Science News
Fish have had telescoping jaws for 100 million years
by Sarah Schwartz
For the last 100 million years, fish have steadily refined the art of tossing their own jaws forward.
This hunting trick, known as jaw protrusion, helps bony teleost fish — the most abundant group of fish worldwide — snag their prey. When fish first tried the trick in the Late Cretaceous, they could stretch their jaws up to 8.16 percent of their own body length. Today, fish can extend their jaws to over 20 percent of their body length, scientists report in the Oct. 19 Current Biology.
Telescoping fish jaws probably played an important role in changing marine food webs, the researchers say. Crabs and other prey animals might have even evolved to be smaller and nocturnal to avoid getting snatched up.
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General relativity centennial celebrates Einstein’s genius
By Eva Emerson
Einstein is shorthand for genius, and describing everything Albert Einstein did to inspire that synonym would take a book, or multiple books (see reviews of some). But in this issue, Science News uses the opportunity of the 100th anniversary of the general theory of relativity to take a deep dive into one — perhaps the most important — of Einstein’s scientific contributions.
Tom Siegfried describes the challenges that Einstein faced and met to develop his theory, which reimagined gravity as a warping of spacetime. Of course, his equations had much wider implications. As Christopher Crockett explores, general relativity’s requirement that gravity bend light has been a boon to astronomers seeking to see the most ancient stars and galaxies. Gravitational lenses can help magnify or brighten images of faraway objects, extending scientists’ vision. Gravitational waves, another consequence of general relativity, have been detected indirectly; scientists are actively searching for direct evidence.
General relativity has been wildly successful, but it doesn’t mesh well with quantum mechanics, the 20th century’s other revolutionary advance in physics, as Andrew Grant reports. But some physicists believe those two ideas may merge via Einstein’s offspring: black holes and wormholes.
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Technology News
What’s in a Boarding Pass Barcode? A Lot
by Brian Krebs
The next time you’re thinking of throwing away a used boarding pass with a barcode on it, consider tossing the boarding pass into a document shredder instead. Two-dimensional barcodes and QR codes can hold a great deal of information, and the codes printed on airline boarding passes may allow someone to discover more about you, your future travel plans, and your frequent flyer account.
Earlier this year, I heard from a longtime KrebsOnSecurity reader named Cory who said he began to get curious about the data stored inside a boarding pass barcode after a friend put a picture of his boarding pass up on Facebook. Cory took a screen shot of the boarding pass, enlarged it, and quickly found a site online that could read the data.
“I found a website that could decode the data and instantly had lots of info about his trip,” Cory said, showing this author step-by-step exactly how he was able to find this information. ‘
“Besides his name, frequent flyer number and other [personally identifiable information], I was able to get his record locator (a.k.a. “record key” for the Lufthansa flight he was taking that day,” Cory said. “I then proceeded to Lufthansa’s website and using his last name (which was encoded in the barcode) and the record locator was able to get access to his entire account. Not only could I see this one flight, but I could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.”
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WikiLeaks Wants to Pay $50K for Video of the Kunduz Hospital Bombing
by Andy Greenberg
Once, the reward for leaking to WikiLeaks was nothing more than a clean conscience. Soon, it could also pay tens of thousands of dollars—at least to anyone who possesses video of the most notorious American airstrike in recent memory.
WikiLeaks has now put out a call for crowdfunded donations to assemble a $50,000 “bounty” for anyone who can give the group video evidence of the U.S. airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which killed 22 people and injured another 37. And WikiLeaks isn’t seeking just any video of the bombing: It wants cockpit footage and internal audio from the Lockheed AC-130 gunship that performed the attack—the same sort of highly classified internal evidence it published in 2010’s internet-shaking “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Iraq.
“The AC-130 records its attacks with high resolution gun cameras. According to military procedure, this footage should have been retained along with the cockpit audio. A post-massacre inquiry report referred to as an ‘AR 15-6′ should have also been commissioned,” reads a statement on WikiLeaks’ website announcing the crowdfunding push. “We are raising a US$50,000 bounty to obtain the footage, the cockpit audio, the inquiry report and other relevant materials such as the Rules of Engagement active at the time.”
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Environmental News
Widespread coral bleaching threatens world’s reefs
by Teresa Shipley Feldhausen
Corals across the globe are experiencing widespread bleaching from high ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states in its latest Coral Watch Report. Stressful conditions in the Pacific and Caribbean could last into early 2016. This is the third such global bleaching event in 17 years, NOAA notes.
Bleaching happens when corals get stressed. Overly warm water causes them to expel the symbiotic algae that give coral their color and are the corals’ major food source.
By the end of this year, NOAA predicts that nearly all U.S. coral reefs will have been subject to stressful bleaching conditions. The agency says global warming and this year’s strong El Niño are mostly to blame.
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Pumpkin Lovers Face Slim Pickings, Thanks to Climate Change
More rain has hit the pumpkin harvest in the U.S.
By Niina Heikkinen and ClimateWire
Pumpkin lovers, it’s time to stock up.
