Scientists in Washington, DC, are reporting development and successful tests of a new way for exploring the insides of living cells, the microscopic building blocks of all known plants and animals. They explode the cell while it is still living inside a plant or animal, vaporize its contents, and sniff. The study appears in online in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry.

Akos Vertes and Bindesh Shrestha note that knowing the contents of cells is the key to understanding how healthy cells differ from those in disease. Until now, however, the only way to "look" inside an individual cell was to remove it from its natural environment in an animal or plant, or change its environment. But doing so changed the cell. Scientists never knew whether one cell differed from another because of the disease, or because they had removed it to a new environment.

The new report describes development of a new technique that uses laser pulses focused through a tiny glass fiber to explode a cell and turn its contents into vapor. Scientists then use a laboratory instrument to analyze the vapor and get a profile of the chemicals inside. It can reveal differences between diseased and healthy cells, even between adjacent cells in the same tissue. The scientists used this new technique to analyze the contents of living plant and animal cells and show that it quickly and accurately identified important chemical details that would have been overlooked using conventional techniques.

A newly discovered dinosaur species that roamed the Earth about 200 million years ago may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land, scientists in South Africa said Wednesday.

The Aardonyx celestae was a 23-foot- (7-meter-) long small-headed herbivore with a huge barrel of a chest, and the scientists told reporters it could prove to be a missing evolutionary link.

This is a species "that no one has seen before and one that has a very significant position in the family tree of dinosaurs," said Australian paleontologist Adam Yates.

Yates, who is based at the University of the Witwatersrand's Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research, led the research with a number of other local and international scientists.

Their findings were published Wednesday in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B, a London-based peer-reviewed journal.

It would take a combination of severe and catastrophic events to drive the hardy human race to extinction, research concludes.

Humans could become extinct, a new study concludes, but no single event, aside from complete destruction of the globe, could do us in, and all extinction scenarios would have to involve some kind of intent, either malicious or not, by people in power.

The determinations suggest that the human race itself will ultimately determine its fate.

"I think the ability to adapt very quickly is singular to humanity," project leader Tobin Lopes told Discovery News. "Species progress and evolve to enhance their chances, but it's done over a very long period of time."

"Instinct guides a lot of what we do early in our lives, but the capacity to learn different behaviors as a result of different environments makes humanity capable of survival," added Lopes, who is associate director of global energy management programs at the University of Colorado Denver.

A study of the genetic structure of viruses in an Antarctic lake has revealed an astonishing genetic richness in the large number of viral families discovered.

Aquatic viruses usually infect prokaryotes such as bacteria, but the viruses in the Antarctic had a large proportion of viruses that infect eukaryotes. The findings included small single stranded DNA (ssDNA) viruses and phycodnaviruses that have never previously been seen in aquatic environments.

The researchers, Alberto Lopez-Bueno and colleagues, from Spain and the UK, examined samples taken from Lake Limnopolar on Livingston Island in the Antarctic before and during the summer, and found the aquatic environment to be rich in microorganisms and a diverse collection of viruses that prey on them.

The number of viral genotypes found was unusually high, running into thousands instead of the more usual hundreds, and less than 3 percent of the genome sequences were similar to previously identified viral genomes from aquatic systems. Many of the ssDNA viruses were related to non-aquatic viruses that infect plants, mammals and birds, and some had never been found in aquatic environments before.

Were dinosaurs "warm-blooded" like present-day mammals and birds, or "cold-blooded" like present day lizards? The implications of this simple-sounding question go beyond deciding whether or not you'd snuggle up to a dinosaur on a cold winter's evening.

In a study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded.

If dinosaurs were endothermic (warm-blooded) they would have had the potential for athletic abilities rivalling those of present day birds and mammals, and possibly similar quick thinking and complicated behaviours as well¬. Their internal furnace would have enabled them to live in colder habitats that would kill ectotherms (cold-blooded animals), such as high mountain ranges and the polar regions, allowing them to cover the entire Mesozoic landscape. These advantages would have come at a cost, however; endothermic animals require much more food than their ectothermic counterparts because their rapid metabolisms fatally malfunction if they cool down too much, and so a constant supply of fuel is required.

