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Sherlock

Bones Reveal Harsh Life of Colonial America

Randolph E. Schmid
Discovery News
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:20 UTC
It's a tale of toil, starvation and death, set forth in messages from the grave.

Skeleton
© AP Photo/Smithsonian, Chip Clark
Forensic anthropologist Karin Bruwelheide examining a 17th century skeleton from the Leavy Neck site, Anne Arundel County, Md., part of an exhibit, The saga of life in 17th century America.
The saga of life in 17th century America -- "Written in Bone" -- goes on display Saturday at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Some 340 objects, including artifacts and human bones, are on display for two years, with discussions of how cold cases from colonial times shed light on what life was like for some of the earliest English and Africans to settle in America.

The exhibit is "a fascinating window into the lives of our nation's earliest colonists," observed museum director Cristian Samper.

Since 1992 researchers have unearthed the remains of hundreds of early settlers around Chesapeake Bay.

"Now we can get to know these individuals, learn about how they lived and sometimes how they died," said forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, curator of the exhibit.
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Sherlock

'Green Magic' Protected Egyptian Child Mummies

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:06 UTC
Mummy Stone
© Raffaella Bianucci
A bright green stone found inside a fossilized leather bag buried with an Egyptian toddler.
A rare mummified child from the early period of Egyptian history was discovered buried with a bright green amulet stone once believed to hold magical powers, according to a new study.

The finds help to explain why hieroglyphics and historical texts record that Egyptian children wore green eye makeup. It also adds to the growing body of evidence that ancient Egyptians thought color itself held sacred energy that could help or hurt individuals.
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Saturn

HiRISE Captures Bolide Break-up and Impact on Mars

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:45 UTC
Impact 1
© NASA
Incoming! Hundreds of small objects, mostly asteroid fragments, impact Mars every year. Sometimes, like on Earth, objects break up in the Martian atmosphere. But Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, meaning more stuff hits the ground on the Red Planet. If a bolide breaks apart and but doesn't disintegrate, the result can be a cluster of craters. The image here is an example of that, with this group of recently made small impact craters. Although small Martian crater clusters are common, this example is unusual because there is a dark line between the two largest craters. The HiRISE scientists hypothesize that atmospheric breakup created two nearly equal-size objects that impacted close together in space and time so the air blasts interacted with each other to disturb the dust along this line. Wow!
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Cow Skull

Mammoth Remains Found at California Construction Site


The Associated Press
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:05 UTC
Workers digging at a downtown San Diego construction site have uncovered the prehistoric remains of an 8-foot-long mammoth.

A backhoe operator working at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law site unearthed a 20-foot-long tusk Wednesday.

School spokesman Chris Saunders says experts called in from the San Diego Natural History Museum uncovered the animal's skull and other bones.
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Sherlock

Census of Modern Organisms Reveals Echo of Ancient Mass Extinction


PhysOrg
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:08 UTC
Marine Organisms
© Susan Kidwell
Bivalves predominate in this sample of marine organisms. Marine bivalves have been originating new species faster since the extinction of the dinosaurs than before.
Paleontologists can still hear the echo of the death knell that drove the dinosaurs and many other organisms to extinction following an asteroid collision at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago.

"The evolutionary legacy of the end-Cretaceous extinction is very much with us. In fact, it can be seen in virtually every marine community, every lagoon, every continental shelf in the world," said University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski. It is, he said, "sort of an echo of the big bang for evolutionary biology."

This conclusion followed a detailed global analysis of marine bivalves, one of the few groups plentiful enough in the fossil record to allow such a study, which was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Andrew Krug of the University of Chicago, Jablonski and James Valentine of the University of California, Berkeley, examined the geologic ages of every major lineage of living bivalves the world over, from oysters and scallops to quahogs and cockles. Their report appears in the Feb. 6 issue of the journal Science.
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Sherlock

Genetic Roots of Synaesthesia Unearthed

David Robson
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:23 UTC
The regions of our DNA that wire some people to "see" sounds have been discovered. So far, only the general regions within chromosomes have been identified, rather than specific genes, but the work could eventually lead to a genetic test to diagnose the condition before it interferes with a child's education.

