Lyme disease is a stealthy, often misdiagnosed disease that was only recognized about 40 years ago, but new discoveries of ticks fossilized in amber show that the bacteria which cause it may have been lurking around for 15 million years - long before any humans walked on Earth.

The findings were made by researchers from Oregon State University, who studied 15-20 million-year-old amber from the Dominican Republic that offer the oldest fossil evidence ever found of Borrelia, a type of spirochete-like bacteria that to this day causes Lyme disease. They were published in the journal Historical Biology.

In a related study, published in Cretaceous Research, OSU scientists announced the first fossil record of Rickettsial-like cells, a bacteria that can cause various types of spotted fever. Those fossils from Myanmar were found in ticks about 100 million years old.
As summer arrives and millions of people head for the outdoors, it's worth considering that these tick-borne diseases may be far more common than has been historically appreciated, and they've been around for a long, long time.

"Ticks and the bacteria they carry are very opportunistic," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology of the OSU College of Science, and one of the world's leading experts on plant and animal life forms found preserved in amber. "They are very efficient at maintaining populations of microbes in their tissues, and can infect mammals, birds, reptiles and other animals.

"In the United States, Europe and Asia, ticks are a more important insect vector of disease than mosquitos," Poinar said. "They can carry bacteria that cause a wide range of diseases, affect many different animal species, and often are not even understood or recognized by doctors.

A team from Northwestern University of China, led by Professor Sen Jian Yong conducted observations in the highlands of Tibet.

During a severe thunderstorm, they witnessed the emergence of a giant fireball, about five meters in diameter, and managed to measure the chemical composition of its basic elements with a spectrometer. Chinese scientists were able to investigate the chemical makeup of the main elements of ball lightning.

According to "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" such substances as silicon, iron and calcium are common in soil. On this basis, the Chinese physicists said that they were able to confirm the hypothesis of the New Zealand scientist John Abrahamson, who suggested that when lightning strikes the ground the sudden rise in temperature makes the soil eliminate oxides of silicon, iron and other elements.

A shock wave throws resulting gas into the air, forming a ball. According to Chinese physicists, the mystery ball of lightning has been uncovered. Another interesting fact was found as well. The fluctuations of ball lightning are about 100 hertz, though they are supposed to be half as less. It is possible that an extra 50 hertz could have been added by those located nearby power lines.

One of the leading Russian experts in studying the phenomenon of ball lightning, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, Vladimir Bychkov is convinced that Chinese scientists have not received conclusive evidence about the origin of ball lightning striking in normal soil. Bychkov is not alone in his doubts. Thus, the world's authoritative scientific journal Nature refused to publish an article by the Chinese scholars, it came out in a less prestigious publication.

According to Professor Bychkov, the situation with ball lightning has remained virtually unchanged for many years. Today there are hundreds of theories that explain its origin. Many famous scientists offered their version, in particular, the Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Kapitsa. However, so far no theory has become increasingly accepted.

In the days leading up to some recent moderate-sized earthquakes, instruments nearby have picked up brief low-frequency pulses in Earth's magnetic field. A few scientists have proposed that such pulses, which seemed to become stronger and more frequent just before the earthquakes occurred, could serve as an early warning sign for impending seismic activity. Now, a team has come up with a model for how these magnetic pulses might be generated, though some critics say they may have a human made origin.

Brief fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field have been detected before many earthquakes in the past 50 years, says Friedemann Freund, a crystallographer at San Jose State University in California.

For example, in the weeks before a magnitude-5.4 quake struck about 15 kilometers northeast of San Jose in October 2007, an instrument near the epicenter sensed a number of unusual magnetic pulses, presumably emanating from deep in the Earth. (The largest of them measured 30 nanoteslas, which is about 1/100,000th the typical strength of the planet's magnetic field measured at Earth's surface.) Those blips became more frequent as the day of the earthquake approached, Freund says.

More recently, prior to several medium- to moderate-sized quakes in Peru, two sensitive magnetometers recorded the same sort of pulses.

Man's best friend may soon be a humanoid, a computerized robot, capable of determining its owner's mood and feelings and offering a modicum of emotional comfort in return.

With no further introduction, meet "Pepper," described by its creators as "The World's First Personal Robot That Reads Emotions." Its creators are Japan-based SoftBank Mobile Corporation and its French subsidiary Aldebaran Robotics SAS, a manufacturer of humanoid robotics. If corporations are people, then yes, Pepper has two parents.

Pepper will be available for sale and empathy in Japan from SoftBank Mobile in February 2015. The price may not provide much comfort; anticipated retail stands at the equivalent of $1,900, still cheaper than a shrink. Plans for sale outside Japan are not yet determined.

But, you ask, what will Pepper do for me? Well, he is programmed to make people happy. He won't do your dishes or reupholster your furniture, but he will provide companionship, engagement, personal growth and some life-quality-enhancing services.

The first video of life on Arctic sea ice from a polar bear point of view has been released by the US Geological Survey. The agency on Friday released a clip recorded by a camera attached to the collar of a female polar bear without cubs in the Beaufort Sea north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The necks of polar bear males are wider than their heads and collars slide off.

The clip shows the bear pursuing a seal under water, dunking a frozen seal into seawater and interacting with a male who might be a suitor.

A massive asteroid roughly the size of an entire football stadium that was discovered only months ago is passing by the Earth this week, with professional and amateur astronomers alike having the best chance to watch the flyover on Thursday.

Officially named Asteroid 2014 HQ124, the giant hunk of space mass has been nicknamed the Beast because, at an estimated size of over 1,000 feet wide, it is roughly the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Initial estimates guessed that the body's diameter was between 400 to 900 meters (1,312 to 2,953 feet), although NASA's NEOWISE has determined the Beast is closer to 325 meters. (The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia measured between 17 to 20 meters in diameter.)