British scientists begin a new study on Tuesday to consider how human DNA is used in animal experiments and to determine what the boundaries of such controversial science might be.

Though experts have been swapping human and animal DNA for years - like replacing animal genes with human genes or growing human organs in animals - scientists at the Academy of Medical Sciences want to make sure the public is aware of what is happening in laboratories before proceeding further.

"It sounds yucky, but it may be well worth doing if it's going to lead to a cure for something horrible," said Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell expert at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, and a member of the group conducting the study.

The Mithraic Mysteries was a mystery religion that became popular among the military in the Roman Empire, from the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Information on the cult is based mainly on interpretations of monuments, which depict Mithras as born from a rock and sacrificing a bull. His worshippers had a complex system of seven grades of initiation, with ritual meals and they met in underground temples. Little else is known for certain.

Last week, the Archaeological Society of Malta organised a lecture by Dr Claudia Sagona, Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne (Australia), entitled Looking for Mithra in Malta. Dr Sagona is the author of The Archaeology of Punic Malta and her latest publication is Looking for Mithra in Malta. (The name of the god was certainly given as "Mithras" (with an 's') on Latin monuments, although "Mithra" may have been used in Greek.)

If life is to be found beyond our home planet, then our closest encounters with it may come in the dark abyss of some extraterrestrial sea. For Earth is certainly not the only ocean-girdled world in our solar system. As many as five moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thought to hide seas beneath their icy crusts.

To find out more about these worlds and their hidden oceans, two ambitious voyages are now taking shape. About a decade from now, if all goes to plan, the first mission will send a pair of probes to explore Jupiter's satellites. They will concentrate on giant Ganymede and pale Europa, gauging the depths of the oceans that almost certainly lie within them.

A few years later, an even more audacious mission will head towards Saturn to sniff the polar sea spray of its snow-white moon Enceladus. It will also visit Titan, which has perhaps the most astonishing extraterrestrial landscape in our solar system. To explore this giant moon, the spacecraft will send out two seemingly antique contraptions: a hot-air balloon to fly over the deserts and mountains, and a boat that will float on a sea of liquid hydrocarbons.

This plan for ocean exploration was announced in February, when the science chiefs of NASA and the European Space Agency decided to press ahead with the planning stages of both missions. Jupiter is the destination that tops the schedule, probably because the Europa Jupiter System Mission relies on well-tested space technology. The plan is for EJSM to lift off in early 2020, in two pieces. NASA's contribution, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter (JEO), and ESA's Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter (JGO) will be launched within a month of each other and plot parallel courses for Jupiter, arriving after six years. They will then engage in a complex dance, visiting various moons before each probe homes in on its prime target.

Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its odor.

In a report published in the American Chemical Society's Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal, they describe development of a new test that can measure the degradation of old books and precious historical documents on the basis of their aroma. The non-destructive "sniff" test could help libraries and museums preserve a range of prized paper-based objects, some of which are degrading rapidly due to advancing age, the scientists say.

Matija Strlič and colleagues note in the new study that the well-known musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper.

"The aroma of an old book is familiar to every user of a traditional library," the report notes. "A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness, this unmistakable smell is as much a part of the book as its contents. It is the result of the several hundred VOCs off-gassing from paper and the object in general. The particular blend of compounds is a result of a network of degradation pathways and is dependent on the original composition of the object including paper substrate, applied media, and binding."

The collision of a large extraterrestrial object with Earth almost 2 billion years ago may have stirred the seas worldwide and delivered a huge serving of oxygen to the deep ocean.

The Sudbury impact, named after the Canadian city located near the center of what remains of the ancient crater, happened around 1.85 billion years ago (SN: 6/15/02, p. 378). Despite erosion since then, the impact structure - at least 200 kilometers across - is recognized to be the second-largest on the face of the planet, says William Cannon, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va., and coauthor on a paper in the November Geology. The event fundamentally affected the concentrations of dissolved oxygen in the deep sea - enough to almost instantly shut down the accumulation of marine sediments known as banded iron formations, report Cannon and coauthor John F. Slack, also of the USGS in Reston.

Banded iron formations, massive deposits rich in iron oxides, have accumulated at several periods in Earth's long-distant geological past, mostly when atmospheric concentrations of oxygen were low (SN: 6/20/09, p. 24).