Most geodes—hollow, crystal-lined rocks—can fit in the palm of your hand. But the giant Pulpí Geode, which is about half the size of a small bedroom, fills part of an abandoned mine in southeastern Spain. Now, researchers have analyzed some of its crystals to figure out its age—and how this real-life Fortress of Solitude came to be so big.
The 11-cubic-meter geode—the largest in the world, the researchers say—was discovered in 1999, in a long-closed mine near its namesake town. Some of the crystals are several meters long and are so pure that they’re transparent, despite their thickness.
Although the geode is embedded in rocks that are about 250 million years old, the crystals themselves are much younger than that. Radioactive dating of some of the oldest suggests they formed less than 5.6 million years ago but probably no more than 2 million years ago, the researchers report this week in Geology.
New wrinkle on origami turns designing folding structures into child’s play
Most people associate origami with colorful cranes and decorative frogs, but the ancient Asian art of folding paper may be a whole lot more useful than that. Scientists have used it to make tiny robots and other self-folding 3D devices, for example. Now, a team of soft-matter physicists has invented a method for designing origami by essentially assembling puzzle pieces that encode the various points or vertices where folds meet. The approach could make designing folding robots much easier.
“It’s a big advance, and I’m pretty excited about it,” says Christian Santangelo, a theoretical physicist at Syracuse University in New York who was not involved in the work.
Sci-News
Super Spirals Spin Faster Than Expected, Astronomers Say
Super spirals are very luminous — they can shine with anywhere from 8 to 14 times the brightness of our Milky Way Galaxy.
They are also giant and massive, with a diameter up to 450,000 light-years and stellar mass between 30 and 340 billion solar masses. Only about 100 super spiral galaxies are known to date.
“Super spirals are extreme by many measures. They break the records for rotation speeds,” Dr. Ogle said.
Dr. Ogle and co-authors analyzed data for 23 super spiral galaxies collected with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), the 5-m Hale telescope of the Palomar Observatory, and NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
Giant Dinosaurs Evolved Various Brain-Cooling Mechanisms: Study
“Small dinosaurs could have just run into the shade to cool off, but for giant dinosaurs, the potential for overheating was literally inescapable,” said Professor Lawrence Witmer, co-author of the study.
“They must have had special mechanisms to control brain temperature, but what were they?”
Professor Witmer and his colleague, Dr. Ruger Porter, looked to the modern-day relatives of dinosaurs, birds and reptiles, where studies indeed showed that evaporation of moisture in the nose, mouth, and eyes cooled the blood on its way to the brain.
Scientific American
Molecules in Blood Spike Hours before Seizures
More than 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and one of its harshest aspects is its unpredictability. Sufferers rarely know when a seizure will occur.
But molecular biologist Marion Hogg of FutureNeuro, a research institute hosted at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and her colleagues have found molecules whose levels in the bloodstream differ before and after a seizure. This discovery could lead to a blood test that gauges when seizures are likely to strike, enabling patients to take fast-acting preventive drugs. The study, published in July in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, may even offer clues about epilepsy's causes.
Russian “CRISPR-Baby” Scientist Has Started Editing Genes in Human Eggs with the Goal of Altering Deaf Gene
Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov has started gene editing in eggs donated by women who can hear to learn how to allow some deaf couples to give birth to children without the genetic mutation that impairs hearing. The news, detailed in an e-mail he sent to Nature on 17 October, is the latest in a saga that kicked off in June, when Rebrikov told Nature of his controversial intention to create gene-edited babies resistant to HIV using the popular CRISPR tool.
Rebrikov’s latest e-mail (see box) follows a September report in Russian magazine N+1 that one deaf couple had started procedures to procure eggs that would be used to create a gene-edited baby — but the eggs that Rebrikov has edited are from women without the genetic mutation that can impair hearing. He says the goal of the experiments is to better understand potentially harmful ‘off-target’ mutations, which are a known challenge of using CRISR–Cas9 to edit embryos.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Why 'doomism' is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars
Once if you were a climate scientist the chief enemy was denial. Now, says Michael E. Mann, it’s more likely to be “doomism”: the idea that taking action to reduce the threat of runaway climate change is pointless because it’s already too late.