Poor growing conditions and significantly lower-than-normal yields of processing pumpkins used for baking mean that the popular canned pumpkin brand, Libby’s 100% Pure Pumpkin, may be in short supply in the coming months—just in time for the holiday season.
Yields of the pumpkins were low enough that Paul Bakus, president of corporate affairs at Nestlé Corp., which owns Libby’s, urged shoppers to take immediate action.
“If you want to have a Libby’s pumpkin [pie] for Thanksgiving or Christmas, get your pumpkin now,” he said.
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Medical News
Chemical tags on DNA appear to differ between gay and straight men
Twin study shows distinct patterns of markers along stretches of the genome
By Tina Hesman Saey
BALTIMORE — Molecular tests may be able to distinguish homosexual from heterosexual men, a small study of twins suggests.
Chemical modifications to DNA that change the activity of genes without changing the genes’ information differ between homosexual and heterosexual men, researchers from UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine have discovered. Results of the unpublished study on the link between these modifications, called epigenetic tags, and sexual orientation were presented October 8 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. Comparing one type of epigenetic tag known as DNA methylation in pairs of twins in which one brother is gay and the other straight revealed patterns that distinguish one group from the other about 67 percent of the time, computational geneticist Tuck Ngun and colleagues say.
The work already has provoked controversy, with some scientists questioning its methodology and others worried about how the research could be used. Some are concerned that the research could be misinterpreted as one step in an effort to “cure” homosexuality. Nothing could be further from the researchers’ intentions, say Ngun and Eric Vilain, the geneticist who heads the research group. “None of us see homosexuality as a disorder or something to be fixed,” Ngun said. “We’re just interested in what makes us tick.”
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Countries at Heart of Ebola Outbreak See First Virus-Free Week
The week of October 4 is the first without new patients since March 2014 but WHO warns that further cases may still break out
By Reuters Staff
DAKAR (Reuters) - The three West African countries at the heart of an Ebola epidemic recorded their first week with no new cases since the outbreak was declared in March 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.
The U.N. agency said that more than 11,000 people have died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the world's worst known occurrence of Ebola, but there were no new cases in the week to Oct. 4.
New cases of Ebola have dwindled sharply this year but the WHO said there was still a risk of the disease breaking out again.
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Space News
Ancient Mars had long-lasting lakes of liquid water
by Thomas Sumner
Large lakes once wet the Martian landscape for thousands of years at a time, new evidence suggests.
Last year, NASA scientists reported that Gale Crater, currently home to the Curiosity rover, was once filled with liquid water. Analyzing sediments and signs of erosion, Curiosity mission scientists report in the Oct. 9 Science that ancient lakes on the Red Planet stuck around for at least 100 to 10,000 years.
While relatively short-lived by Earth standards, the lingering lakes potentially lasted long enough to support life, the researchers say.
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A remarkable number of people think 'The Martian' is based on a true story
The Examiner
“The Martian” is a smash hit movie that made $100 million worldwide during its first weekend. The science and engineering depicted was, with certain notable exceptions, near perfect. The cinematography and special effects were so well done that one could almost imagine that Ridley Scott sent Matt Damon and a film crew to Mars to shoot the movie. In fact, perhaps the film was a little too good. Tuesday, Buzzfeed took a stroll through social media and discovered that many people think that “The Martian” is based on a true story.
Just for the record, even though people have been dreaming of going to Mars for over a century and NASA has planned for Mars voyages since before the Apollo program ended, no human being from the planet Earth has ever set foot on the Red Planet. The reasons for this oversight have more to do with bad politics rather than the technological challenges. Had NASA been given the funding and direction, it is virtually certain that humans could have walked on Mars by the mid-1980s.
Yet, a remarkable number of people seem to think that the first interplanetary voyage has already taken place, that Mark Watney is real, and that he was marooned on Mars and then rescued. Mind, such a voyage would have been the greatest, most covered event of this century. Everybody who was of age at the time know where they were when Neil Armstrong made that first footstep on the moon. Just as many people would have known where they were when the news came that astronaut Mark Watney was safe aboard the Hermes and headed home.
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Odd News
Math Mystery: Shinichi Mochizuki and the Impenetrable Proof
A Japanese mathematician claims to have solved one of the most important problems in his field. The trouble is, hardly anyone can work out whether he's right
By Davide Castelvecchi and Nature magazine
Sometime on the morning of August 30 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki quietly posted four papers on his website.
The papers were huge—more than 500 pages in all—packed densely with symbols, and the culmination of more than a decade of solitary work. They also had the potential to be an academic bombshell. In them, Mochizuki claimed to have solved the abc conjecture, a 27-year-old problem in number theory that no other mathematician had even come close to solving. If his proof was correct, it would be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics this century and would completely revolutionize the study of equations with whole numbers.
Mochizuki, however, did not make a fuss about his proof. The respected mathematician, who works at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) in Japan, did not even announce his work to peers around the world. He simply posted the papers, and waited for the world to find out.
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