Satellite dwarf galaxies at the edges of the Milky Way and neighboring Andromeda defy the accepted model of galaxy formation, and recent attempts to pigeon-hole them into the model are flawed, an international team of scientists reports.

The mismatch raises questions about the accuracy of the standard model of cosmology, which is the widely accepted paradigm for the origin and evolution of the universe, the astrophysicists say.

A preprint of the research paper, accepted for publication by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is online here.

The standard model, also called the "lambda cold dark matter model," says that satellite dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to behave a certain way: The galaxies would form in halos of dark matter, be widely distributed and would have to move in random directions, said Marcel Pawlowski, a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the new study.

"But what astronomers see is different," Pawlowski said. "We see the satellite galaxies are in a huge disk and moving in the same direction within this disk, like the planets in our solar system moving in a thin plane in one direction around the sun. That's unexpected and could be a real problem."

In the Milky Way, the dwarf galaxies and accompanying star clusters and streams of stars are in what's called the Magellanic plane, or what the authors call the Vast Polar Structure; and in Andromeda, half of the satellites are in the Great Plane of Andromeda.

Pawlowski and 13 co-authors from six different countries examined three recent papers by different international teams that concluded the planar distributions of galaxies fit the standard model.

"When we compared simulations using their data to what is observed by astronomers, we found a very substantial mismatch," Pawlowski said.

Imagine if people from Kansas and California were as genetically distinct from each other as someone from Germany is from someone from Japan. That's the kind of remarkable genetic variation that scientists have now found within Mexico, thanks to the first fine-scale study of human genetic variation in that country. This local diversity could help researchers trace the history of the country's different indigenous populations and help them develop better diagnostic tools and medical treatments for people of Mexican descent living all over the world.
The team has done a "tremendous job" of creating a "blueprint of all the genetic diversity in Mexico," says Bogdan Pasaniuc, a population geneticist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research.

Mexico contains 55 different indigenous ethnic groups, 20 of which are represented in the study, says Andrés Moreno-Estrada, a population geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and the study's lead author. Working with Carlos Bustamante, another Stanford population geneticist, the team sampled the genomes of indigenous populations all over Mexico, from the northern desert of Sonora to the jungles of Chiapas in the south. Over centuries of living so far apart - and often in isolation because of mountain ranges, vast deserts, or other geographic barriers - these populations developed genetic differences from one another, Bustamante explains.

Many of these variants are what he calls "globally rare but locally common." That is, a genetic variant that's widespread in one ethnic group, like the Maya, may hardly ever show up in people of different ancestry, like people of European descent. If you study the genomes of only the Europeans, you'd never catch the Maya variant. And that's a big problem for people with Maya ancestry if that variant increases their risk of disease or changes the way they react to different kinds of medication. "All politics is local, right? What we're starting to find is that lots of genetics is local, too," Bustamante says.

Ninth-graders design science experiment to test the effect of cellphone radiation on plants. The results may surprise you.

Five ninth-grade young women from Denmark recently created a science experiment that is causing a stir in the scientific community.

It started with an observation and a question. The girls noticed that if they slept with their mobile phones near their heads at night, they often had difficulty concentrating at school the next day. They wanted to test the effect of a cellphone's radiation on humans, but their school, Hjallerup School in Denmark, did not have the equipment to handle such an experiment. So the girls designed an experiment that would test the effect of cellphone radiation on a plant instead.

The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress, into a room without radiation, and six trays of the seeds into another room next to two routers that according to the girls' calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone.

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests. In a behavior that's unusual for a primate, the silvery gibbon sings: It can vocalize long, complicated songs, using 14 different note types, that signal territory and send messages to potential mates and family.

Far from being a mere curiosity, the silvery gibbon may hold clues to the development of language in humans. In a newly published paper, two MIT professors assert that by re-examining contemporary human language, we can see indications of how human communication could have evolved from the systems underlying the older communication modes of birds and other primates.

From birds, the researchers say, we derived the melodic part of our language, and from other primates, the pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech. Sometime within the last 100,000 years, those capacities fused into roughly the form of human language that we know today.

But how? Other animals, it appears, have finite sets of things they can express; human language is unique in allowing for an infinite set of new meanings. What allowed unbounded human language to evolve from bounded language systems?

"How did human language arise? It's far enough in the past that we can't just go back and figure it out directly," says linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "The best we can do is come up with a theory that is broadly compatible with what we know about human language and other similar systems in nature."

The extinct influenza virus that caused the worst flu pandemic in history has been recreated from fragments of avian flu found in wild ducks in a controversial experiment to show how easy it would be for the deadly flu strain to reemerge today.