Doomism, argues the internationally renowned climate scientist, is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars - a new tool being exploited by those resisting change in the way the world does business.
It sits alongside what he calls “soft denialism” (climate change is happening but it's OK, we can adapt) and “deflection” (sowing division by making it all about individual lifestyle choices). Such tactics, he says, are in some ways “even more pernicious” than the old arguments flatly rejecting human-induced climate change.
Scientists discover big storms can create 'stormquakes'
Scientists have discovered a mash-up of two feared disasters - hurricanes and earthquakes - and they're calling them "stormquakes".
The shaking of the sea floor during hurricanes and cyclones can rumble like a magnitude 3.5 earthquake and can last for days, according to a study in this week's journal Geophysical Research Letters. The quakes are fairly common, but they weren't noticed before because they were considered seismic background noise.
A stormquake is more an oddity than something that can hurt you, because no one is standing on the sea floor during a hurricane, said Wenyuan Fan, a Florida State University seismologist who was the study's lead author.
BBC News
Satellites to monitor whale strandings from space
Scientists developing techniques to count great whales from space say the largest ever recorded mass stranding event was probably underestimated.
The carcasses of 343 sei whales were spotted on remote beaches in Patagonia, Chile, in 2015 - but this survey work was conducted from planes and boats, and carried out many weeks after the deaths actually occurred.
However, an analysis of high-resolution satellite images of the area taken much closer in time to the stranding has now identified many more bodies.
It's difficult to give a precise total for the number of whales involved but in one sample picture examined by researchers, the count was nearly double.
Snowy 2.0: Australia's divisive plan for a vast underground 'battery'
Far beneath a national park in one of the coldest parts of Australia is where the government wants to build a hugely ambitious project: a power station capable of generating 10% of the nation's energy.
It is part of a bold - and expensive - hydro electricity scheme in the Kosciuszko National Park in south-east New South Wales.
The Snowy 2.0 project has ambitions to carve tunnels through 27km (17 miles) of rock to make a huge pipeline linking two reservoirs. The difference in elevation of 700m (2296ft) is what gives the plan its extraordinary might.
It is simple enough in concept, but elaborate in design, and challenging in practice.
Ars Technica
Archaeologists unearth a Bronze Age warrior’s personal toolkit
Three-thousand years ago, at least 140 fighters died in a battle along the banks of Germany’s Tollense River. One of the fallen dropped a small kit containing tools and a handful of bronze scraps. Based on the types of artifacts archaeologists found in this kit, they've concluded that at least some of the combatants in the prehistoric battle probably came from hundreds of kilometers away in Central or even Southern Europe.
According to University of Göttingen archaeologist Tobias Uhlig and his colleagues, that suggests that large-scale battles between far-flung groups began long before people in Europe had developed a system of writing to record the history of their conflicts.
The EPA has approved the first-ever bee-distributed pesticide for the US market
Bees’ fuzzy yellow bodies and hairy legs are custom-built for picking up pollen. Nothing can distribute the yellow powder more efficiently—something farmers that shell out for commercial beehives every growing season know all too well. And starting with this fall’s growing season, bees may be given some cargo to carry on their outbound journey to the blossoms: pesticides.
On August 28, the EPA approved the first-ever bee-distributed organic pesticide for the US market—a fungus-fighting powder called Vectorite that contains the spores of a naturally occurring fungus called Clonostachys rosea (CR-7). CR-7 is completely harmless to its host plant and acts as a hostile competitor to other, less innocuous fungi. It has been approved for commercial growers of flowering crops like blueberries, strawberries, almonds, and tomatoes.
The beauty of Vectorite is that it mimics a “locally appropriate natural system,” said Vicki Wojcik, director of Pollinator Partnership Canada. “It’s an interesting twist… where care for the health of the pollinator is actually vital because it is your actual vector.”