A mysterious fossil that has evoked images of a sea monster roaming the shallow waters of prehistoric Cincinnati may not be the remains of such a complex life form, but even so scientists are stumped as to what kind of creature (or sea plant) it was.

The researchers, who presented the finding at a Geological Society of America meeting in Dayton, Ohio, say one thing is sure: The enigmatic "blob" - discovered in elliptical pieces that, when fitted together, extended about 7 feet (2.1 meters) long and 3.5 feet (1 meter) wide - was once alive.

The team of scientists, along with the fossil hunter who discovered the 450-million-year-old specimen, suggest a range of possibilities: a type of huge algae or microbial mat, or even a member of the cnidarian family, which includes jellyfish (though scientists concede the jellyfish idea is highly unlikely).

"It's really got us baffled as to just how it looked when alive," David Meyer of the University of Cincinnati geology department told LiveScience. "My initial thought was an algal mat on the sea bottom, and then it got deformed somehow into these funny shapes and then preserved."

A paleontologist not involved in the discovery doubts the organism was a complex life.

"The discovery is certainly interesting. I would diverge on the interpretation, however," said Bruce Lieberman, a University of Kansas geology professor who is senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the university's Biodiversity Institute. "I wonder if it is possible that this represents several broken pieces of a coral that died and were then overgrown, either by a bryozoan or possibly a sponge, as it lay on the seafloor."

The unusual minor planet 2012 HD2 was discovered on 2012, April 18 by J. V. Scotti with the 0.9-m f/3 reflector + CCD at Steward Observatory on Kitt Peak (see M.P.E.C. 2012-H32). according to the latest orbital solution available, this object moves along a comet-like orbit with an Inclination of 146.9 deg, Eccentricity = 0.96, Perihelion distance = 2.55 AU and Period = 668 years.

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp, remotely from the Siding Spring-Faulkes Telescope South on 2012, Apr. 19.4, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD. No cometary features are visible in our images, the object has the same aspect of the nearby field stars of similar brightness (FWHM= 1.2").

Our confirmation image:

You can see an animation showing the movement of 2012 HD2.

Researchers have found that violence in the lives of children can cause changes in their DNA equivalent to seven to 10 years of premature aging.

Scientists measured this cellular aging by studying the ends of children's chromosomes, called telomeres.

Telomeres are DNA sequences that act like the plastic tips on shoelaces, which prevent the DNA in chromosomes from unraveling. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter until a cell dies when it can't divide anymore, reports Liz Szabo for USA Today.

Idan Shalev, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology and neuroscience at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and lead author of the study in today's Molecular Psychiatry says, "This is the first time it has been shown that our telomeres can shorten at a faster rate even at a really young age, while kids are still experiencing stress."

The researchers analyzed DNA samples from twins at ages 5 and 10 and compared telomere length to three kinds of violence: domestic violence between the mother and her partner, being bullied frequently, and physical maltreatment by an adult. Moms were also interviewed when kids were 5, 7, and 10 to create a cumulative record of exposure to violence.

The research team plans to further explore the new findings by measuring the average length of telomeres in the twins after they become adults. They'll also repeat the study in a second, older group of 1,000 individuals in the Dunedin Study, who have been under observation since their birth in the 1970s in New Zealand.

We are surrounded by a constantly changing magnetic field, be it Earth's or those emanating from devices, such as cell phones. Carlos Martino, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, is interested in understanding how these magnetic-field fluctuations change biochemical reactions inside us.

Martino explains that the subject is controversial. "Our research shows that exposure to different types of magnetic fields affect biological response," he says. "More importantly, the exposure levels are well below the standard levels" approved by the World Health Organization. "This raises the concern of safety issues," he adds. Martino presented some of his work at the Experimental Biology 2012 meeting in San Diego, California on April 23.

Magnetic fields come in different types. There are static fields, like those around permanent magnets. Earth's magnetic field is quasi-static, which means it can fluctuate slightly. Then there are radiofrequency magnetic fields, which may change both in intensity and frequency.

Martino's work concerns low-level static magnetic fields, which are one to two orders of magnitude weaker than Earth's field, as well as weak radiofrequency magnetic fields. Martino gives the example of cell phones, which give off very weak magnetic fields. There is debate whether these magnetic fields cause brain tumors in cell-phone users.

Martino says his work on low-level fields and radiofrequency magnetic fields raises "the question of reassessing the standard limit of exposure because we clearly see effects both in vitro and in vivo in the low level and radiofrequency magnetic field range."

We can all name at least a handful of fictional characters who can communicate with animals: Tarzan, Aquaman, the Horse Whisperer (a character appearing in a Nichols Evans novel and Robert Redford film), Dr. Doolittle and others.

Of course, most people communicate with animals all the time; pet lovers are famous for cooing baby talk to their animals and repeatedly asking banal, rhetorical questions like, "Do you want some food?" or "Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy?"
But pet psychics claim to do something more remarkable: They speak to animals and get information back. This is done, they say, by some sort of interspecies psychic power or telepathy.

Of course, psychic communication between humans has never been scientifically proven, so claims of psychic communication between animals and humans begins on very shaky ground. At least humans can share a common language; how a psychic could possibly translate the thoughts and intentions of a parakeet, fish, hamster, horse, spider or any other animal into human language is a mystery.

Yet thousands of people in real life claim to have exactly such a remarkable ability. For example, a Canadian woman named Lauren Bode claims she's a real-life horse whisperer.

Bode says that several horses at Toronto's Far Enough Farm telepathically told her that they are upset about plans to move them from their current location to another farm nearby. They are anxious about the June 30 move and worried about whether they will like their new home.

