs ineffective—but public health advocates often point to agriculture. Farmers administer more than 70% of the antibiotics used in the United States to improve health and promote the growth of livestock and poultry. Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced changes in farm use of antibiotics designed to safeguard the drugs for medical use.
The American Society for Microbiology applauded the move in an e-mail, calling it "a major step to address antibiotic resistance comprehensively." But critics worry about what they see as a large loophole, and they say the steps don’t go far enough.
Farm animals are often given a constant dose of antibiotics, added to their feed, in order to boost growth and prevent outbreaks of disease. Unfortunately, the practice raises the risk of microbes evolving resistance and eventually spreading to humans. In final guidance released on 11 December, FDA is asking companies that produce drugs for animals to voluntarily change their labels. No longer should they advertise improved growth and feed efficiency from antibacterial drugs that FDA considers medically important to humans.
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NASA reveals new results from inside the ozone hole
Earth & Climate
NASA scientists have revealed the inner workings of the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica and found that declining chlorine in the stratosphere has not yet caused a recovery of the ozone hole. More than 20 years after the Montreal Protocol agreement limited human emissions of ozone-depleting substances, satellites have monitored the area of the annual ozone hole and watched it essentially stabilize, ceasing to grow substantially larger. However, two new studies show that signs of recovery are not yet present, and that temperature and winds are still driving any annual changes in ozone hole size.
"Ozone holes with smaller areas and a larger total amount of ozone are not necessarily evidence of recovery attributable to the expected chlorine decline," said Susan Strahan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "That assumption is like trying to understand what's wrong with your car's engine without lifting the hood."
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Medical News
Sniffing out Danger: Fearful Memories Can Trigger Heightened Sense of Smell
Rutgers University
Dec. 12, 2013 — Most people -- including scientists -- assumed we can't just sniff out danger.
It was thought that we become afraid of an odor -- such as leaking gas -- only after information about a scary scent is processed by our brain.
But neuroscientists at Rutgers University studying the olfactory -- sense of smell -- system in mice have discovered that this fear reaction can occur at the sensory level, even before the brain has the opportunity to interpret that the odor could mean trouble.
In a new study published today in Science, John McGann, associate professor of behavioral and systems neuroscience in the Department of Psychology, and his colleagues, report that neurons in the noses of laboratory animals reacted more strongly to threatening odors before the odor message was sent to the brain.
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Scientists Discover Double Meaning in Genetic Code
University of Washington
Dec. 12, 2013 — Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA. This second code contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease.
A research team led by Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington associate professor of genome sciences and of medicine, made the discovery. The findings are reported in the Dec. 13 issue of Science. The work is part of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project, also known as ENCODE. The National Human Genome Research Institute funded the multi-year, international effort. ENCODE aims to discover where and how the directions for biological functions are stored in the human genome.
Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.
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Space News
Noble Gas Molecule Discovered in Space
Cardiff University
Dec. 12, 2013 — A molecule containing a noble gas has been discovered in space by a team including astronomers from Cardiff University.
The find was made using a Cardiff-led instrument aboard Europe's Herschel Space Observatory. The molecule, argon hydride, was seen in the Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that exploded 1,000 years ago. Before the discovery, molecules of this kind have only been studied in laboratories on Earth.
The noble gases, which include helium, argon, radon and krypton, usually do not react easily with other chemical elements, and are often found on their own. In the right circumstances, however, they can form molecules with other elements. Such chemical compounds have only ever been studied in laboratories on Earth, leading astronomers to assume the right conditions simply do not occur in space.
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Water Vapor Plumes Erupt From Europa
Sid Perkins
Europa, an ice-swaddled jovian satellite that has long fascinated both scientists and science fiction writers, just got a bit more interesting. Data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that plumes of water vapor hundreds of kilometers tall, possibly originating in a subsurface ocean, spew from the moon’s south pole. The phenomenon is similar to the sprays of ice particles found emanating from the saturnian moon Enceladus almost a decade ago.
Oxygen and hydrogen atoms emit or absorb certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light. If these telltale signs appear together in light from a distant object, they hint that water vapor might be present there, explains Lorenz Roth, a planetary astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. So, late in 2012, in hopes of detecting vapor plumes, he and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Europa in ultraviolet light. Oxygen is often present in Europa’s tenuous atmosphere, and sometimes it’s more concentrated in the space above the moon’s southern hemisphere, Roth says. But for one lengthy interval during the observations, the team spotted emissions from hydrogen (at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometers) in the same region. Because the satellite’s surface is covered with ice, the clearest observations came from portions of the purported plumes that were silhouetted against space rather than against the moon itself.
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Odd News
Mysterious Glowing Sea Creature Explained
By Marc Lallanilla
Strange and wondrous creatures fill the seas, and even after eons of living near and traveling across the world's oceans, people are still amazed by the seas' rich biological diversity.
Take, for example, the recent sighting of a mysterious glowing sea-beast — the video of which is now making its way across the Internet — that brought considerable delight and wonder to the people who witnessed the odd-looking creature moving through the harbor in Bristol, England.
Adding to the mystery is the fact that nobody could determine what exactly the luminous object might be. Was it another cheap online hoax? Or a shimmering example of bioluminescence, the ability of some animals to convert chemical energy into light?
The creature's ability to glow sparked some interest in the phenomenon of bioluminescence. Insects such as fireflies use bioluminescence to attract mates; anglerfish use a similar technique to attract prey. Even some plants, such as mushrooms and other fungi, have bioluminescent properties.
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