Scientists said the study involved infecting laboratory ferrets with close copies of the 1918 virus - which was responsible for the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people - to see how easy it can be transmitted in the best animal model of the human disease.

But other researchers have denounced the research as foolhardy and dangerous. Critics said that any benefits of the attempts to recreate 1918-like flu viruses from existing avian flu strains do not justify the catastrophic risks if such a genetically engineered virus were to escape either deliberately or accidentally from the laboratory and cause a deadly influenza pandemic.

However, Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison dismissed the criticisms of his research saying that it is necessary for the development of influenza vaccines and other countermeasures designed to minimise the risks of a future flu pandemic.

"These critics fail to appreciate the precautions and safeguards built into our work, the regulation, review and oversight these studies receive....The risks of conducting this research are not ignored, but they can be effectively managed and mitigated," Professor Kawaoka said.

"We know studies like ours advance the field and help those responsible for making decisions about surveillance and pandemic preparedness [to] base decisions on scientific fact, rather than conjecture. Therefore our research provides important benefits that cannot be achieved by other means," he said in an email to The Independent.

The study, which was carried out in a secure laboratory with the second highest biosafety level, showed that all the necessary ingredients exist in the wild population of bird flu viruses for the emergence of a virus similar to the deadly 1918 flu strain.

At several times in Earth's history, mass extinctions have come close to wiping life out altogether. The reasons for these catastrophes are still unclear - they've been blamed on everything from asteroid impacts to cosmic ray blasts. But a new study has found that our planet itself could have a surprising hand in these disasters.

Research recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that reversals of the Earth's magnetic field may have sparked mass extinctions in the past by stripping oxygen from the atmosphere.

The sun is hitting its stride. Earth's closest star shot off yet another powerful solar flare today (June 11) after producing a pair of major solar storms Tuesday.

The X1-class flare reached its peak at 5:06 a.m. EDT (0906 GMT) and came from Region 2087 near the southeastern limb of the sun's disk, the same region of the star that produced the two powerful solar flares yesterday. NASA captured an amazing video of the X1 solar flare using its space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Today's solar tempest did cause a brief radio blackout on Earth, but officials with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center based in Boulder, Colorado, don't think that the flare has an associated coronal mass ejection - a burst of hot plasma sent out from the sun during some solar flares. [See photos of the biggest solar flares in 2014]

More than 40 million people worldwide have been displaced from their homes and left to find shelter in strange lands. Maybe they find a tarp, or a tent, but their quality of life almost always remains dismal. To close this gap in need, Jordanian-Canadian architect and designer Abeer Seikaly designed a new kind of shelter. One that allows refugees to rebuild their lives with dignity.

Seikaly, now living in Amman, Jordan is well poised to design a dwelling for refugees given that her ancestors in Jordan probably toggled between nomadic and sheltered life in the desert for centuries.
"The movement of people across the earth led to the discovery of new territories as well as the creation of new communities among strangers forming towns, cities, and nations," writes Seikaly in her design brief. "Navigating this duality between exploration and settlement, movement and stillness is a fundamental essence of what it means to be human."

But today, a great deal of migration is no longer voluntary, as wars and climate change force people out of their homes - often with very little money. The collapsible woven shelters, which are conceptual but proven to work, would allow these people to carry their homes with them.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have reported findings that could change our understanding of lightning. Researchers have discovered a link between charged particles on the Sun and increased lightning on Earth. Wal Thornhill explains why this is not a surprise to the Electric Universe community.

For a background discussion on lightning in the Electric Universe, see video below:

A Texas observatory has captured a powerful gamma-ray burst - the violent death of a massive star - that happened relatively "soon'" after the Big Bang. Understanding such hard-to-spot events gives us insight into how the early universe developed.

While the observation was published only this week, the transient flash of the dying star GRB 140419A was detected on April 19 by NASA's space satellite, which relayed the info an automated telescope belonging to Southern Methodist University (SMU).

It is only these sophisticated and integrated technologies that allow us to systematically observe gamma-ray bursts, mysterious phenomena that were only discovered in the 1960s.

"Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. These bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Earth's sun during its entire expected lifespan of 10 billion years," said Farley Ferrante, the SMU student who monitored the event.

Like some other similar disintegrations, GRB 140419A might have been a star up to 50 times bigger than our sun that ran out of fuel, and collapsed upon itself, creating a black hole - a mass so dense and with so much gravity that nothing can escape it. The explosion happened relatively soon - 1.7 billion years - after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.82 billion years ago.

"Considering this thing was at the edge of the visible universe, that's an extreme explosion. That was something big. Really big," said Robert Kehoe, the leader of SMU's astronomy team.