Bode did not explain how exactly the horses told her this, nor how they got wind of the news about the planned relocation; perhaps they learned enough English to eavesdrop on their trainers' conversations. If so, it would not be the first time that a horse was able to fool humans into believing it could understand languages.

Mysterious objects appear to be doing some damage to Saturn's "weirdest ring," scientists say.

The discovery comes from detailed photos taken of the Saturn system by NASA's Cassini orbiter. In these images, researchers spotted strange objects about a half-mile (kilometer) wide tearing through Saturn's F ring, the thin outermost discrete ring around the planet.

As they pass through the ring, these interlopers drag glittering ice particles out with them, creating visible trails of debris scientists are calling "mini jets."

"I think the F ring is Saturn's weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought," Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at London's Queen Mary University, said in a statement. "These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half mile in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles in size, creating a spectacular show."

Research by a Danish physicist suggests that the explosion of massive stars - supernovae - near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. Prof. Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) sets out his novel work in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When the most massive stars exhaust their available fuel and reach the end of their lives, they explode as supernovae, tremendously powerful explosions that are briefly brighter than an entire galaxy of normal stars. The remnants of these dramatic events also release vast numbers of high-energy charged particles known as galactic cosmic rays (GCR). If a supernova is close enough to the Solar System, the enhanced GCR levels can have a direct impact on the atmosphere of the Earth.

Prof. Svensmark looked back through 500 million years of geological and astronomical data and considered the proximity of the Sun to supernovae as it moves around our Galaxy, the Milky Way. In particular, when the Sun is passing through the spiral arms of the Milky Way, it encounters newly forming clusters of stars. These so-called open clusters, which disperse over time, have a range of ages and sizes and will have started with a small proportion of stars massive enough to explode as supernovae. From the data on open clusters, Prof. Svensmark was able to deduce how the rate at which supernovae exploded near the Solar System varied over time.

Comparing this with the geological record, he found that the changing frequency of nearby supernovae seems to have strongly shaped the conditions for life on Earth. Whenever the Sun and its planets have visited regions of enhanced star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, where exploding stars are most common, life has prospered. Prof. Svensmark remarks in the paper, "The biosphere seems to contain a reflection of the sky, in that the evolution of life mirrors the evolution of the Galaxy."

In the new work, the diversity of life over the last 500 million years seems remarkably well explained by tectonics affecting the sea-level together with variations in the supernova rate, and virtually nothing else. To obtain this result on the variety of life, or biodiversity, he followed the changing fortunes of the best-recorded fossils. These are from invertebrate animals in the sea, such as shrimps and octopuses, or the extinct trilobites and ammonites.

The seafloor off the Oregon coast now holds a little less mystery, thanks to a team of geologists, oceanographers and commercial fishermen. They've mapped the region's near-shore ocean floor in rich detail, revealing seafloor features that could affect tsunami formation, house fisheries and marine preserves and help engineers harvest energy from ocean waves.

"We're pulling up the window shade on the near-shore environment - not only for the science, but also for the practical side," said Chris Goldfinger, a geologist at Oregon State University who led the work.

One of those practical sides is a better understanding of how tsunamis form and travel in this area, so that scientists and officials can alert coastal communities in their paths.

Tsunami threat

Living along the Cascadia subduction zone - where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is slowly sliding under the North American plate - Oregonians have plenty of reasons to be wary of tsunamis, which are triggered by major earthquakes such as the magnitude-9 one that hit the region in 1700. The tsunami triggered by that quake reached Japan and caused significant destruction.

The shape and structure of the ocean floor can affect how tsunamis affect coastal lands.

"The same way a lens focuses the sunlight, a headland can focus waves and a bay can diffuse them," Goldfinger explained. "The bathymetry itself shapes the wave and impacts how it travels toward the shore."

For migratory birds and sea turtles, the ability to sense Earth's magnetic field is crucial to navigating the long-distance voyages these animals undertake during migration. Humans, however, are widely assumed not to have an innate magnetic sense. Research published in Nature Communications this week by faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that a protein expressed in the human retina can sense magnetic fields when implanted into Drosophila, reopening an area of sensory biology in humans for further exploration.

In many migratory animals, the light-sensitive chemical reactions involving the flavoprotein cryptochrome (CRY) are thought to play an important role in the ability to sense Earth's magnetic field. In the case of Drosophila, previous studies from the Reppert laboratory have shown that the cryptochrome protein found in these flies can function as a light-dependent magnetic sensor.

To test whether the human cryptochrome 2 protein (hCRY2) has a similar magnetic sensory ability, Steven Reppert, MD, the Higgins Family Professor of Neuroscience and chair and professor of neurobiology, graduate student Lauren Foley, and Robert Gegear, PhD, a post doctoral fellow in the Reppert lab now an assistant professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, created a transgenic Drosophila model lacking its native cryptochrome protein but expressing hCRY2 instead. Using a behavioral system Reppert's group previously developed, they showed that these transgenic flies were able to sense and respond to an electric-coil-generated magnetic field and do so in a light-dependent manner.

Traces of ancient viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago are more widespread in us than previously thought.

A study shows how extensively viruses from as far back as the dinosaur era still thrive in our genetic material.

It sheds light on the origins of a big proportion of our genetic material, much of which is still not understood.

The scientists investigated the genomes of 38 mammals including humans, mice, rats, elephants and dolphins.

The research was carried out at Oxford University, the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Centre in New York and the Rega Institute in Belgium.

It is reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the viruses was found to have invaded the genome of a common ancestor around 100 million years ago with its remnants discovered in almost every mammal in the study.

Another infected an early primate with the result that it was found in apes, humans and other primates as well.