It has long been known that synaesthesia - which can take many other forms, but generally involves a cross-wiring between the senses - seems to run in families, although it also appears to be affected by environmental factors.

To investigate the nature of the genetic component of the condition, Julian Asher, now at Imperial College London, and colleagues from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford took genetic samples from 196 individuals of 43 families. Of these, 121 individuals exhibited the synaesthetic trait of seeing a colour in response to a sound.
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Meteor

Comet Lulin's Disconnected Tail


Space Weather
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:23 UTC
Lulin
© Ernesto Guido, Giovanni Sostero & Paul Camilleri

On Feb. 4th, a team of Italian astronomers witnessed "an intriguing phenomenon in Comet Lulin's tail." Team leader Ernesto Guido explains: "We photographed the comet using a remotely-controlled telescope in New Mexico, and our images clearly showed a disconnection event. While we were looking, part of the comet's plasma tail was torn away."
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Blackbox

Auroras: What Powers the Greatest Light Show on Earth?

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:46 UTC
Aurora
© ImageBroker
Polar lights, seen over the White Sea, White Karelia, Russia.
A few times a day, a gigantic explosion shakes the Earth's magnetic shield, triggering a chain of events that lights up the polar skies with dazzling auroras. These explosions are substorms, and how they happen has long been a mystery. Until now, no one has been able to explain how they gather the energy to create such spectacular displays, or what happens to trigger them.

Now a flotilla of NASA satellites is finally providing answers. They could help us understand not only one of nature's greatest spectacles, but also help predict more serious space weather, which can endanger satellites and astronauts, and even scramble electrical systems on Earth.
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Telescope

Astronomers Find Cosmic Dust Fountain

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:27 UTC
Dust is everywhere in space, but the pervasive stuff is one thing astronomers know little about. Cosmic dust is also elusive, as it lasts only about 10,000 years, a brief period in the life of a star. "We not only do not know what the stuff is, but we do not know where it is made or how it gets into space," said Donald York, a professor at the University of Chicago. But now York and a group of collaborators have observed a double-star system, HD 44179, that may be creating a fountain of dust. The discovery has wide-ranging implications, because dust is critical to scientific theories about how stars form.

Cosmic Dust Fountain
© NASA
HST image of the Red Rectangle.
The double star system sits within what astronomers call the Red Rectangle, a nebula full of gas and dust located approximately 2,300 light years from Earth.

One of the double stars is a post-asymptotic giant branch (post-AGB) star, a type of star astronomers regard as a likely source of dust. These stars, unlike the sun, have already burned all the hydrogen in their cores and have collapsed, burning a new fuel, helium.
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Saturn

Exceptionally Deep View of Strange Galaxy


PhysOrg
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:11 UTC
Spiral Galaxy
© NASA/ESA
A spiral galaxy NGC 4921 along with a spectacular backdrop of more distant galaxies. It was created from a total of 80 separate pictures through yellow and near-infrared filters.
The Coma Galaxy Cluster, in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice, is one of the closest very rich collections of galaxies in the nearby Universe. The cluster, also known as Abell 1656, is about 320 million light-years from Earth and contains more than 1000 members. The brightest galaxies, including NGC 4921 shown here, were discovered back in the late 18th century by William Herschel.

The galaxies in rich clusters undergo many interactions and mergers that tend to gradually turn gas-rich spirals into elliptical systems without much active star formation. As a result there are far more ellipticals and fewer spirals in the Coma Cluster than are found in quieter corners of the Universe.

NGC 4921 is one of the rare spirals in Coma, and a rather unusual one - it is an example of an "anaemic spiral" where the normal vigorous star formation that creates a spiral galaxy's familiar bright arms is much less intense. As a result there is just a delicate swirl of dust in a ring around the galaxy, accompanied by some bright young blue stars that are clearly separated out by Hubble's sharp vision. Much of the pale spiral structure in the outer parts of the galaxy is unusually smooth and gives the whole galaxy the ghostly look of a vast translucent jellyfish.
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