An object of such size could obviously pose a huge threat to Earth, although the Beast will fly no closer to the planet than 3.2 lunar distances (roughly equivalent to 716,500 miles). It would only take an object of about 100 feet wide to be destructive to Earth, according to Wired magazine.

Scientists have found telltale chemical fingerprints of the Mars-sized body that is believed to have crashed into baby Earth, pulverizing itself into debris that later formed the moon.

Evidence for the so-called giant impact theory comes from studies of oxygen isotopes in Apollo moon samples.

"We have developed a technique that guarantees perfect separation" of oxygen isotopes from other trace gases, lead researcher Daniel Herwartz, with the University of Cologne in Germany, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

The team studied several lunar meteorites and three basalt rock samples brought back by the crews of the Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 missions, which took place between 1969 and 1972.

"We also had soil samples from NASA, but this material is not ideal for determining the bulk oxygen isotopic composition of the moon, as lunar soil may be contaminated by micrometeorites and the like," Herwartz said.

The scientists were seeking evidence of Theia, a mysterious Mars-sized object that is believed to have crashed into Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, sending a cloud of debris into space that later reformed into the moon.

Most computer models predict that between 70 percent and 90 percent of the moon is Theia, which, like most planets in the solar system, should have a unique isotopic composition. If the moon was mostly Theia, scientists believe it would have a slightly different chemical makeup than Earth.

Forget close encounters of a third kind. Imagine galactic encounters with millions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, each of them overflowing with complex life forms. A new study says it's a possibility.

Although researchers are nearly unanimous in the belief that some other life forms exist in the great expanse of outer space, the worlds that any intelligent life forms inhabit are probably too distant for any human-alien meetings in the near future.

"On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that we are alone," said Louis Irwin, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at El Paso and lead author of the study published in Challenges journal. "On the other hand, we are likely so far away from life at our level of complexity, that a meeting with such alien forms is extremely improbable for the foreseeable future."

The team of researchers arrived at their conclusions after examining more than 1,000 exoplanets for particular characteristics like age, chemistry, density, temperature and distance from the parent star. From the available information, the team arrived at a "biological complexity index" (BCI) that ranges between 0 and 1.0. The index is determined by "the number and degree of characteristics assumed to be important for supporting multiple forms of multicellular life."

"I realise now that I wanted to disappear. To get so lost that nobody ever found me. To go so far away that I'd never be able to make my way home again. But I have no idea why." -Jessica Warman

When you lie down on your back on a clear, dark, moonless night, what is it that you see? If your vision is outstanding and observing conditions are just right, you're likely to see not only a few planets and thousands of stars, but also star clusters, some faint nebulae, the plane of the Milky Way, and maybe even a distant galaxy or two.

But when you start to look more deeply - beyond what you can see with your naked eye - you start to find that there's an amazing Universe past our own galaxy, past the stars, clusters and nebulae of the Milky Way out there. What once seemed like faint, fuzzy, inconsequential smudges have since revealed themselves to be distant galaxies, or island Universes not so different than our own, consisting of anywhere from hundreds of millions to many trillions of stars.
And the Universe is full of them, with roughly as many galaxies in the part observable to us as there are stars in the entire galaxy we inhabit.

What's perhaps surprising about these galaxies is that the farther away we find them, the faster they appear to be moving away from us. This was one of the most puzzling discoveries of the early 20th century, and it was finally put into order by Edwin Hubble (and, independently, Georges Lemaître) who realized that this was a consequence of living in an expanding Universe.

The resultant relation - that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to recede - is known as Hubble's law. The only exceptions to this rule happen when a galaxy has been subject to an intense, local gravitational interaction, giving it what's known as a significant peculiar velocity. But on the largest scales, Hubble's law, or the velocity/redshift relation, shows itself incredibly clearly.


You might instinctively wonder, especially if you know about the framework of the Big Bang, whether this will continue forever or not? Hubble's famous law was formulated all the way back in 1929, and for the majority of the 20th century, scientists were seeking the answer to that very question.

Read more here.

Researchers identify first piece of new brain-repair circuit

Duke researchers have found a new type of neuron in the adult brain that is capable of telling stem cells to make more new neurons. Though the experiments are in their early stages, the finding opens the tantalizing possibility that the brain may be able to repair itself from within.

Neuroscientists have suspected for some time that the brain has some capacity to direct the manufacturing of new neurons, but it was difficult to determine where these instructions are coming from, explains Chay Kuo, M.D. Ph.D., an assistant professor of cell biology, neurobiology and pediatrics.

In a study with mice, his team found a previously unknown population of neurons within the subventricular zone (SVZ) neurogenic niche of the adult brain, adjacent to the striatum. These neurons expressed the choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) enzyme, which is required to make the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. With optogenetic tools that allowed the team to tune the firing frequency of these ChAT+ neurons up and down with laser light, they were able to see clear changes in neural stem cell proliferation in the brain.
The findings appeared as an advance online publication June 1 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The mature ChAT+ neuron population is just one part of an undescribed neural circuit that apparently talks to stem cells and tells them to increase new neuron production, Kuo said. Researchers don't know all the parts of the circuit yet, nor the code it's using, but by controlling ChAT+ neurons' signals Kuo and his Duke colleagues have established that these neurons are necessary and sufficient to control the production of new neurons from the SVZ niche.

"We have been working to determine how neurogenesis is sustained in the adult brain. It is very unexpected and exciting to uncover this hidden gateway, a neural circuit that can directly instruct the stem cells to make more immature neurons," said Kuo, who is also the George W. Brumley, Jr. M.D. assistant professor of developmental biology and a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. "It has been this fascinating treasure hunt that appeared to dead-end on multiple occasions!"